The Trials and Tribulations Of The Generation Of ’68-The Summer of 1969-Frank Jackman Casts His Fate With The Poor Peoples Of The Earth-And Tweaking The U.S. Army To Boot-With Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” In Mind

The Trials and Tribulations Of The Generation Of ’68-The Summer of 1969-Frank Jackman Casts His Fate With The Poor Peoples Of The Earth-And Tweaking The U.S. Army To Boot-With Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” In Mind  

By Frank Jackman 

Maybe it is the nature of this publication, maybe it is the nature of historic memory or maybe it is the nature of this man, me, this Frank Jackman who has staked his life on what he remembered hearing a long time ago on a radio folk music show in the heat of the folk minute that swept the nation, the nation’s youth particularly in the early 1960s when he was growing up poor in the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville a bunch of miles south of Boston. He had been startled to hear one Pete Seeger, banjo man extraordinaire playing that instrument and singing alternately in Spanish and English the old Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti’s version of Guantanamera when he came upon a later verse translated as “I want to cast my fate with the poor people of this earth.”* The story I have to tell, a personal Frank Jackman story is how in the summer of 1969, fifty years ago, yes, I know a lot of 50^th anniversaries have been addressed in this publication over the past few years by members of the Class of `68 still standing, had been a key decision point in my own fervent desire to cast my fate with the poor people of the earth. And have not done a bad job of staying committed to that vision at a time when things could have gone either way in that hell-bent Vietnam War year.    

[*I was about to say that with this song this was the first time I had even heard of the name Pete Seeger, a name I would come to know as a fellow activist and later when I took up writing reviews of music that mattered in the American songbook I got to know him personally as a “hail fellow, well met” but that is not true. Not true although that Sunday evening WBZ (in Boston) Dick Summer’s folk show I rightly assumed I had not heard of the man or his voice before because of one   Lester Dannon (known in the local professional music world as Lester Dannon and his Cannons, a jazzy, pop music grouping favored among the older set, the generation that had gone through the Great Depression and slogged through World War II as he had, my parent’s generation for weddings and family outings).  Lester whom we kids called innocently then without any other thought that taking part in a youthful rhyming craze called Lester the Molester, which these days would call for all kinds of interventions and investigations, had force-fed the most popular work of Pete’s and a group that he was a member of The Weaver’s cover of Leadbelly’s Goodnight, Irene.

Lester may have not been a molester, but he had a plan to wean us away from our growing love of break-out rock and roll music which he hated by playing on the record player and having us sing folk tunes like Irene and pop tunes from his, our parent’s generation. We bucked and buckled under that horrible weight for three junior high school years but gave in to the inevitable when he threatened to play classic music and opera if we didn’t learn his clowny stuff. (Lester may have not been a molester of anything but our growing music taste buds although he was caught up unjustly in a scandal later when the junior high school male gym teacher was fired because he was sexually molesting young underage boys although not from the school or town but elsewhere part of the reason he was able to be a predator for as long as he had been. We had to bring a big campaign to clear Lester’s name once we heard about the false accusations against him but that did not cause him to not hate rock and roll until his dying days or us to forgive him from ramming music we really did hate then, a generational thing, down our throats.)  

Many of the older writers still standing at this publication, I will just mention the guys I grew with still standing, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth, Jack Callahan, Allan Jackson, Bart Webber have written extensively the past couple of years on key anniversaries, key 50^th anniversaries which none of us would have thought possible back in the 1960s when the motto, if unspoken mostly was “live fast, die young, and make a good corpse.” Noteworthy and cause for much internal friction between older and younger writers who could have given a fuck about events their parents had come of age through happened a couple of years ago when then site manager Allan Jackson went crazy giving 24/7/365 or so it seemed to commemorating the Summer of Love, 1967 and subsequently the riotous happenings of 1968 too numerous to mention now but the anniversaries which were fully covered last year.*

Now in the year of the 50^th anniversary of Woodstock, the eternally etched rock festival that defined one end of a generation, we are in for another burst of writing about what it all meant historically and personally. It is with that backdrop that I tell my story which is not about Woodstock Nation, not then anyway, but about that previously mentioned then vague and untested idea of casting my fate with the poor people of the earth, my people. Others from that cohort of older writers I grew up with have written about my epiphany, especially Seth Garth’s Frank Jackman’s Masters of War but just now if nothing else as a cautionary tale I want to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of my personal decision to refuse orders to Vietnam, which is just a short cut way of saying that I had cast my fate with the poor people of the earth-for good.         

(*Look to the Archives from late 2017 to early 2018 to get the inside story of what happened to cause Allan Jackson’s downfall and subsequent short “exile” before new and current site manager Greg Green brought him back as a contributing editor. A short summary was that the younger writers balked at having to do assignments they didn’t’ care about to the exclusion of stuff they did know, brought the matter to a vote of no confidence, won the vote and brought Greg Green and an Editorial Board in to oversee that such things as Summer of Love mania never happened again. Strangely some of the assignments Greg decided on when he took charge, seemingly in order to assert his authority were frankly bizarre like the Marvel/DC comics come to cinema series that nobody young or old wanted to touch with a ten- foot pole.)

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Every guy and it was all guys then who came of age in most parts of the 1960s, who were of draft age, from eighteen to late twenty something, maybe later, had to face one big choice no matter where they stood on the issues of the day, on the Vietnam War. What to do about military service. Everybody from POTUS (Twitter speak) Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump down to the guys in the Acre neighborhood of growing up poor North Adamsville. I have heard many stories about how guys wound up in the military or figured a way around military duty over the past fifty years and have concluded that I would be less judgmental about how each person made their decision, except those who essentially bought their ways out like Bush and Trump but this story is not about them. It is a wonder so many survived their experiments, like those who found a way around going into the service like taking all kinds of drugs just before the dreaded physical which everybody passed unless you had some serious deficiency, military deficiency like only one leg or blindness, the Army needed two-legged men and non-visually-impaired men (now men and women) to hump the boonies as the saying went-meaning nowhere else in the world but sweated jungle, delta, river Vietnam. Like guys loading up on salt to drive their blood pressures up. Like declaring themselves homosexuals which today might seem weird giving the changes in policy but then meant you were refused and if you did get in and were found out that you really were gay subject to discharge and not an honorable one either (assuming that you were serious about your homosexuality and not just using it to avoid service which hung over guys for a long time.) Like guys declaring themselves fervent members of a whole number of communist organizations or their fronts when the security clearance questions were asked. That, by the way, lasted only so long until the Selective Service (the draft’s official organizational name) figured, knowingly figured from their FBI friends who had infiltrated those organizations in the previous decades, that there was a scam going on. The vast majority though one way or another who refused induction didn’t use these ruses some very clever but by a flat-out refusal to be drafted-not later when actually in the military as in my case.

The reader, hell, on reflection fifty years later writing this piece, me, may wonder why I did not join that last grouping by refusing military service as a civilian which took its own level of commitment and decision-making outside the box that society expected of us. I certainly knew that there were plenty of young guys, men who were refusing, although as I recall I did not know any personally on campus or elsewhere. I did know since I was working my way through college driving a truck and servicing coffee machines I passed the Arlington Street Church in the Back Bay section of Boston which was a central sanctuary for draft-resisters. Go back though to that point I made about coming from the hard-core working class, working poor Acre section of North Adamsville and that will give a better idea of why I had not resisted military service as a civilian. 

