This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Songcatcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style
As told to Si Lannon
A YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe (a British musicologist in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads, Charles Seeger, and the Lomaxes, father and son when they headed south and west to fink the “people’s music”)"discovered" the song in 1916 in Kentucky. Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, or so I though at the time but was heard the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ in Boston hosted by Dick Summer (who is featured on the 2012 Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene) and hearing the late gravelly-voiced folksinger Dave Van Ronk like some latter-day Jehovah doing his version of the song. I know the next day I rushed over to the now exiled out in Utah somewhere Allan Jackson’s house and asked him if he had heard the song the previous night. He said hell no. This before he became a serious folk aficionado and was still hung up on some lollipop music that all the neighborhood high school girls were going crazy over, a bunch of Bobbies, I forget the last names, and so required some attention if he was to get anywhere with Diana Nelson.
But that was high school dream stuff so I let it go then. A couple of years later when he was in college at Boston University he took a date to the long gone Club Nana over in Harvard Square to hear Dave Von Ronk play and where he did the song. He called me the next saying that he finally got it. By the way the way that Club Nana date came about was that his date was crazy for Dave Von Ronk. Some things never changed. In all quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.
[By the way that “or so I thought” about mountain music later turned out to be not quite true. My father from coal country Hazard, Kentucky out by the hills and hollows (I refuse to write “hollas”) and my mother left Boston for a time to go back to his growing up home to see if they could make a go of it there after World War II. They could not but that was a separate story while they were there I was conceived and being carried in my mothers’ womb so it turned out the damn stuff was in my DNA. Go figure, right.]
COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES (A.P. Carter)
The Carter Family - 1932
Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning
They will first appear and then they're gone
They'll tell to you some loving story
To make you think that they love you true
Straightway they'll go and court some other
Oh that's the love that they have for you
Do you remember our days of courting
When your head lay upon my breast
You could make me believe with the falling of your arm
That the sun rose in the West
I wish I were some little sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I would fly away to my false true lover
And while he'll talk I would sit and cry
But I am not some little sparrow
I have no wings nor can I fly
So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow
And try to pass my troubles by
I wish I had known before I courted
That love had been so hard to gain
I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden
And fastened it down with a silver chain
Young men never cast your eye on beauty
For beauty is a thing that will decay
For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden
How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away
Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Lead Belly's "Bourgeois Blues"-A Song For Our Times-Build The Resistance
A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject from Leadbelly who may have sang the song seventy or eighty years ago but is not that far off now-except now it is more than just black people.
Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. And those songs provide our movement with that combination entertainment/political message that is an art form that we use to draw the interested around us. Even though today those interested may be counted rather than countless and the class struggle to be whiled away is rather one-sidedly going against us at present. The bosses are using every means from firing to targeting union organizing to their paid propagandists complaining that the masses are not happy with having their plight groveled in their faces like they should be while the rich, well, while away in luxury and comfort.
But not all life is political, or rather not all music lends itself to some kind of explicit political meaning yet speaks to, let’s say, the poor sharecropper at the juke joint on Saturday listening to the country blues, unplugged, kids at the jukebox listening to high be-bop swing, other kids listening, maybe at that same jukebox now worn with play and coins listening to some guys from some Memphis record company rocking and rolling, or adults spending some dough to hear the latest from Tin Pan Alley or the Broadway musical. And so they too while away to the various aspects of the American songbook and that rich tradition is which in honored here.
This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up. These are the lyrics-take the "n" word part as you will but that is what he wrote.
Lord, in a bourgeois town It's a bourgeois town I got the bourgeois blues Gonna spread the news all around
Home of the brave, land of the free I don't wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie Lord, in a bourgeois town Uhm, the bourgeois town I got the bourgeois blues Gonna spread the news all around
Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs We heard the white man say "I don't want no niggers up there" Lord, in a bourgeois town Uhm, bourgeois town I got the bourgeois blues Gonna spread the news all around
Well, them white folks in Washington they know how To call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow Lord, it's a bourgeois town
Friedrich Engels, in his 1878 book Anti-Dühring, observed that religion serves both as solace for the miseries produced by class society and as an ideology justifying class domination. Marxists counterpose a materialist view of the world to religious obscurantism and other forms of idealism. Against the notion that religious belief could be dispelled simply through rational argumentation, Engels explained that religion will only disappear with the realization of a classless communist society in which scarcity has been eliminated.
All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces….
We have seen repeatedly that in existing bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions created by themselves, by the means of production which they themselves have produced, as if by an alien force. The actual basis of the religious reflective activity therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself. And although bourgeois political economy has given a certain insight into the causal connection of this alien domination, this makes no essential difference. Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises in general, nor protect the individual capitalists from losses, bad debts and bankruptcy, nor secure the individual workers against unemployment and destitution. It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the alien domination of the capitalist mode of production) disposes. Mere knowledge, even if it went much further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is not enough to bring social forces under the domination of society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social act. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force; when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes—only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.
