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An Encore Presentation-The Big Sur Café- With The “King Of The Beats” Jean-bon Kerouac In Mind
From The Pen Of Zack James
Josh Breslin, as he drove in the pitch black night up California Highway 156 to connect with U.S. 101 and the San Francisco Airport back to Boston was thinking furious thought, fugitive thoughts about what had happened on this his umpteenth trip to California. Thoughts that would carry him to the airport road and car rental return on arrival there and then after the swift airbus to his terminal the flight home to Logan and then up to his old hometown of Olde Saco to which he had recently returned. Returned after long years of what he called “shaking the dust of the old town” off his shoes like many a guy before him, and after too. But now along the road to the airport he had thought that it had been a long time since he had gotten up this early to head, well, to head anywhere. He had in an excess of caution decided to leave at three o’clock in the morning from the hotel he had been staying at in downtown Monterrey near famous Cannery Row (romantically and literarily famous as a scene in some of John Steinbeck’s novels from the 1920s and 1930s, as a site of some of the stop-off 1950s “beat” stuff if for no other reason than the bus stopped there before you took a taxi to Big Sur or thumbed depending on your finances and as famed 1960s Pops musical locale where the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rose to the cream on top although now just another tourist magnet complete with Steinbeck this and that for sullen shoppers and diners who found their way east of Eden) and head up to the airport in order to avoid the traffic jams that he had inevitably encountered on previous trips around farm country Gilroy (the garlic or onion capital of the world, maybe both, but you got that strong smell in any case), and high tech Silicon Valley where the workers are as wedded to their automobiles as any other place in America which he too would pass on the way up.
This excess of caution not a mere expression of an old man who is mired in a whole cycle of cautions from doctors to lawyers to ex-wives to current flame (Lana Malloy by name) since his flight was not to leave to fly Boston until about noon and even giving the most unusual hold-ups and delays in processings at the airport he would not need to arrive there to return his rented car until about ten. So getting up some seven hours plus early on a trip of about one hundred miles or so and normally without traffic snarls about a two hour drive did seem an excess of caution.
But something else was going on in Josh’s mind that pitch black night (complete with a period of dense fog about thirty miles up as he hit a seashore belt and the fog just rolled in without warnings) for he had had the opportunity to have avoided both getting up early and getting snarled in hideous California highway traffic by the expedient of heading to the airport the previous day and taken refuge in a motel that was within a short distance of the airport, maybe five miles when he checked on his loyalty program hotel site. Josh though had gone down to Monterey after a writers’ conference in San Francisco which had ended a couple of days before in order travel to Big Sur and some ancient memories there had stirred something in him that he did not want to leave the area until the last possible moment so he had decided to stay in Monterrey and leave early in the morning for the airport.
That scheduled departure plan set Josh then got an idea in his head, an idea that had driven him many times before when he had first gone out to California in the summer of love, 1967 version, that he would dash to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun came up and then head to the airport. He had to laugh, as he threw an aspirin down his throat and then some water to wash the tablet down in order to ward off a coming migraine headache that the trip, that this little trip to Big Sur that he had finished the day before, the first time in maybe forty years he had been there had him acting like a young wild kid again.
Funny as well that only a few days before he had been tired, very tired a condition that came on him more often of late as one of the six billion “growing old sucks” symptoms of that process, after the conference. Now he was blazing trails again, at least in his mind. The conference on the fate of post-modern writing in the age of the Internet with the usual crowd of literary critics and other hangers-on in tow to drink the free liquor and eat the free food had been sponsored by a major publishing company, The Globe Group. He had written articles for The Blazing Sun when the original operation had started out as a shoestring alternative magazine in the Village in about 1968, had started out as an alternative to Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, an alternative to all the safe subscription magazines delivered to leafy suburban homes and available at urban newsstands for the nine to fivers of the old world for those who, by choice, had no home, leafy or otherwise, and no serious work history.
Or rather the audience pitched to had no fixed abode, since the brethren were living some vicarious existences out of a knapsack just like Josh and his friends whom he collected along the way had been doing when he joined Captain Crunch’s merry pranksters (small case to distinguish them from the more famous Ken Kesey mad monk Merry Pranksters written about in their time by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) the first time he came out and found himself on Russian Hill in Frisco town looking for dope and finding this giant old time yellow brick road converted school bus parked in a small park there and made himself at home, after they made him welcome (including providing some sweet baby James dope that he had been searching for since the minute he hit town).
Still the iterant, the travelling nation hippie itinerants of the time to draw a big distinction from the winos, drunks, hoboes, bums and tramps who populated the “jungle” camps along railroad tracks, arroyos, river beds and under bridges who had no use for magazines or newspapers except as pillows against a hard night’s sleep along a river or on those unfriendly chairs at the Greyhound bus station needed, wanted to know what was going on in other parts of “youth nation,” wanted to know what new madness was up, wanted to know where to get decent dope, and who was performing and where in the acid-rock etched night (groups like the Dead, the Doors, the Airplane leading the pack then). That magazine had long ago turned the corner back to Time/Life/Look/Newsweek land but the publisher Mac McDowell who still sported mutton chop whiskers as he had in the old days although these days he has them trimmed by his stylist, Marcus, at a very steep price at his mansion up in Marin County always invited him out, and paid his expenses, whenever there was a conference about some facet of the 1960s that the younger “post-modernist” writers in his stable (guys like Kenny Johnson the author of the best-seller Thrillwere asking about as material for future books about the heady times they had been too young, in some cases way to young to know about personally or even second-hand). So Mac would bring out wiry, wily old veterans like Josh to spice up what after all would be just another academic conference and to make Mac look like some kind of hipster rather than the balding “sell-out" that he had become (which Josh had mentioned in his conference presentation but which Mac just laughed at, laughed at just as long as he can keep that Marin mansion. Still Josh felt he provided some useful background stuff now that you can find lots of information about that 1960s “golden age” (Mac’s term not his) to whet your appetite on Wikipedia or more fruitfully by going on YouTube where almost all the music of the time and other ephemera can be watched with some benefit.