Start with the family, make that families since mine replicated the great majority of the families in the Irish-etched Roman Catholic Acre. Where would I have either learned or gained support from that milieu about not going into the military when my father had slogged through World War II in the Pacific War as a gung-ho Marine who faced all the island- hopping battles those Leathernecks were engaged in. Many other fathers and relatives had the same stories. (I was not close probably ever to my very distant father who had like many men from his generation had seen the ugly face of war and kept quiet about what they saw after their service did tell me one time that he, a son of the Hazard. Kentucky coalmines enlisted in the Marines on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, on the idea that he would rather take his chances against the Nips, a derogatory term for the Japanese then, than face life in the mines and what that meant and had never looked back. Maybe to his personal sorrows since he had nothing but a very tough life when he married my mother and landed in her hometown Acre neighborhood)    

Moreover even in my own Acre neighborhood generation, the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys as we called ourselves, which came of age not only under the sign of rock and roll but of the great Cold War ideologies and concepts which were held pretty firmly if not totally understood provided no cover for what I would do. My high school graduation class of 1964 for example had as I later found out when the males were asked for their military service if any almost all had some such record. Among Tonio corner boys as the war escalated every single guy with the exception of a couple who had disabilities which precluded military service wound up serving in Vietnam including the late Peter Markin who of all of us would had been the logical choice as a resister. (Markin whose life and fate still bring a tear to our eyes when we mention his name took his service harder than the others and would wind up falling down in the end to an early grave already extensively written about by everybody in our crowd including me, a bitter fate for a guy who was always ahead of the curve in our crowd about which way the social winds were blowing). Top that off with the deaths of two corner boys, Rick Rizzo and David White, whose names are forever etched on the Adamsville town memorial stone and down in black granite down in Washington, who laid down their heads in some bloody swamps in Vietnam and you get an idea of what the milieu was like and how likely the ideas of resistance were to come intellectually to me without some serious trial to confront me. (My family and many other families which I learned about second-hand after the dust had settled not only hated or did not understand what I did but supported the war efforts long after even guys like POTUS Richard M. Nixon had tried to get out from under anyway he could).   

No, no, now that I am on my high horse it is not good enough blame the social milieu as the defining reason for allowing myself to be inducted into the Army in January of 1969 against all good reason. No question a different milieu say in Shaker Heights and among the elite college brethren and intelligentsia would have provided more thought-provoking possibilities but that denies my, Frank Jackman’s, sense of himself and his desires and concerns. I believe I have written about it elsewhere in this publication and if not then I certainly have mentioned it in a million conversations the contradictions between that stated purpose of “casting my fate with the poor people of the earth” which has animated this whole piece and what I thought my life’s goals, destiny if you like, were to be can be summarized in what I was about in the fall of 1960 when I was just fourteen.

I had always been interested in politics, history, government, something I shared with the late Markin. Which did not preclude either of us from being extremely larcenous corner boys or totally bonkers about girls, cars and sex in whatever order you want to put those elemental categories like the other guys who lived and died exclusively on that plateau. Markin and I, although we had deeply imbibed the Cold War anti-communist ideologies that choked American society in the 1950s, had other ideas as well, centrally concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and a stirring concern about the emerging black civil rights struggle down the South. Ideas which we tended not to discuss with the fellow corner boys who would have either red-baited or race-baited us. In 1960 the blessed Quakers, and they were blessed and always will be as the reader will find out later when the deal when down in the summer of 1969 whatever religious or political differences we had then or now along with prominent liberals like Doctor Spock, the famous baby doctor whose words of wisdom many mothers although not Acre mothers lived and died by decided to have a nation-wide event to call for nuclear disarmament in October of that year.

Despite all kinds of advice, maybe some veiled threats, certainly scorn from fellow students and the civics teacher I argued for that cause in school and had decided to go to Boston, to the historic protest spots on Boston Common to take part in the nation-wide observance. Even, and maybe especially, our corner boy leader Frankie Riley argued against my going (we even made a corner boy famous bet about whether I would go or “chicken out”) since he feared for my life if I went there giving the times and given the reaction of what I would later call the rednecks. I went (winning that bet gladly since I could have money for a date with a certain girl I was then for a minute interested in) and met those forthright Quakers and a few others who braved the scorn of the crowds to protest the nuclear arms race. If one thinks today that politics and prejudices are ugly and headed to civil war if not stopped in their tracks then you get the idea back then right out on those mean streets, maybe more in your face if you can believe that.     

Contradiction. The fall of 1960 was also the time this country was knee deep in the upcoming presidential election between one Richard Milhous Nixon and our own Irish Jack Kennedy. “Our own” no wrong term for we were crazy in the Irish-strewn Acre to see Jack beat that bastard Nixon. I would all fall go door to door putting literature in doors touting Jack’s candidacy. For those who don’t remember or are too young a central component of Jack’s campaign was that there was a “missile gap,” with the Soviets overhauling us with ways to take advantage of their larger number of weapons, nuclear weapons. So in one short period I could, and did, express my sincere beliefs in nuclear disarmament in Boston and in tribal Jack of the gap. That would not be the first time or the last that such contradictions ruled my universe. In 1968, remember Bobby Kennedy with a tear, I went crazy around the East Coast trying to get him elected before he was felled breaking many dreams and my heart. More importantly to what will follow I let my somewhat vague, upon reflection, anti-war sentiments get overwhelmed by all the other considerations about why I should have refused induction, including a girlfriend whose brother was serving in Vietnam.

Forward though to January 1969. As previously pointed out there were little points of rebellion about going into the Army, but they did not dominate, no way and if the impression has been left that this was the case that is wrong. Probably the truest statement would be some kind of belief that either war would be over before I had to confront what every male of my generation had to confront whatever his personal beliefs might or that I expected somehow like at several times in my young life to skate by, not get called for some reason known only to me at the time. Given what was happening on the battlefields I think that the latter sentiment dominated. I got my “friends and neighbors at the draft board” notice in the early fall of 1968 to report for the inevitable almost forgone conclusion physical examination (that “friends and neighbors” the actual salutation on the letter). Naturally I passed it since at that time almost anybody with two arms and two legs passed unless they had some gimmick already to get them out but which even if I had known about it then would not have used still depending on luck I guess I would call it.

Then in December 1968, I think I got the notice to report to the Boston Army Base for induction (no longer there but now part of the up-scale Seaport District). While that certainly got my attention, I was still in some form of denial. Adding to that my girlfriend at the time (this after I had broken up with that girlfriend whose brother was in Vietnam for personal reasons) , Joyce, who had started graduate school at Boston University after having been through the “wars” out at the University of Wisconsin which along with Berkeley, Michigan and B.U. were among the most vociferous centers of anti-war opposition was pressuring me to refuse induction. Easy for her to say, although she would prove right and prove a stalwart as well during my imprisonments. Whatever idealistic views I had (via Robert Kennedy), some sloth and maybe my whole freaking youth in the Acre which could not and should not be discounted did not mesh-then. The only thing that might point to some future struggles on my part was that the day in January 1969 before I was to report for induction I had Joyce cut my longish hair (you could hardly be a young male in Boston without that longer hair to distinguish you from the rednecks) and giving the Army butcher-barbers the satisfaction of cutting my locks. Still I took the oath, accepted induction.

The expectation, gained from the Acre brethren who had already either served or were in the service in Vietnam like Sam Lowell, was that I would take basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey. What happened was that for reasons known only to the Army Dix was full or something so those inducted that day were sent first to Fort Jackson down in South Carolina and then transferred to Fort Gordon over in Augusta, Georgia (the site of the later to be revered by Sam Lowell Masters’ Golf Tournament) for basic. The former location is where I had my opening epiphany, where I first really knew I had made a mistake about accepting induction. And while it would still be premature to say I had decided to refuse to go the thought was getting etched into my psyche.

Stop. The previous pages represent a pretty good remembrance of my times before that fateful January day. In looking over what others like Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Zack James (Alex from Carver’s younger brother who was too young to have been involved in all of this but who is a very good writer and hence has written, from outside the inner circle, a good piece on my travails). Rather than reinvent the wheel I think Sam should take over and tell once again his version of what I went through. Hell I have said enough let’s let site manager Greg Green publish his Introduction and Sam’s piece and if anybody has further questions they can comment and I will answer in return.    