Maybe Not Fit For The Primetime Hallmark Channel- Gary Cooper’s “Peter Ibbetson” (1935)-A Short Film Review
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Peter Ibbetson, starring Ann Harding, Gary Cooper, 1935
Hasn’t the Hallmark Channel except this time of year add in some Christmas carols and a few decorated trees, etc. already done the plotline to this film, this 1935 film Peter Ibbetson, starring a mustachioed Gary Cooper in the title role and Ann Harding as his flame Mary. (He last seen in this publication in a review, a debunking expose of the legendary American Old West outlaw Link Jones who must have had a pretty press agent to beat the rap as a bad guy by self-proclaimed legend-slayer young Will Bradley). I know of whence I speak since Laura Perkins, yes, the Laura Perkins who writes here and my long-time companion is “addicted” to this channel’s television products this holiday time of year and some days I heard the plot-line as background when I am working or reading.
Let me outline, with Laura’s key input and approval, the plot and see if except the last almost surreal end minutes this couldn’t have been one of the long line of similar Hallmark presentations and saved the channel some money for screenwriters (although they probably only spent about six dollars on that expense from the dialogue and stories that I have overheard but please don’t tell Laura that). Some young professional woman returns home (for Christmas but any holiday would do) having either dumped or been dumped by some unworthy guy who didn’t see her positive qualities, or he didn’t have any as the case may be. During that home stay, and this is the important connector to the film under review, she runs into, one way or another “the boy next door,” some guy from her youth growing up in splendid small-town America. Either she had a crush on him or him her when they were young and that sets the “drama” for the rest of the production. Until that last clinching kiss after one or the other, or both have tried to avoid destiny call.
Fast forward, no, fast backward. Peter and Mary are the children of English ex-pats in the 19th century who live in some splendor in Paris-and are next door neighbors. And are fast friends despite their childhood predilections. Young Peter’s mother though dies of what probably was consumption then, tuberculous now and he is shipped back to England with some ne’er-do-well uncle. Before parting they swear undying devotion to each other. (Interestingly we see neither Peter or Mary’s father so maybe that ex-pat business had to do with their mothers as we called it in the old Acre working class section of North Adamsville where I grew up “going to see Aunt Emma,” leaving town or in this case country to have a child out of wedlock, to be pregnant, to bear illegitimate children no big deal now but very big then.)
That promise to reunite is what drives the second part of the film when Peter as an adult has taken up the profession of architect and Mary has landed on her feet very nicely by marrying an older man, an English Duke of the realm and loaded with dough and love of horses if not of Mary. And she him, the not in love part. The reunion, the dragged out reunion, between the pair gets resolved when up and coming architect Peter is commissioned by the Duke and Duchess to build a new stable for the horses, a job he will supervise for a couple of months without either him or Mary figuring out the basis of the growing attraction between them. Naturally the relationship between the two former neighbors grows putting everything in doubt once the Duke, who may have loved horses and not loved Mary, still was no fool and saw what was going on between them. Saw and had enough jealous rage to plot their murders. Except in the melee the Duke was killed by Peter. No good could come of that.
Frankly, Peter should have gotten himself a better lawyer because what was clearly a case of self-defense got him convicted of a murder rap in very protective of nobility England. Here is where things veer off from a Hallmark script. Essentially Peter and Mary are so much in love that they have a mystical bond between them which lasts for the rest of their lives despite being apart. Peter in some hell-hole Dickens Dartmoor dungeon and her in tortured splendor at her estate (she always seems to land on her feet unlike Peter who takes it on the chin always). I suspected they like Thomas de Quincy and Sam Coleridge were doing some very strong drugs but that is mere speculation. In any case when Mary dies Peter passes away as well although they will be united for eternity wherever they wind up. You know maybe I am wrong, maybe this one has too much drama, too much melodrama to pass muster on the Hallmark Channel. Laura agrees.
The Shadow Knows, Knows Nada, Nada Nunca, Nada As Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Steps Up His Game-With Alex Baldwin’s “The Shadow” (1994) In Mind-A Film Review, Of Sorts
By Will Bradley
The Shadow, starring Penelope Ann Miller, Alex Baldwin, John Lone, 1994
How the mighty have fallen. As the constant reader knows I have been on a tear the past year or so beginning with the expose of the legend around one Sherlock Holmes (where I locked horns with old man Seth Garth in an epic fourteen movie review struggle which between us left nothing much left of that silly so-called private detective and his boyfriend or whatever their relationship), or whatever his name really was since the London police files show Larry Lawrence on its books when he was arrested for transporting stolen goods and about thirty other similar charges and a couple more serious like conspiracy to murder which he and a few others did serious time for in Dartmoor, and his dear friend Doc Watson whose real name was Nigel something but don’t get hung up on names when dealing with legends since their various activities require such or their well-paid and padded press agents decided to spruce up their desperado names to appeal to the public’s fancy.
I won’t bore the reader with the litany of those whose reputations, over-inflated, bloated, undeserved or just plain false, lies so brazen that even a priest would be hard-pressed to give absolution, have been crushed and they are now ready for the trash barrel of history. I have taken my righteous campaign going back as far as Robin Hood and his press agent’s coverup of his nefarious doings when he came into some dough. This Robin Hood, for the record real name Robert Locklear or Lockwood the manse records are messy and show both spellings, for example, who was nothing but a gouging rack-renter once his patron King Richard, aka the Lion-Hearted, gave him plenty of acreage for services rendered and he became as oppressive a landlord in his lofty manor as any country squire. Forgot about those yeomen bandits who helped him with his armed robberies of rich and poor alike, whoever dared show their faces in and around Sherwood Forest up in the north of England. Shamed that Lady Marian, real name Holly, by what today would be called “pimping” her to the various courtesan when he found a younger woman, Ophelia.