Despite Josh’s tiredness, and a bit of crankiness as well when the young kid writers wanted to neglect the political side, the Vietnam War side, the rebellion against parents side of what the 1960s had been about for the lowdown on the rock festival, summer of love, Golden Gate Park at sunset loaded with dope and lack of hubris side, he decided to take a few days to go down to see Big Sur once again. He figured who knew when he would get another chance and at the age of seventy-two the actuarial tables were calling his number, or wanted to. He would have preferred to have taken the trip down with Lana, a hometown woman, whom he had finally settled in with up in Olde Saco after three, count them, failed marriages, a parcel of kids most of whom turned out okay, plenty of college tuitions and child support after living in Watertown just outside of Boston for many years.
Lana a bit younger than he and not having been “washed clean” as Josh liked to express the matter in the hectic 1960s and not wanting to wait around a hotel room reading a book or walking around Frisco alone while he attended the conference had begged off on the trip, probably wisely although once he determined to go to Big Sur and told her where he was heading she got sort of wistful. She had just recently read with extreme interest about Big Sur through her reading of Jack Kerouac’s 1960s book of the same name and had asked Josh several times before that if they went to California on a vacation other than San Diego they would go there. The long and short of that conversation was a promise by Josh to take her the next time, if there was a next time (although he did not put the proposition in exactly those terms).
Immediately after the conference Josh headed south along U.S. 101 toward Monterrey where he would stay and which would be his final destination that day since he would by then be tired and it would be nighttime coming early as the November days got shorter. He did not want to traverse the Pacific Coast Highway (California 1 for the natives) at night since he had forgotten his distance glasses, another one of those six billion reasons why getting old sucks. Had moreover not liked to do that trip along those hairpin turns which the section heading toward Big Sur entailed riding the guardrails even back in his youth since one time having been completely stoned on some high-grade Panama Red he had almost sent a Volkswagen bus over the top when he missed a second hairpin turn after traversing the first one successfully. So he would head to Monterrey and make the obligatory walk to Cannery Row for dinner and in order to channel John Steinbeck and the later “beats” who would stop there before heading to fallout Big Sur.
The next morning Josh left on the early side not being very hungry after an excellent fish dinner at Morley’s a place that had been nothing but a hash house diner in the old days where you could get serviceable food cheap because the place catered to the shore workers and sardine factory workers who made Cannery Row famous, or infamous, when it was a working Row. He had first gone there after reading about the place in something Jack Kerouac wrote and was surprised that the place actually existed, had liked the food and the prices and so had gone there a number of times when his merry pranksters and other road companions were making the obligatory Frisco-L.A. runs up and down the coast. These days Morley’s still had excellent food but perhaps you should bring a credit card with you to insure you can handle the payment and avoid “diving for pearls” as a dish-washer to pay off your debts.
As Josh started up the engine of his rented Acura, starting up on some of the newer cars these days being a matter of stepping on the brake and then pushing a button where the key used to go in this keyless age, keyless maybe a metaphor of the age as well, he had had to ask the attendant at the airport how to start the thing since his own car was a keyed-up Toyota of ancient age, he began to think back to the old days when he would make this upcoming run almost blind-folded. That term maybe a metaphor for that age. He headed south to catch the Pacific Coast Highway north of Carmel and thought he would stop at Point Lobos, the place he had first encountered the serious beauty of the Pacific Coast rocks and ocean wave splash reminding him of back East in Olde Saco, although more spectacular. Also the place when he had first met Moonbeam Sadie.
He had had to laugh when he thought about that name and that woman since a lot of what the old days, the 1960s had been about were tied up with his relationship to that woman, the first absolutely chemically pure version of a “hippie chick” that he had encountered. At that time Josh had been on the Captain Crunch merry prankster yellow brick road bus for a month or so and a couple of days before they had started heading south from Frisco to Los Angeles to meet up with a couple of other yellow brick road buses where Captain Crunch knew some kindred. As they meandered down the Pacific Coast Highway they would stop at various places to take in the beauty of the ocean since several of the “passengers” had never seen the ocean or like Josh had never seen the Pacific in all its splendor.
In those days, unlike now when the park closes at dusk as Josh found out, you could park your vehicle overnight and take in the sunset and endlessly listen to the surf splashing up to rocky shorelines until you fell asleep. So when their bus pulled into the lot reserved for larger vehicles there were a couple of other clearly “freak” buses already there. One of them had Moonbeam as a “passenger” whom he would meet later that evening when all of “youth nation” in the park decided to have a dope- strewn party. Half of the reason for joining up on bus was for a way to travel, for a place to hang your hat but it was also the easiest way to get on the dope trail since somebody, usually more than one somebody was “holding.” And so that night they partied, partied hard.
About ten o’clock Josh high as a kite from some primo hash saw a young woman, tall, sort of skinny (he would find out later she had not been so slim previously except the vagaries of the road food and a steady diet of “speed” had taken their toll), long, long brown hair, a straw hat on her head, a long “granny” dress and barefooted the very picture of what Time/Life/Look would have used as their female “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences coming out of one of the buses. She had apparently just awoken, although that seemed impossible given the noise level from the collective sound systems and the surf, and was looking for some dope to level her off and headed straight to Josh. Josh had at that time long hair tied in a ponytail, at least that night, a full beard, wearing a cowboy hat on his head, a leather jacket against the night’s cold, denim blue jeans and a pair of moccasins not far from what Time/Life/Look would have used as their male “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences so Moonbeam’s heading Josh’s way was not so strange. Moreover Josh was holding a nice stash of hashish. Without saying a word Josh passed the hash pipe to Moonbeam and by that mere action started a “hippie” romance that would last for the next several months until Moonbeam decided she was not cut out for the road, couldn’t take the life, and headed back to Lima, Ohio to sort out her life.
