From The Archives-The Streets Are Not For Dreaming Now- Chicago 1968-The Late Norman Mailer's View

From The Archives-The Streets Are Not For Dreaming Now- Chicago 1968-The Late Norman Mailer's View

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?_r=1


Commentary/Book Review (2008)

This year, also a presidential election year, marks the 40th anniversary of the bloodbath in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention. I have reposted Norman Mailer’s work Miami and the Siege of Chicago originally posted on this site in September 2007 that recounts many of the incidents that occurred during that week. Mailer’s work is as good example as any that I have read from a journalist’s perspective so can stand here, as well.

Parts of the review also detail my own political positions during that period. Readers can get the gist of those positions below. I would only add that during this particular week I was in Boston manning the phones while others in the Humphrey campaign had gone to Chicago. In retrospect, the most painful detail of that week was the necessity of answering many irate calls from Gene McCarthy supporters and others about the police riot in Chicago. Even stranger was being denounced as a “hawk” for supporting Humphrey’s Vietnam position. Oddly, my own position at the time- for immediate withdrawal- was actually far to the left of what the irate callers were arguing for. Such is the price of my youthful opportunism though.

The Streets Are Not For Dreaming Now

COMMENTARY/BOOK REVIEW

MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO, NORMAN MAILER, THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK, 1968

As I recently noted in this space while reviewing the late Norman Mailer’s The Presidential Papers at one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that he wrote. In his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels in his time like The Deer Park I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might partially admit, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon.

With that in mind I recently re-read his work on the 1968 political campaign Miami and the Siege of Chicago -the one that pitted Lyndon Johnson, oops, Hubert Humphrey against Richard M. Nixon. This work is exponentially better than his scatter shot approach in the Presidential Papers and only confirms what I mentioned above as his proper place in the literary scheme of things. Theodore White may have won his spurs breaking down the mechanics of the campaign and made a niche for himself with The Making of a President, 1960 and his later incarnations on that same theme but Mailer in his pithy manner gives an overview of the personalities and the stakes involved for the America in that hell-bent election. I would note that for Mailer as for many of us, not always correctly as in my own case, this 1968 presidential campaign season and those conventions evolved in a year that saw a breakdown of the bourgeois electoral political process that had not been seen in this country since the 1850’s just prior to the Civil War.

The pure number of unsettling events of that year was a portent that this would be a watershed year for good or evil. Out of the heat, killing and destruction in Vietnam came the North Vietnamese/National Liberation Front Tet offensive that broke the back of the lying reports that American/South Vietnamese success was just around the corner. Today’s Iraq War supporters might well take note. In the aftermath of that decisive event insurgent anti-war Democratic presidential hopeful Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy’s seemingly quixotic campaign against a sitting president jumped off the ground. In the end that Tet offensive also forced Lyndon Johnson from office. And drove Robert Kennedy to enter the fray. The seemingly forgotten LBJ spear carrier Hubert Humphrey also got a new lease on life. I will have more to say about this below. Then, seemingly on a dime, in a tick we started to lose ground. The assassination of Martin Luther King and the burning down of the ghettos of major cities in its aftermath and later in the spring of Robert Kennedy at a moment of victory placed everything on hold.

That spring also witnessed turmoil on the campuses of the United States exemplified by the Columbia University shut down and internationally by the student –ignited French General Strike. These and other events held both promise and defeat that year but when I reflect on 1968 almost forty years later I am struck by the fact that in the end one political retread, Richard Milhous Nixon, was on top and the front of an almost forty year bourgeois political counter revolution had began. Not a pretty picture but certainly a cautionary tale of sorts. The ‘of sorts’ of the tale is that if you are going to try to make fundamental changes in this society you better not play around with it and better not let the enemy off the hook when you have him cornered. That now seems like the beginning of wisdom.

I have written elsewhere (see archives, Confessions of An Old Militant- A Cautionary Tale, October 2006) that while all hell was breaking loose in American society in 1968 my essentially left liberal parliamentary cretinist response was to play ‘lesser evil’ bourgeois electoral politics. My main concern, a not unworthy but nevertheless far from adequate one, was the defeat of one Richard Nixon who was making some very depressing gains toward both the Republican nomination and the presidency. As noted in the above-mentioned commentary I was willing to go half the way with LBJ in 1968 and ultimately all the way with HHH in order to cut Nixon off at the knees.

I have spent a good part of the last forty years etching the lessons of that mistake in my brain and that of others. But as I also pointed out in that commentary I was much more equivocal at the time, as Mailer was, about the effect of Robert Kennedy the candidate of my heart and my real candidate in 1968. I have mentioned before and will do so again here that if one bourgeois candidate could have held me in democratic parliamentary politics it would have been Robert Kennedy. Not John, although as pointed out in my review of The Presidential Papers, in my early youth I was fired up by his rhetoric but there was something about Robert that was different. Maybe it was our common deep Irish sense of fatalism, maybe our shared sense of the tragic in life or maybe in the end it was our ability to rub shoulders with the ‘wicked’ of this world to get a little bit of human progress. But enough of nostalgia. If you want to look seriously inside the political conventions of 1968 and what they meant in the scheme of American politics from a reasonably objective progressive partisan then Mailer is your guide here. This is the model, not Theodore White’s more mechanical model of coverage, that Hunter Thompson tapped into in his ‘gonzo’ journalistic approach in latter conventions- an insightful witness to the hypocrisy and balderdash of those processes.

The100thAnniversaryOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- From The Pen Of Issac Deutscher- LEON TROTSKY- THE PROPHET ARMED, UNARMED, OUTCAST

The100thAnniversaryOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-  From The Pen Of Issac Deutscher- LEON TROTSKY- THE PROPHET ARMED, UNARMED, OUTCAST

BOOK REVIEWS

THE PROPHET ARMED-1879-1921; THE PROPHET UNARMED-1921-1929; THE PROPHET OUTCAST-1929-1940, THREE VOLUMES, ISAAC DEUTSCHER. VERSO PRESS, LONDON, 2003.


THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION OF LEON TROTSKY-ONE OF HISTORY’S GREAT REVOLUTIONARIES. IT IS THEREFORE FITTING TO REVIEW THE THREE VOLUE WORK OF HIS DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHER.

PARTS OF THIS REVIEW HAVE BEEN USED PREVIOUSLY IN A BLOG REVIEW OF TROTSKY'S MY LIFE (DATED, FEBRUARY, 21, 2006) AND HIS HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (DATED, APRIL 18, 2006).

Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of the great Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky although written over one half century ago remains the standard biography of the man. Although this writer disagrees , as I believe that Trotsky himself would have, about the appropriateness of the title of prophet and its underlying premise that a tragic hero had fallen defeated in a worthy cause, the vast sum of work produced and researched makes up for those basically literary differences. Deutscher, himself, became in the end an adversary of Trotsky’s politics around his differing interpretation of the historic role of Stalinism and the fate of the Fourth International but he makes those differences clear and in general they do not mar the work. I do not believe even with the eventual full opening of all the old Soviet-era files any future biographer will dramatically increase our knowledge about Trotsky and his revolutionary struggles. Moreover, as I have mentioned elsewhere in other reviews, while he has not been historically fully vindicated he is in no need of any certificate of revolutionary good conduct.