(I have refused thus far to take on the “big boys and girls,” the ancient Greeks and Romans, the cranky and crazed gods and goddesses for the simple reason that tracing the records is a bear of a job but I do have a lightweight line on Andromeda and Perseus which I am following concerning his alleged fight against the sea serpents to free her which looks like it was a put -up job worked out so he could “gain her favors,” ancient talk for hitting the sheets or however they covered themselves in their pursuit of lust, if they did, did cover themselves)
Here is the exciting news though and should help me a lot moving up the food chain in this crazy quilt pattern and cutthroat profession which I am only now beginning to navigate with some confidence. A recent UCal survey, poll, conducted in association with the well-known Harrison Foundation has shown a decrease in the belief in various legendary figures of late. The survey was simplicity itself with a broad cross section of the population represented, rich, poor, various genders, races a good mix from what I have seen so far in the preliminary report, as the interviewee was asked about his or her belief in some figure, then told to read my or somebody else’s documented research and asked whether they were more likely, less likely or the same to believe in the legend. Almost across the board the ratings for these bums with nothing but high priced press agents and shills touting their deeds went down, especially a guy named Don Juan who legend was made of whole cloth by some pent up in a convent by a rich man’s hormonally-charged daughter and Captain Blood exposed as one of the worse of the worse Middle Passage slave trade transporters (and reportedly the person British painter Turner was thinking of when he painted his masterful “Slave.”)
Naturally in any human endeavor there are failures, failures when people still believe despite all the evidence to the contrary in the validity of something. That was the case with one Johnny Cielo whose legend has kept me up many a night trying to figure out why with all the documentation that I have amassed his ratings actually “spiked” in this latest polling (I should note maybe reflecting the season that belief in angels has also spiked during this period). Fellow writers had shaken their heads when I started this legend-slaying campaign although once I showed them the poll results they have since backed off since especially among the older writers who were knee-deep in backstabbing me for their own purposes, mainly to not fall down the food chain further in my wake. They still though look at me with funny glances around the water cooler when I bring up my troubles breaking the Cielo legend. My whole idea is to get people to think more reasonably to shed their misconceptions, to shed their alternate facts universe in these troubled times when clear heads and clear thinking are necessary. Hence the heavy push against the fake Cielo legend.
A few Cielo details before I go on to my current task of busting up one Lamont Cranston and his shadow game. The genesis of my knowledge of the Cielo legend came from a fellow journalism graduate student who I knew at NYU and whom I had kept in touch with over the past few years. He had been down in Florida, down in the Keys, on an unrelated story which the parties had backed off on, didn’t show up to expose whenever they had to offer (something about CIA conduits to Cuba if I recall). He was sitting in the old Tanner Tavern trying to drown his sorrows and come up with some kind of story to earn his daily bread. While there an older guy, a drunk from the look of him, Billy something (here I really don’t remember the last name) came up and tried to cadge a drink from him.
My guy reluctantly bought him a whiskey, and a few more as the evening wore on, and as a result that loosened up Billy’s tongue about the old days in Key West. The days when Johnny Cielo roamed the space, roamed the skies by day and drank and whored by night. My guy had never heard of Johnny and so Billy spent the better part of an hour describing this and that about Johnny’s place in the early aviation pantheon which every serious aficionado knows about. (That part, the press agent bullshit part is at least true that the cultists know every detail about Johnny, especially in this part of Florida and the South in general)
The rest of the story can be told by the researching I did after my fellow reporter told me the story since he knew I was looking for copy on these so-called legendary characters for my burgeoning by-line. The first tip of the Johnny iceberg was the claim that he has been the first guy to take human flight. This would seem to have been the straw that broke the camel back on the legend since I was able to retrieve a copy of his birth certificate from the Elmira clerk’s office showing one John Richard Cielo to have been born in 1910. The Wright boys did their magic at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The other kind of secondary piece of evidence for Johnny’s early days was that he gave Howard Hughes the idea for TWA and would have made millions if he had stayed with Hughes. The real deal Johnny was basically a low-rent flying mail postman who ran many operations to the ground before he had to hightail it out of the country with guys with guns breathing down his neck, and a reward on his head by some Chicago mobster who he tried to shake down.
That leaving the country is really where the Johnny legend is centered, that and his later so-called exploits before he fell into the sea. Yeah, his leaving for Barranca to run a mail operation down there is when all the bullshit got wings. See he was supposed to have talked movie icon drop-dead beautiful Rita Hayworth into leaving with him before she ran off with the Aga Khan after Johnny ran out of dough-and prospects. The reality. He had met a whore working some joy house in Hoboken named Sarah Lind, remember be wary of the truth of names in this stuff who did look like Rita and went with him figuring she was getting off cheap street with this good-looking guy (so-so, okay looks from the photos). A view of her photos taken later when Johnny’s money had run out and she had too from some men’s magazines, “girlie” magazines shows that her legs were nowhere as good as Rita’s and this tramp didn’t have a tenth of Rita’s style on her best days.
