DECEMBER 21, 2018 For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left by JIM KAVANAGH FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail Something’s happening here…

DECEMBER 21, 2018 For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left by JIM KAVANAGH FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail Something’s happening here… Class Act The “yellow vest” (gilets jaunes) movement has upended French politics, at least. It has delivered a sharp and refreshing smack in the face to the smuggest of smug, entitled neoliberal brats, Emmanuel Macron, forcing him to retreat on substantive tax and minimum wage issues. It has also raised a raft of issues from wealth inequality (including demands for higher taxes on the rich) to a rejection of austerity and the dreaded Frexit. Most importantly, it has acted outside the gatekeeping of traditional opposition parties and institutions–including those of the left, which have all been thoroughly decaffeinated and beguiled by the fantasia of Third-Way EU becoming “Social Europe.” The Yellow Vest movement is millions of people out in the street, engaged in militant, confrontational protest, talking to and acting with each other unsupervised, telling the governing elite: “Va te faire foutre!” A self-mobilization of the working class: This is the specter of Europe past, which Third-Way politicians and intelligentsia thought they had once and for all banished to the netherworld a few decades ago. The Yellow Vest movement, now spreading to other counties, is striking a new body blow to the teetering edifice of neoliberalism that has been built on the bones of the working-class lives in Europe and America over those decades. This explains why the American mainstream media has avoided focusing on the Yellow Vest movement. The left, on the other hand, must be overjoyed, right? Well, it’s more like: Comme-ci, comme ça. Why? “Identity politics” is, of course, the term that immediately comes to mind, though that term oversimplifies, particularly regarding the French context. As C. J. Hopkins put it: “Nothing scares the Identity Politics Left quite like an actual working class uprising.” Scares and confuses. Historically, the core definition of the left has been solidarity with the working class (everyone who depends on wages to live), which includes the majority of people of all races and genders. But a new definition has taken hold among American/Western/college-educated liberals and progressives, as well as socialists and Marxists, who are perceived and think of themselves as on the “left”, and it has given rise to a new pattern of solidarity. These leftists have trained themselves to quickly embrace movements defined in terms of race and gender. Critical interrogation will come from within an assumed position of solidarity, and it will usually be in terms of those categories: Does your racial justice movement x have the right attitude and/or demographics in terms of gender? Much less frequently and urgently, and virtually never as a condition of support, will a race or gender movement be interrogated regarding its position—its attitude and demographics—in terms of class. There’s a different default setting for working-class movements. They will almost always be looked upon with suspicion, until and unless they prove their attitudinal and demographic race and gender bona fides to the satisfaction of American/Western/college-educated “leftists.” That interrogation has effectively become a prior condition of solidarity for working-class movements. Leftists have adopted a kind of checklist of concerns, and class has moved way down. So that’s been affecting the slow uptake of left support and coverage of Yellow Vest movement, which is, centrally and unashamedly, a working-class movement. Though the spark was a hike in the diesel gas tax, the flame quickly engulfed a wide range of issues. Far from being an “anti-tax” revolt, as some on the right and the left rushed to characterize it, Yellow Vest has called for the re-imposition of the wealth tax that Macron had so kindly abolished for the French elite. Fundamentally, it’s an eruption of a lot of people who are rightly raging about economic inequality. Diana Johnstone sums it up well: The gasoline tax was the last straw in a long series of measures favoring the rich at the expense of the majority of the population….Briefly, the message was this: we can’t make ends meet. The cost of living keeps going up, and our incomes keep going down. We just can’t take it any more. And the French people make it clear repeatedly: Embedded video The Intercept ✔ @theintercept “The Europe of the rich. We have a president who’s insulting us, and treating us like illiterate workers.” https://interc.pt/2QxW64D (video by @raulgaab) 251 2:46 PM - Dec 14, 2018 223 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy The Yellow Vest movement is a widespread working-class revolt against economic injustice and the neo-liberal state. Exactly what the left should embrace. Neera Tanden ✔ @neeratanden I don’t understand why any progressive is cheering French protesters who are amassing against a carbon tax. 4,867 3:15 AM - Dec 8, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy 2,962 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy When we see a “Center for American Progress (CAP), progressive, feminist,” like Neera Tanden tweeting, from the checklist: “I don’t understand why any progressive is cheering French protesters who are amassing against a carbon tax,” and a correspondent for the “leftist” French publication Libération ,calling Yellow Vest a “movement of hicks” or a “band of polluting oafs, addicted to their cars, who need to be dealt with by the police,” we are seeing the sorry, degraded, utterly clueless state of what passes for the left. Neera should talk to, or have clue one about, Colette, age 83, who “doesn’t own a car, but explained to whoever would listen that the steep raise of gasoline prices would also hurt people who don’t drive, by affecting prices of food and other necessities. She had done the calculations and figured it would cost a retired person 80 euros per month.” Or the young woman in southwestern France who “cares for elderly people who live at home alone in rural areas, driving from one to another, to feed them, bathe them, offer a moment of cheerful company and understanding. She loves her vocation, loves helping old people, although it barely allows her to make a living. She will be among those who will have to pay more to get from one patient to the next.” Another “polluting oaf.” As commentator O Societyr astutely put it: “The Paris protests aren’t over a fuel tax any more than Colin Kaepernick is about the American National Anthem. Kaepernick is protesting police brutality and the Gilets Jaunes are protesting their ‘Let them eat cake’ government.” The ability of leftists to reject the diversions and cut through to the crux of the matter in one case, while quickly succumbing to them in the other is a perfect example of the left’s diminished attention to, and concern for, class. As Tanden and Libé remarks indicate, it’s not just “identity” that’s up there in the hierarchy of the checklist. As I’ve said before, the left has succumbed to deprecating a politics of class solidarity in favor of a politics of solidarity based on like-mindednesson a checklist of issues. But this has things backward. Solidarity is not a matter of prior agreement. It’s bedrock socialism that you can only build a movement with the working-class we have, not the one we wish for. Which means solidarity must start with material interest, not like-mindedness, You don’t have to agree with me for me to defend your interests. Agreement doesn’t precede, it results from, solidarity. You get—earn and build—popular support for progressive, socialist, and revolutionary ideas and programs by defending and fighting for people’s material interests, not by interrogating people who are in actual revolt against the neo-liberal state to see whether they have the correct ideas regarding everything on your checklist, and insulting and attacking them if they don’t. That’s the approach of the liberal intellectual, not the left socialist. Agreement will come from respectful engagement in a common fight for a dignified life for everyone. Or it won’t. There are no guarantees. Because everybodyin a capitalist society gets “taught wrong on purpose,” a lot of people with a lot of half-assed ideas—whether kinda-sorta racist or sexist, or kinda-sorta authoritarian, or kinda-sorta in thrall to liberal capitalist politicians, or kinda-sorta self-righteous, or kinda-sorta skeptical of global warming—must get together and learn what ideas, attitudes, and actions help the movement, and what kind of bullshit will guarantee defeat and has to go. Or they won’t, and the movement will fail, or turn nasty. Furthermore, the change from “normal” opposition to a radical, insurrectionary, or revolutionary movement always starts with an abrupt, unforeseeable explosion over a relatively minor “final straw” slight. And it never starts with an agenda of all the correct demands. What that explosion does, precisely, is initiate a process of struggle and learning, through which the working classes, acting outside of any preconceived agenda, and joined by those who have had the time and privilege to study history and politics, can define not only an agenda of specific demands, but a new type of polity. I certainly have my pessimism of the intellect about where this movement can go without more clearly defining itself politically and organizationally. And it must and will do that, through the work and influence of someone(some persons or groups), if it doesn’t disappear or get destroyed by the repressive and ideological power of the neoliberal capitalist state. It’s not that, because it’s a working-class movement, Yellow Vest is sure to be socialist and successful. Given the actual socio-economic, ideological and political state of neo-liberal capitalist societies, it would be foolish to think such a thing. It’s that: that someone can only be a participant. Rather than hold its nose in pre-judgement, for the self-satisfaction of “Tsk, tsk,” and “I told you so,” any self-respecting left has the responsibility to support and participate, as it can, in a working-class uprising, in order to make a better outcome more likely. The Gilets-Jaunes is clearly a movement of the rightfully pissed-off working classes against the smug capitalist elite. it deserves our solidarity. Union Gap Across the West, the left has struggled to know how to respond to the populist uprisings of recent years. There is a tendency on the left to denounce any shock to the status quo as driven by reactionary forces. The revolting masses are often written off as fascists. –Fraser Myers For some two or three hundred years, people one could call “left” hoped that popular movements would lead to changes for the better. Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism. –Diana Johnstone Let’s also dispel the elitist liberaloid night in which all populisms are black. Enough of ceding popular democracy—including combative, even insurrectionary, democratic movements (i.e, those seeking to really—socially and politically—empower the majority of people) to the right. Sure, Yellow Vest, the Brexit vote in England, and the vote for Donald Trump in the United States are all expressions of politically-amorphous class anger. But, A) That’s not intrinsically “fascist”; and B) The social overdeterminations and political alliances differ from each other in Important ways, Particularly as Americans, we should have the humble good sense not to confuse the politico-ideological situation of the French working class with our own. Unlike its American cousin, the French working class is not steeped in libertarian, casino capitalist, market-worshipping, Shark Tank ideology. Yellow Vest is precisely fighting against the encroachment of that ideology. Indeed, that’s what Macron has been trying to foist on France, as the agent of the neoliberal finance globalism in which he sincerely believes—and which has, just coincidentally, netted him “a few quick millions during his passage through the Rothschild Bank.” ($31.5 millionin four years, in fact. Nice Work.) Macron, known as “the president of the rich,” has been “on a mission… to change things across the board in a way that I consider right.” That has involved introducing “a raft of tax reforms in a bid to dispel France’s reputation as a country that soaks the rich and stifles enterprise.” As a result of his zeal, the French can now celebrate that “Paris has overtaken London for the first time in a global league table of the world’s ultra-rich.” Mission accomplished. That is what the French working class is protesting against. It is not taken in by this market-worshipping crap, and never was. There was no wave of enraptured workers who thought Macron would make France great again for them. He was elected “only because a majority felt they had to vote against the ghost of “fascism” allegedly embodied by his opponent, Marine Le Pen… the French voted two to one in favor of a man whose program most of them either ignored or disliked.” Macron has been trying to impose the American paradigm, promoting “a profound ideological transformation of the French ideal of égalité, equality, from a horizontal concept, meaning equal benefits for all, to the vertical ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’, meaning the theoretical chance of every individual to rise above the others.” Fortunately, “The French have traditionally been logical enough to understand that everyone can’t rise above the others.” Like many of its counterparts throughout Europe, the French working class, including its unions and political parties, has historically been infused with socialist and communist ideologies. Though capitalist ideology has been making inroads, French workers are far from persuaded that casino capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. The core understanding of class struggle remains, and is a primary engine of the Yellow Vest movement. This is left populism. It is nothing like the American working-class—the exceptionalism of which is its thorough and consistent saturation with capitalist social ideology, which leaves so many of them with the fantasy that they are, as Steinbeck (apocryphally) put it: “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” That ideological formation sets the American working class up for capture by the two proudly capitalist parties—today, by Trumpian right-wing faux populism through which working-class anger is eaten by the reactionary Republican party; yesterday and tomorrow, by kindler, gentler, “we’recapitalistand that’s just the way it is” Clintonism, through which working-class anger is euthanized by the Democratic party. In the Yellow Vest movement, the French working class is defending its social state, a form of social democracy that doesn’t exist in the United States. Their fight—actual fighting in the streets—is forrobust, publicly-funded public services, to defend them againstbeing privatized. As Diana Johnstone explains Macron’s attempted neo-liberal healthcare “reforms” they are fighting: France has long had the best public health program in the world, but this is being steadily undermined to meet the primary need of capital: profit. In the past few years, there has been a growing government campaign to encourage, and finally to oblige people to subscribe to a “mutuelle”, that is, a private health insurance, ostensibly to fill “the gaps” not covered by France’s universal health coverage. The “gaps” can be the 15% that is not covered for ordinary illnesses .., or for medicines taken off the “covered” list, or for dental work, among other things. The “gaps” to fill keep expanding, along with the cost of subscribing to the mutuelle. In reality, this program, sold to the public as modernizing improvement, is a gradual move toward privatization of health care. It is a sneaky method of opening the whole field of public health to international financial capital investment. This gambit has not fooled ordinary people and is high on the list of complaints by the Gilets Jaunes. Meanwhile, in the home of the brave, establishment liberals are trying to prevent the American people from getting anything close to what the French working class is fighting to defend, as Adam Cancryn writes in a Politico article, sharply titled, “Establishment looks to crush liberals on Medicare for All”: “The private-sector interests, backed in some cases by key Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign alumni, are now focused on beating back another prospective health care overhaul”. The Yellow Vest movement is not a repeat of, but a model for, American working-class populist protest. A few million working-class Americans out on the street busting things up to get Medicare-for-All is exactly what we need. It got the French people some major “impossible” concessions right quick, and it’s probably the only way we’re going to get even the one social-democratic advance of Medicare-for-All. Wonking with the Neera Tandens and other Clintonite Democrats is certainly a waste of time. So the Yellow Vest movement is a protest against international a neoliberal, sometimes called “globalist,” project to destroy European social democracy. The Yellow Vest protest is demonstrating, if not entirely recognizing, that the European Union—and especially its capstone, the Euro—isthat project. Too many Western leftists, including among the working-class, bought the idea that the European Union was a progressive project. This was understandable, as it was sold as a prophylactic against the recurrence of the kind of horrendous wars among European nations that ravaged the continent. Leftists let themselves be persuaded that it could also be the foundation of a new, united “social Europe” that would spread and strengthen the achievements of progressive social democracy andthe values of new identity, diversity, ecology, and human rights movements. It would be a project for overcoming both military conflict and archaic social attitudes. All good things. Through one good thing to rule them all. But that was, and is, hogwash. For its architects—the ones who had real power in government, business and finance, not the professors in their post-modern symbolic-exchange seminars—the primary purpose of the EU was always clear: to increase the power of capital over labor. European capital (in conjunction with and under the tutelage of American capital) needed to find a way around the power of national labor movements embedded in strong unions and allied socialist and communist political parties. European capital didn’t give a damn about diversity and human rights, but was happy to use those tropes as needed to marginalize class-based politics. Anything that would promote the idea that class was passé, and thereby help hasten the victory of the European capitalist classesover national labor movements, was fine by them. (Ecology is a little trickier, but they have some workarounds for that.). Wrapping class disdain in the patter of progressive, universal vs. backward, local values was a shrewd tactic that helped capital misdirect the attention of liberal intellectuals.to what the trick actually was. Comes the reveal. The real point of the EU was to force the member states into the neo-liberal austerity program dictated by international capital (and now particularly finance capital), from its headquarters in Washington/New York through its satellite in Berlin/Frankfurt. With leftist eyes fixed elsewhere, capital proceeded with its economic “reforms”—i.e., elimination of labor protections and capital controls. the privatization of public goods and services, budget restrictions that force the state to take loans from private banks, “competition” rules that favor private and foreign capital over public investment, etc. It’s the program to which, international capital and Third-Way politicians have decreed, There Is No Alternative. And the EU is there to discipline the various states with rules and regulation of political economy that ensure that, indeed, there can be no alternative for them For capital, it’s moving from public constraint to market freedom. For the working-class, it’s moving from secure public services to sauve-qui-peut. Every incipient entrepreneur for him or her self. And the extra-special reveal: the left discovers the card in its own pocket, discovers that it’s been recruited, with various degrees of wittingness, to move from its historical place with the working class to up on the stage as “the left-wing of neoliberalism.” In a specific example of how the imposition of the neoliberal TINA regime has played out in France, Macron’s government abandoned a Tidal Energy project because it wasn’t profitable—because new industrial projects rarely start out profitable, and need government subsidies to succeed. At the same time, General Electric came in and bought a big energy company. De-industrialization provides another example. France has lost 40% of its industry as capital moves to lower-wage EU countries like Poland (The dismantling of the post-capitalist Soviet bloc was another huge boost for European unitycapital freedom). Auto-workers in central France, desperate to save their jobs, threaten to blow up the plant if the government doesn’t intervene. But workers have lost their greatest weapon, the strike, the power to shut down an industry, when capital has beaten them to it. The EU’s real mission was to forge this single neo-liberal political economy to which all its states and all their citizens are subjected. Johnstone sums it up nicely for