At the beginning of the 21st century when the validity of socialist political programs as tools for change is in apparent decline or disregarded as utopian it may be hard to imagine the spirit that drove Trotsky to dedicate his whole life to the fight for a socialist society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century he represented only the most consistent and audacious of a revolutionary generation of mainly Eastern Europeans and Russians who set out to change the history of the 20th century. It was as if the best and brightest of that generation were afraid, for better or worse, not to take part in the political struggles that would shape the modern world. As Trotsky noted elsewhere this element was missing, with the exceptions of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and precious few others, in the Western labor movement. Here are some highlights of Trotsky's life and politics culled from Deutscher's works that militant leftists should think about.

On the face of it Trotsky’s personal profile does not stand out as that of a born revolutionary. Born of a hard working, eventually prosperous, Jewish farming family in the Ukraine (of all places) there is something anomalous about his eventual political occupation. Always a vociferous reader, good writer and top student under other circumstances he would have found easy success, as others did, in the bourgeois academy, if not in Russia then in Western Europe. But there is the rub; it was the intolerable and personally repellant political and cultural conditions of Czarist Russia in the late 19th century that eventually drove Trotsky to the revolutionary movement- first as a ‘ragtag’ populist and then to his life long dedication to orthodox Marxism. As noted above, a glance at the biographies of Eastern European revolutionary leaders such as Lenin, Martov, Christian Rakovsky, Bukharin and others shows that Trotsky was hardly alone in his anger at the status quo. And the determination to something about it.

For those who argue, as many did in the New Left in the 1960’s, that the most oppressed are the most revolutionary the lives of the Russian and Eastern European revolutionaries provide a cautionary note. The most oppressed, those most in need of the benefits of socialist revolution, are mainly wrapped up in the sheer struggle for survival and do not enter the political arena until late, if at all. Even a quick glance at the biographies of the secondary leadership of various revolutionary movements, actual revolutionary workers who formed the links to the working class , generally show skilled or semi-skilled workers striving to better themselves rather than the most downtrodden lumpenproletarian elements. The sailors of Kronstadt and the Putilov workers in Saint Petersburg come to mind. The point is that ‘the wild boys and girls’ of the street do not lead revolutions; they simply do not have the staying power. On this point, militants can also take Trotsky’s biography as a case study of what it takes to stay the course in the difficult struggle to create a new social order. While the Russian revolutionary movement, like the later New Left mentioned above, had more than its share of dropouts, especially after the failure of the 1905 revolution, it is notably how many stayed with the movement under much more difficult circumstances than we ever faced. For better or worst, and I think for the better, that is how revolutions are made.

Once Trotsky made the transition to Marxism he became embroiled in the struggles to create a unity Russian Social Democratic Party, a party of the whole class, or at least a party representing the historic interests of that class. This led him to participate in the famous Bolshevik/Menshevik struggle in 1903 which defined what the party would be, its program, its methods of work and who would qualify for membership. The shorthand for this fight can be stated as the battle between the ‘hards’ (Bolsheviks, who stood for a party of professional revolutionaries) and the ‘softs’ (Mensheviks, who stood for a looser conception of party membership) although those terms do not do full justice to these fights. Strangely, given his later attitudes, Trotsky stood with the ‘softs’, the Mensheviks, in the initial fight in 1903. Although Trotsky almost immediately afterward broke from that faction I do not believe that his position in the 1903 fight contradicted the impulses he exhibited throughout his career- personally ‘libertarian’, for lack of a better word , and politically hard in the clutch.

Even a cursory glance at most of Trotsky’s career indicates that it was not spent in organizational in-fighting, or at least not successfully. Trotsky stands out as the consummate free-lancer. More than one biographer has noted this condition, including his definitive biographer Isaac Deutscher. Let me make a couple of points to take the edge off this characterization though. In that 1903 fight mentioned above Trotsky did fight against Economism (the tendency to only fight over trade union issues and not fight overtly political struggles against the Czarist regime) and he did fight against Bundism (the tendency for one group, in this case the Jewish workers, to set the political agenda for that particular group). Moreover, he most certainly favored a centralized organization. These were the key issues at that time.

Furthermore, the controversial organizational question did not preclude the very strong notion that a ‘big tent’ unitary party was necessary. The ‘big tent’ German Social Democratic model held very strong sway among the Russian revolutionaries for a long time, including Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The long and short of it was that Trotsky was not an organization man, per se. He knew how to organize revolutions, armies, Internationals, economies and so on when he needed to but on a day to day basis no. Thus, to compare or contrast him to Lenin and his very different successes is unfair. Both have an honorable place in the revolutionary movement; it is just a different place.

That said, Trotsky really comes into his own as a revolutionary leader in the Revolution of 1905 not only as a publicist but as the central leader of the Soviets (workers councils) which made their first appearance at that time. In a sense it is because he was a freelancer that he was able to lead the Petrograd Soviet during its short existence and etch upon the working class of Russia (and in a more limited way, internationally) the need for its own organizations to seize state power. All revolutionaries honor this experience, as we do the Paris Commune, as the harbingers of October, 1917. As Lenin and Trotsky both confirm, it was truly a ‘dress rehearsal’ for that event. It is in 1905 that Trotsky first wins his stars by directing the struggle against the Czar at close quarters, in the streets and working class meeting halls. And later in his eloquent and ‘hard’ defense of the experiment after it was crushed by the Czarism reaction. I believe that it was here in the heat of the struggle in 1905 where the contradiction between Trotsky’s ‘soft’ position in 1903 and his future ‘hard’ Bolshevik position of 1917 and thereafter is resolved. Here was a professional revolutionary who one could depend on when the deal went down. (A future blog will review the 1905 revolution in more detail).

No discussion of this period of Trotsky’s life is complete without mentioning his very real contribution to Marxist theory- that is, the theory of Permanent Revolution. Although the theory is over one hundred years old it still retains its validity today in those countries that still have not had their bourgeois revolutions, or completed them. This rather simple straightforward theory about the direction of the Russian revolution (and which Trotsky later in the 1920’s, after the debacle of the Chinese Revolution, made applicable to what today are called 'third world’ countries) has been covered with so many falsehoods, epithets, and misconceptions that it deserves further explanation. Why?

Militants today must address the ramifications of the question what kind of revolution is necessary as a matter of international revolutionary strategy. Trotsky, taking the specific historical development and the peculiarities of Russian economic development as part of the international capitalist order as a starting point argued that there was no ‘Chinese wall’ between the bourgeois revolution Russian was in desperate need of and the tasks of the socialist revolution. In short, in the 20th century ( and by extension, now) the traditional leadership role of the bourgeois in the bourgeois revolution in a economically backward country, due to its subservience to international capitalist powers and fear of its own working class and plebian masses, falls to the proletariat. The Russian Revolution of 1905 sharply demonstrated the outline of that tendency especially on the perfidious role of the Russian bourgeoisie. The unfolding of revolutionary events in 1917 graphically confirmed this. The history of revolutionary struggles since then, and not only in ‘third world’ countries, gives added, if negative, confirmation of that analysis. (A future blog will review this theory of permanent revolution in more detail).