But while they were on their “fling” Moonbeam taught “Cowboy Jim,” her new name for him, many things. Josh thought it was funny thinking back how wedded to the idea of changing their lives they were back then including taking new names, monikers, as if doing so would create the new world by osmosis or something. He would have several other monikers like the “Prince of Love,” the Be-Bop Kid (for his love of jazz and blues), and Sidewalk Slim (for always writing something in chalk wherever he had sidewalk space to do so) before he left the road a few years later and stayed steady with his journalism after that high, wide, wild life lost it allure as the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and people drifted back to their old ways. But Cowboy Jim was what she called Josh and he never minded her saying that.
See Moonbeam really was trying to seek the newer age, trying to find herself as they all were more or less, but also let her better nature come forth. And she did in almost every way from her serious study of Buddhism, her yoga (well before that was fashionable among the young), and her poetry writing. But most of all in the kind, gentle almost Quaker way that she dealt with people, on or off drugs, the way she treated her Cowboy. Josh had never had such a gentle lover, never had such a woman who not only tried to understand herself but to understand him. More than once after she left the bus (she had joined the Captain Crunch when the bus left Point Lobos a few days later now that she was Cowboy’s sweetheart) he had thought about heading to Lima and try to work something out but he was still seeking something out on the Coast that held him back until her memory faded a bit and he lost the thread of her).
Yeah, Point Lobos held some ancient memories and that day the surf was up and Mother Nature was showing one and all who cared to watch just how relentless she could be against the defenseless rocks and shoreline. If he was to get to Big Sur though he could not dally since he did not want to be taking that hairpin stretch at night. So off he went. Nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur, naturally he had to stop at the Bixby Bridge to marvel at the vista but also at the man-made marvel of traversing that canyon below with this bridge in 1932. Josh though later that it was not exactly correct that nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur but that was not exactly true for he was white-knuckled driving for that several mile stretch where the road goes up mostly and there are many hairpin turns with no guardrail and the ocean is a long way down. He thought he really was becoming an old man in his driving so cautiously that he had veer off to the side of the road to let faster cars pass by. In the old days he would drive the freaking big ass yellow brick road school bus along that same path and think nothing of it except for a time after that Volkswagen almost mishap. Maybe he was dope-brave then but it was disconcerting to think how timid he had become.
Finally in Big Sur territory though nothing really untoward happen as he traversed those hairpin roads until they finally began to straighten out near Molera State Park and thereafter Pfeiffer Beach. Funny in the old days there had been no creek to ford at Molera but the river had done its work over forty years through drought and downpour so in order to get to the ocean about a mile’s walk away Josh had to take off his running shoes and socks to get across the thirty or forty feet of rocks and pebbles to the other side (and of course the same coming back a pain in the ass which he would have taken in stride back then when he shoe of the day was the sandal easily slipped off and on) but well worth the effort even if annoying since the majestic beauty of that rock-strewn beach was breath-taking a much used word and mostly inappropriate but not this day. Maybe global warming or maybe just the relentless crush of the seas on a timid waiting shoreline but most of the beach was un-walkable across the mountain of stones piled up and so he took the cliff trail part of the way before heading back the mile to his car in the parking lot to get to Pfeiffer Beach before too much longer.
Pfeiffer Beach is another one of those natural beauties that you have to do some work to get, almost as much work as getting to Todo El Mundo further up the road when he and his corner boys from Olde Saco had stayed for a month after they had come out to join him on the bus once he informed them that they needed to get to the West fast because all the world was changing out there. This work entailed not walking to the beach but by navigating a big car down the narrow one lane rutted dirt road two miles to the bottom of the canyon and the parking lot since now the place had been turned into a park site as well. The road was a white-knuckles experience although not as bad as the hairpins on the Pacific Coast Highway but as with Molera worth the effort, maybe more so since Josh could walk that wind-swept beach although some of the cross-currents were fierce when the ocean tide slammed the defenseless beach and rock formation. A couple of the rocks had been ground down so by the relentless oceans that donut holes had been carved in them.
Here Josh put down a blanket on a rock so that he could think back to the days when he had stayed here, really at Todo el Mundo but there was no beach there just some ancient eroded cliff dwellings where they had camped out and not be botheredso everybody would climb on the bus which they would park by the side of the road on Big Sur Highway and walk down to Pfeiffer Beach those easy then two miles bringing the day’s rations of food, alcohol and drugs (not necessarily in that order) in rucksacks and think thing nothing of the walk and if they were too “wasted” (meaning drunk or high) they would find a cave and sleep there. That was the way the times were, nothing unusual then although the sign at the park entrance like at Point Lobos (and Molera) said overnight parking and camping were prohibited. But that is the way these times are.
Josh had his full share of ancient dreams come back to him that afternoon. The life on the bus, the parties, the literary lights who came by who had known Jack Kerouac , Allan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the remnant of beats who had put the place on the map as a cool stopping point close enough to Frisco to get to in a day but ten thousand miles from city cares and woes, the women whom he had loved and who maybe loved him back although he/they never stayed together long enough to form any close relationship except for Butterfly Swirl and that was a strange scene. Strange because Butterfly was a surfer girl who was “slumming” on the hippie scene for a while and they had connected on the bus except she finally decided that the road was not for her just like Moonbeam, as almost everybody including Josh figured out in the end, and went back to her perfect wave surfer boy down in La Jolla after a few months.
After an afternoon of such memories Josh was ready to head back having done what he had set out to which was to come and dream about the old days when he thought about the reasons for why he had gone to Big Sur later that evening back at the hotel. He was feeling a little hungry and after again traversing that narrow rutted dirt road going back up the canyon he decided if he didn’t stop here the nearest place would be around Carmel about twenty-five miles away. So he stopped at Henry’s Café. The café next to the Chevron gas station and the Big Sur library heading back toward Carmel (he had to laugh given all the literary figures who had passed through this town that the library was no bigger than the one he would read at on hot summer days in elementary school with maybe fewer books in stock). Of course the place no longer was named Henry’s since he had died long ago but except for a few coats of paint on the walls and a few paintings of the cabins out back that were still being rented out the place was the same. Henry’s had prided itself on the best hamburgers in Big Sur and that was still true as Josh found out.