France, where all the ruling parties “have followed European Union directives requiring member states to adopt neoliberal economic policies. Especially since the adoption of the common currency, the euro, a little over fifteen years ago, those economic policies have become tangibly harmful to France, hastening its deindustrialization, the ruin of its farmers and the growing indebtedness of the State to private banks.” Thus, the neoliberal austerity offensive of the EU is a war on social democracy, That’s what the yellow vests and other European populists and “nationalist” movements are responding to. What’s also taken so many on the left and in the working class too long to get is that it has been a war on social democratic economic arrangements, carried out by the Social Democratic political parties. When asked to name her greatest achievement, Margaret Thatcher said instantly and correctly: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour.” Similarly, Reagan’s greatest legacy was Bill Clinton and the Clintonite Democratic Party. And Mitterrand became the best bud of Reagan and Thatcher, creating the Socialist Party of Hollande and Macron. Turning the Socialist Party of France into one of the midwives of neoliberalism in Europe. Rinse and repeat throughout Europe. For thirty years, the ostensible Social Democratic parties steadily but surreptitiously–under false pretenses–introduced elements of the austerity project, until austerity was all that was left. It’s been a neat trick of political-economy substitution—switching social-democracy with austerity right before your eyes. And one day—after a gas-tax hike or whatever—the working class woke up to realize that all the incremental changes had added up to a qualitative difference. The great post-war social democratic arrangement–whereby the capitalist classes agreed to provide a set of essential public services and decent-life guarantees, in exchange for being allowed to maintain their decisive control of society’s capital wealth–was gone. “Macron is a bubble that has burst.” There are a few conclusions to be drawn from all this that are severely discomfiting to, and have been assiduously avoided by, too many leftists who have been entrenched in anything-but-class discourse. One is that the European Union itself (with the Euro) was one of the main weapons, and falsest of pretenses, in this flim-flam. The EU was the pretty box the rabbit went into, and came out cooked. The EU is, and always was, a project of capitalist globalization, which, despite much wishful thinking, is not—in fact, is the opposite of—proletarian internationalism. It’s a nasty simulacrum thereof, that pushes European society in the opposite direction. Many leftists, grounding themselves solely in a humanitarian and altruistic paradigm, resist thinking about the disruptions and depressions of labor pools and markets, and the transfer of cheap labor around the continent and the world, as part of a process of capitalist globalization, as a complement and enhancement to the “free” movement of capital, as a process created and managed by capital in its interest and antithetical to the interest of proletarian internationalism. In so resisting, they are again forgoing the critique of the political economy of capitalism and resting within a paradigm of concern shared with wealthy elites. Angela Nagle’s argumentdeserves to be taken seriously. There are many difficult things to unpack here, but altruism is not solidarity, and we have to start thinking the difference. A corollary conclusion is that it turns out the European nation-state is now the last redoubt of social democracy. As Michael Hudson frequently points out, we have to think of what the EU (especially through the Euro) has been doing to European nations—and especially to the working classes of those nations—as war with financial and economic weapons: “It’s a financial war. And finance really is war by other means, the way it’s being conducted today, because the objective of finance in Western Europe is the same as that of war.” It’s not a metaphor; it’s a war of the bankers and capitalists to wrench the public wealth of European nations from the political control of their working-class populations, with deadly consequences. The working classes are besieged and are fighting back, for social democracy, from the territory in which they are cornered, and in which they still have some power: the national polity. If leftists can’t think of it this way, and only see the expressions of nationalism as “fascism,” if they decry the Yellow Vests for singing the Marseillaise…Well, all I can say is: If it was good enough for Rick… The important thing isn’t what song you sing, it’s whom your song is defying. Euro, Trash A crucial point about the EU and the key role of the Euro is perfectly summarized by Greg Palast (echoing Hudson): “currency union is class war by other means.” Palast explains: “The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.” Palast’s “progenitor” is University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell, who “produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.” Mundell hated the fact that, in his words: “It’s very hard to fire workers in Europe,” so he designed a tool that would make it easier. As Palast says, the Euro was designed specifically to “remov[e] a government’s control over currency.. [and be] a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations.” And Mundell, its architect, said it himself: “It [the Euro] puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians, [And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.” Diana Johnstone explains that this is exactly how the Euro has ravaged France: it has become more and more obvious that EU monetarist policy based on the common currency, the euro, creates neither growth nor jobs as promised but destroys both. Unable to control its own currency, obliged to borrow from private banks, and to pay them interest, France is more and more in debt, its industry is disappearing and its farmers are committing suicide, on the average of one every other day. This is the result of the EU and the Euro, and the “eco-tax” that provoked the protest has everything to do with it: Johnstone again: Indeed, it is perfectly hypocritical to call the French gas tax an “ecotax” since the returns from a genuine ecotax would be invested to develop clean energies – such as tidal power plants. Rather, the benefits are earmarked to balance the budget, that is, to serve the government debt. This “ecotax” is a fraud in every way. Macron’s “ecotax” is nothing but a means of restricting spending and balancing books—zeroing out numbers—at the insistence of the banksters running the EU. As Johnstone points out, it does not “pay for” anything. And, really, think about how utterly silly that would be. The premise is that the tax a measure to stop catastrophic global warming. So: “We’re facing an apocalyptic disaster that will drown half the earth in a few decades. What should we do?” Answer: “Levy a tax.” That’ll do what? All it will do is stop people who can’t “pay for” the tax to stop driving (or be driven deeper into debt). Everyone in the 1%, who can afford it, will keep on destroying the earth. That’s all “pay for” can mean in this context: The wealthy will pay a few more euros; the working class will pay with even more degraded lives. The problem will remain. If you’re a serious political authority facing a global apocalypse—if the asteroid is heading for Earth—you don’t sit around trying to figure out: “What should we tax?” You decide what you have to do, and you do it, paying for it with your sovereign currency. If you have one. You’d also need world-wide, cooperative public planning unconcerned with profit—something like, you know, socialism. Taxes, along with their obverse, profit “incentives,” are precisely the capitalist workaround for pretending to tackle the complex, global and systemic ecological problems that can only be solved by a socialist commonwealth. So, while the masters of the EU universe are pushing us away from that, the Yellow Vests are perfectly right to say: “I’m more worried about the end of the month than about the end of the world.” That’s the succinct, populist version of Pepe Escobar’s observation:“Why is it easier to imagine the total destruction of mankind, from nuclear war to a climate catastrophe, than to work on changing the system of relations spawned by neoliberal capitalism?” This also has everything to do with the point about money and taxes that I’ve made in a previous essay—namely, that taxes do not fund government spending, and that monetary sovereignty, which France and other European countries fatally surrendered to the EU and the Eurobank, is an indispensable tool for progressive policy initiatives. The Yellow Vest revolt is implicitly, and must be explicitly if it is to succeed, a revolt against the Euro. And leftists need to understand why that is so. Finally, a point alluded to above is worth reprising: Social Democracy killed social democracy. And it wasn’t by accident. The Social Democratic parties and politicians (like Macron) that spent 30 years undoing social democracy, and now firmly perceive their identity as uber-State stewards of global finance capitalism, are not going to bring it back. Willingly. The only reason we had post-war European social democracy in the first place was because of the threat of socialist revolution. The only thing that could get it back is precisely the same threat. We are in a conjuncture—the Social Democratic parties have brought us here—where: If you want social democracy, you have to fight for full-on socialism. But, hey, if you succeed so well as to threaten a socialist victory, why stop short? If you again leave the capitalist class with their control of the capital wealth of society, they will again use it relentlessly to erode whatever social democracy they concede, and you’ll repeat the same cycle. That’s what a classanalysis tells you. Of course, the Yellow Vest movement, though it may be in that conjuncture, is nowhere near that choice. And I do not know, and have serious doubts about, whether it ever will be. This percolating crisis of European neo-liberalism has been throwing up a lot of disappointing false-hope movements, like Syriza (which I critiqued sharply at the time here and here). As the song goes: “What it is ain’t exactly clear.” But what’s happening here, with the Yellow Vests, is a self-actuated working-class movement against austerity, inequality, and the neo-liberal uber-State. It’s a hell of a start, and deserves the support of the left. It’s the classic scene, where the detached American decides to take the risk of siding with a movement that’s not what he asked for. Play the Marseillaise. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by:JIM KAVANAGH Jim Kavanagh edits The Polemicist.