World War I was a watershed for modern history in many ways. For the purposes of this review two points are important. First, the failure of the bulk of the European social democracy- representing the masses of their respective working classes- to not only not oppose their own ruling classes’ plunges into war, which would be a minimal practical expectation, but to go over and directly support their own respective ruling classes in that war. This position was most famously demonstrated when the entire parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic party voted for the war credits for the Kaiser on August 4, 1914. This initially left the anti-war elements of international social democracy, including Lenin and Trotsky, almost totally isolated. As the carnage of that war mounted in endless and senseless slaughter on both sides it became clear that a new political alignment in the labor movement was necessary.

The old, basically useless Second International, which in its time held some promise of bringing in the new socialist order, needed to give way to a new revolutionary International. That eventually occurred in 1919 with the foundation of the Communist International (also known as the Third International). (A future blog will review the first years of the Communist International). Horror of horrors, particularly for reformists of all stripes, this meant that the international labor movement, one way or another, had to split into its reformist and revolutionary components. It is during the war that Trotsky and Lenin, not without some lingering differences, draw closer and begin the process of several years, only ended by Lenin’s death, of close political collaboration.

Secondly, World War I marks the definite (at least for Europe) end of the progressive role of international capitalist development. The outlines of imperialist aggression previously noted had definitely taken center stage. This theory of imperialism was most closely associated with Lenin in his master work Imperialism-The Highest Stage of Capitalism but one should note that Trotsky in all his later work up until his death fully subscribed to the theory. Although Lenin’s work is in need of some updating, to account for various technological changes and the extensions of globalization, holds up for political purposes. This analysis meant that a fundamental shift in the relationship of the working class to the ruling class was necessary. A reformist perspective for social change, although not specific reforms, was no longer tenable. Politically, as a general proposition, socialist revolution was on the immediate agenda. This is when Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution meets the Leninist conception of revolutionary organization. It proved to be a successful formula in Russia in October, 1917. Unfortunately, those lessons were not learned (or at least learned in time) by those who followed and the events of October, 1917 stand today as the only ‘pure’ working class revolution in history.

An argument can, and has, been made that the October Revolution could only have occurred under the specific condition of decimated, devastated war-weary Russia of 1917. This argument is generally made by those who were not well-wishers of revolution in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter). It is rather a truism, indulged in by Marxists as well as by others, that war is the mother of revolution. That said, the October revolution was made then and there but only because of the convergence of enough revolutionary forces led by the Bolsheviks and additionally the forces closest to the Bolsheviks (including Trotsky’s Inter-District Organization) had prepared for these events by its entire pre-history. This is the subjective factor in history. No, not substitutionalism-that was the program of the Social Revolutionary terrorists, and the like- but if you like, revolutionary opportunism. I would be much more impressed by an argument that stated that the revolution would not have occurred without the presence of Lenin and Trotsky. That would be a subjective argument, par excellent. But, they were there.

Again Trotsky in 1917, like in 1905, is in his element speaking seemingly everywhere, writing, organizing (when it counts, by the way). If not the brains of the revolution (that role is honorably conceded to Lenin) certainly the face of the Revolution. Here is a revolutionary moment in every great revolution when the fate of the revolution turned on a dime (the subjective factor). The dime turned. (See blog dated April 18, 2006 for a review of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution).

One of the great lessons that militants can learn from all previous modern revolutions is that once the revolutionary forces seize power from the old regime an inevitable counterrevolutionary onslaught by elements of the old order (aided by some banished moderate but previously revolutionary elements, as a rule). The Russian revolution proved no exception. If anything the old regime, aided and abetted by numerous foreign powers and armies, was even more bloodthirsty. It fell to Trotsky to organize the defense of the revolution. Now, you might ask- What is a nice Jewish boy like Trotsky doing playing with guns? Fair enough. Well, Jewish or Gentile if you play the revolution game you better the hell be prepared to defend the revolution (and yourself), guns at the ready. Here, again Trotsky organized, essentially from scratch, a Red Army from a defeated, demoralized former peasant army under the Czar. The ensuing civil war was to leave the country devastated but the Red Army defeated the Whites. Why? In the final analysis it was not only the heroism of the working class defending its own but the peasant wanting to hold on to the newly acquired land he had just got and was in jeopardy of losing if the Whites won. But these masses needed to be organized. Trotsky was the man for the task.

Both Lenin’s and Trotsky’s calculation for the success of socialist revolution in Russia (and ultimately its fate) was its, more or less, immediate extension to the capitalist heartland of Europe, particularly Germany. While in 1917 that was probably not the controlling single factor for going forward in Russia it did have to come into play at some point. The founding of the Communist International makes no sense otherwise. Unfortunately, for many historical, national and leadership-related reasons no Bolshevik-styled socialist revolutions followed then, or ever. If the premise for socialism is for plenty, and ultimately as a result of plenty to take the struggle for existence off the human agenda and put other more creative pursues on the agenda, then Russia in the early 1920’s was not the land of plenty.

Neither Lenin, Trotsky nor Stalin, for that matter could wish that fact away. The ideological underpinnings of that fight center on the Stalinist concept of ‘socialism in one country’, that is Russia versus the Trostskyist position of the absolutely necessary extension of the international revolution. In short, this is the fights that historically happens in great revolutions- the fight against Thermidor (a term taken from the overthrow of Robespierre in 1794 by more moderate Jacobins). What counts, in the final analysis, are their respective responses to the crisis of the isolation of the revolution. The word isolation is the key. Do you turn the revolution inward or push forward? We all know the result, and it wasn’t pretty, then or now. That is the substance of the fight that Trotsky, if initially belatedly and hesitantly, led from about 1923 on under various conditions until the end of his life cut short by his assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940.

Although there were earlier signs that the Russia revolution was going off course the long illness and death of Lenin in 1924, at the time the only truly authoritative leader the Bolshevik party, set off a power struggle in the leadership of the party. This fight had Trotsky and the ‘pretty boy’ intellectuals of the party on one side and Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev (the so-called triumvirate)backed by the ‘gray boys’ of the emerging bureaucracy on the other. This struggle occurred against the backdrop of the failed revolution in Germany in 1923 and which thereafter heralded the continued isolation, imperialist blockade and economic backwardness of the Soviet Union for the foreseeable future.

While the disputes in the Russian party eventually had international ramifications in the Communist International, they were at this time fought out almost solely within the Russian Party. Trotsky was slow, very slow to take up the battle for power that had become obvious to many elements in the party. He made many mistakes and granted too many concessions to the triumvirate. But he did fight. Although later (in 1935) Trotsky recognized that the 1923 fight represented a fight against the Russian Thermidor and thus a decisive turning point for the revolution that was not clear to him (or anyone else on either side) then. Whatever the appropriate analogy might have been Leon Trotsky was in fact fighting a last ditch effort to retard the further degeneration of the revolution. After that defeat, the way the Soviet Union was ruled, who ruled it and for what purposes all changed. And not for the better.