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Introduction To Sam Lowell’s Frank Jackman’s Masters of War by Greg Green

Life is full of surprises as everybody over the age of about three knows firsthand even if that hard fact does not stand out and light a fire under you at every possible moment. Take my own situation. A couple of years ago I was working hard at the American Film Gazette managing the overall film review schedule and trying to outdo the legendary publisher Larry Lorton from Film Daily in the number of films we did reviews on. Then Pete Markin (aka Allan Jackson who used that moniker in honor of a fallen hometown friend who taught him and a few of the other writers here a thing or two about the profession although he eventually fell on his own sword which is a story many had detailed here over time and I need not go into) brought me over here to run the day to day operations while he readied himself for retirement or some other project. Jesus, then the Summer of Love, 1967, or rather the 50^th anniversary commemoration of the event hit this place like a whirling dervish. I was too young to know much about that time but had heard some pretty raw and scary stuff about drugs, unprotected sex, unlicensed or registered vehicles including some converted yellow school bus that became home for varying times by some of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys from the Acre  and other larcenies from writers here who had been there under Markin’s guidance, the real Markin not Allan. In any case Allan went crazy to make sure the damn event got almost as much coverage after 50 years as when the thing actually got off the ground and created what he and the others hatched up as a re-working of the antics of the Generation of ’68.

All well and good. Well not all well and good since the younger writers could in the words of Alden Riley one of the leaders of the Young Turks give a fuck about the fucking Summer of Love, 1967 or any other year in that decade. That led to a show-down and the demise of Allan Jackson, a founding member, and my elevation to site manager and the overall poohbah of this operation. According to what I hear around the water cooler things are calmer now that not everybody has to spent 24/7/365 neck-deep in the 1960s like that was the golden age, like that was the Garden as Lance Lawrence mockingly called it.

All this to say that some of the stuff from the 1960s, and the recently concluded The Roots is the Toots rock and roll series is one example that I was more than happy to give an encore presentation to (admittedly after a little nudge from Sam Lowell and others), is worth another inspection. That brings us to the real-life story below about what happened to Frank Jackman when he was of draft age, eighteen to who knows how long if things ever got really dicey, in the age when that meant something and meant some tough decisions for a whole generation of young men who didn’t know what the hell to do when their number got called. Yeah, maybe this tale is not the sexiest one on the block, on the lowdown of the 1960s when youth nation went overboard with sex, drugs and rock and roll but fifty years or so later it still reads like a good story that people should know about-and shout from the rooftops about as we enter another year of endless war in the endless wars of our times.

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Frank Jackman’s War from the pen of Sam Lowell

(I have changed up locales and people’s names but the story-line is as pure as I can make it for my friend Frank Jackman-S.L.)

Jack Callahan’s old friend from Sloan High School in Carver down in Southeastern Massachusetts Alex James (Alex short for Alex not as is the fashion today to just name a baby Alexander and be done with it) is an amateur writer and has been at it since he got out of high school. Found out that maybe by osmosis, something like that, the stuff Miss Enos taught him junior and senior years about literature and her favorite writers Hemingway, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker to name a few, with which she would entice the English class stuck with him with through college where although he majored in Political Science he was in thrall to the English literature courses that he snuck into to his schedule. Snuck in although Alex knew practically speaking he had a snowball’s chance in hell, an expression he had learned from Hemingway he thought, of making a career out of the literary life, would more likely wind up driving a cab through dangerous midnight sections of town occasionally getting mugged for his night’s work. That Political Science major winding up producing about the same practical results as the literary life though. Those literary designs stuck with him, savior stuck with him, through his tour of duty during the Vietnam War, and savior stayed with him through those tough years when he couldn’t quite get himself back to the “real” world after ‘Nam and let drugs and alcohol rule his life so that he wound up for some time as a “brother under the bridge” as Bruce Springsteen later put the situation in a song that he played continuously at times after he first heard the opening line “Saigon, long gone…."  Stuck with him after he recovered and started building up his sports supplies business, stuck with him through three happy/sad/savage/acrimonious “no go” marriages and a parcel of kids and child support.  And was still sticking with him now that he had time to stretch out and write longer pieces and beat away on the word processor a few million words on this and that.

Amateur writer meaning nothing more than that he liked to write, and that writing was not his profession, that he did not depend on the pen for his livelihood (or rather more correctly these days not the pen but the word processor). That livelihood business was taken up running a small sports apparel store in a mall not far from Lexington (the Lexington of American revolutionary battles to give the correct town and state) where he now lived. Although he was not a professional writer his interest was such that he liked these days with Jimmy Shore, the famous ex-runner running the day to day operations of the store, to perform some of his written work in public at various “open mic” writing (and poetry) jams that have sprouted up in his area.

This “open mic” business Alex had embarked on s was a familiar concept to Jack from the days back in the 1960s when he would go to such events in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square and Beacon Hill to hear amateur folk-singers perfect their acts and try to be recognized as the new voice of their generation, or something like that. For “no singing voice, no musical ear” Jack those were basically cheap date nights if the girl he was with was into folk music. The way most of the "open mics" worked, although they probably called them talent searches then, was each performer would sign up to do one, two, maybe three songs depending on how long the list of those wishing to perform happened to be (the places where each performer kicked in a couple of bucks in order to play usually had shorter lists). These singers usually performed in the period in front of the night’s feature who very well might have been somebody who a few weeks before had been noticed by the owner during a previous "open mic" and asked to do a set of six to sixteen songs depending on the night and the length of the list of players in front of him or her. The featured performer played, unlike the "open mic" people, for the “basket” (maybe a hat) passed around the crowd in the audience and that was the night’s “pay.” A tough racket for those starting out like all such endeavors. The attrition rate was pretty high after the folk minute died down with arrival of other genre like folk rock, heavy rock, and acid rock although you still see a few old folkies around the Square or playing the separate “open mic” folk circuit that also run through church coffeehouses just like these writing jams.

Jack was not surprised then when Alex told him he would like him to come to hear him perform one of his works at the monthly third Thursday “open mic” at the Congregational Church in Arlington the next town over from Lexington. Alex told Jack that that night he was going to perform something he had written and thought on about Frank Jackman, about what had happened to Frank when he was in the Army during Vietnam War times.

Jack knew almost automatically what Alex was going to do, he would somehow use Bob Dylan’s Masters of War lyrics as part of his presentation. Jack and Alex ( a Vietnam veteran who got “religion” on the anti-war issue while he in the Army and became a fervent anti-war guy after that experience despite his personal problems, including a couple of losing bout s with drugs and alcohol before getting twelve step sober) had met Frank in 1971 when they were doing some anti-war work among the soldiers at Fort Devens out in Ayer about forty miles west of Boston. Frank had gotten out of the Army several months before and since he was from Nashua in the southern part of New Hampshire not far from Devens and had heard about the G.I. coffeehouse, The Morning Report, where Jack and Alex were working as volunteers he had decided to volunteer to help out as well.

Now Frank was a quiet guy, quieter than Jack and Alex anyway, but one night he had told his Army story to a small group of volunteers gathered in the main room of the coffeehouse as they were planning to distribute Daniel Ellsberg’s sensational whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various spots around the base (including as it turned out inside the fort itself with one copy landing on the commanding general’s desk for good measure). He wanted to tell this story since he wanted to explain why he would not be able to go with them if they went inside the gates at Fort Devens.

Jack knew Alex was going to tell Frank’s story so he told Frank he would be there since he had not heard the song or Frank’s story in a long while and had forgotten parts of it. Moreover, Alex wanted Jack there for moral support since this night other than the recitation of the lyrics he was going to speak off the cuff rather than his usual reading from some prepared paper. 

That night Alex was already in the hall talking to the organizer, Eli Walsh, you may have heard of him since he has written some searing poems about his time in three tours Iraq. Jack felt right at home in this basement section of the church and he probably could have walked around blind-folded since the writing jams were on almost exactly the same model as the old folkie “open mics.” A table as you entered to pay your admission this night three dollars (although the tradition is that no one is turned away for lack of funds) with a kindly woman asking if you intended to perform and direct you to the sign-up sheet if so. Another smaller table with various cookies, snacks, soda, water and glasses for those who wished to have such goodies, and who were asked to leave a donation in the jar on that table if possible. The set-up in the hall this night included a small stage where the performers would present their material slightly above the audience. On the stage a lectern for those who wished to use that for physical support or to read their work from and the ubiquitous simple battery-powered sound system complete with microphone. For the audience a bevy of chairs, mostly mismatched, mostly having seen plenty of use, and mostly uncomfortable. After paying his admission fee he went over to Alex to let him know he was in the audience. Alex had told him he was number seven on the list so not to wander too far once the session had begun.