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance 

By Josh Breslin 

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates 

Let’s start this new year of action together The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

As we enter 2019, Repairers of the Breach, the Kairos Center and the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign invite you to a national Watch Night Service tomorrow, New Year's Eve. We will bring together people of faith and conscience and recommit ourselves to the fight against systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation. The first Watch Night Service took place in 1862 when both enslaved and free Black people came together in churches and homes across the nation while they waited for the news of the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation—an act of bravery and hope that helped the United States move forward. More than 150 years later, we must continue this tradition with all those who, despite the challenges that arise every day, believe and are working towards a more just and equitable society today. Tune into this year’s Watch Night Service in Raleigh, NC, to hear directly from Rev. Dr. Barber, Rev. Dr. Theoharis and those impacted by our nation’s distorted moral narrative and experience powerful music that will inspire the heart. Watch the event here >> Want to join us at the event? You can sign up to attend here >> Let us move into 2019 with our sights set on the America that is yet to be. Forward together, not one step back, The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, please click here.

Last chance: Donate and your gift will be doubled! Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Last chance: Donate and your gift will be doubled! Coalition of Immokalee Workers 1:29 PM Dear Fair Food Nation, This month, hundreds of supporters have celebrated 25 Years of Fair Food by helping us raise nearly $20,000 to usher in the next quarter-century of human rights in agriculture. And last week, we announced that every donation made before the New Year will be matched dollar-for-dollar up to $10,000 by a generous donor. Will you give today to help us reach our goal? We’ve come such a long way since 1993. The very same fields once dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” are now known as the best work environment in U.S. agriculture. And the world of Fair Food is growing. Today, the Fair Food Program has expanded its unprecedented protections to tens of thousands of workers across seven states and three crops, and counting. And we couldn’t have done it without you being right there with us every step of the way. As we continue building this 21st century human rights revolution, there's still time to make a gift in honor of the women and men leading the way in the fields . Happy New Year,  Your friends in Immokalee Donate today to support Fair Food and your donation will be doubled! Coalition of Immokalee Workers (239) 657 8311 | workers@ciw-online.org | www.ciw-online.org Connect with us Facebook ‌ Twitter ‌ Instagram ‌ YouTube ‌ Coalition of Immokalee Workers | 110 S 2nd St, Immokalee, FL 34142

The Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby (1938)- A Film Review

The Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby (1938)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, directed by Howard Hawks, 1938  

[WTF-Hell now Phil Larkin has got me in a foul swearing mood.  (Phil in his youth bore the sobriquet Foul-mouthed Phil which may still be an appropriate moniker) The old time writer for this space and close friend of the recently departed to parts unknown and unlamented from what I have heard around the water cooler former site manager Allan Jackson is once again belly-aching about an assignment given to him by new manager Greg Green. Green had given him another Marvel Studio production The Avengers to review I assume because he did a good job on the first effort Captain America; Civil War.  Belly-aching at my expense which is why I am, again, doing a bracketed introduction. (Unlike Phil I still have put my screed in the traditional brackets to forewarn disinterested reader who could give a f—k about the internal disputes in an on-line publication operation to move on down the page to the story.)    

Quickly Phil’s first dispute was having to do a modern review of that Marvel comic production Captain America: Civil War mentioned above rather than the one Greg Green rightly assigned to me Humphrey Bogart’s lesser film Deadline-USA. He actually did an okay job on the film including what will be a classic line about Captain America having the brain of sea-pod despite his brawny exterior. I, in turn, this according to Greg himself, gave a very good account of myself on the Bogie article. That is what has me steamed this time when Phil once again assumed that somebody not born in 1930 or so could ever do justice, could ever have any insights into those by-gone productions like the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby where Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn playing somewhat against type sparkled up the screen with their antics and budding romance.          

Yeah that haughty, I am being nice to the bastard now, attitude has driven me to distraction young as I in this publication business. Phil has obviously not seen fit to read my previous introduction or decided to consciously ignore that information when I gave my “credentials” for be able, young as I am, to do a review on a Bogie film. I had been reared by black and white film crazed parents who from an early age carted me off to various film festival retrospectives both in college and later. I, in my turn, when I came off age would go myself, and later with various cheap date dates to my own slew of such features. I say again for Phil or anybody else I don’t need some certificate to prove that I can write intelligently about Bogie or about the golden age of screwball comedy. An age when the likes of Preston Sturgis, George Cukor, and the director here Howard Hawks made America laugh at itself for a few minutes in the heat of the 1930s Greta Depression and later the slogging through World War II that my grandparents and great-grandparents went through. WTF how hard is that to understand . Kenny Jacobs] 

********

I had to laugh when I read Phil Larkin’s review of The Avengers since he gave it short shrift in the story-line department. Wrote the whole thing as some kind of ghoulish nightmare in about three lines so what he really wanted to write about was the “injustice” done to him-again. Which is maybe why Greg wanted me to do the Bringing Up Baby. Wanted to get more than three lines about the actual film he was reviewing. Of course with Baby, with any film you can do a sabotage job dismissing a film in a few words. You can also get the kernel of truth the film is trying to get at as well.