In a sense if the fight in 1923-24 is the decisive fight to save the Russian revolution (and ultimately a perspective of international revolution) then the 1926-27 fight which was a bloc between Trotsky’s forces and the just defeated forces of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin’s previous allies was the last rearguard action to save that perspective. That it failed nevertheless does not deny the importance of the fight. Yes, it was a political bloc with some serious differences especially over China and the Anglo-Russian Committee. But two things are important here One- did a perspective of a new party make sense at the time of the clear waning of the revolutionary tide in the country. No. Besides the place to look was at the most politically conscious elements, granted against heavy odds, in the party where whatever was left of the class-conscious elements of the working class were. As I have noted elsewhere in discussing the 1923 fight- that “Lenin levy” of raw recruits, careerists and just plain thugs to fatten up the Stalin-controlled Soviet bureaucracy was the key element in any defeat.

Still that fight was necessary. Hey, that is why we talk about it now. That was a fight to the finish. After that the left opposition, or elements of it, were forever more outside the party- either in exile, prison or dead. As we know Trotsky went from expulsion from the party in 1927 to internal exile in Alma Ata in 1928 to external exile to Turkey in 1929. From there he underwent further exiles in France, Norway, and Mexico when he was finally felled by a Stalinist assassin. But no matter when he went he continued to struggle for his perspective. Not bad for a Jewish farmer’s son from the Ukraine.

The last period of Trotsky’s life spent in harrowing exiles and under constant threat from Stalinist and White Guard threats- in short, on the planet without a visa-was dedicated to the continued fight for the Leninist heritage. It was an unequal fight, to be sure, but he waged it and was able to form a core of revolutionaries to form a new international. That that effort was essentially militarily defeat by fascist or Stalinist forces during World War II does not take away from the grandeur of the attempt. He himself stated that he felt this was the most important work of his life- and who would challenge that assertion. But one could understand the frustrations, first the harsh truth of his analysis in the 1930's of the German debacle, then in France and Spain. Hell a lesser man would have given up. In fact, more than one biographer has argued that he should have retired from the political arena to, I assume, a comfortable country cottage to write I do not know what. But, please reader, have you been paying attention? Does this seem even remotely like the Trotsky career I have attempted to highlight here? Hell, no.

Many of the events such as the disputes within the Russian revolutionary movement, the attempts by the Western Powers to overthrow the Bolsheviks in the Civil War after their seizure of power and the struggle of the various tendencies inside the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International discussed in the book may not be familiar to today's audience. Nevertheless one can still learn something from the strength of Trotsky's commitment to his cause and the fight to preserve his personal and political integrity against overwhelming odds. As the organizer of the October Revolution, creator of the Red Army in the Civil War, orator, writer and fighter Trotsky was one of the most feared men of the early 20th century to friend and foe alike. Nevertheless, I do not believe that he took his personal fall from power as a world historic tragedy. Read these volumes for more insights.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- Artist's Corner- "The Solution" -In Honor Of Bertolt Brecht

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-    Artist's Corner- "The Solution" -In Honor Of Bertolt Brecht

Markin comment:

This poem refers to the German workers uprising, an attempted workers political revolution, in East Germany in 1953.


The Solution- Bertolt Brecht

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had thrown away the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

The Bolshevik-Led October Revolution-Lessons- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition (1929)

The Bolshevik-Led October Revolution-Lessons- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The  Anniversary Of His Death- The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition (1929)


Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/fi-b.htm


Frank Jackman comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist ( I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive and sought some safe literary niche, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.

When The Thin Man Was Fat -With The Original Film Adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man In Mind

When The Thin Man Was Fat -With The Original Film Adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man In Mind   

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

Recently in a review of the fourth in the famous Myrna Loy-William Powell seemingly never-ending The Thin Man series, Shadow Of The Thin Man, I mentioned that a long time ago, or it now seems a long time ago, I had a running argument with the late film critic Henry Dowd about the alleged decline in manly film detectives after the time of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in the 1940s. By that Henry meant tough guy, no holds barred, non-filter cigarette smoking, Luckies or Camels, bottom of the desk drawer hard shell whiskey neat drinking, who didn’t mind taking or giving a punch, or taking or giving a  random slug for the cause detectives. He had based his opinion strictly on viewing the films of the famous detective couple Nick and Nora Charles.           

Henry Dowd believed that with the rise of The Thin Man series that previous characterization of a model detective, his previous characterization Henry was given to the imperative tone, switched from the hard whiskey drinking guy to a soft martini swigging suave guy with a soft manner and an aversion to taking risks, certainly to taking punches or slugs. Hell, in that film under review at the time not only had Nick been married to Nora but they had a kid, not to mention that damn dog Asta, a regular entourage to weigh a guy down. Back in the day what had surprised Henry in our public prints argument had been when I told him that the same guy, Dashiell Hammett, who had written the heroic tough guy detective Sam Spade had also written the dapper Nick and charming Nora characters. Henry did not believe me until I produced my tattered copy of Hammett’s The Thin Man which had started the whole film series. Thereafter he kept up the same argument except placing The Thin Man as an aberration probably do to Hammett’s known heavy drinking or that he was trying to soften his own Stalinist-etched persona with such an obvious bourgeois couple. Jesus.       

My objection to Henry’s “decline of the manly” detective theory back then had not been so much about the social manners or the social class of the couple in the series, a reversion to the parlor detective genre before Hammett and Chandler brought the genre out of the closet and onto the streets, as the thinness of the plots as they rolled out each new product. I continue to tout the original film in series The Thin Man as the one everybody should view and take in the rest if you have restless hour and one half or so to whittle away.  

I had held my viewing of Shadow up as a case in point. I mentioned above all that the affable Nick and Nora would get involved in the murder case of a jockey who allegedly threw a horse race. The very notion that anybody, much less a private eye, would give more than a passing glance to the demise an allegedly corrupt jockey was beyond me. After all the indignities those curs have thrown my way whenever I have had a “sure thing” has given me a very cynical view of these professionals. Has left me teary eyed at my bad luck-or ready to shot one myself. Of course if you are talking about throwing horse races then you have to deal with the question of the mob and all the connections to that organization from law enforcement to track officials. And in a roundabout way this is how Nick with a little timely intervention by Nora solved that one thereby exonerating that fallen jockey (and a newspaper guy too). Bringing a high-born connected guy down to boot. Enough said.

Enough said except that I also mentioned that if one had just one film in the series then you had to opt for the original one based far more closely on that tattered copy of Hammett’s crime novel. Those were the days when Nick, still besotted by Nora, but not knocked over by her could work up the energy to do more than mix martinis. (Or to revive the old Dowd argument before Hammett let the bottle get to him or while working under the umbrella of Popular Front days directed from red Moscow).     

Of course even then Nick had been softened up a little by some time out in gentle, gentile Frisco town by once he hit New York he put on his stern working face when the daughter of an ex-client attempted to find out where her father had taken off too. Taken off after a couple of murders fouled up the scene. See that old man, that thin man, had been running around with a dizzy dame who was two-timing him and so all eyes pointed in his absent direction. Only got more heated when a guy who saw the murderer got wasted by same.  Looked like the old man would take the big step-off, take a last breathe that he would not like.