I mentioned that Johnny later, in the late 1950s fell into the ocean, fell into the Gulf of Mexico. That location is important for the last really blasphemous part of the Johnny legend. That he was the guy flying arms and other supplies into Cuba for Fidel, Che and the hermanos and had fallen down into the Caribbean. All the flight manifests from Key West show Johnny flying a Piper Club, Jesus, a freaking tinplate Piper Club, taking well-heeled passengers to Naples down in Florida before he fell into the Gulf. To this day despite every denial by successive Cuban governments and every belief by those who want to see a romantic Amerciano helping the good guys that is the lynchpin of his legacy. That is the basis of the shrine, the heavy money-making shrine in the Keys which Johnny’s estate such as it was established to milk the whole thing for what it was worth. Yes, it will be tough to break that one if all the documentation has provided nothing but a spike in his legend. Damn.
But we must move on to the case of one Lamont Cranston, who claimed until his end at Bellevue where he spent the last twenty years of his life in the indigent ward that he was the so-called Shadow whose task was to rid New York City, also called Gotham, also called Metropolis, of crime and criminals. A one-man wrecking crew, ah, vigilante man. We will crack this one easily although I do feel some trepidation right now thinking that maybe one of the reasons for the durability of the Cielo legend is that he was an American and maybe there is as in a lot of things these days a sense of American exceptionalism, that all the modern recordable American legends have to be true. Baloney. (By the way I should point out that all these one-man or one-woman vigilante operations to rid New York City, Gotham, Metropolis of crime and criminals beyond questioning whatever nefarious motives they have is not borne out by the statistics. Per capita that town’s crime rate was no higher than say Roseville out in Kansas then, maybe now too with the epidemic of opioid addiction flooding the rural parts of the country.)
World War I, Lamont Cranston’s war, I will use that name despite the fact that the only person with that name in the 1920s was on the NYPD police blotter for selling jewelry from a push-cart without a license on 7th Avenue and subsequently for a “bait and switch” con on so-called magic decoder rings, was hard on a whole generation of European and American youth. The effects hit Lamont like a ton of bricks, maybe shell shock is what he had although that diagnosis was in its infant stages back then, made him a Class A junkie before long. But instead of heading to Paris in the 1920s, in the Jazz Age he headed to Tibet and gathered in a serious opium addiction and lustful carryings on with a fistful of concubines-all at one time when he was really high. Then the Lama, Jimmy Lama if I am not mistaken, Lama in any case, took up his case, made him see that he was made for better stuff, made to see the better angel of his nature.
This Lama, no it wasn’t Jimmy but Jerry, yeah, Jerry Lama spent a ton of time giving Lamont the skill set to go back to America, go back to so-called cesspool NYC and clean house, make it livable for average joes to survive. One of the skills he picked up was the ability to transform himself via a joke store nose to look differently when he was doing his whirling dervish Shadow shtick. That and a silly eerie laugh fit in the end more fit for Bellevue than the mean streets of NYC. Yeah, the Shadow knows alright.
I grant that for a while this Cranston caught the public’s imagination although strangely during his escapades the crime rate in Gotham spiked before they put him in a safe place. Mostly I attribute that positive spin to his hiring a press agent, the famous society columnist John Kerr, and his reputation soared for a bit. Then the wheels came off his express. See back in Tibet the word was that Lamont was some progeny of one Genghis Khan, yes that Genghis whose nomadic marauding Mogol hordes at least according to some revisionist historians brought some stability and modernization to Central Asia in his day. DNA testing has proven once Lamont’s body was exhumed at the request of his estate to see the truth of that matter showed he was descended originally in the 14th century from a pig thief in England who was hanged, hanged high in those days when stealing livestock meant something, especially when the stolen object was of royal or noble ownership.
Yeah so Lamont played out the Genghis Khan gag, along with his brother Don, the bad guy in the loop who like his forebear wanted to rule the known world. A known world much larger to conquer these days than the steppes of Central Asia which was child’s play for those lustful Mongol hordes. This Don Khan, this brother, arrived in H.G. Wells time machine fashion via a coffin delivered to the natural history museum in that town. After Don arrived all hell broke loose since all he cared about were two things-world conquest and bringing brother Lamont in on the deal as his hatchet man, as his alter ego maybe since Don too had been trained by Jerry Lama. No wonder this so-called Lamont character wound up in a straight- jacket, maybe they should have used two to be safe.
Of course when you have a guy like John Kerr sprucing up your legend, taking liberties with the truth you have to have some society dame in the mix or these Mayfair swells won’t read the column or buy into the legend. The love affair aspect here is provided by one Lois Lane, no Margo Lane, whose father allegedly was the real father of the atom bomb. More on him in a minute. We know that Lamont had some kinky sex habits when he was high as a kite on cocaine, opium whatever he could find in Xanadu, in the late Kubla Khan’s opulent opium den where Sam Coleridge earlier had picked up his habit by the sunless seas. This so-called society girl, this so-called Margo, was some call girl he picked up in a joy house he frequented on 8th Avenue when he was looking for a “flute player” just because she said she could read Lamont’s mind. Not the hardest task in the world when somebody is looking for a little off-kilter sex.