Here you have goof paleontologist Huxley, maybe vibes of Aldous, played by Cary Grant playing a little against type, fussing over finishing the construction of his pet project dinosaur bones getting that one last piece. Strangely just the day before he is to get married to his wet blanket assistant who only apparently wants him for his brain and fame potential. No way is Cary going to marry that person so let’s segue into later when to hustle some hard cash to finish up the project he winds up on a golf course trying to hustle dough from a rich matron’s lawyer. Enter poor little holy goof rich girl Susan, played by Katharine Hepburn playing pretty far from type and which ended up with poor box office haunting her career for a couple of years until she got all wistful and delightful in The Philadelphia Story. From that first meeting the pair exchange, mainly her exchange, a comedy of errors including a lot of dipsy-doodle around a dog and that last piece dinosaur bone. But you know as well as I do that through all the misadventures that holy goof Susan starts to grow on the good ancient bone goof Doctor. Of course there has to be one last pratfall by Susan to cement their mutual love with the poor innocent dinosaur taking a beating once more as if that millions of years ago extinction wasn’t humiliating enough. Short summary but more three lines to wrap up another Hollywood boy meets girl story that frankly was not hard for me to figure out or watch with interest. Touché Phil.         

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Warren Smith’s “Rock And Roll Ruby”-A Story Goes With It

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Warren Smith’s “Rock And Roll Ruby”

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

WARREN SMITH ROCK´N´ ROLL RUBY LYRICS

Well I took my Ruby jukin'
On the out-skirts of town
She took her high heels off
And rolled her stockings down
She put a quarter in the jukebox
To get a little beat
Everybody started watchin'
All the rhythm in her feet

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

Now Ruby started rockin' 'bout one o'clock
And when she started rockin'
She just couldn't stop
She rocked on the tables
And rolled on the floor
And Everybody yelled: "Ruby rock some more!"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

It was 'round about four
I thought she would stop
She looked at me and then
She looked at the clock
She said: "Wait a minute Daddy
Now don't get sour
All I want to do
Is rock a little bit more"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

One night my Ruby left me all alone
I tried to contact her on the telephone
I finally found her about twelve o'clock
She said: "Leave me alone Daddy
'cause your Ruby wants to rock"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul
*****
Nobody had seen Billie (William James Bradley for those who are sticklers for detail and, by the way, not Billy, not some billy-goat thing like the boys in first grade called him, called him the last time anybody did so and he made Billie stick, and you will call him that too unless you want more, much more, than you can handle from a wiry, deceptively strong guy) for a while, a few months anyway back then, back in the late 1950s. I had drifted away from his circle, his corner boy circle, when my family moved across town to the other side of Adamsville, North Adamsville a couple of years before. And when Billie got into some stuff, some larceny stuff, mainly “clipping” things (you know five-finger discount at jewelry stores and drugstores mainly to get his girls, that’s plural, not a typo, some pretty “gift” to show his Billie love), and stealing cars if you must know, and when I decided, decided almost at the last minute, that I wanted no part of that scene that pretty much ended our best friend friendship. I still kept in touch with him for about a year or so after that and then when he got into his new “jag,” robbing stores, gas stations and the like, through keeping in touch with others.

Rumor had it, and it was always rumor with Billie whether he was right in the room or got his fate reported by one of his boys, one of his legend-producing boys which definitely including me at one time (I was the fawning flak par excellence and would have made Tony Curtis’s Sydney Falco in the film Sweet Smell Of Success look like nothing but kid’s stuff with my Billie build-ups), that he was shacked up with some “broad.” I admit I did my fair share to build up the Billie legend but that’s all, he just naturally filled in the empty spaces, empty spaces that he hated, and that characteristic goes a long way in telling why we hadn’t heard from him for a while except through that rumor mill.

The rumor mill also had it, to fill in the particulars, that he had stolen some car, a classic hopped-up 1949 Nash owned by a tough guy, real tough guy, named “Blindside” Buckley (that moniker tells you all you need to know about that august gentleman just keep clear of him, alright. So that’s two hombres to stay clear of in this sketch) or something like that, or maybe it was that he had stolen one car, abandoned it, and had stolen another. Either way sounds about right. Stole the cars and was holed up somewhere with a honey, Lucy (description to follow), that he had met down at the Sea and Surf teen nightclub across from the Paragon Park Amusement Park in Nantasket, a few miles outside of the town limits of Adamsville. Now this honey, this Lucy honey, was a little older than Billie but, and like I say this is rumor, she jumped on him from minute one when he walked in the door, leaving the guy she was with looking kind of stupid. And in the scheme of things he was probably prepared to commit mayhem on Billie (no brother, bad move, bad career, hell, bad life move).

Billie, no question, was a good-looking guy, was a real good dancer and, best of all, he had a great voice, a great rock and roll voice, that fit nicely, very nicely into the music that we were all listening to, listening to like crazy, on our little transistor radios back in the 1950s, mostly late 1950s. So maybe, for all I know, Lucy had heard Billie sing, sing at one of the two billion talents shows that he was always entering in order, as he constantly said, to win his fame and fortune. Like I said he was good, good at covering Top Forty stuff, but just short, just a short, I guess, of making that “projects” jail break-out move that he was always confident would occur once the talent guys heard him, really heard. At some point that dream faded like a lot of projects dreams faded early and hence his alternative career as a stick-up man.

And this honey, this red-headed Lucy, a luscious red-lipped honey was, reportedly, just the exact kind of honey that Billie dreamed of grabbing for his own. Great shape (great shape then meaning all fill-out curves and leggy legs, or something like that), great boffo hair (dark red, an obviously Irish girl), kittenly sexy, and most importantly ready to go all night whether dancing, doing this and that (figure it out, okay), or helping plan some caper. Just the kind of girl the priests and parents of even the projects neighborhood were always warning us against but which we boys still secretly dreamed of running up against, dreamed of hard. Yah, this Lucy was just Billie’s action, just his catnip. And so when I first heard that rumor, that Billie holed- up and out of sight rumor, I said yah, that seemed about right.

See Billie one night, one twelve- year old summer night, down in back of old Adamsville South Elementary School where we used to hang out because that was the only real hang-out place around, and talk, talk of futures, talk of dreams just like everybody else, every twelve- year old everybody else Billie kind of laid the whole thing out for us. He was going to parlay his singing voice, his rock and roll singing voice, into fame and fortune and when his ship came in he was going to search for his rock and roll soul-mate. He didn’t put it just this way but the idea was to get the hottest, sexiest, dancing-est girl around and sail off into the sunset leaving that dust of the projects behind, way behind.

So it looked like Billie had one part of his dream coming true, although being on the lam, being big time on the lam, from the cops, the owner of that hopped-up classic 1949 Nash, and maybe even that guy Lucy left looking stupid, take your choice, wasn’t part of the description back in those twelve- year old summer nights. But being sixteen, being in some dough, and being with the rock and roll queen of the seaside night still seems like a bargain worth having made with whatever devil Billie needed to consult to pull the caper off. Hell, it makes me think that maybe I made a mistake moving away from Billie’s orbit. But just call that a rumor too in case any cops are around, alright. Anyway, my reaction was now that Billie was holed up, any girls, red-headed or otherwise, who wanted to dance the night away please just call out my name. Hey, I could dream too.

***From The Archives-On The Centenary Of Tennessee Williams' Birthday-Homage To The Outsider- Some Of The Work Of Playwright Tennessee Williams

***From The Archives-On The Centenary Of Tennessee Williams' Birthday-Homage To The Outsider- Some Of The Work Of Playwright Tennessee Williams

Friday, June 10, 2011

On The Centenary Of Tennessee Williams' Birthday-Homage To The Outsider- Some Of The Work Of Playwright Tennessee Williams

From  American Left History - Thursday, January 15, 2009


Homage To The Outsider- The Work Of Playwright Tennessee Williams

Play/DVD Reviews

Enough Mendacity To Sink A Ship

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller as America’s finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams’ extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level, like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

“Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” is a prime example of the contradiction that a radical commentator is placed in. The themes of duplicity, latent homosexuality, adultery and dysfunctional families topped off by more than enough mendacity to sink a ship are the stuff of social drama that NEED to be addressed as outcomes in the modern capitalist cultural sphere. However, in the end nothing really gets resolved truthfully here. Old 1950’s-style All-American boy Brick, the ‘great white hope’ of the family, may or may not sober up after the ‘lost’ of his dear friend and fellow football player, Skipper. Saucy and sexy wife Maggie (the cat) may or may not really get pregnant by Brick and save the family heritage for him, or die trying. The only certainty, despite all that above-mentioned mendacity, is that Big Daddy is going to die and that 28,000 acres of the finest land in the Delta is going to need new management, either Brick, brother Goober (along with his scheming wife and their ‘lovely brood’ of children) or some upstart. Off of these possible outcomes, however, I would not get too worked up about the final outcome.