This is the way Alex told the story and why Jack knew there would be some reference to Bob Dylan’s Masters of War that night:

Hi everybody my name is Alex James and I am glad that you all came out this cold night to hear Preston Borden present his moving war poetry and the rest of us to reflect on the main subject of this month’s writing jam-the endless wars that the American government under whatever regime of late has dragged us into, us kicking and screaming to little avail.  I want to thank Eli as always for setting this event up every month and for his own thoughtful war poetry. [Some polite applause.] But enough for thanks and all that because tonight I want to recite a poem, well, not really a poem, but lyrics to a song, to a Bob Dylan song, Masters of War, so it might very well be considered a poem in some sense.   

You know sometimes, a lot of times, a song, lyrics, a poem for that matter bring back certain associations. You know some song you heard on the radio when you went on your first date, your first dance, your first kiss, stuff like that which is forever etched in your memory and evokes that moment every time you hear it thereafter. Now how this Dylan song came back to me recently is a story in itself.

You remember Eli back in October when we went up to Maine to help the Maine Veterans for Peace on their yearly peace walk that I ran into Susan Rich, the Quaker gal we met up in Freeport who walked with us that day to Portland. [Eli shouted out “yes.”] I had not seen Susan in about forty years before that day, hadn’t seen her since the times we had worked together building up support for anti-war G.I.s out at the Morning Report coffeehouse in Ayer outside Fort Devens up on Route 2 about thirty miles from here. That’s when we met Frank Jackman who is the real subject of my presentation tonight since he is the one who I think about when I think about that song, think about his story and how that song relates to it. 

Funny as many Dylan songs as I knew Masters of War, written by Dylan in 1963 I had never heard until 1971. Never heard the lyrics until I met Frank out at Fort Devens where after I was discharged from the Army that year I went to do some volunteer anti-war G.I. work at the coffeehouse outside the base in Army town Ayer. Frank too was a volunteer, had heard about the place somehow I forget how, who had grown up in Nashua up in southern New Hampshire and after he was discharged from the Army down at Fort Dix in New Jersey came to volunteer just like me and my old friend Jack Callahan who is sitting in the audience tonight. Now Frank was a quiet guy didn’t talk much about his military service, but he made the anti-war soldiers who hung out there at night and on weekends feel at ease. One night thought he felt some urge to tell his story, tell why he thought it was unwise for him to participate in an anti-war action we were planning around the base. We were going to pass out copies of Daniel Ellsberg’s explosive whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various location around the fort and as it turned out on the base. The reason that Frank had balked at the prospect of going into the fort was that as part of his discharge paperwork was attached a statement that he was never to go on a military installation again. We all were startled by that remark, right Jack? [Jack nods agreement.]

And that night the heroic, our kind of heroic, Frank Jackman told us about the hows and whys of his Army experience. Frank had been drafted like a ton of guys back then, like me, and had allowed himself to be drafted in 1968 at the age of nineteen not being vociferously anti-war and not being aware then of the option of not taking the subsequent induction. After about three week down at Fort Dix, the main basic training facility for trainees coming from the Northeast then, he knew two things-he had made a serious mistake by allowing himself to be drafted and come hell or high water he was not going to fight against people he had no quarrel with in Vietnam. Of course the rigors of basic training and being away from home, away from anybody who could help him do he knew not what then kept him quiet and just waiting. Once Basic was over and he got his Advanced Infantry Training assignment also at Fort Dix which was to be an infantryman at a time when old Uncle Sam only wanted infantrymen in the rice paddles and jungles of Vietnam things came to a head.

After a few weeks in AIT he got a three day weekend pass which allowed him to go legally off the base and he used that time to come up to Boston, or really Cambridge because what he was looking for was help to file an conscientious objector application and he knew the Quakers were historically the ones who would know about going about that process. That is ironically where Susan Rich comes in again, although indirectly this time, since Frank went to the Meeting House on Brattle Street where they were doing draft and G.I. resistance counseling and Susan was a member of that Meeting although she had never met him at that time. He was advised by one of the Quaker counselors that he could submit a C.O. application in the military, which he had previously not been sure was possible since nobody told anybody anything about that in the military, when he got back to Fort Dix but just then, although they were better later, the odds were stacked against him since he had already accepted induction. So he went back, put in his application, took a lot of crap from the lifers and officers in his company after that and little support, mainly indifference, from his fellow trainees. He still had to go through the training, the infantry training though and although he had taken M-16 rifle training in basic he almost balked at continuing to fire weapons especially when it came to machine guns. He didn’t balk but in the end that was not a big deal since fairly shortly after that his C.O. application was rejected although almost all those who interviewed him in the process though he was “sincere” in his beliefs. That point becomes important later.

Frank, although he knew his chances of being discharged as a C.O. were slim since he had based his application on his Catholic upbringing and more general moral and ethical grounds. The Catholic Church which unlike Quakers and Mennonites and the like who were absolutely against war held to a just war theory, Vietnam being mainly a just war in the Catholic hierarchy’s opinion. But Frank was sincere, more importantly, he was determined to not go to war despite his hawkish family and his hometown friends,’ some who had already served, served in Vietnam too, scorn and lack of support. So he went back up to Cambridge on another three day pass to get some advice, which he actually didn’t take in the end or rather only partially took up  which had been to get a lawyer they would recommend and fight the C.O. denial in Federal court even though that was also still a long shot then.

Frank checked with the lawyer alright, Steve Brady, who had been radicalized by the war and was offering his services on a sliding scale basis to G.I.s since he also had the added virtue of having been in the JAG in the military and so knew some of the ropes of the military legal system, and legal action was taken but Frank was one of those old time avenging Jehovah types like John Brown or one of those guys and despite being a Catholic rather than a high holy Protestant which is the usual denomination for avenging angels decided to actively resist the military. And did it in fairly simple way when you think about it. One Monday morning when the whole of AIT was on the parade field for their weekly morning report ceremony Frank came out of his barracks with his civilian clothes on and carrying a handmade sign which read “Bring the Troops Home Now!”

That sign was simply but his life got a lot more complicated after that. In the immediate sense that meant he was pulled down on the ground by two lifer sergeants and brought to the Provost Marshal’s office since they were not sure that some dippy-hippie from near-by New York City might be pulling a stunt. When they found out that he was a soldier they threw him into solitary in the stockade.

For his offenses Frank was given a special court-martial which meant he faced six month maximum sentence which a panel of officers at his court-martial ultimately sentenced him to after a seven day trial which Steve Brady did his best to try to make into an anti-war platform but given the limitation of courts for such actions was only partially successful. After that six months was up minus some good time Frank was assigned to a special dead-beat unit waiting further action either by the military or in the federal district court in New Jersey. Still in high Jehovah form the next Monday morning after he was released he went out to that same parade field in civilian clothes carrying another homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home Now!” and he was again manhandled by another pair of lifer sergeants and this time thrown directly into solitary in the stockade since they knew who they were dealing with by then. And again he was given a special court-martial and duly sentenced by another panel of military officers to the six months maximum.

Frank admitted at that point he was in a little despair at the notion that he might have to keep doing the same action over and over again for eternity. Well he wound up serving almost all of that second six-month sentence but then he got a break. That is where listening to the Quakers a little to get legal advice did help. See what Steve Brady, like I said an ex-World War II Army JAG officer turned anti-war activist lawyer, did was take the rejection of his C.O. application to Federal District Court in New Jersey on a writ of habeas corpus arguing that since all Army interviewers agreed Frank was “sincere” that it had been arbitrary and capricious of the Army to turn down his application. And given that the United States Supreme Court and some lower court decisions had by then expanded who could be considered a C.O. beyond the historically recognized groupings and creeds the cranky judge in the lower court case agreed and granted that writ of habeas corpus. Frank was let out with an honorable discharge, ironically therefore entitled to all veterans’ benefits but with the stipulation that he never go onto a military base again under penalty of arrest and trial. Whether that could be enforced as a matter of course he said he did not want to test since he was hardily sick of military bases in any case. 