But good hamburgers (and excellent potato soup not too watery) are not what Josh would remember about the café or about Big Sur that day. It would be the person, the young woman about thirty who was serving them off the arm, was the wait person at the joint. As he entered she was talking on a mile a minute in a slang he recognized, the language of his 1960s, you know, “right on,” “cool,” “no hassle,” “wasted,” the language of the laid-back hippie life. When she came to take his order he was curious, what was her name and how did she pick up that lingo which outside of Big Sur and except among the, well, now elderly, in places like Soho, Frisco, Harvard Square, is like a dead language, like Latin or Greek.
She replied with a wicked smile that her name was Morning Blossom, didn’t he like that name. [Yes.] She had been born and raised in Big Sur and planned to stay there because she couldn’t stand the hassles (her term) of the cities, places like San Francisco where she had gone to school for a while at San Francisco State. Josh thought to himself that he knew what was coming next although he let Morning Blossom have her say. Her parents had moved to Big Sur in 1969 and had started home-steading up in the hills. They have been part of a commune before she was born but that was all over with by the time she was born and so her parents struggled on the land alone. They never left, and never wanted to leave. Seldom left Big Sur and still did not.
Josh said to himself, after saying wow, he had finally found one of the lost tribes that wandered out into the wilderness back in the 1960s and were never heard from again. And here they were still plugging away at whatever dream drove them back then. He and others who had chronicled in some way the 1960s had finally found a clue to what had happened to the brethren. But as he got up from the counter, paid his bill, and left a hefty tip, he though he still had that trip out here next time with Lana to get through. He was looking forward to that adventure now though.
On The Occasion Of The Centennial Of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy’s Birthday-Frank Jackman’s Journey-Take Two
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
[Recently in what I had assumed would be a one-time short
reminiscence on the centennial of John Fitzgerald Kennedys’ birth here in
Massachusetts about the effect that the election of the first Irish Catholic
President back in 1960 had on the bedraggled psyches of a bunch of Irish
Catholic working class (hell working poor and lower if the truth be known)
kids, corner boys, whom I hung around with and came of age with in that Camelot
time. Apparently in this age of instant social media feedback and quick
communications my simple plan has now turned into yet another screed.
The reason? These days there can only be one reason in my
universe. One Francis Xavier Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys
of our times back in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Acre section of
North Adamsville. Once again like in the old days Frankie has seen to it that
I, or anybody else who might venture some idea not cooked up by and authorized
by him, that proper homage be paid to the Scribe, to the late fallen comrade
Peter Paul Markin, who was our “intellectual” leader. Funny when Frankie was
running the show back then he treated the Scribe like a dog-except on those
occasions when he wanted the Scribe to write something up about him, to be his
“flak.” That was how Makin got his moniker in the first place after he had in order
to ingratiate himself with Frankie when he came from across town to live in the
Acre written some bullshit about how
Frankie was the “second coming,” something like for the school newspaper and
everybody bowed down to Frankie thereafter.
Now the bone that Frankie had to pick with me was that in
that rather simple remembrance about Jack Kennedy’s hold on us, one of our own
running the whole show, I didn’t emphasize enough how Markin, how the Scribe
got us off our collective girl hunger asses and out on the stump for Jack
around town. Didn’t speak enough of the Scribe’s “vision” that a new day was
coming, a “new breeze across the land” as Markin called it which drove a lot of
his thoughts then and for several years after before the ebb tide blew him away.
Funny again that if I recall correctly Frankie could not have given a rat’s ass
about all of that at the time. All he cared about was “doing the do” with
Minnie Murphy. But Frankie was not the acknowledged leader of the Acre corner
boys of our time for nothing because he was able to twist my tail about how
Markin had given us all a grand purpose and why soil his potter’s grave down in
dreaded Sonora, Mexico when a few kind words would be as welcome as the morning
breeze. So I had to re-write the whole freaking thing over. Jesus, Mary and
Joseph why did I ever start this small JFK tribute in the first place. Below is
the revised, final sketch. Scribe wherever you are I hope you are satisfied
with my few words. I am sure Frankie won’t be. Frank Jackman]
******
Sure now, today, as anybody who is familiar with the American Left History on-line site and The Progressive Journal print site that
I write for these days knows, or should be expected to know, I along with many
of my political kindred have long raked many of the policies and projects that
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States 1961-1963, initiated
over the coals. Most notable of those
nefarious exploits for those of us who were inspired, maybe inflamed is
a better word once we were actual witnesses on television as the rebels entered
Havana by the exploits of the revolutionaries (without being revolutionaries
ourselves but proper liberals and social democrats) in Cuba who overthrew the
Batista regime was the fumbled Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961 which
was our first point of serious differences with a generally positive attitude
toward Camelot.
More troublesome was the deep state escalation of American
involvement in Vietnam which led to the slippery slope that tore this society
asunder as we can as near to a cold civil war as we had in this country until
very recently. (Of course in the “revisionist” histories since JFK has come off
as something of a pacifist who would have hightailed it out of Vietnam the
minute things got out of hand and let the commies overrun the land. This from a
guy deeply enamored of counter-guerilla warfare, in love with Special Forces
and of manliness in person and politics). There were other generic differences
that came to the fore later when we were seeking, desperately seeking, for what
gangster saint brother Robert Kennedy called, “stealing” a page from Alfred
Lord Tennyson, “ a newer world.” Looking for more socialist-oriented solutions
to what ailed society.
All that however was later. Today I want to speak of the
promise that the election of JFK meant to a bunch of Irish Catholic corner boys
from the poverty-stricken Acre section of North Adamsville back in the fall of
1960 when we felt that first fresh breeze coming over the land from the icy
depths of the red scare Cold War night that we had come of political age in.