In the movie version, done in the 1950’s as well, which starred the recently departed excellent actor Paul Newman as Brick and a fetching Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the question of Brick’s possible homosexual relationship with Skipper is far more muted than in the play. The implicit question seems to concern Brick’s fading youth, his search for perfect meaning to life in Mississippi and that one’s existential crisis can be eliminated by reliance on the bottle. The relationship between the dying Big Daddy and his ever suffering wife, Big Mama, is less dastardly than in the play as well. The scheming Goober and wife and family and those ‘lovely’ children, however, run true to form. My sense of the movie, unlike the deeper issues of the play, is that a few therapy sessions would put old Brick back on the right track. The play was far less hopeful in that regard.

The Fickle Bird Of Youth

The Sweet Bird Of Youth, Three Plays of Tennessee Williams, New Directions Books, New York, 1959

“Sweet Bird Of Youth” is another case in point. Not for the first time, a seemingly 1950s style All- American boy, Chance, who has left his hometown, his home town girl and his roots behind to drift in that endless spiral toward fame- Hollywood and the movies, naturally- comes back to claim what is his by right. On this little hometown reunion Chance is in the service of one aging and fretful actress who has her own issues with that elusive ‘bird of youth.’ On his return to town it appears that Chance has stirred up a hornet’s nest with the local political establishment in the person of one red-neck preacher turned politician in order to better do “god’s work”, old Tom Findley. The object of this dispute is one Heavenly Findley, old Ton’s daughter and Chance’s left behind paramour who is now the subject of some scandal (due to the amorphously stated need for female-related medical treatment, an abortion, due to Chance’s irresponsibility). Along the way we get to see how political power is distributed in a small Southern town as well as the inevitable tempting of the fates by Chance in order to win the ‘brass ring’ before it is too late (apparently somewhere over thirty, by my reckoning). At play’s end though, where he is between a rock and a hard place, Chance may not get the chance to be Chance at thirty. Oh, that fickle bird of youth. Still, Chance, go for it.

In the movie version the recently departed excellent actor Paul Newman, a classic example of a 1950’s All-American boy type (among his other acting talents), as the movie star ‘wannabe’ and Geraldine Page as the aging actress recreated their stage performances although with a greater screen presence for Ms. Page. Moreover, Chance’s strivings to reconnect with Heavenly are more central to the plot. More importantly, the endings differ in that, despite some mauling by Tom Findley’s boys Chance takes my advice from the play version and runs, with Heavenly, just as far and as fast as his now aging legs can carry him.

Waiting For A Sign

The Rose Tattoo, Three Plays of Tennessee Williams, New Directions Books, New York, 1959

“The Rose Tattoo” is a little different look at the family. Although the geography of the play is still the American South this play is not peopled with Williams’ usually WASP-ish characters but rather a little conclave of immigrant Italians who have somehow made a beachhead in the Gulf Coast area. The central character is a previously abandoned but now widowed Italian seamstress trying to survive, mainly through her hopes for her daughter, on her wits, her memories of youth, her integrity and her fierce instinct to survive in alien territory. A philandering husband, the obsessive subject of her adoration, a daughter trying to learn to fly on her own in the love game, and an incidental encounter with a fellow, younger Italian truck driver come together to give her the sign she needs to start over. Maybe. This play, more than most of Williams’ efforts, depends on the strength of the dialogue and not the plot line. That is what gives its dramatic edge as Williams explores yet another tangled up dream gone awry story.

In the movie version, the role of the young Italian truck driver as played by Burt Lancaster and the seamstress as played by the fabulous Anna Magnini is more central to the unfolding story from the beginning. The dramatic tensions between this pair and the ‘waiting for a sign’ by the seamstress are still fairly similar. It is however Lancaster’s enhanced role that really makes this a visual treat and gives one hope that this new family ‘aborning’ can survive.

Take A Walk On The Wild Side

Orpheus Descending, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

On reading “Orpheus Descending”, Williams’ take on the old Greek legend in modern garb I was struck by the similarity in the character of the Orpheus figure, Val ,and Nelson Algren’s Dove Linkhorn in “ A Walk On The Wild Side.” Both are loners, outsiders, have checkered pasts and are ready for anything from deep romantic love to murder and mayhem. And because they are capacity of that range of emotions and reactions they are also as capable of getting burned by a complacent society that does not take kindly to those that it cannot control. Val drifts into town, gets a job at a store owned by the enigmatic Lady and then the wheels begin to turn and to deal out his fate. Could he have stopped and turned away? Although that is a question that drives many dramatic efforts it is not always resolvable in a play- or in life. Lady’s terminally ill husband lurks in the background with nothing to lose, once the romantic sparks start to fly. I do not understand why this play was not more successful in its earlier manifestations as was pointed out in the introduction, especially as this is a culture that has made space, if only grudgingly, for the outsider to tempt the fates if only symbolically.

The Sweet Bird Of Youth Gone Awry

Suddenly Last Summer, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

“Suddenly Last Summer is an odd little beauty of a play. Odd in that the appetites of the main (unseen in the play) character Sebastian seem to be both beyond the pale and obsessive. Odd, also that his protective monster of a mother is determined to keep the truth about her “genius” son from the world even after his ‘untimely’ death ……last summer. As if to add fuel to the fire of an already bizarre tale of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, Sebastian’s beautiful lure of a cousin used as bait for Sebastian’s appetites is to be permanently taken out of the picture in order to keep this world beautiful. Nobody believes the sordid tale she has to tell about dear cousin Sebastian. The play ends with the ‘hope’ that there may actually be someone to believe the girl’s story before she becomes one more sacrifice to ‘beauty’ in the world. Frankly, old Sebastian got what was coming to him over in the islands.

In the movie version, the stories that have to be told verbally in the play get told as flashbacks as well. Katherine Hepburn is in high dudgeon as Sebastian’s mother and ‘keeper of the flame’. Montgomery Clift is a more sober, somber and searcher for the truth psychiatrist than the one in the play and Elizabeth Taylor is the beautiful lure cousin is a mass of confusions whose memories of last summer have to be erased ….some way. Old Sebastian and his twisted sense of life and his place in history is still a guy who had it coming to him. Well, he did, didn’t he?

Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

By Lance Lawrence  

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[Although I am a much younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. Originally I had agreed with both men as far as Phil Larkin’s, what did, Si call them, yes, rantings about heads rolling, about purges and would have what seems like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have read about that regime were  dubious at best. Now I am not so sure as I have heard other younger writers rather gleefully speaking around the shop water cooler about moving certain unnamed writers out to pasture-finally in the words of one of them.

In any case the gripe the former two writers appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned, I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.”  That I too as Si pointed out while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.

In the interest of transparency I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stopping young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go, had to “retire.” (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks as definite proof that Allan was purged although maybe I should reevaluate everything he has said in a new light.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. That fact should signal the end of this embarrassing and rather provocative disclaimers. Done. Lance Lawrence}    

Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweaty profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come. Some nights they were on fire at blew that big note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white, I swear, blew out to the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at when he was not in his prime.         