Except in those days although Nick was allegedly “retired” kicked out the jams long enough to find out that the whole thing was a scam, was all smoke and mirrors by somebody, not the thin man. Along the way Nick outsmarts the public coppers, not so hard to do when the put their two and two together and it came up five. Two murders and a missing boyfriend, the old man, and they had him all wrapped up and tied with a ribbon. One little problem: the old man, the thin man, this Wynant to give him a name was dead, very dead and had been so of a couple of months after Nick (okay, okay with a little sniffing help from Asta) so the public coppers had egg all over their faces. You might be surprised by who actually did the deed, did the three murders and would surely take the big step-off, be gasping for breathe at the end, but you can watch the film to see that   worked out. What is important is that Nick, drunk or sober, dapper or not, seemingly lazy or not, too laid back or not grabbed the right person, solved the damn mystery without working up serious sweat. And without getting bopped on the head, or taking some slugs. Enough said.     

When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“Billie Holiday: The First Verve Sessions ”-A CD Review

When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“Billie Holiday: The First Verve Sessions ”-A CD Review 

CD Review

By Music Critic Seth Garth

Billie Holiday: The First Verve (Record) Sessions, Billie Holiday, Verve Records, Polygram, 1975   

Everybody, at least the every bodies who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, had at least heard the sad life story and junkie death of the legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew that information either from having read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those younger readers who have not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings in the current retro revival of that method), newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s The Supremes). So everybody knew that Lady Day had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life and had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin. Had turned her into some hustling gal with dark lights out of a Nelson Algren story about her “daddy” making her blues go away, had the “fixer” man making the pain going away for a moment. (I believe that the Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young who himself blew many a high white note out to the China seas as the phrase went on the West Coast when he was “on” gave her that name. Put lady and day together and it stuck. He backed her up on many recordings, including here, and in many a venue, including New York café society before they pulled her ticket. The name fit her as did that eternal flower arrangement, sweet gardenia or some such flower speaking of sexual adventures and promise, in her hair)     

Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if you listen to this CD under review like the other compilations that I am reviewing at this time while I am in a “from hunger” wanting habits mood about Lady Day’s work like I get into every once in a while about music that moved, moves, me, spoke, speaks, to me. If you listen through this CD or her classic tunes for Verve Records you will also know why in the first part of the 21^st century guys like me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful pause between notes that carried you to a different place, by that slight hush as she enveloped a song which kept your own blues at bay. I repeat kept your blues away whatever she suffered to bring that sentiment forward.

That last statement, those last two sentences are really what I want to hone in on here as I have previously done since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than a single selection spending half the night turning over vinyl, flipping tapes, changing CDs if you don’t have multiple CD recorder, or grabbing the dial on an MP3 player. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours, tune that vinyl over in the beginning in my case, and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right.

Here is the not nice part, maybe better the not respectful part for a sanctified woman’s voice and spirit.  Once a few years ago I was talking to some young people about Billie and, maybe under the influence of the Diana Ross film or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another junkie gone to seed. When I was a kid, long before I acquired the Billie habit I had some similar ideas about junk and junkies maybe under the influence of Frankie Machine (played by Frank Sinatra) in the film adaptation of the voice of the small people Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm. (The “golden arm” the amount of money spent with the “fixer man” which singer/songwriter John Prine later mentioned in a lyric about “all the money going into a hole in daddy’s arm” in the song Sam Sloan about the fate of a returning Vietnam veteran who couldn’t face the “real” world after that experience.) The film seen and not totally understood then with my parents in the early 1950s who warned me against the dangers of hanging with junkies and getting hooked on dope. A real and present danger in the neighborhood we were forced to live in where dope was around if a lot more discreetly and on the low than now. It would take actually knowing guys, soldiers, friends, coming back from Vietnam where via the Golden Triangle heroin, opium and such were cheap and plentiful to have a more tolerant attitude toward that guys with a “habit”. A couple of overdoses only added to the sense of loss. I shocked them, I think, and maybe myself a little when I said if I had had the opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking my own blues   away. 

That is why we still listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today. 

Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the 1930sand 1940s, the time of her time, the time of her Verve recordings covering Cole Porter, Gershwin and Jerome Kern songs with a little Johnny Mercer thrown in, the time of Tin Pan Alley songs which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it” which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. Some of the versions of the songs here may be a little more indicative of her high water mark than her later work where she teamed up with serious jazz and blues players like the aforementioned Lester Young blowing out high white notes to the China seas while she basked in the glow of the lyrics. But just check out Blue Moon, Autumn In New York, Love For Sale and Solitude and you will get an idea of what I am talking about. And as I have stated repeatedly maybe get your own blues chased away    

When The Thin Man Got Thinner-With “The Thin Man Goes Home” Film Adaptation Of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man In Mind

When The Thin Man Got Thinner-With “The Thin Man Goes Home” Film Adaptation Of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man In Mind   

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[Take the following as something of a disclaimer since I have decided to embark of a look at several of the Thin Man films that came out in the 1940s. These days now that I am, well, let’s call the situation semi-retired from reviewing films I made no pretense to viewing film series like the famous 1940s The Thin Man film series under discussion here in chronological order. Now I go by happenstance. That happenstance got worked out this way on this series. I happened to see a DVD copy of Shadow Of The Thin Man highlighted at my local library for some reason. Since I have spent a fair amount of time recently reviewing black and white films I grabbed this one. I loved to watch such films in my younger days, my teenage days,  when I would go to the Majestic Theater box of popcorn in hand in Riverdale some distance from Boston where I would spent many Saturday afternoons watching double features. That is the genesis of this out of order series of reviews for which I take full responsibility. S.L.]     

Recently in a review of the fourth in the famous Myrna Loy-William Powell seemingly never-ending The Thin Man series, Shadow Of The Thin Man and again later commenting on the original film adaptation, I mentioned that a long time ago, or it now seems a long time ago, I had a running argument with the late film critic Henry Dowd about the alleged decline in manly film detectives after the time of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in the 1940s. By that Henry meant tough guy, no holds barred, non-filter cigarette smoking, Luckies or Camels, bottom of the desk drawer hard shell whiskey neat drinking, who didn’t mind taking or giving a punch, or taking or giving a  random slug for the cause detectives. He had based his opinion strictly on viewing the films of the famous detective couple Nick and Nora Charles.           

Henry Dowd believed that with the rise of The Thin Man series that previous characterization of a model detective, his previous characterization Henry was given to the imperative tone, switched from the hard whiskey drinking guy to a soft martini swigging suave guy with a soft manner and an aversion to taking risks, certainly to taking punches or slugs. Hell, in that film under review at the time not only had Nick been married to Nora but they had a kid, not to mention that damn dog Asta, a regular entourage to weigh a guy down. Back in the day what had surprised Henry in our public prints argument had been when I told him that the same guy, Dashiell Hammett, who had written the heroic tough guy detective Sam Spade had also written the dapper Nick and charming Nora characters. Henry did not believe me until I produced my tattered copy of Hammett’s The Thin Man which had started the whole film series. Thereafter he kept up the same argument except placing The Thin Man as an aberration probably do to Hammett’s known heavy drinking or that he was trying to soften his own Stalinist-etched persona with such an obvious bourgeois couple. Jesus.       