That “fresh breeze,” as I have noted many, many times elsewhere an expression
that fellow corner boy and our house “intellectual” the late Peter Paul Markin,
the Scribe, (the actual Markin, not the moderator of the ALH blog site who uses that moniker in honor of our fallen brother
long departed) would endlessly bore us with in those days when all we gave a
rat’s ass about (also an expression I have used many, many times concerning our
reaction to Markin’s “fresh breeze” statement) was girls, getting dough to deal
with girls and cars, “boss” cars not necessarily in that order. (To be fair to
Markin he was the king hell king of the midnight creep when we needed dough at
the times when his seamier side got ahead of the “better angel of his nature”).
None of us, me, Jack Callahan, the legendary football player
who for some reason liked hanging with the bad boys when he was not being
forlornly chased by defensive players or girls after Chrissie McNamara made her
feelings known to him, Frankie Riley, our esteemed corner boy leader and a
genius organizer, Phil Larkin, Jimmy Murphy, Ralph Kiley, Ricky Russo, Allan
Stein, the corner boys although the latter two were not full Irish, but only
half Irish got as carried away with Markin’s fresh breeze coming as he did. Back then when before he “taught”
us what it was like to on the cutting edge of the new day we could have,
ignorantly to be sure, could have given a rat’s ass about breezes or elections.
The routine, the bare necessity routine was girls, cars, and dough and how to
get all three or any combination thereof. Markin would continue to spout forth on
that subject for another half decade before it did come in the form of the many
threads that led up to the Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967 which Alex James
and others have written about in this the 50th anniversary year of
that “youth nation” explosion. By then
though we had all been “converted” to the wisdom of Markin’s ideas after he
came back to fetch us in the late summer of 1967.
But long before that breeze
came to fruition Markin made us thrill beyond words to be able to say “one of
own,” an Irish Catholic had done what Al Smith could not do a few decades
before and get elected president in a low-slung Protestant-controlled country.
(My grandfather never got over the dirty campaign waged by the “refined” WASPs,
the Brahmins, you know the people with the three-name monikers like Wesley
Stuart Gardner, names like that who used every Papal Plot lie in the book to
down the beleaguered Smith against the heathen Hebert Hoover of Hooverville
fame.) Markin made us see that it did not matter that JFK was the scion of
“chandelier” Irish unlike our own “shanty” Irish digs. He was ours in all its
glory.
Markin, like in many other such endeavors was the bell-weather
for our take on JFK. For getting enthusiastic about the guy, about getting out
the vote in our town for our man. I have mentioned above (in the brackets) my
belief that even Frankie Riley our leader could have given a rat’s ass about
the elections until Markin pulled the plug of our indifference. But once Markin
convinced him that the election was important then Frankie got all worked about
it. Got things organized. The Scribe was not the guy who would organize the
stuff though. Jesus no. He could not organize himself out of a paper bag much
less run a political campaign in a large neighborhood. The one time the Scribe
did try to organize one of our midnight creeps to get dough when Frankie was
out of town was almost a disaster. His plan was great (in fact Frankie would
later execute it to perfection) but he “forgot” you needed a few look-outs for
the cops when pulling a midnight creep and we almost wound up with a show-down
with the cops who were cruising the neighborhood at that hour. So once the
Scribe won Frankie over he organized the whole caper.
(By the way many local Acre urban legends have grown up
around how the Scribe got his moniker. Here’s the skinny. When he came across
town in junior high school to live in the Acre with his family, his mother had
grown up in the Acre, he latched onto Frankie the first day somehow. To seal
the deal though he wrote something for the school newspaper about a speech that
Frankie had given about President Eisenhower in some assembly after he beat
Adlai Stevenson the second time. Everybody, teachers especially, agreed that
the Scribe’s article was A-one. When I read the article I thought it sounded
like Frankie, thieving, scheming, conniving Frankie Riley, had just given the
Gettysburg Address or something. Here’s the real reason that Markin got the
moniker from that time forward from Frankie (all the way to San Francisco, 1967
when he subsequently “became” the Be-Bop Kid). Markin had written the whole
thing. Had written the speech and written the write-up. Pure Frankie
conniving).
Frankie won’t like this but that election of 1960 was also a
prime example of the contradictions that would a little over decade later do
Markin in and which for many of the rest of us was a close thing between
freedom and a dark dungeon. See Markin among his million other thoughts like
the fresh breeze and the like was all hopped up about getting rid of nuclear
weapons, was all hopped up for the United States to get rid of them
unilaterally if necessary. The rest of us, especially Frankie Riley, our esteemed
acknowledged leader, thought he was crazy, crazy with the Russian armed to the
teeth with similar such weapons. Frankie almost hit the Scribe in Civics class
from what I heard when he tried to present the idea in a class discussion.
Don’t forget though that we were still seriously hung up on the Cold War stuff
we read about and were taught was the real deal in school.
One thing about Markin though was he put his money where his
mouth was most of the time. He had heard about a rally, stand-out, vigil or
something in Boston, at the Boston Common near the Park Street subway station
against nuclear weapons in October of 1960 a few weeks before the election
sponsored by a group called SANE, Doctor Spock’s group, some Quakers and other
odd-balls. He was determined to go although he expressed some fears that he
might be harmed by pro-nuclear weapons people who would see red over the issue.
But he did go saying later to us that he had found some kindred spirits who
were not afraid unlike a fearful fourteen year old boy and that got him
through.
(This is not the place to digress too much about side stuff
but Markin’s fear was the subject of a bet between him and Frankie Riley that
he would not go. Markin was very proud of winning that bet and would bring it
up periodically long after we could have given a rat’s ass about the wager
since we were always betting on almost any propositions that struck our
fancies. The most infamous bet, a rigged job by Frankie, was when he needed
“date” money in high school and he bet the Scribe on how high Tonio at the
pizza place we hung out at would fling the pizza after having worked it out
with Tonio to fling low. Markin never knew what hit him except he was out about
six dollars and Frankie was out with Minnie Murphy doing whatever that night.)