So where does Bob Dylan’s Masters of War come into the picture. Well as you know, or should know every prisoner, every convicted prisoner, has the right to make a statement in his or her defense during the trial or at the sentencing phase. Frank at both his court-martials rose up and recited Bob Dylan’s Masters of War for the record. So for all eternity, or a while anyway, in some secret recess of the Army archives (and of the federal courts too) there is that defiant statement of a real hero of the Vietnam War. Nice right? 

 Here is what had those bloated military officers on Frank’s court-martial boards seeing red and ready to swing him from the highest gallows, yeah, swing him high.

Masters Of War-Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music

British Trotskyists Say: Brexit Now! For a Workers Europe! The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer (No. 245, Summer 2019), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.

Workers Vanguard No. 1157	21 June 2019

British Trotskyists Say:

Brexit Now!

For a Workers Europe!

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer (No. 245, Summer 2019), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.

In defiance of the decisive popular vote to leave the EU [European Union], three years later, the British ruling class still has its seat in the bankers’ and bosses’ cartel. With the Brexit deadline kicked back to October, the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie, centred on the City of London, are demanding continued access to the single market and the rest of the EU spoils. Theresa May’s resignation has set off a leadership contest, with a wing of the Tories, encouraged by U.S. president Donald Trump, pushing for more independence from the EU treaties in hopes of better competing against German and French imperialism (and no doubt with their own political fortunes in mind).

In contrast, the entire Labour Party leadership is carrying the banner for the City of London by supporting the EU. Momentum [a grouping inside the Labour Party], deputy leader Tom Watson and the Blairites are all furiously denouncing Corbyn for not being pro-EU enough. But Corbyn’s “constructive ambiguity” over Brexit is designed to allow him to pursue a pro-EU programme while maintaining the support of Labour’s working-class base, which is fed up with the EU’s devastating impact on living standards and working conditions. The absence of an organised working-class opposition to the EU has put wind in the sails of racist, right-wing demagogues like Nigel Farage and outright fascists.

Corbyn betrayed his working-class supporters by campaigning for remain [in the EU] in the 2016 referendum; he stands for Britain staying in a permanent customs union and full alignment with the single market, i.e., no Brexit; and he has been very clear that he supports a second referendum to overturn the result of the first. No second referendum! Britain out now!

The EU is a set of treaties designed to maximise profits by increasing the exploitation of workers across Europe. For the European imperialists, centrally Germany and France as well as (so far) Britain, the unstable EU alliance is a means to increase their competitiveness against their imperialist rivals, the U.S. and Japan, while further subjugating the weaker countries. At the same time, the EU acts as an adjunct of NATO and is a source of great profits for the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie. The conflicting national interests of the imperialists constantly threaten to tear the alliance asunder.

The EU’s nature can be seen in the rape of Greece, which today has less national sovereignty than neocolonial Mexico; the economic devastation of Ireland after the 2008-09 financial crisis; the transformation of Poland and other East European countries into reservoirs of super-exploited labour; and the fall in living standards for working people in the imperialist centres, including Germany and Britain.

In advocating a leave vote in 2016, we noted: “Amid the growing chaos besetting the EU, a British exit would deal a real blow to this imperialist-dominated conglomerate, further destabilising it and creating more favourable conditions for working-class struggle across Europe—including against a weakened and discredited Tory government in Britain” (Workers Hammer No. 234, Spring 2016). The prolonged crisis of the Tory government has created an advantageous situation for working-class struggle, which could also drive Britain out of the EU. But rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to advance the interests of the oppressed and exploited, the misleaders of the proletariat in the Labour Party and the unions have instead provided an invaluable service to the British bourgeoisie by promoting illusions in the EU while isolating and demobilising strikes.

The struggle to forge a new leadership of the unions, one based on the understanding that the interests of labour and capital are fundamentally counterposed, cannot be separated from the struggle for a revolutionary party that champions all those ground under the heel of the capitalists, including immigrant and minority workers who are among the most oppressed and the most militant components of the proletariat.

Marxists oppose the EU because it is an alliance of the enemies of our class. Its breakup would be a defeat for the imperialist rulers. Our support for Brexit flows from our perspective for the liberation of humanity through a series of proletarian revolutions that sweep away the capitalist rulers in Britain and internationally. For a Socialist United States of Europe, united on a voluntary basis!

The City’s “Socialists”

The Communist Party (CPB), Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party [affiliated with Socialist Alternative in the U.S.] and the Socialist Workers Party all claim to be for Brexit but constantly contradict that claim in practice. These groups’ nominal “left exit” stance in 2016 was carefully calibrated to avoid confrontation with Labour’s remain campaign. Now they all clamour for a general election to replace the Tory government with a pro-EU Corbyn government. Like the traitors of the Second International who sided with their “own” ruling classes at the outbreak of World War I, these ostensible socialists are nothing but social-chauvinists “who are helping ‘their own’ bourgeoisie to rob other countries and enslave other nations” (V.I. Lenin, “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International,” January 1916).

Holding elections to the EU’s sham “parliament” on 23 May was an open display of ruling-class contempt for the populace. Reflecting working-class resentment over this farce, the CPB called for a “people’s boycott” of the elections. But lest the “people’s boycott” be mistaken for genuine opposition to the EU, in an 18 May article in the Morning Star, CPB general secretary Robert Griffiths insisted: “It is not a question of opposing participation in EU elections in principle.” Griffiths upheld the party’s previous campaigns for the EU “parliament,” which he falsely equated with standing for election to the actual Parliament in Westminster.

The so-called EU “parliament” is not a parliament at all. It is a forum for diplomatic manoeuvring which the European imperialists use to falsely present their cartel as a democratic union transcending the nation state. Any participation in EU “parliament” elections is a betrayal of the principle of proletarian class independence. Such participation can only mean seeking to serve as a diplomatic representative of a capitalist state and promoting illusions that the imperialists’ treaties reflect the interests of the population as a whole (see “Down With the EU! No Participation in Its Pseudo-Parliament!”, WV No. 1154, 3 May).

When the CPB is not explicitly defending participation in EU bodies, their support for Brexit comes down to a defence of British sovereignty. So for example, as reported in the Morning Star (22 March), Griffiths groused about “the governments of Germany and France telling us when we can leave and on what terms,” which he gives as an example of “the power of the EU opposed to popular sovereignty.”

To state the obvious, if the British rulers wanted to, they could leave the EU tomorrow. Britain is not an oppressed country like Ireland or Greece, dominated by imperialist powers; it is an imperialist power in its own right, albeit a senile and decrepit one. Britain has remained in the EU not from any lack of national sovereignty but because the British imperialists want to keep their fingers in the pie.

It is the bourgeoisie in this country that tramples on the democratic aspirations of the population. As the 1919 Platform of the Communist International explains:

“The highly touted general ‘will of the people’ is no more real than national unity. In reality, classes confront each other with antagonistic, irreconcilable wills. But since the bourgeoisie is a small minority, it needs this fiction, this illusion of a national ‘will of the people,’ these high-sounding words, to consolidate its rule over the working class and impose its own class will on the proletariat.”

Peter Taaffe’s Brexit Crisis

The Socialist Party (SP), whose predecessor the Militant tendency spent decades buried in the Labour Party, calls for Jeremy Corbyn to implement a “socialist,” “pro-worker” Brexit. This is obviously absurd, given that Corbyn supports the EU. At the same time, the SP echoes Corbyn’s opposition to a “damaging Tory Brexit.” For example, the March 2018 editorial in Socialism Today insists: “The workers’ movement must maintain an independent class opposition to a Tory Brexit, ‘soft,’ ‘hard’ or ‘no deal’.” All this comes down to opposing Brexit when it’s actually posed. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, it’s Brexit tomorrow and Brexit yesterday—but never Brexit today. No surprise from an organisation whose Irish section served in the EU’s fraudulent “parliament” for years!