My objection to Henry’s “decline of the manly” detective theory back then had not been so much about the social manners or the social class of the couple in the series, a reversion to the parlor detective genre before Hammett and Chandler brought the genre out of the closet and onto the streets, as the thinness of the plots as they rolled out each new product. I continue to tout the original film in the series The Thin Man as the one everybody should view and take in the rest if you have restless hour and one half or so to whittle away.  

I had held my viewing of Shadow up as a case in point. And the same is true of the film being reviewed here The Thin Man Goes Home. The story line is basically Nick’s revenge for his doctor father’s disapproval of his choice of a career in law enforcement and private detection rather than the gentile medical profession. And his drinking-centered urban lifestyle as well. He and Nora travel to the quiet oasis from crime Podunk town where he had grown up for a vacation. Apparently in Podunk the mere appearance of a famous ex-private detective was enough to bring local society down with a bang. Make that bang-bang since a murder of a young factory worker cum artist is what drives Nick to beat everybody including the public coppers to the punch-to finding the murderer and the reason for his death and well as ultimately the death of his Apple Annie mother who was trying to protect him. The usual cast of characters show up with their own grab bag of motives to do the rotten deed.    

In the end the town, probably like a million other towns had its fair share of the jealous, of the crooked and those who craved hard cash. Without giving too much of the not too much to give away plot the struggle for the hard cash centered on grabbing plans for a new style propeller from the local defense factory and sell them to the highest bidder-meaning foreign interests. Naturally such unpatriotic behavior had to be stopped. And Nick proved his metal (Nora pretty much stood around and looked beautiful in this one) to his father who coughed up a “good work” comment at the end. So you can see even ever ready Hollywood was running out of serious work for our fair couple to feast on.      

Enough said except that I also mentioned that if one had just one film in the series then you had to opt for the original one based far more closely on that tattered copy of Hammett’s crime novel. Those were the days when Nick, still besotted by Nora, but not knocked over by her could work up the energy to do more than mix martinis. (Or to revive the old Dowd argument before Hammett let the bottle get to him or while working under the umbrella of Popular Front days directed from red Moscow).    

Memories Of Victor Lazlo-With The 75th Anniversary Of Ingrid Bergman And Humphrey Bogart’s “Casablanca” In Mind

Memories Of Victor Lazlo-With The 75^th Anniversary Of Ingrid Bergman And Humphrey Bogart’s “Casablanca” In Mind

By Bradley Davis

[For those in America who do not know, or have forgotten, the name Victor Lazlo who died on January 20, 1989 he was a living legend during World War II as the key leader of the armed civilian resistance to the Nazi juggernaut that tried to permanently roll over Europe. First in his native Czechoslovakia where he stood in the main square attempting to rally Czech resistance as the Germans crossed the border to “claim” what they saw as their historic hinterlands. Hardly the first crew to run that argument to the ground before the wrath of the risen people put paid to that notion. Later after the Germans had captured Lazlo and put him in concentration camps he became one of the last hopes in those dark days for the average occupied European when he repeatedly escaped from the Nazi barbed wire enclaves to fight another day. That despite repeated German High Command announcements complete with photographs that the brave man was dead. Only to appear again and again until even the Germans saw it was useless to make an example of Lazlo once he made his way to Casablanca along with a very much younger woman companion, Ilsa, to forge a working resistance underground network to jam up the Germans as best they could.   

Strangely Lazlo came from a very well-to- do family who had done well in the munitions business (which the Nazis took over with every hand once they crushed benighted Czechoslovakia) and could have easily gotten out of Prague and into London or Paris before all hell broke loose. But the times demanded “no heads in the sand” and so some layers of society whom one would not expect to dirty their hands with the work usually left to the plebian masses found a calling. For a short time after World War II there were several statues dedicated to Lazlo’s service in Prague and other Czech towns, a few in other grateful liberated countries too, which were taken down during the Soviet period. They were eventually restored well after 1989 too late for Lazlo to bask in his well-deserved accolades.

Lazlo’s death prompted some of those of his comrades still alive, a dwindling number as the actuarial tables grind away, to write about their heroic leader. One whose article I had seen in the New York Gazette I contacted at the time through a friend who worked at the paper. His name Christian Berger, Danish by birth and subsequently a naturalized American citizen. He had been part of Lazlo’s underground operation and had actually helped get Lazlo and Ilsa out of Casablanca to continue his work without having to look over his shoulder every minute for some dastardly pro-Nazi assassin looking to get a name for himself.

This Casablanca period in Lazlo’s exploits has been the subject of some differences among those who have written extensively about the armed civilian resistance during the war. About those who fought the Nazis and their various national indigenous allies as best they could. The main bone of contention in the matter is who actually set the wheels in motion to get Lazlo out of Casablanca. During the war it was always, correctly it seems, assumed that the local branch of Lazlo’s operation-the Knights Templar- got him out. 

Immediately after the war though an American ex-patriate, Rick Blaine, who during the war and for many years after ran a gin joint in the Casbah, Rick’s Café Americian, claimed that as a gesture of love for Ilsa, who was actually Lazlo’s wife which they were keeping quiet for security reasons and to protect Ilsa if the Germans found out their real relationship, gave the couple a pair of “letters of transit” to get on the nightly midnight plane to neutral Lisbon. No such documents were ever found in any archive or file. The failure to not find the missing documents would not have been conclusive since in wartime all kinds of regular business are churned up and lost in movements and withdrawals but would have helped Blaine’s case immensely. For years after the war Lazlo, long after Ilsa had left him for an English nobleman and a country estate and not having seen Rick since 1941, insisted that there were no letters of transit and while not calling Rick Blaine a liar he always claimed the local Knight Templars were the agents through which he escaped.              

Since Lazlo’s death the Rick allegations have resurfaced and have had some champions, romantic fools mostly, who have bought into that long ago gesture of love business. The following is Christian Berger’s take on the matter from his perspective as the leader of the local ex-pat resistance which found itself stranded in Casablanca during those troubled times. Bradley Davis] 

*******

Sure I knew Victor Lazlo, the great Czech World War II anti-fascist liberation leader, who passed away the other day at 91, the day George H.W. Bush was sworn in as President of the United States here in America. I first met him in Casablanca, down in Morocco, the part that the French, the Vichy French, had control of not the Spanish part. In those days, the days when one scourge Adolph Hitler, his minions, and his tanks were making mincemeat of Europe I, Christian Berger, having barely escaped with my life from my native Denmark got to Casablanca through the underground network that Victor Lazlo was the key man setting up once the night of the long knives set in over the benighted continent.

I have been a life-long working man, a dock-worker, a union man with the ILA in Copenhagen and Newark, New Jersey here in America who had been then a part of a small socialist resistance unit who had as the Nazis came waltzing into Denmark blown up as many tunnels and other impediments as possible to slow down their inevitable march. My, our, escape was a close thing since I, we, had to get through France, the southern part that was controlled by Vichy, by those damned French collaborators with the Nazi Germany regime which had set itself up in fallen Paris with papers that were not too good. Papers that claimed I was from the Ukraine since Russia was in some kind of devil’s pact with Hitler at the time. The customs officers at Marseilles had a hard time believing I was a Slav what with me looking like the map of Copenhagen and talking like some Nordic skier seen in the movies in one of those sports films in the mountains which dealt mainly with love interests back in the 1930s. I got through okay, took a derelict freighter across the Mediterranean through Algiers (again with papers problems but since I had been stamped by French officials in Marseilles less so) and down to Casablanca where I was to await orders to either head to America via the midnight plane to Lisbon, the only safe neutral spot at that point,  and then across the Atlantic to raise funds from among the Scandinavians sprouted throughout the Midwest or head back to Vichy France with some others stranded in Casablanca and join the French resistance which was beginning to be organized (mainly then by loosely affiliated individuals and later by the Communists after Hitler turned the tables on “Uncle Joe” Stalin and did a massive invasion of Russia).   