Here’s where the Markin contradiction came in, maybe the
human condition contradiction when all is said and done after my own fifty plus
years of having gone through my own sets of contradictions. During the
television debates between JFK and his Republican opponent, then Vice President
Nixon who was later a president in his own right and a common criminal as well
Kennedy made a great deal out of some supposed “missile gap” between the United
States and Russia that had developed under the Eisenhower-Nixon regime. To our
disadvantage. That “gap” was among others things in the number and
effectiveness of the American nuclear arsenal. Kennedy’s solution: build more
and better such weapons. Totally against what the Scribe had tried do in
Boston. Nevertheless the very next weekend after that Boston anti-nuclear
weapons rally Markin rounded us up to go up to the North Adamsville Kennedy for
President headquarters located in a small shed-like building on the property of
the Knights of Columbus and grab a bunch of leaflets to go door to door putting
them in mail slots. Of course before the Scribe could take step one Frankie
intervened and told the guys to go to the supermarkets, the post office, a
couple of banks opened on Saturday in those days before ATMs, the bowling alley
and the football fields. That is where they could hand out eye to eye with the
receivers their materials. Frankie laughed at Markin and his hokey idea of
stuffing leaflets in mail boxes.
Such were the ups and downs of having “one of our own”
getting elected to the White House in sunnier days. And one of our own hipping
us to the idea.
Trump’s Budget Expands Global War on the Backs of the American Poor
It is fitting that while President Trump is traveling the world, sealing a weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, he would drop his own kind of bomb on the American people: his budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, titled, of course, “The New Foundation for American Greatness.” … The budget proposes deep cuts to government support for the poor, including slashing over $800 billion from Medicaid, $192 billion from food assistance, $272 billion from welfare programs, $72 billion from disability benefits, and ending programs that provide financial support for poor college students. While cutting government assistance for working classAmericans, the budget notably beefs up annual military spending by 10%, to the tune of $639 billion. The US defense budget is already roughly the size of the next eleven largest national military budgets combined. Trump’s budget aims to go bigger, laying the groundwork “for a larger, more capable, and more lethal joint force [and] warfighting readiness.” More
Winners and losers in Trump's budget proposal
Trump wants to increase military spending over the next 10 years and slash nondefense spending. Typically, those categories of annually appropriated spending have been roughly equal. Separate are entitlement programs, chiefly Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid; of those, only Medicaid is in for cuts. More
How Trump’s budget helps the rich at the expense of the poor
Trump announced a tax overhaul that would reduce or eliminate trillions of dollars in taxes that are paid primarily by the wealthy, including the estate tax and the marginal rate on ordinary income paid by the richest taxpayers. He would lessen spending on Medicaid, the federal program that provides health insurance to the poor, by $1.4 trillion over a decade, and he would allow states to impose strict limits on other major anti-poverty benefits such as food stamps. The budget also called for repealing President Obama’s health-care reform, which helped cover poor and middle-class households with funds raised in part through greater taxes on the rich… Trump’s policies would almost certainly add to economic inequality — which is already at historically elevated levels. Half a century ago, in 1967, the richest one in 100 American households claimed 11 percent of the income generated by the whole U.S. economy that year. That figure had doubled to 22 percent by 2015, the latest year for which data is available… the richest 0.1 percent of U.S. households alone now own about as much as the poorest 90 percent of the country combined. That discrepancy has not been so severe since the Great Depression. More
Voucher programs will accelerate school resegregation
According to The Century Foundation, a think tank dedicated to reducing inequality, Trump’s plan would increase segregation in public schools because many of the private schools that would be eligible to receive public money through vouchers serve a disproportionate percentage of white and wealthy students, further concentrating students of color and poor students in public schools. A recent report by the Southern Education Foundation found that 43 percent of the nation’s private school students attend virtually all-white schools compared to just 27 percent of public school students… Looking at the effects of school privatization in Southern states shows how it’s tied to increased segregation on the local level. In an amicus brief filed as part of the lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s voucher program established in 2014, the state NAACP showed how private schools are able to induce segregation in public schools… This is illustrated by the fact that even in majority Black counties — Bertie, Halifax, Hertford, and Northampton — the private schools are almost 100 percent white. More
Want To See How School Choice Leads to Segregation? Visit Betsy DeVos’ Hometown
Since Michigan adopted the school choice policies DeVos is now pushing across the country, Holland’s white enrollment has dropped by more than 60%, as students decamped for public schools or charters in whiter communities nearby. The students who remain in the Holland Public Schools are now majority Hispanic and overwhelmingly poor—twice the schools’ poverty rate when Michigan’s school choice experiment began. Many of these students are the children of migrant farm workers who came to this part of the state to pick fruit; school choice enabled Holland’s white families to pick not to attend school with them. One in three students in Holland no longer attends school there, and since the money follows the child in the Mitten State, yet another DeVos priority, white flight has eaten the district’s finances too. In 2000, Holland had fifteen schools. Now it has just eight. Of nine Holland schools that once served elementary students, just two are left. By 2009, even the elementary school where DeVos’ mother once taught had been shuttered. More
BOYCOTT TRUMP!
Can a Movement to Hurt the President Financially Change the Political Landscape?