Here is where things get interesting. The legend anyway. Don, Don Khan in case you forgot his name, that erratic symbiotic brother was interested in this Margo too, and for the same reason in the end but mainly because she had a certain style which could work with the guy who claimed to be the father of the atomic bomb. This bomb is what Don needed to play out his hand. Margo got handed back and forth and in the end she went with Lamont since he was more her speed than the defeated maniac Don. Done in by the NYPD wrapping up his operations off the East River. Well folks that is the legend, the legend the Mayfair swells bought into to keep the “people with the pitchforks” from Riverside Drive and other high number precincts in the 1920s and 1930s. In the end though they trusted their local coppers who at least they could bribe rather than another one of John Kerr’s paste-up jobs. Still legends die hard, especially modern legends which can be traced as I have been doing of late. For now though another bum-of-the-month down.
In Honor Of The Late Black Liberation Fighter The Omaha Three’s Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa -Support And Donate To The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal For Our Political Activists Inside The Prison Walls
By Frank Jackman
I know, as I have recounted elsewhere about my personal situation during my military service, so-called, my military resister time, during the Vietnam War, that the holidays are tough times for our political prisoners, hell all prisoners, but today we write on behalf of our fellow activists behind the walls. A place where we outside the walls may find ourselves under the regime of whatever party in power. (After all Lynne Stewart and Chelsea Manning among others, for example, were in jail in Obama time.) And nobody on the outside working for social change is exempt as the case of the late black liberation fighter Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, outlined below, will demonstrate. So be very generous this year in aid of those on the inside who will garner strength knowing that those outside the walls today are standing in solidarity. I know in my time I did from such support in my time.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1124
15 December 2017
The following article appeared under the Partisan Defense Committee's Class-Struggle Defense Notes masthead in the print version of this issue of Workers Vanguard. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.
32nd Annual Holiday Appeal
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
This year’s Holiday Appeal marks the 32nd year of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending monthly stipends as an expression of solidarity to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression and imperialist depredation. This program revived a tradition initiated by the International Labor Defense under James P. Cannon, its founder and first secretary (1925-28). This year’s events will pay tribute to a former stipend recipient, Lynne Stewart, who succumbed to the effects of metastasized breast cancer last March. A courageous radical lawyer who defended numerous poor people and fighters for the oppressed, including the Ohio 7, Stewart had been incarcerated for her vigorous defense of a fundamentalist sheik who was convicted in an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks. We honor her by keeping up the fight for the freedom of all class-war prisoners. The PDC currently sends stipends to 12 class-war prisoners.
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia, condemning him to life in prison with no chance of parole. Last year attorneys for Mumia filed a petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) seeking to overturn the denial of his three prior PCRA claims by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If successful, he would be granted a new hearing before that court to argue for reversal of his frame-up conviction. On September 7, Judge Leon Tucker ordered a private review of the complete file of the prosecution by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office of Mumia’s case, looking for evidence of the personal involvement of then D.A. Ronald Castille, whose refusal as a judge to recuse himself during Mumia’s PA Supreme Court appeal is the basis for this PCRA. After a two-year battle, Mumia was finally able to begin lifesaving treatment for hepatitis C. In May, lab tests showed that he was free of this life-threatening illness. But the drawn-out period during which he was refused treatment left him with an increased risk of liver cancer.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its Native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. The lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have repeatedly denied Peltier’s appeals while acknowledging blatant prosecutorial misconduct. Before leaving office, Barack Obama rejected Peltier’s request for clemency. The 73-year-old Peltier is not scheduled for another parole hearing for another seven years. Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions including a heart condition for which he had to undergo triple bypass surgery. He is incarcerated far from his people and family.
Seven MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa and Eddie Africa—are in their 40th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. Collectively known as the MOVE 9, two of their number, Merle Africa and Phil Africa, died in prison under suspicious circumstances. After nearly four decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Now Laaman and Manning face prison torture where they are isolated in solitary confinement for extended periods. Manning has been deprived of necessary medical attention. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter is a former Black Panther supporter and leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. He and his former co-defendant, Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, who died in prison last year, were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. They were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and Poindexter has now spent more than 45 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that crucial evidence, long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal events will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredation. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1086
25 March 2016
Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa
1947—2016
Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, born David Rice, died on March 11 in the maximum-security Nebraska State Penitentiary of respiratory failure. A courageous class-war prisoner who was imprisoned for life for a crime he did not commit, Mondo suffered his last days ill with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, still fighting for his freedom. He spent almost 46 years in prison and remained a political fighter against racial oppression until the end.
Mondo had been an activist since his youth, radicalized by the mass social struggles that swept the country in the 1960s. Mondo became a supporter of the Black Panther Party in response to racist police brutality, in particular the killing of black 14-year-old Vivian Strong, who was shot in the back of the head by a cop in Omaha, Nebraska, in the summer of 1969. He went on to be a leader of the Omaha National Committee to Combat Fascism with his comrade Ed Poindexter. As Mumia Abu-Jamal put it in a March 15 audio tribute, by becoming a Panther, Mondo “walked into the crosshairs of the state.” He became one of the many victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panthers were killed and hundreds more framed up and imprisoned.