The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating father Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.

Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.  

They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their won and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade whiskey (or so he called it).

So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room to the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, pretty good right.  

When The Bolsheviks Went Into The Trenches To Stop Russian Continued Participation In World War I, Circa 1917

When The Bolsheviks Went Into The Trenches To Stop Russian Continued Participation In World War I, Circa 1917

By Lance Lawrence    

[Sam when he was telling the story, Frank Jackman’s story, to his longtime companion Laura who knew some of the outline of Frank’s military service,  had to bring her up to speed on some of the specifics which the reader may as well be interested in although Frank a few years early had written a detailed summary of the whole affair for the Progressive Nation magazine when they were doing a series on Vietnam veterans and wanted the perspective of an anti-war soldier who while in the military became a military resister. (While every serious civilian peace activist then, or now, honors those who “got religion” as Sam likes to call it on the issues of war and peace after their military service was completed the military is the special category that marks off this story from theirs.) 

Here in quick outline is what Sam told Laura. Frank had been drafted in 1969 in the heart of the Vietnam War, had allowed himself to be inducted with a slight anti-war feeling but not enough to do anything else about so accepted induction in the Army. (Sam, just to set the record straight had been drafted in 1968 had served a year, actually thirteen months with a month R&R in Hawaii, in Vietnam as an 11 Bravo, an infantryman, a grunt, “cannon-fodder” as Frank would say, and saw other do, and he did things which still cause restless nights.)  

About three days into basic training down south down in notorious Fort Gordon near Augusta, Georgia which all recruits go through Frank realized that he had made a big mistake, a very big mistake, since whatever seemingly slight anti-war feeling he had previously expressed had actually been a pretty powerful opposition to war but only had been awakened by the actual experience of Army life. Frank would always tip his hat later to those draft resisters who had formed their powerful opposition to war before facing induction and under the threat of several years of federal prison. Nevertheless, being no place where he could seek help and not sure what help he needed he went through both basic training and, and this is important, Advanced Infantry Training, the same training that Sam had gone through about a year earlier, meaning training as an infantryman, grunt, “cannon-fodder” as he came to call it. That meant no question in the post-Tet summer of 1969 when the Army was desperate for replacements after suffering heavy casualties and the only place on the good green planet when 11 Bravo skills were in anything like serious demand was in Southeast Asia orders to Vietnam. At the end of that training with a month’s leave before reporting to Fort Lewis, Washington for transit that was exactly what happened.                     

While home, still not sure what he was going to do, he got in touch with the Quakers up in Cambridge who he had found out were doing counselling for G.I.s in exactly his situation. The option presented which applied to him out of several not good paths to choose from, after a technical AWOL (absent without leave, a no no) to get dropped from the rolls for not reporting to Fort Lewis, was to turn himself in at the nearest Army post which was at Fort Devens out in Ayer, Massachusetts and apply for Conscientious Objector (CO) status. A long shot as the counsellor made clear but the route he had to follow if he expected relief. At that time the Army was turning down virtually all such applications whatever basis for the beliefs, sincere or not. Frank was turned down on the basis of his Catholic just war theory and moral and ethical objections none of which then were viable as reasons for discharge, and as the next step the Quakers had gotten him a lawyer who was very interested in testing these kind of Army turndowns in federal court on writs of habeas corpus. That was one strand of the Frank case which in the end would be the way that he got out of the Army via granting of a writ in civilian court and received an honorable discharge as a result since the court ruled the Army had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in turning down his admittedly sincere application.   

The other more important strand, the one which makes sense of why Frank startled Sam by affirming his pride in what he had done in the military one night soon after he had gotten out and more recently reconfirmed several weeks ago was his increasing commitment to the cause of peace, to stopping the massacres in Vietnam. One day he decided not without feelings of extreme anxiety to join a demonstration those Quakers from Cambridge were putting on at the front gates to the fort. During the duty day and in uniform both illegal. That action lead to his first special court-martial where he drew and served a six month sentence, or rather almost six months with a couple of weeks chopped off for good conduct. Sam had to Laura explained some of the specific details of that case previously about how the military authorities pretty high up in the fort conspired to try to ship him off under guard to Fort Lewis for transit to Vietnam something that

was only averted by a time temporary restraining order from that federal court in Boston. Also explained how Frank in his defense of his actions in open court had read into the record Bob Dylan’s searing Masters of War which drove the judges apoplectic.  

Stockade sentence one down Frank had clearly what he called “gotten religion” about war and peace during this whole process and almost immediately after he got out one Monday morning early on the weekly parade field where everybody lined up he came storming out of the barracks in civilian clothes carrying a sign “Bring The Troops Home.” That brought a second Special court-martial in which he drew another six month sentencing serving almost all of it before the writ of habeas corpus came through releasing him from the Army’s clutches. Otherwise Frank had mentioned one time he might still be in the stockade the way he was feeling and the Army was obliging him in his determination to break the chains holding him to the Army.

Another night Frank would tell Sam and some other friends that after he first turned himself in long before he served serious time he had felt relieved of the fear that troubles most people into thinking twice about doing what their heart tells them to do for fear of incarceration. He, not having been entangled with the law previously had had to stay in a naval prison cell in Boston subsequently a State Police holding cell before being transported to a short pre-trial detainment cell in the post stockade, after turning himself in as an AWOL. That very few days of initial imprisonment acted as a catalyst since a lot of the fear of jail time, which is nevertheless hard time to do no matter what anybody says, is a fear of the unknown and of stories heard from childhood about not doing this or that unless you wanted to wind up behind bars where they might lock you up and throw away the keys. The first taste relieves that anxiety. He made everybody laugh that night when he related how every freaking dumb-ass drill sergeant in basic training and AIT would warn their charges that any willful misconduct would wind them up in Fort Leavenworth, the maximum security hard-ass hard time place for the incorrigible. After surviving that first small bout, that mere taste Frank recalled that he would keep repeating to anybody who would listen- “hey, what do you want to do wind up in Leavenworth” when they threatened to put him away for keeps. A strange way to lose your fear of being locked up in the slammer but a nice cautionary tale. Lance Lawrence]

******

You never know, especially if you have lived in this wicked old world long enough, when some ancient memory long buried will come up and bite you. Not literally but make you sit up and take notice nevertheless. Take the case of one Frank Jackman, a writer, something of an inventor, and for our purposes one of those guys whom he, when in writing mode, has called a member in good standing of the Generation of ’68, a turbulent war time, roller coaster of emotion time which deeply formed many a baby-boomer. Oh yes and for our purposes since we will be speaking of war and what the hell to do about stopping it as we approach the final year of the 100^th anniversary of the First World War, the so-called war to end all wars, a full-fledged Army veteran. A veteran of a certain type not to be found in the cheap dollar a hard liquor drink bars adjacent to your local American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting hall.        

This is the way Frank told Sam Lowell, a friend from high school down in North Adamsville, south of Boston also a veteran but of the more traditional type, except also minus the cheap bar stuff one night over a couple of drinks at The Grotto in downtown Boston near the Seaport District. (A story Sam would tell his longtime companion Laura, Laura Perkins as well after setting up the story with a brief Frank Jackman introduction outlined above.) Frank had, as mentioned previously, startled Sam by opening up the conversation with a statement that he had always been understatedly proud of his Army record, what he had done for the cause of peace in his very small individual way, when, using old familiar language from their growing up poor Acre section of town, the deal went down. (Sam had automatically thought after hearing that sentiment that Frank should be rather than understatedly have been “understandably” proud of that record wishing he had done something similar when he time had come to face his demons.)