Among all the ways you can now voice your dissent, though, there’s one tactic that this president will surely understand: economic resistance aimed at his own businesses and those of his children. He may not be swayed by protesters filling the streets, but he does speak the language of money. Through a host of tactics -- including boycotting stores that carry Trump products, punishing corporations and advertisers that underwrite the administration’s agenda, and disrupting business-as-usual at Trump companies -- protesters are using the power of the purse to demonstrate their opposition and have planned a day of resistance against his brand on June 14th… And yet, even as throngs of organizations and hundreds of thousands of individuals throw their energy into economic tactics intended to weaken the president, it’s still an open question whether this type of resistance -- or, more specifically, its current implementation -- can precipitate anything in the way of meaningful change. More
* * * *
NEW WARS / OLD WARS– What Could Possibly Go Wrong
Manchester Bombing is Blowback from the West’s Disastrous Interventions and Proxy Wars
The heinous suicide bombing by British-born Salman Abedi of an Arianna Grande concert in Manchester was not merely the work of an “evil loser,” as Donald Trump called it. It was blowback from interventionist policies carried out in the name of human rights and “civilian protection.” Through wars of regime change and the arming and training of Islamist proxy groups, the US, UK and France played out imperial delusions across the Middle East. In Syria and Libya, they cultivated the perfect petri dish for jihadist insurgency, helping to spawn weaponized nihilists like Abedi intent on bringing the West’s wars back home… When the uprising against Gaddafi began in 2011, Ramadan Abedi, the father of Salem, returned to his home country to fight with the LIFG. [Libyan Islamic Fighting Group] He was part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war. More
Manchester Attacks: What Price Hypocrisy?
The lack of a coherent anti-terrorism strategy in Washington and by extension the West, as emergency services deal with the devastating aftermath of yet another terrorist atrocity in Europe – this time a suicide bomb attack at a concert in Manchester, England – has been thrown into sharp relief during President Trump’s tour of the Middle East. Specifically, on what planet can Iran be credibly accused of funding and supporting terrorism while Saudi Arabia is considered a viable partner in the fight against terrorism? This is precisely the narrative we are being invited to embrace by President Trump in what counts as a retreat from reality into the realms of fantasy, undertaken in service not to security but commerce.More
Trump Official Praises Autocratic Rule:
'Not a Single Hint of a Protester' in Saudi Arabia
Putting a fine point on the spin that President Donald Trump's trip to the Middle East has been a glowing, peace-dealing success, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross praised the fact that there were no protesters in Saudi Arabia—a nation where political dissonance is punishable by death. Speaking to CNBC on Monday, Ross, who accompanied Trump on the weekend trip to Riyadh,said he found it "fascinating" that he did not see "a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard." The remarks immediately caught the ear of Middle East experts and other observers. Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Center for Middle East Policy, told CNBC afterwards that Saudi Arabia is among the "most repressive" of free speech in the Middle East, adding: "Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy which forbids any political protest or any manifestation of dissent. It is also a police state that beheads opponents." More
Donald Trump puts US on Sunni Muslim side of bitter sectarian war with Shias
President Trump called on 55 Muslim leaders assembled in Riyadh to drive out terrorism from their countries. He identified Iran as a despotic state and came near to calling for regime change, though Iran held a presidential election generally regarded as fair only two days previously… Saudi leaders will be pleased by Mr Trump’s condemnation of Iran as the fountainhead of terrorism. This was the most substantive part of speech and is the one most likely to increase conflict. The Saudis will see it as a licence to increase their support for proxy wars being waged against Shia movements and communities in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and beyond. Houthi militiamen in Yemen and Shia militiamen in Iraq and Syria are often referred to as “Iranian-backed”, which may or may not be true, but it is their Shiism which is by far the most important determinant of their political identity. In targeting them, Mr Trump is plugging the US into the ferocious sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia. More
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy ruled by Wahhabism, an intolerant form of Sunni Islam, and the Saudi state has supported movements such as Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban. The Saudi government fiercely discriminates against Muslims of other sects, bans public worship by Christians, and supports gender inequality. The Saudis opposed the 2015 U.S.-Iran nuclear deal even though it guarantees a world with fewer nuclear weapons.
Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain to support that country's rulers during the 2011 Arab Spring, and it is presently making war in Yemen, where its airstrikes have led to many thousands of civilian deaths and risks a serious famine. Our country is providing indispensable military aid and support for the Saudi war in Yemen; in the last two years our government has sold over $20 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia. We refuel Saudi warplanes that have bombed schools, hospitals, marketplaces, weddings, and funerals.
Additionally, Saudi military actions have disrupted the food supply in Yemen. Yemen imports nearly 90% of its food; according to the UN, 17 million Yemenis suffer from severe food insecurity.
Trump Lets Saudis Off on 9/11 Evidence
Many people know the explicit evidence found from 2009 that Saudi Arabia was, “a critical financial support base for al Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.” Just like many know the more recent and far more damning 2016revelation that Saudi Arabia continues to provide “clandestine financial and logistical support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups” in the Middle East. And, anyone who cares about women’s rights and human rights should also know about the latest human rights report produced by Rex Tillerson’s own State Department that details, “Saudi Arabia’s restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement and religion, as well as the country’s pervasive gender discrimination.” … Sixteen years post-9/11, the 9/11 families are still earnestly trying to receive a modicum of justice in a court of law by providing all the evidence we have gathered against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We simply want our day in court. More
Trump in the Middle East: From 'America First' to Saudi and Israel first
President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East has turned out as expected: no single act of outreach to the Muslim world could undo his fueling of Islamophobia and no amount of Iranophobia could cover up the irony of Trump and Saudi Arabia uniting against intolerance. It is clear what Trump wanted from the trip: massive arms sales and Saudi investments in the US economy. But it is less clear why Saudi Arabia and Israel once again depict Iran as an existential threat even after Tehran’s nuclear programme has been checked. The answer lies not in Iran’s regional policy, but Israel and Saudi Arabia’s wish for the US to re-establish hard, American hegemony in the Middle East. That is, for the United States to lead and underwrite the Herculean task of sorting out the chaos in the region. In short: Saudi and Israel first. More
Israeli Officers: You’re Doing ISIS Wrong
As far as these Israeli officers are concerned, the ideal strategy is to sit back and let both types of groups duke it out… But does that mean the United States and its allies should simply allow ISIS to retain its so-called caliphate in parts of eastern Syria and eastern Iraq? “Why not?” the officer shot back. “When they asked the late [Israeli] Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the Iraq-Iran War in the 80s, who does Israel stand for, Iraq or Iran, he said, ‘I wish luck to both parties. They can go at it, killing each other.’ The same thing is here. You have ISIS killing Al Qaeda by the thousands, Al Qaeda killing ISIS by the thousands. And they are both killing Hezbollah and Assad.” More
War in Afghanistan Is Killing Children in Record Numbers in 2017
In fact, the 2016 civilian casualty figure was the worst since the US occupation of Afghanistan began in 2001… A family destroyed in seconds -- this horror is just one of too many incidents documented at the onset of this fighting season," Tadamichi Yamamoto, the UN Secretary-General's special representative for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), told Agence France-Presse. In its annual report for 2016, UNAMA documented 11,418 civilian casualties, an increase over previous years. Children accounted for at least 30 percent of these casualties. The report noted 3,512 child casualties (923 deaths and 2,589 injuries), a 24 percent increase from 2015, and the highest number of child casualties recorded by UNAMA in any single year… While a number of the child casualties are from insurgent attacks and aerial airstrike by pro-government forces, a surprisingly high number of the casualties are a direct result of unexploded ordnance left behind on the battlefield by parties to the conflict who had failed to clear it. More
New York Times!