The SP also does its part to bolster support for the EU by parroting the doom-mongering of the remainers over the dangers of “a chaotic ‘no-deal’ Brexit,” for instance in the 10 April editorial in the Socialist. The EU treaties have meant crushing austerity for working people across Europe. Their rollback would be a blow against imperialist devastation. And the SP doesn’t just panic-monger over the potential economic consequences of Brexit. The Taaffeites in both Britain and Ireland are busy whipping up fears that leaving the EU will result in a “hard border” on the island of Ireland, warning, for example, that “However a physical border is re-established, it would inflame sectarian tensions” (Socialism Today, May 2019).

Ireland has been divided by a border since British imperialism partitioned the island in 1921. To talk of this border being “re-established” is reformist nonsense, promoting the myth that the EU has somehow transcended the national divisions among its member states and brought peace. The British imperialists exercise control over the border of Northern Ireland, as do the Southern Irish bourgeoisie. Dark-skinned people and Republicans are regularly subject to harassment when crossing the border. In the Brexit negotiations, it is the German imperialists who have been demanding that the Republic of Ireland act as the customs guard for the single market as they and the British compete over the subjugation of Ireland.

As revolutionary socialist James Connolly predicted, the partition of Ireland resulted in a “carnival of reaction.” Since its inception, Northern Ireland has been an Orange statelet based on the oppression of the Catholic minority, part of the Irish Catholic nation. Catholics still live under constant fear of violence from Loyalist thugs as well as from the RUC/PSNI [Royal Ulster Constabulary/Police Service of Northern Ireland] backed up by the British army. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which was premised on the continued presence of British troops, copper-fastened sectarian divisions and Catholic oppression, while not doing the Protestant working class any good either.

We stand for mobilising the working class—both Protestant and Catholic—against Catholic oppression and British imperialism as part of the struggle for the proletariat to liberate itself from capitalism. At the same time, we recognise that until capitalism is overthrown, there can be no equitable solution to the conflicting aspirations of the Irish Catholic nation and the Protestant community. Our perspective is for an Irish workers republic, part of a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles, leaving open where the Protestants may fall.

In contrast, the inveterate Labourites of the Socialist Party deny the threat that the repressive forces of British imperialism pose to working people, while railing against Republicans. In what could pass for a Home Office press release, an article titled “Brexit and the Irish Border: A Warning to the Workers’ Movement” on their Northern Irish affiliate’s website says: “Dissident republicans would seek to exploit any border infrastructure, targeting buildings and border staff with bomb and bullet” (socialistpartyni.org, 23 November 2018). The starting point for Marxists is to oppose their own ruling class and its forces of state repression, including “border staff.” We demand: All British troops and bases out of Northern Ireland!

SWP: Apostles for “Humanitarian” Imperialism

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) falsely present the immigration agreements between countries in the EU as “anti-racist” and demand that any Brexit deal retain the “freedom of movement” supposedly enshrined in the EU. “Freedom of movement” is a myth used by promoters of the EU to imply that borders no longer exist within the EU and that the imperialist alliance is a defender of immigrants.

Contrary to the SWP, control over borders is a basic prerogative of the state. No capitalist class will voluntarily relinquish control of its own borders, and individual states in the EU have not done so. The individual bourgeoisies assert their own rule, although for the weaker countries, their rule is curtailed by the imperialists. Insofar as a great power can force a weaker state to open its borders, this allows for increased penetration of imperialist capital and eliminates the sovereignty of the weaker country, as has been the case with Greece and Eastern Europe under the EU. For the many thousands of migrants languishing in concentration camps in Greece and elsewhere set up at the behest of Germany and the other imperialist powers, the idea that the EU grants “free movement” is a macabre joke.

Marxists do not have a positive programme for immigration within the framework of capitalism, and certainly not one based on upholding aspects of the imperialist-dominated EU! To advance the unity and fighting capacity of the international proletariat, we demand full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it to this country and call for the trade unions to organise foreign-born workers on a full and equal basis. No deportations! At the same time, the communist perspective to address the poverty, unemployment and economic devastation of oppressed countries is not emigration to the rich countries, but a struggle against the imperialist oppression that ravages their home countries. Only international proletarian revolution can lay the basis for the elimination of scarcity and for the withering away of the state, and with it borders themselves.

There is a sharp contradiction between the global market created by capitalism and the nation-state through which capitalism developed. Individual capitalist states, each ruled by a national bourgeoisie, have long been an obstacle to the expansion of the productive forces. This contradiction cannot be resolved under capitalism. Only through a series of socialist revolutions can the proletariat end capitalism and open the road to a world without exploitation and oppression. The working class in power will develop an internationally planned, collectivised economy enabling a vast increase in the productivity of labour and the end of material scarcity.

The necessary instrument to bring the working class to power is a Leninist vanguard party comprising the most dedicated and class-conscious layers of the proletariat, a section in Britain of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International. Such a party can only be built through the most intransigent struggle against all political currents that seek to subordinate the working class to the interests of its capitalist exploiters.

*****Reaching For The Stars-With The Apollo Moon Flights In Mind

*****Reaching For The Stars-With The Apollo Moon Flights In Mind 

By Bradley Maxwell

Several years ago, in a period when Larry Turner after years of studied denial and distain began to think about the matter both as a way to clear up his head on the issue and to satisfy a growing curiosity, he through the beauties of modern high-tech got in contact with some old classmates of his from Riverdale High. The fact of the matter was that he had been thinking about doing so for a number of years before that but somehow that studied denial and distain always got in the way. The impetus of an upcoming class reunion, or rather knowledge that it had been almost fifty years since he had graduated from high school with the Class of 1963, had sharpened his senses about clearing things up, getting some questions answered about why so many years ago he had as he called it “brushed the dust off his shoes” from any connection with the town, and those whom he had known there.

Despite the fact that so many years had passed and some questions would never be answered for the simple fact that some of those who would have known the answers to Larry’s inquiries, including his parents and a couple of his best friends who had died in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, he decided to “suck it up” and find out what he could find out about where the roads had gone awry on him. That said Larry was not thinking only about the dramatic and heavy burden of family misunderstanding and the like but about his youth, and about the days when he was in his way filled with wonder, filled with a desire to reach for the stars at a time when that was physically no longer out of the reach of humankind. Yeah, so Larry wanted to think about the days when if he had stuck with it he could have reached for the stars, gone on a different road.  

Getting in contact with old classmates these days from fifty years ago with all the modern social networking apparatuses to choose from is almost as simple as walking across the street in the old days to see if “Jimmy” was home and did he want to go to the courts and play a little hoop. In Larry’s case that was made easier by the simple expedient of Googling on the Internet for the Riverdale High School Class of 1963 and he came up with two quick possible sources of information. First a Facebook page put up by Nora Morris (nee Daley), who had been the Class secretary, had been a head cheerleader, and had been the chief social butterfly on all the committees that mattered in high school, the Fall and Spring dance, class day, prom, and Civic Pride committees. Moreover she still lived in town, still lived in Riverdale, and had a million connections that Larry would make some use of later. The second source which had been linked from the Facebook page was a website dedicated specifically to the upcoming class reunion. So Larry was in business.

Now Larry was not all of the following: a class officer, a sports player, a dance, Fall or Spring, class day, prom, or Civic pride committee member, or any school clubs. So he had not particular affinity with Nora Daley, and she probably did not even know he existed, but he nevertheless contacted her about joining the class website (he had seen nothing on Facebook that except some names, most of which he recognized if he did not know personally, and what they had been doing since high school, which would have helped him in his quest except that link to the class website). He sent her an e-mail via the website saying he wished to join the group.

Now the way this website stuff works, or the way it worked for the Class of 1963, was that all two hundred and seventy-three members of the class who graduated had their class photographs listed on the site (those who had not had their photographs taken for the yearbook simply had their names listed). If you wanted to join the site you just clicked on your name, provided some information, as much as you desired to tell a candid world, clicked on a “submit” icon and you were, pending webmaster Nora’s okay, a member of the site. Larry cleared all those low-bar hurdles and Nora sent him a personal e-mail via the site both to welcome him and to tell him that as he suspected she did not remember him from school.