Mondo and Poindexter, who became known as the Omaha Two, were falsely convicted of the 1970 killing of a cop in a bomb explosion on the perjured testimony of teenager Duane Peak, who first confessed to acting alone in placing the bomb. Peak was threatened with getting the electric chair and was offered a deal to be sentenced as a juvenile if he helped frame Mondo and Poindexter. Peak’s clearly coerced testimony was shown to be completely bogus. A recording of a 911 call that proved Peak’s testimony was perjured was excluded from evidence in the trial and was long suppressed by the FBI. The political motivation for the frame-up was made clear two decades later by Jack Swanson, an Omaha police detective and key figure in the prosecution. In a 1990 BBC documentary, Swanson boasted: “We feel we got the two main players in Mondo and Poindexter, and I think we did the right thing at the time, because the Black Panther Party...completely disappeared from the city of Omaha...and it’s...been the end of that sort of thing in the city.”
Federal appeals courts ruled that Mondo should be released or retried, but that ruling was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, which ordered the case returned to the Nebraska state courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court then ruled that his appeal time had lapsed! In 1993, the Nebraska parole board recommended that the Board of Pardons commute Mondo’s life sentence to a term of a set number of years, which would have made him eligible for parole. But the Board of Pardons denied Mondo a hearing.
Mondo was one of the class-war prisoners who receive monthly stipends from the Partisan Defense Committee. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League. The class-war prisoner stipend program is not an act of charity but the duty of those on the outside toward those inside prison walls, irrespective of their particular views or affiliation. Ed Poindexter, who remains imprisoned, is also a PDC stipend recipient.
We remember Mondo—writer, artist and unbroken fighter—who was consigned to America’s prison hell for his opposition to racial oppression. We print below a poem he composed in June 2015 titled When It Gets to This Point.
I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind
By Frank Jackman
SWEET FORGIVENESS (Iris DeMent)
(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP
Sweet forgiveness, that's what you give to me
when you hold me close and you say "That's all over"
You don't go looking back,
you don't hold the cards to stack,
you mean what you say.
Sweet forgiveness, you help me see
I'm not near as bad as I sometimes appear to be
When you hold me close and say
"That's all over, and I still love you"
There's no way that I could make up for those angry words I said
Sometimes it gets to hurting and the pain goes to my head
Sweet forgiveness, dear God above
I say we all deserve a taste of this kind of love
Someone who'll hold our hand,
and whisper "I understand, and I still love you"
AFTER YOU'RE GONE (Iris DeMent)
(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP
There'll be laughter even after you're gone
I'll find reasons to face that empty dawn
'cause I've memorized each line in your face
and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me
I'll miss you, oh how I'll miss you
I'll dream of you and I'll cry a million tears
but the sorrow will pass and the one thing that will last
is the love that you've given to me
There'll be laughter even after you're gone
I'll find reason and I'll face that empty dawn
'cause I've memorized each line in your face
and not even death could ever erase the story they tell to me
Every once in a while I have to tussle, go one on one with the angels, or a single angel is maybe a better way to put it. No, not the heavenly ones or the ones who burden your shoulders when you have a troubled heart but every once in a while I need a shot of my Arky angel, Iris Dement. Every once in a while when I am blue, not a Billie Holiday blue but maybe just a passing blue I need to hear a voice that if there was an angel heaven voice she would be the one I would want to hear.
I first heard Iris DeMent doing a cover of a Greg Brown tribute to Jimmy Rodgers, the old time Texas yodeller, on Brown's tribute album, Driftless. I then looked for her solo albums and for the most part was blown away by the power of Iris’ voice, her piano accompaniment and her lyrics (which are contained in the liner notes of her various albums, read them, please). It is hard to type her style. Is it folk? Is it Country Pop? Is it semi-torch songstress? Well, whatever it may be that Arky angel is a listening treat, especially if you are in a sentimental mood.
Naturally when I find some talent that “speaks” to me I grab everything they sing, write, paint, or act I can find. In Iris’ case there is not a lot of recorded work, with the recent addition of Sing The Delta just four albums although she had done many back-ups or harmonies with other artists most notably John Prine. Still what has been recorded blew me away (and will blow you away), especially as an old Vietnam War era veteran her There is a Wall in Washington about the guys who found themselves on the Vietnam Memorial probably one of the best anti-war songs you will ever hear. That memorial containing names very close to me, to my heart and I shed a tear each time I even go near the memorial when I am in D.C. It is fairly easy to write a Give Peace a Chance or Where Have All the Flowers Gone? type of anti-war song. It is another to capture the pathos of what happened to too many families when we were unable to stop that war. The streets of my old-time growing up neighborhood are filled with memories of guys I knew, guys who didn’t make it back, guys who couldn’t adjust coming back to the “real world,” or could not get over no going into the service to experience the decisive event of our generation.
Other songs that have drawn my attention like When My Morning Comes hit home with all the baggage working class kids have about their inferiority when they screw up in this world. Walking Home Alone evokes all the humor, bathos, pathos and sheer exhilaration of saying one was able to survive, and not badly, after growing up poor, Arky poor amid the riches of America. (That may be the “connection” as I grew up through my father coal country Hazard, Kentucky poor.)