ALEPPO AFTER THE “FALL”
Yasser said he was one of the first people to come back [to east-Aleppo], right after what he — like everyone else I met — calledthe liberation… Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I asked him why. “No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition,” Joudeh told me. “They know what they don’t want, not what they want.” In December, he said, “Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’ And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.” For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad’s crimes looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors… Aleppo was a turning point, and in some ways an emblem of the wider war. Its fall appears to have persuaded many ordinary Syrians that the regime, for all its appalling cruelty and corruption, is their best shot at something close to normality… “Freedom doesn’t come from destroying the country,” he said… “We all served the politics of other countries in our own land, whether we knew it or not,” he said. “Everybody has to wake up. To be brave, to admit they’ve made mistakes, to come back to the right way.” More
Landslide Win for Iran’s Reformists Doesn’t Fit Trump’s Script, So He Ignores It
As Iran’s moderates celebrated on Saturday night, Trump and members of his cabinet were dancing with swords in Saudi Arabia.
Speaking in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on Sunday, Trump made no mention of the scenes in Iran or of President Hassan Rouhani, whose diplomatic engagement with the West over Iran’s nuclear program helped to avert the war American allies in the region, including the Gulf states and Israel, seemed to be still hoping for. Instead, the American president promised the monarchs and autocrats in the room that he would work with them “to isolate Iran.” He also promised, bizarrely, “to help our Saudi friends to get a good deal” from American arms makers. More
In this age of rancorous hyper-partisanship, getting members of Congress to agree on anything beyond the naming of a post office is a challenge. Yet in late April, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate signed a tough letter to the U.N. Secretary General, demanding that the organization end its “unwarranted attacks” on Israel’s human rights record. Three months earlier, members of the House voted overwhelmingly to condemn a U.N. Security Council resolution critical of Israel’s relentless expansion of settlements on occupied lands. Like dozens of other Democrats, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland blasted President Obama for abstaining from the U.N. vote, saying it “sent the wrong signal to our ally Israel.” In the Senate, leading progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders offered no support for President Obama, either. Their votes and rhetoric did not simply reflect public opinion. Although Americans sympathize with Israel far more than the Palestinians, two-thirds of adults surveyed in in 2015 said the United States should not take sides in the Middle East conflict. Fewer than half say they consider Israel an ally. More
Netanyahu vows: Temple Mount, Western Wall will forever remain part of Israel
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Wednesday that the Temple Mount and the Western Wall "will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty" during a special Knesset session celebrating Jerusalem Day and marking 50 years to the capital's unification… "Some see the Six-Day War as a disaster for Israel," Netanyahu went on to say. "I see it as Israel's salvation. How could we keep existing with a narrow waist (of the country) and daily danger to our citizens?" The prime minister spoke of US President Donald Trump's visit to Israel this week, saying "I'm sure you were all as moved as I was to see President Trump and his family standing by the Western Wall and touching its stones. The IDF soldiers who liberated Jerusalem during the Six-Day War did the same, with a burst of emotions that came from the depths of their souls." More
Israeli cops assault American Jewish activists in Jerusalem Day protest
Israeli police broke the arm of an American Jewish activist and injured several other anti-occupation demonstrators while forcefully dispersing a Jerusalem Day protest in the Old City on Wednesday. The demonstration, held at Damascus Gate by American and Israeli Jewish activists with IfNotNow, Free Jerusalem and All That’s Left, took place during the March of the Flags, an annual right-wing parade that habitually results in violence against Palestinians from both its participants and the Israeli police units escorting them. The march is heavily funded by the Jerusalem Municipality. The parade passes through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, and Palestinian traders along the route are ordered by police toclose their shops during the march. More
For many in the Holy Land, Trump’s visit was a success for what he didn’t say
During his public addresses in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Trump talked forcefully about peace but refrained from offering specifics of how it could be achieved or from berating one side or the other too harshly. Unlike his predecessor, there were no references to Israeli settlements, an issue the Obama administration clearly deemed the main barrier to achieving peace. He also did not mention a future with an Israeli and Palestinian state side by side, nor did he bring up the status of Jerusalem. Analysts and commentators were left Wednesday wondering what, if anything, Trump might do to resolve the decades-old conflict. On the Israeli side, leaders celebrated Trump’s vagueness. More
A Palestinian Point Of View On Trump's Attempt At Middle East Peace
I think it's very important to keep in mind that the reason that Israel has been able to maintain this occupation is because the international community has allowed it to maintain the occupation. And so all it really requires is the international community to have the will to actually stop Israel by putting into place measures to hold Israel accountable. Whether that's boycotts, whether it's putting into place sanctions, all of that is possible. Is President Trump the person to do it? On that part, I'm very skeptical. More