Sam was a bit confused by Frank’s comment nevertheless since while both men were Army veterans and whatnot they seldom of late had talked about those experiences much less what lessons Frank as the more political type of the two had drawn from that experience. He asked Frank why he had brought up that point since they long ago had agreed that Frank had done the right thing during his Army time (and that Sam to his everlasting regret had not but nobody pushed that point then or now). What had caused that recollection to surface once more was a recent “controversy,” what Sam usually called “a tempest in a teapot” when whatever the problem was it was minor in the great scheme of things. This would prove the case as well but Sam could see where Frank would be incensed by the implications of what went as a result of that minor event in the great scheme of things.

Of all things almost fifty years later the big deal was over Frank’s discharge, his official DD214 which for all military personnel is the summation of one’s service time and discharge. What enabled you to be called veteran by friend and foe alike, and what entitled you to certain governmental benefits reserved for those in veteran status. If you can believe this would come up with what you already know from above about whether he was even a veteran. Sam gasped in disbelief but held up comment because he wanted every gory detail of this charge.

Both men, each from a different place but each having “gotten religion” on the issues of war and peace, began shortly after Frank’s discharge which was later than Sam’s to work with various anti-war veteran groups like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Sam did that kind of work for a while and even today if Frank asks him he will show up at an anti-war rally against American aggression in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or the ever-growing threat of war in places like Iran and North Korea. But mostly he was bogged down with work, with three ex-wives and a parcel of kids who almost broke him with college tuition and left the politics to Frank. Frank as well would have periods of political inactivity due to a lot of the same reasons Sam had except he would stick with it more for the long haul-those periods of inactivity he called an “un-armed truce” with the war-monger. Particularly Frank (and Sam for a longer while than usual having finally gotten that parcel of well-behaved kids through college which had nearly broken him having a little more free time) became incensed and energized over the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Iraq invasion of 2003 and wound up joining the local chapter of another veteran’s peace group, Veterans Peace Action (VPA), in Boston. And that is where “the rubber hit the road” as one of Sam’s expensively-trained at his almost breaking point expense college boys would say.      

Frank, as anybody who read the introduction could see a mile away, once he is committed to something is in “all the way.” That was his approach to VPA once he decided to join up. That joining up process as previously with VVAW and other later organizational affiliations meaning no paper membership but an activist’s commitment and for a few years, several years actually, there was no problem, no political problem. When Frank had joined he had specifically joined the local VPA chapter since there was an option to join the local, the national organization or both. He opted for the local since he felt, and still feels that the national organization is something that he would be merely a paper member of which did not interest him in the least. Things seemed okay until a local member with ties the national organization who let’s call him as Frank did “the Inquisitor-General” began an individual campaign a few years ago directed mainly at Frank declaring that he was not a member of VPA since he has not, had never, paid dues to National (he did faithfully to the local chapter as well as contribute extra funds for various campaigns another usual step when he was “all in”). The Inquisitor-General as it turned out was right when Frank checked that matter out. Was right as far as that fact went although the local held to its long-time which was reaffirmed in their subsequently enacted by-laws that one could be a local member without being a National member as long as one, with various hardship exceptions, paid local dues. Mostly bureaucratic hokum as the whole thing drifted like smoke from his mind.

Not so the Inquisitor-General (let’s call him to save cyberspace I-G for simplicity’s sake hereafter). He would periodically badger Frank about his “non-membership” usually via e-mail since while the I-G may have been an organization stickler he played other than poster child “thorn in the side” no active role in the local organization. Had his base of support to the extent that he had any in the national office VPA bureaucracy.  Then about a year ago the I-G amped up his campaign, decided for his own nefarious reasons or his own delusions, or maybe both, that if Frank didn’t apply for National VPA membership which required proof of military discharge, that vaunted DD214 that he was “hiding” something ( that proof of discharge a requirement of the local chapter as well but being a looser not as well organized volunteer organization with fewer resources and less procedural hurtles had never asked Frank, or many others for that matter, for discharge papers upon becoming members). He was hiding something, something nefarious in a veterans’ organization of any stripe, that he was possibility not a veteran. Frank sensing a twisted turn in events in order to protect himself had quickly contacted the State Adjutant-General’s Office to get a copy of his discharge since he no longer had a copy at home. A few days later it came via e-mail and he forwarded that copy to the local executive committee which was the appropriate place to verify his status under normal circumstances. End of story as Sam was famous for saying.

Not quite, actually not by a long shot. The I-G as far as Frank could tell never pressed the issue further that year. Several weeks ago the I-G again pressed the issue not only to Frank but to the Executive Committee once again defaming Frank as possibility not a veteran. The executive committee or the members who overlapped from the previous year told the I-G that they had seen Frank’s discharge and that was that. As you now know that was not the case. The I-G essentially defaming the committee in the process wanted a copy of the discharge which he as a merely marginal member of the local VPA was emphatically not entitled to view for privacy reasons among others. He kept up a drumbeat including to Frank to produce the DD214 although Frank had a long-standing policy of not responding to anything from the I-G for any reason after few blow-outs a few years previously. On this particular issue Frank was adamant that he needed no “good conduct certificate” by the I-G (or any other entity including the local and National branches of VPA) as a stand-up anti-war soldier. Without going further into the silly rather continuously repetitive details at some point not yet concluded the Executive Committee started expulsion proceedings against the I-G and Frank has retained a lawyer to begin a defamation suit in Massachusetts court.           

         

During this whole nightmarish Kafkaesque/1984 process Frank had a chance to think through not only his pride in his individual actions against the American war machine during the Vietnam War but his changing attitude not toward the personal actions themselves but to their effectiveness. That is in a sense the real reason, if one was necessary since the question of discharge for him was finished the day he received his discharge back in February of 1971, Frank had kept his personal history “on the low” as they say in another context. That leads us finally to the title of this piece, the why of the Bolshevik way to stopping war in its tracks at the soldier, grunt, cannon-fodder on the ground.        

You see, and the first time Sam heard Frank mention this he freaked out, Frank has come to believe that pride or not he should have when ordered to Vietnam gone there and seen what he as an anti-war soldier could do to stop the war “in the trenches” taking a phrase from World War I. His later model the Bolsheviks, at that 1969 time their anti-war policies unknown to him, who Frank thought correctly ordered their male members if inducted or dragooned into the Czarist armies to accept that induction under penalty of expulsion from the organization (a policy of later Bolshevik-descended organizations including the Communist and Socialist Workers parties in their better days in the United States).

Not for the Bolsheviks the refusal of the draft notice as occurred in America with wide-spread refusal on an individual basis. Refusal by the kind of politically adept young men whom if they had been inducted and accepted orders to Vietnam en masse could have perhaps shifted the balance. Shifted it even more drastically than in the actual case where the American Army in Vietnam in 1969 no end in sight, no victory in sight, nothing but useless deaths in sight was half-mutinous. Had, as individual soldiers Frank met in VVAW and VPA would confirm from refusal to go beyond the minimum ordered march to FTA on their helmets to laying wasted under marijuana and other refined killer drugs. Was an army even to, maybe especially to, the top generals, a spent force and which would take an all- volunteer and several years to put back into fighting trim.

Such actions by those young men, by Frank, might have shortened the war by years. Of course such speculation would depend on whether such numbers would have been permitted to go, whether in Frank’s individual case he would have landed in a unit that would listen to him, whether he might like many others have landed in mutinous Long Binh Jail (LBJ). One thing Frank knew as this 100^th anniversary of the last year of the First World War was coming into focus collective action beat individual acts of conscience six, two and even. He laughed as he thought about how insignificant the I-G’s nonsense mattered in the great scheme of things except he had to be stopped in his tracks like any other miserable wannbe big fish in a little pond. Some things never change.