Frankly, and I admit this publicly in this space, I love Ms. Iris Dement. Not personally, of course, but through her voice, her lyrics and her musical presence. This “confession” may seem rather startling coming from a guy who in this space is as likely here to go on and on about Bolsheviks, ‘Che’, Leon Trotsky, high communist theory and the like. Especially, as well given Iris’ seemingly simple quasi- religious themes and commitment to paying homage to her rural background in song. All such discrepancies though go out the window here. Why?
Well, for one, this old radical got a lump in his throat the first time he heard her voice. Okay, that happens sometimes-once- but why did he have the same reaction on the fifth and twelfth hearings? Explain that. I can easily enough. If, on the very, very remotest chance, there is a heaven then I know one of the choir members. Enough said. By the way give a listen to Out Of The Fire and Mornin’ Glory. Then you too will be in love with Ms. Iris Dement.
Iris, here is my proposal, once again. If you get tired of fishing the U.P., or wherever, with Mr. Greg Brown, get bored with his endless twaddle about old Iowa farms or going on and on about Grandma's fruit cellar just whistle. Better yet just yodel like you did on Jimmie Rodgers Going Home on that Driftless CD.
You Got That Right Brother-The Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman On Your Mind -With Arthur Alexander's Anna In Mind
By Alex Radley
A YouTube film clip of Arthur Alexander performing his classic Anna later coveted on a cover by the Beatles.
Johnny Prescott daydreamed his way through the music that he was listening to just then on the little transistor radio that Ma Prescott, Martha to adults, and Pa too, Paul to adults, but the main battles over the gift had been with Ma, had given him for Christmas. In those days we are talking about, the post-World War II red scare Cold War 1950s in America, the days of the dreamy man in the family being the sole provider fathers didn’t get embroiled in the day to day household kids wars and remained a distant and at times foreboding presence called in only when the dust-up had gotten out of hand. And then Papa pulled the hammer down via a classic united front with Ma. Johnny had taken a fit around the first week in December in 1960 when Ma quite reasonable suggested that a new set of ties to go with his white long-sleeved shirts might be a better gift, a better Christmas gift and more practical too, for a sixteen year old boy.
Reasonable since alongside Pa being that sole provider, being a distant presence, and being called in only when World War III was about to erupt in the household he also worked like a slave for low wages at the Boston Gear Works, worked for low wages since he was an unskilled laborer in a world where skills paid money (and even the skills that he did have, farm hand skills, were not very useful in the Boston labor market). So yes ties, an item that at Christmas time usually would be the product of glad-handing grandmothers or maiden aunts would in the Prescott household be relegated to the immediate family. And that holiday along with Easter was a time when the Prescott boys had in previous years gotten their semi-annual wardrobe additions, additions provided via the Bargain Center, a low-cost, low rent forerunner of the merchandise provided at Wal-Mart.
This year, this sixteen year old year, Johnny said no to being pieced off with thick plaid ties, or worse, wide striped ties in color combinations like gold and black or some other uncool combination, uncool that year although maybe not in say 1952 when he did not know better, uncool in any case against those thin solid colored ties all the cool guys were wearing to the weekly Friday night school dances or the twice monthly Sacred Heart Parish dances the latter held in order to keep sixteen year old boys, girls too, in check against the worst excesses of what the parish priests (and thankful parents) thought was happening among the heathen young.
No, that is not quite right, that “Johnny said no” part, no, he screamed that he wanted a radio, a transistor radio, batteries included, of his own so that he could listen to whatever he liked up in his room, or wherever he was. Could listen to what he liked against errant younger brothers who were clueless, clueless about rock and roll, clueless about what was what coming through the radio heralding a new breeze in the land, a breeze Johnny was not sure what it meant but all he knew was that he, and his buddies, knew some jail-break movement was coming to unglue all the square-ness in the over- heated night. Could listen in privacy, and didn’t have to, understand, didn’t have to listen to some Vaughn Monroe or Harry James 1940s war drum thing on the huge immobile RCA radio monster downstairs in the Prescott living room. Didn’t have to listen to, endlessly Saturday night listen, captive nation-like listen to WJDA and the smooth music, you know, Frank Sinatra, Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, and so on listen to the music of Ma and Pa Prescott’s youth, the music that got them through the Depression and the war. Strictly squaresville, cubed.
Something was out of joint though, something had changed since he had begun his campaign the year before to get that transistor radio, something or someone had played false with the music that he had heard when somebody played the jukebox at Freddy’s Hamburger House where he heard Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, Wanda (who was hot, hot for a girl rocker, all flowing black hair and ruby red lips from what he had seen at Big Max’s Record Shop when her Let’s Have A Party was released), the Big Bopper, Jerry Lee, Bo, and a million others who made the whole world jump to a different tune, to something he could call his own. But as he listened to this Shangra-la by The Four Coins that had just finished up a few seconds ago and as this Banana Boat song by The Tarriers was starting its dreary trip through his brain he was not sure that those ties, thick or uncool as they would be, wouldn’t have been a better Christmas deal, and more practical too.