My cover strange as it seemed given my real background in Casablanca was as a jeweler since we needed to be able to move money without having the fucking French, fucking Louie the corrupt Captain of the [A1] [A2] [A3] [A4] [A5] coppers looking over our shoulders every minute. An out of the suitcase seller was my cover but mostly I was a buyer of high-priced gems at a fraction of the price since anybody who made it to that sullen town needed plenty of dough to not be condemned to die in the damn place. I was looked at as either a bastard for robbing the unfortunates who wound up there or a savior for giving that last bit of money they needed to make arrangements to get out of that hellhole. That made me look like the real thing as people either enjoyed my company or avoided me like some dreaded medieval plague.

I was in those days just hanging out in Casablanca awaiting orders about which way I was heading, hanging out mostly at Rick’s Café Americian where every transient exile went to do any kind of transaction, legal or illegal, or just to get the sand out of their mouths with some of Rick’s high-end liquor which he obtained on the international black market which had its heyday then for quality goods. I did a little work in that market as well to strengthen my cover and met some strange guys, a guy like Santo Diaz who would have stolen the shirt off your back and sold it back to you for twice what you paid for if the weather was too hot or too cold to go bare-chested but who had so many connections that I would have paid the price if he had taken my shirt. Some of the more bewildered and younger transients came just to dance and listen to a guy, a black guy everybody called Sam but whose real name was Dooley something, sorry I forgot his last name, play all the current Tin Pan Alley tunes on his piano (accompanied by a pretty good back-up band). Everybody went crazy over his rendition of If I Didn’t Care although Rick would make sure he played I’ll Get By every set although he once told me he hated the damn song thought it was pretty corny and not well-written ne but Rick was the boss and so the damn thing got played every set (the customers apparently once they got a load on didn’t know he played the song three times a night. As least I never heard anybody complain on the matter).

I will mention this Rick, Rick Blaine, originally from New York City in America I believe he said when I asked one time when he offered to buy me a drink after buying some jewels from one of his lady friends, Rita, a luscious redhead, whom he had picked up in Senor Ferrara’s whorehouse in the Casbah where he stocked plenty of loose European women for the local wealthy trade who seemed to have tired of their own kind and  whom he wished to get rid of on the next flight to Lisbon. (The  jewels which he had bought from me in the first place when his love was in fresh bloom as he expressed it to me upon purchase and which I had gotten on the black market and given him a good price on to help establish myself as a regular at Ricks’. Tiring of redhead and blondes, brunettes too was a luxury that Rick could afford with the proceeds from his gambling racket and letting his place be used by a guy named Frenchie for his pimping transactions. Yeah, Rick was that kind of guy even then.) 

Right now though I want to mention the first news I had heard that made me think we might win against that bastard Hitler and his henchmen like General Petain who was running Vichy France. Like I said I belonged to the same resistance organization that Victor Lazlo had set up after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia-The Knight Templars was our code name and an old time Celtic cross our means of identifying each other. Mine I had placed in a ring that I would take out occasionally and look at as my own possession, so people, so the local Vichy cops, the swine, would not think to look there. Lazlo was so much the public face of the organization that when the Germans captured him the morale of the organization sank like a stone. Then we would hear that he had escaped, usually with the help of local Knights Templars. 

A few times the Germans claimed they had killed him and then he would be sighted again. A real old-time romantic revolutionary, old school no question even though he had been brought up in a very upper middle class bourgeois family. The last time we heard he was killed we thought that really was the end. Then one day out of the blue we got news that Lazlo was not only not dead but had escaped again and was heading to Casablanca. Elated we prepared for his arrival. That meant that the local organization that I had put together would have to insure that Victor Lazlo was able to get out of Casablanca and get to Lisbon and head to London or New York depending on what we could do for him.          

One night bold as we figured him to be Lazlo walked into Rick’s, walked in with the Nordic goddess, a Swede from her looks, a woman who I would later find out whose name was Ilsa, Ilsa Lund, whom he was either married to (privately) or was shacked up with. In any case a good looking dame although quite a bit younger that Lazlo. Lazlo by the way was a tall, kind of thin good-looking guy who always dressed like he had just come out of a men’s magazine. Everything about him spoke of coolness under pressure and strong nerves. I would not say that he was a lady’s man, more of a man’s man but not a few femmes in Casablanca threw glances his way so he must have appealed to a certain kind of woman. Frankly this Ilsa didn’t seem his type but she must have had her charms and some kind of unknown back story to be attached to his arm coming half way across Europe hunted in every quarter.

Now Rick’s was not only the favorite of the transients looking for something but also the favorite watering hole of the Germans assigned to watch over the local Vichy government and the Vichy cops and bureaucrats, especially Louie, everybody called him Louie except his men, the Captain of the cops. Cool as a cucumber Lazlo walked in, sat at a ringside table ordered a couple of drinks, martinis I think, for himself and his lady friend and checked things out. I knew at once he was looking for me. Although we had never met I knew he would have known that the local organization existed and that somebody would contact him once he was safely in Casablanca. Once I spotted him I went over and showed him my ring. We were in business, the business of getting him to Lisbon and whatever future work would come his way. Our relationship for the short time we were together then was cordial and he displayed no class superiority like some of the unattached intellectual French resistance fighters did. (Lazlo and I met a few times after the war when he came to America after Ilsa had left him from that British title and estate and after the fall of Czechoslovakia to pro-Soviet elements who had given him the options-exile or jail.)

I have read different stories over time about how some so-called letters of transit were what got Lazlo and his Ilsa out of Casablanca in a nick of time. I have heard that Rick, Rick Blaine, a guy who stuck his neck out for nobody somehow was holding them for a little two-bit con man named Peter Lorre who got caught and Rick was going to use them himself but gave them to Lazlo for him and Ilsa to get out of town as a gesture to love. Bullshit, excuse my Danish-etched English. Never happened, somebody must have been at the hashish pipe too long. But the story, stories, have persisted to this day and even the New York Times in its obituary for Lazlo mentioned that hoary tale as if it was the real deal. So it is worth going into before I tell what really got Lazlo and Ilsa out of Casablanca and allowed him to lead the freedom fighters of Europe against the night-takers.

According to the stories, I will use the story the Times used since in its particulars it gives most of the current view that has been going around forever. Rick, who passed away in the mid-1970s still stuck in Casablanca selling hashish to the locals in collaboration with a couple of unsavory characters in the Casbah when Rick’s Café went to seed after the war, knew this Ilsa, this Ilsa Lund who was travelling with Lazlo, in Paris before the war started. The stories mainly agree that they had some kind of torrent affair, some serious time under the sheets after Rick had escaped from Spain once Madrid fell in 1939.