And why should she have remembered him since in many ways he had been the angry young man, for lots of reasons including a hazardous home-life, had been as filled with teen angst and alienation as Johnny (Marlon Brando) in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel  Without A Cause  two films which he closely associated himself. Although when he was younger, when he was eleven or twelve, he had been as full as pipe dreams and good will as any kid at Danner Junior High.                            

Nora Daley in her role as class site webmaster, and probably just the way she was as a personality, in order to generate some on-going conversation would put up a bunch of questions on the homepage of the website. Silly things like-who did you have a secret “crush” on, who did you go to the prom with (Larry hadn’t), do you remember those great night before Thanksgiving rallies in support of the football team’s struggle against arch-rival Overton High in the gym (Larry did attend the one senior year), and who was your favorite teacher (Miss Soros, Larry’s  English teacher but she did not like him, or rather thought he was an underachiever, a bad sign in her book).

But Nora also posed more serious questions like how did it feel to live in the red scare Cold War night during school with all those crazy air raid drills which were worthless if you thought about it if the Russians decided to throw the big bomb at us. Like what was your attitude, if any, about the black civil rights movement down south that was filling up all the newspapers and televisions with its details. And like the question that Larry felt very comfortable with-what did you think about the exploration of space and what it would do for humankind (Nora used the more old-fashioned “mankind” reflecting perhaps an older learned ethos in her question).           

Larry was not sure whether Nora was asking these questions based on some rote recitation from some on-line time-line for the late 1950s and early 1960s when those events were current and came up with the questions that way or whether these were issues that she was interested in knowing the answers to for some other purpose. The way the thing worked was that if you had an opinion on a question you would write it up and submit it on that particular class opinion and comment page. Larry had briefly mentioned that he had attended the Thanksgiving football rally in senior year and had written a paragraph about it-mainly about how he was supposed to meet an unnamed girl who promised to be there who never showed up. And that was that.  

Larry did the same thing, or almost the same thing, wrote a couple of paragraphs on the question of space exploration, a subject that had fascinated him when he was in junior high when he fancied himself a budding rocket scientist like a million other kids, a million other guys mainly. He had also mentioned in that posting that he had recently gone down to Washington, D.C. on some business. After that conference was concluded on a whim, or not so much a whim as curiosity  since he was knee-deep in reading Norman Mailer’s literary account of the latter part of the “space race,” the struggle to put a man on the moon, Of A Fire On The Moon, he visited the Air and Space Museum just off the National Mall and noted that the old time thrill of wanting to be a rocket scientist (rather than his profession as a lawyer) came back, including memories about what it was like to have a sense of wonder back in those times. Stuff he had not thought about in many years.    

That little posting got Nora to response and ask him to expand on what he was talking about. About that sense of wonder and intrigue connected with space flight, with being part of, if only vicariously, the efforts to win the space race. Larry’s posting had also prompted several other classmates to tell of their interests, a couple who were actually as he remembered serious about science and were members of Mr. Roberts’ science club after school and who went on to have roles in the NASA programs. Larry wasn’t sure he wanted to expand on what he had written in that first posting but Nora had as the Noras of the world will do “pretty pleased” him into writing something. This is what Larry wrote:   

Space Wars, Circa 1960-by Larry Turner

Nora’s Question: In school in the early 1960s did you ever get caught up in the euphoria over the space program?

“We, all of us, are now old enough and presumably have seen enough of this sorry old world, to have become somewhat inured to the wonders of modern technology. Just witness the miracle of cyberspace that we are communicating through this very minute from all our diverse locations. My answer goes back to the mist of time when humankind had just developed the technology to reach for the stars, and we had the capacity to wonder.

For myself, I distinctly remember, as I am sure that you do as well, sitting in some Riverdale classroom as the Principal came over the P.A. system and hooked us up with the latest exploit in space. John Glenn's trip around the earth comes readily to mind. My friends, I will go back even further, back to junior high school, when we were just becoming conscious of the first explorations of space. The reaction to the news of Sputnik, the artificial satellite that the Russians had put up in 1957, drove many of us to extend our range of scientific knowledge.

I vividly remember trying to make rockets, in the basement of our family apartment, by soldering tin cans together fused with a funnel on top. I also remember taking some balsa wood, fashioning a rocket-type projectile, putting up wiring between two poles, inserting a CO2 cartridge and hammering away. Bang!!! Nothing.

After that failed experiment my scientific quest diminished. Moreover, I, a few years later became much more concerned about the fate of my fellow earthlings and trying to correct a few injustices in this world, but that is another story. Now that I think about it the question posed above really is aimed at those, unlike myself, who moved beyond boyish (or girlish) fantasies and used that youthful energy to get serious about science. Maybe you should tell us your stories.”

That little “dare” prompted William James Bradley, that is the moniker he uses now in his very successful car dealership in Overton, but back then, back when he was Larry’s best friend, or something like that, they never quite figured it all out, he was just Billy, to post the following “true” story about Larry’s early space exploits. This is a very different take on the meager offering that Larry provided. Here is what Billy had to say in his comment in response to Larry’s posting:  

Billy, William James Bradley, comment:

Yeah, I know I haven’t talked to most of you in too long a while like I told you I would when I came on this class website. But Larry Turner’s very somber post at Nora’s request about his youthful interest in space got to me. Got to me when he cut short a lot of the details that really happened back then. Guess who was with him all the way with his rocket science inventions. Yeah, me. 

So I am going to set you straight and tell you all about my best friend, Larry Turner, I always considered him my best friend so I don’t know where that “something like that” came from over at Danner Junior High, and his ill-fated attempts to single-handedly close the space gap they kept talking about once the commies put that Sputnik satellite up in orbit in 1957. Some of you who know me, knew me and my troubles back then at Danner, know that I was still kind of broken up about something around that time. Yeah, for you that don’t know I got caught up in some, well I might as well just come out with it, woman trouble, alright girl trouble, okay. So that colors the story a little, explains why I had time to spend with Larry and his foolish experiments. Just to let you know shortly after these space events I helped Larry with, once I discovered Elvis’ real take on the honeys, One Night Of Sin I got a new girlfriend, well, really an old girlfriend, an old stick girlfriend, Cool Donna O’Toole, that I had, as Larry always kidded me about, “discarded” when love Laura who had ditched me came into view. That isn’t getting us to the Larry space odyssey you’ve been waiting breathlessly to hear about so forward.

And I will get to that in just a second now that I think about it, or the heart of the story, but let me just take a minute to tell you this background story. It seems that Larry had had no objection, and shouldn’t have had, after all of Nora’s prodding, to having his space odyssey story told but he just wanted to tell the story himself. That is why we got that cock and bull whitewash  he posted but after I sent an e-mail and confronted him I said no way, no way on this good green earth are you going to get away with telling it that way. Hell, by the time he got done we were all to be weepy, girl weepy, or something about his tremendous contribution to space science rather than the simple truth- Larry should not be let with fifty miles, no, make that five hundred miles, no, let’s be on the safe side, five thousand miles from anything that could even be remotely used for launching rockets. Yeah, it’s that kind of story.

Besides, here is the real reason that Larry shouldn’t get away with his story, and I told him so. Larry, no question is a history guy, that’s probably why he wound up as a lawyer. He was crazy for people like Abigail Adams, and her husband and son, the guys who used to be Presidents, John and John Quincy, back in the Stone Age, and who Adamsville a few towns over is named after, one of them anyway. He also knows, although I have no clue why, about old times Egypt from going to the Thomas Cromwell Public Library branch at school and taking the Greyhound bus, taking the bus for that reason, can you believe this, over to Boston to the Museum of Fine Arts to check out their mummy stuff, and tombs and how they dressed and all that. Yawn.

Larry was also crazy for reading, not stuff that was required for school reading either, and writing about it, a book guy, no doubt. Get this, as an example that I have never forgotten whenever his name comes up, one time he told me about a book of short stories that he was reading about by a guy, an Irish guy, a chandelier Irish guy, Fitzgerald or something like that, who wrote stories about rich kids, very rich kids, rich guys with names like Basil mooning over rich girls. And rich girls with names like Josephine swooning over guys. Nothing big about that but like I told Larry at the time how was reading that stuff going to do anything for you, for us, trying, trying like crazy to get the hell, excuse my English, out of small town Riverdale. He’s was a cloudy guy see, even if he was my best friend.