Yeah, this so-called rock station, WAPX, that he and his friends had been devoted to since 1957, had listened to avidly every night when Johnny Peeper, the Midnight Creeper and Leaping Lenny Penny held forth in their respective DJ slots, had sold out to, well, sold out to somebody, because except for late at night, midnight late at night, one could not hear the likes of Jerry Lee, Carl, Little Richard, Fats, and the new rocker blasts, now that Elvis had gone who knows where. Killer rocker Chuck Berry had said it best, had touched a youth nation nerve, had proclaimed the new dispensation when he had proclaimed loud and clear that Mr. Beethoven had better move alone, and said Mr. Beethoven best tell one and all of his confederates, including Mr. Tchaikovsky, that rock ‘n’ roll was the new sheriff in town. But where was Chuck, where was that rock blaster all sexed up talk and riffs to match now that everybody was reduced to Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, and Bobby, hell, they were all Bobbys and Jimmys and Eddies and every other vanilla name under the sun now not a righteous name in the house. As Johnny turned the volume down a little lower (that tells the tale right there, friends) as Rainbow (where the hell do they get these creepy songs from) by Russ Hamilton he was ready to throw in the towel though. Ready to face the fact that maybe, just maybe the jail-break that he desperately had been looking forward to might have been just a blip, might have been an illusion and that the world after all belonged to Bing, Frank, Tommy and Jimmy and that he better get used to that hard reality.
Desperate, Johnny fingered the dial looking for some other station when he heard this crazy piano riff starting to breeze through the night air, the heated night air, and all of a sudden Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 blasted the airwaves. Ike whose Rocket 88 had been the champion choice of Jimmy Jenkins, one of his friends from after school, when they would sit endlessly in Freddy’s and seriously try to figure out whose song started the road to rock and roll. Johnny had latched onto Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll which Elvis did a smash cover of but who in Joe’s version you can definitely hear that dah-da-dah beat that was the calling card of his break-out generation, as well as the serious sexual innuendo which Frankie Riley explained to one and all one girl-less Friday night at the high school hop. Billy Bradley, a high school friend who had put an assortment of bands together and so knew more than the rest of them combined, had posited Elmore James’ Look Yonder Wall as his selection but nobody had ever heard the song then, or of James. Johnny later did give it some consideration after he had had heard the song when Billy’s band covered it and broke the place up.
But funny as Johnny listened that night it didn’t sound like the whinny Ike’s voice on Rocket 88 so he listened for a little longer, and as he later found out from the DJ, it had actually been a James Cotton Blues Band cover. After that band’s performance was finished fish-tailing right after that one was a huge harmonica intro and what could only be mad-hatter Junior Wells doing When My Baby Left Me splashed through. No need to turn the dial further now because what Johnny Prescott had found in the crazy night air, radio beams bouncing every which way, was direct from Chicago, and maybe right off those hard-hearted Maxwell streets was Be-Bop Benny’s Chicago Blues Radio Hour. Be-Bop Benny who everybody who read the rock and roll magazines found easier at Doc’s Drugstore over on Hancock Street knew, had started Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino on their careers, or helped.
Now Johnny, like every young high-schooler, every "with it" high schooler in the USA, had heard of this show, because even though everybody was crazy for rock and roll, just now the airwaves sounded like, well, sounded like music your parents would dance to, no, sit to at a dance, some kids still craved high rock. So this show was known mainly through the teenage grapevine but Johnny had never heard it before because, no way, no way in hell was his punk little Radio Shack transistor radio with two dinky batteries going to ever have enough strength to pick Be-Bop Benny’s show out in Chicago. So Johnny, and maybe rightly so, took this turn of events for a sign. When Johnny heard that distinctive tinkle of the Otis Spann piano warming up to Spann’s Stomp and jumped up with his Someday added in he was hooked. You know he started to see what Billy, Billy Bradley who had championed Elmore James way before anybody knew who he was, meant when at a school dance where he had been performing with his band, Billie and the Jets, he mentioned from the stage before introducing a song that if you wanted to get rock and roll back from the vanilla guys who had hijacked it while Jerry Lee, Chuck and Elvis had turned their backs then you had better listen to the blues. And if you wanted to listen to blues, blues that rocked then you had very definitely better get in touch with the Chicago blues as they came north from Mississippi and places like that.
And Johnny thought, Johnny who have never been too much south of Gloversville, or west of Albany, and didn’t know too many people who had, couldn’t understand why that beat, that dah, da, dah, Chicago beat sounded like something out of the womb in his head. But when he heard Big Walter Horton wailing on that harmonica on Rockin’ My Boogie he knew it had to be in his genes.
Here’s the funniest part of all though later, later in the 1960s after everybody had become a serious aficionado of the blues either through exposure like Johnny to the country blues that got revived during the folk minute that flashed through the urban areas of the country and got big play at places like the Newport Folk Festival or like Jimmy Jenkins through the British rock invasion the blues became the dues. It was especially ironic that a bunch of guys from England like the Stones and Beatles were grabbing every freaking 45 RPM record they could get their mitts on. So if you listened to the early work of those groups you would find thing covered like Shake, Rattle and Roll (Big Joe’s version), Arthur Alexander’s Anna, Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster and a ton of stuff by Muddy Waters. Yeah, the drought was over.