Supposedly Rick had been at one time in the International Brigades helping the Loyalists defend the Republic against the military machine of General Franco who was aided in no small way by the Germans. Later when the Brigades were withdrawn he stayed on as a free agent until Madrid fell.  I had a chance later after the war to check out what Rick had done exactly in Spain, or if he had even been there with some guys I met from the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15^th Brigade, the American section. I could never get anything to prove he was, or was not, there but since everybody used aliases anyway I let it ride. I will say that Rick never let anybody believe otherwise than that he had been with the good guys but he didn’t talk about it much one way or the other. Ran his saloon business he called it and never let on about this torrid affair with Ilsa as the cause of his brooding many nights from what his head waiter, Charles, told me. Drank by himself stupid alone or with some whore or princess who needed dough to flee to Lisbon. Always discarded them or shipped them off to Louie when he was done with them.          

Everything changed when Ilsa came walking in hand and hand with Lazlo. You could feel the tension in the air when Rick spotted her after being told Lazlo was in the café. Even sitting at the bar later waiting for Lazlo to come and get the low-down on the local situation from me I could see that Ilsa and Rick had had a big thing in Paris. Could see too that it was not Rick who walked away from her. But I could also see, knowing Scandinavian women a little that Ilsa would not be found wanting for company, would always find a safe haven even hanging around with a guy like Victor Lazlo. I won’t say she was a whore, although in a tight spot she might have been a high class call girl to make ends meet. But that look, that pasted innocent look which certain jaded women can put on or take off like their daily make-up told of a few dark secrets that somebody less worldly than Lazlo (or Rick for that matter) would have gone screaming into the night over. But all of that is sheer speculation on my part about her past and it may have all come to being nothing like that. She didn’t need that, need to play the virgin whore since guys would be more than happy to give her whatever she wanted for a little attention, maybe a little loyalty too. But I insist to this day her rose-petal pure and simple young woman was a façade, was a game she played to insure her own future. Whatever had broken up her and Rick in Paris didn’t seem to have touched her at all. Just another affair and move on. That’s the best way that I can explain it.

You would have had to have been there to see her effect on men, tough men like Rick and Lazlo to get a real feel for what was driving everybody crazy. (I will admit that one time when she was waiting at the bar for Lazlo to show after a meeting and I was sitting a few seats down that her wayward smile my way and that scent she wore, gardenia, something like that had me going too since I had left my Danja back in Denmark and had not been with a woman for a while.) All I know for sure was that she was not leaving Casablanca alone and without resources.   

That part was real enough. What was not real and nobody ever to my knowledge ever produced any documents which would pass muster, would not fool even a gullible U.S. customs inspector were those so-called letters of transit. Of course if they had existed then many things would have made sense, or more sense. You have to understand how desperate people were who were able to get to Casablanca in those days and who either by lack of resources or no luck looked like they were never going to get out of there, were going to as Rick once said to Charles as I overheard a conversation between them “die” there. (There is a certain irony in the fact that he did die there pretty wealthy from what I heard about his take on the drug trade and a little off-hand pimping of the local Casbah girls). To hear about “no hassle” just sign your name documents fired many an imagination. Made people believe in what was nothing but thin air.

The whole thing was a concoction made up by this Peter Lorre, a two-bit con man, a German ex-pat of some sort, probably saw no benefit to himself to stay in Germany after 1933 since while Hitler had an assortment of hangers-on, flaks, devotees, and bone-crushers two-bit non-ideological con men were being run out of town and fast.  Hell he could hardly pay his bar tab never mind his rent. Borrowed money off of me (with interest which I never got as it turned out nor payment one on the loan) to get some stuff out of hock. He took advantage of the news, the real news, that two German officers had been killed on their way to Casablanca and figured that he could make a “killing” maybe several, by getting money upfront from those desperate people stranded and running out of hope by saying he had some fool-proof documents which real letters of transit would be no question about that. Of course this idea fizzled when Louie to impress the German officers watching the henhouse decided that Lorre was the perfect guy to take the fall for the killing of the two Germans. He staged a big raid at Rick’s one night for just that purpose, just to impress this bigwig Major Strasser nothing but a strutting fool if you asked me. They found Lorre out in the sand about twenty kilometers from the Casbah a few weeks later with two slugs to the head.

Funny Lorre just before the end in the café had passed a couple of crude documents that he called the letters of transit to Rick from what I heard for safekeeping. Those documents were of the crudest sort that even a half-wit would have been able to see that they were nothing but forgeries and bad ones at that. Would make the possessor who tried to use them prime bait for the concentration camps the Germans were setting up all over occupied Europe.                        

Rick was slick though, or maybe better love sick since he never let on at the time that Lorre had conveyed the “documents” to him or that he knew that they were crudely forged documents. So as far as anybody in Casablanca knew, or wanted to know, like I said they were still around town. Somehow Lazlo found out that Rick had these documents, or some documents and tried to bargain Ilsa, or rather Ilsa’s safe passage out of Casablanca for some sum of dough to be forwarded later. No sale even though while they were discussing the matter Rick let on about the torrid affair in Paris and Lazlo, eternally a European sophisticate, brushed it off as so much collateral damage of war. Lazlo probably knew better than anybody the slightly sluttish side of Ilsa when she wanted something so he probably went to Rick first before she made her charge at the love sick guy.

Which came the next night while Victor and seemingly half the foreigners in town, including me were at a meeting to plan his escape and our tasks after he left. (I was to go to Europe to join the resistance and did not get to America until a few years after the war when I married an American citizen whom I met in Paris right after Liberation day. I never saw Danja again after I fled Denmark and so do not know what happened to her after the fall).    

Ilsa must have really given Rick the business, the whole pitch since when she left his room all disheveled she had made a promise to go away with Rick and forget about Lazlo. Yes, I think I was right that she knew all the arts, probably gave him a blow job to seal the deal since most guys will buckle under if they have some gal “play the flute” for them. Since he had nothing to get out of Casablanca with Rick stalled her as long as he could until the Germans, using Louie as a front man, were ready to grab Lazlo. It was a close thing. When Rick came up empty he would wind up spending many lonely nights thinking about Paris and that last night up in his room with her because Ilsa was back in Victor’s fold when things were getting dicey. So much for the Rick legend which he pursued mercilessly I understand after the war when he claimed that that without him and those so-called letters of transit Lazlo would have been a goner, and by implication that Europe would still be under the Nazi boot heel.     

The real story which I can tell now that Victor Lazlo is in his honored grave, Rick is long gone to his rather shabby grave and Ilsa ever since a couple of years after the war is the Countess of Kent and not bothered by anything these days since she suffers from a series of mysterious diseases. The long and short of it was when that bastard Major Strasser ordered Louie to round up Lazlo with or without Ilsa we, the local branch of the Knights Templar, kidnapped the Major and executed him out in the desert not far from where Lorre had been found earlier. We then held Louie at gunpoint while we ordered him to clear the airport and allow Lazlo and Ilsa to board the late night plane to Lisbon. No big mystery just what freedom-fighters did when they had to face the facts of life at any given moment. The rest is some much thin air. RIP, Victor Lazlo, RIP.