But here is something funny, and maybe makes this reading stuff of some use sometimes. Larry read in the Foreword, who the hell, excuse my language again, in this good green earth reads the Foreword, that one of the stories, one of the Basil stories wasn’t published because the publishers didn’t believe back in the early part of the last century that ten and eleven year old boys and girls would be into “petting parties.” Jesus, and I make no excuse for saying that, where had those guys been, and what planet, not earth. Definitely not then in Riverdale with us poor small town boys and girls. So history and book reading that sums up Larry in those days. Does that sound like a guy who can tell a space story, a nuts and bolts space story? No, leave this one to old Billy, he’ll tell it true.

I don’t know about you but I was not all that hopped up about space exploration, space races, or Jules Verne although I will admit that I was a little excited about the idea of those space satellites going up in the sky, those that started with the Soviet Union’s first object in space, Sputnik. But when they started sending robots, monkeys, mice, and small dogs I lost interest. I figured how hard can it be to do the space thing if rodents can make the trip, unmolested. Besides I had my budding career as a rock star of the Elvis sort to worry about so other kinds of stars took a back seat.

Not so Larry. The minute he heard, or maybe it was a little later but pretty soon after, that Sputnik had gone up, that it had been the Russkies who were first in space, he was crazy to enlist in the space race. I swear I had to stop talking to him for a few days because all he wanted to talk about, with that certain demented look in his eye that told you that you were in for a lecture like at school, was how it was every red-blooded student’s, make that every red-blooded American student’s, duty to get moving in aid of the space front. It was so bad that he would not even heard me talk about the latest rock hit without saying, hey, that’s kid’s stuff I got no time for that. Bad, right.

Now this was not about money, you know going around the neighborhood collecting coins for the space program like we did to restore the U.S.S. Constitution when it was all water-logged or whatever happens to wooden ships when they get too old. And it was not about maybe going to the library to get some books to study up on science and maybe someday become a space engineer and go to Cape Canaveral or someplace like that. No this was about our duty, duty see, to go out in the back yard, go down in the cellar, go out in the garage (if you had a garage) and start to experiment making rockets that might be able to make it to space. See what I mean. Deep-end stuff, no question.

Now I already told you, but in case you might have forgotten, Larry was nothing but a books and history guy, and maybe a little music. I had never seen him put a hammer to a nail or anything like that, and I am not sure that he has those skills. I do know that when we were making papier mache dinosaurs in class one time his thing did not look like a dinosaur. Not close. But one day he got me to go with him up to Riverdale Center to the hardware store to get materials for making a rocket. Larry was nothing if not serious in his little projects, at first. At the store we got some balsa wood, nails, aluminum poles, guide wire, a knife built for carving stuff, and about ten CO2 cartridges. The idea was to build a model (or models) and see which ones have the contours to be space-worthy.

Over the next couple of weeks I saw Larry off and on but mainly off because he was spending his after-school time down in the cellar of the apartment house where his family lived working on those balsa wood models. Then one day, one Saturday I think, yeah, it was Saturday he came over to my house looking for help in setting up his launch pad. The idea was that he would put up two aluminum poles, stretch the guide wire between the two poles and demonstrate what he called the aerodynamic flow of his models by attaching his balsa wood models on the wire with a bent nail. Propulsion was by inserting a CO2 cartridge in a crevice in the rocket and hitting one end of the cartridge by lightly hitting it with a nail. I was to observe at the finish while he covered the start. After about half an hour everything was set to go and Dr. Von Turner was ready to set the explosion. Except moon man Larry hit the nail into the cartridge at the wrong place and, if it had not been for some quick leg work that I still chuckle over when I think about it (like now) my friend would have lost an eye. Scratch balsa wood models.

Oh, you thought that was the end of it. Christ no. After catching some hell from his mother (and a little from me) he was back on the trail blazing away. This time though he kept it very low. I didn’t even know about it until he asked me to help him get some materials from that same hardware store and the Rexall Drug Store uptown. So here is the brain-storm in a nut shell. He said he saw the error of his ways in the balsa wood fiasco- he had used the wrong fuel and the whole guide wire thing was awry. This time he intended to simulate (yeah, I didn’t know what that meant either until he told me it was like practically the same but not the real thing, or something like that) a launching like he had seen on television and in the Bell Laboratories Science films we saw at school. Okay, get this, he built, using his father’s soldering iron, a small rocket out of tin soup cans (Campbell’s, naturally, just kidding) with a tin funnel on top and flattened metal for wings. Hey, it really didn’t look bad. The fuel, I swear I do not know all the ingredients but they all came from either the hardware or drug store so that gives you an idea about something. Apparently he read about it somewhere.

So, again on black Saturday, we are off to the back field to launch the spaceship Billy (named after me, of course) into fame and fortune. We set the rocket on a small launch pad that he made; he put in the fuel from a can, and then closed it off with a fuse device at the end. I, as honoree, was to light the match for take-off. I lit the match alright except a funny thing happened- the rocket quickly, very quickly turned into an inferno, and almost me along with it, except I too did some fancy leg work. Christ, Larry enough. And the lesson to be learned- you had better be young, quick, and have your insurance paid up if you are going to hang out with maddened rocket scientists.

After that experiment I think old Larry lost heart. A few days later I saw him reading a book about Abraham Lincoln so I guess the coast was clear. Oh yeah, and at school a week or two later he asked me if I had heard Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless yet. Welcome back to Earth, Larry.

Larry laughed when he read Billy’s posting. Sent him an e-mail with one word-Touche. But here is the funny thing Billy’s little missive got him thinking about something he saw at the space museum down in Washington. They had on display for the whole world to see the actual vehicle, or a test model, of the landing craft which the Apollo 11, the first men to land on the moon, used. Larry was amazed by the sight and spent some time looking at all aspects of the vehicle.  What startled him was how amateurish the whole thing looked (as some of the other exhibit did as well). The thing with its odd-ball hooks, its off-center antennae, it patches of foil here, some misshapen boxes there, it funny landing pods looked like something he might have created in those halcyon days when he had enlisted himself in the space program when it counted. His conclusion; maybe he had given up too early on his rocket scientist dreams. Maybe he shouldn’t have been bullied by Billy to go back to reading books and listening to music.     

Thinking about Billy though and his posting Larry began to think about that F. Scott Fitzgerald reference that Billy mentioned. Not about Fitzgerald’s Basil and Josephine stories but about The Great Gatsby and that haunting last few paragraphs that kind of summed up something about humankind. Larry wondered if those Apollo astronauts when they landed on the moon had the same sense of wonder about the prospects for that place as those long ago Dutch sailors did as they saw the first “fresh green breast” of land as they hit Long Island Sound. He hoped so.    

To Seek A Newer World- With Alfred Lord Tennyson In Mind

To Seek A Newer World- With Alfred Lord Tennyson In Mind

I have used the expression “to seek a newer world” or variations of that expression any number of times the past several years when presenting sketches and pieces about what made my generation tick, the politically and culturally progressive active part of it anyway, who tried might and main to change the course of American history and sensibilities in the 1960s, my Generation of ’68 which I use for shorthand. The expression cribbed from a Bobby Kennedy pre-1968 presidential campaign book that I had read about what the world was in desperate need of in the face of the bloodbath in Vietnam and other pressing social problems who cribbed it from the 19^th century English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson seemed to me all these many cyberspace years later a fitting way to describe what the Generation of ‘68 was in search of. What we are still in search of since we have been, mostly unsuccessfully, fighting a rearguard action against the progeny of the night-takers we faced in the 1960s. Here, in any case, is the original poem from which Bobby (or his speechwriter although I sense that he probably picked that one himself) and I cribbed our expression.

Many of those sketches can be found on the American Left History blog.  

Ulysses

Ulysses

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1809–1892 Alfred, Lord Tennyson

        

       

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.