AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

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

Friday, April 05, 2019

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side-The Hard Years Of War- A Sketch-Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Two

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side-The Hard Years Of War- A Sketch-Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient history. I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm Sorge.

Since Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20^th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes too.

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the third year of which we are commemorating this month.

*************

Wilhelm Sorge, as he looked around the town, as he saw the dirty dusty streets of Boston clogged with rampaging rain-washed mucks and in some physical disrepair, especially the sidewalks weighted down with well-wishers who continued to come out to cheer on the departing boys, in some need of fixing after all the endless regiments raised helped create this condition after almost a year of war. The Brothers’ war they were beginning to call it around the press rooms not so much because of the eleven state departure as because the social tensions around the slavery issue were decimating many families, arms in hand, North and South, creating schisms that would not heal for years, if ever.  All this time, all the almost year the war against the departed brethren down south who had gone on to form their own nation had gone, had made Wilhelm pensive.

Boston, although Wilhelm had not been born here but in Cologne over in Germany he, unlike his father who due to his damn “red republican” politics and the fellowship of his youth, including those who perished on the barricades or died rotting in jail would always be a Cologne man at heart but he had come of age here and felt differently, felt that his fate was tied in with America whatever the final outcome of the war. He thought back to how his father, Friedrich, the owner of small print shop on Milk Street, a former barricade fighter in his native Cologne back in ’48 (as his father would say it when discussing that time with his peer fellow exiles at the German-American club over on Hanover Street), a known “high abolitionist” around town had played his part in raising that dust that he saw before him with his endless tirades about the necessity of creating regiments in preparation for the civil war that he knew in his bones was coming, seeming ever since Kansas times back in the mid-50s when Friedrich tirelessly raised money for arms to the Kansas abolitionists in their fight against the pro-slavery elements. Probably raised money among the German exiles for that monomaniac John Brown who started this whole conflagration.

They had, father and son, argued constantly for a time about Wilhelm’s enlisting in the fight, in Massa Lincoln’s fight Wilhelm called it, mocking the speech pattern of the nigras who worked the warehouses at Sanborne and Son. That argument had eventually died down if it had not been extinguished when both men had seen that the other’s arguments held no sway, and perhaps best left unsaid since the daily casualty reports posted in front of the Gazette office and the increasing number of mothers, aunts, sisters, sweethearts dressed in funeral black spoke to the appalling loses. Losses that perhaps only a brothers’ war could unleash. Wilhelm flat out saw no reason to fight, saw benefits to his career as a budding factor such as it was by keeping out of the fight and decidedly did not want to lift a finger to free the sweaty turgid slaves. Wilhelm was by no measure his father’s son on that score.

As Wilhelm thought about the present political situation thinking amid the dust clouds being raised as he walked along Tremont Street he said to himself that no, he had decidedly not changed his mind over that time, over the year since he and his father had first quarreled, and subsequently, every time, every damn time his father, the “high abolitionist” Friedrich Sorge held forth on his favorite subject-freeing the “nigras.” Or rather his favorite subject of having his eldest son, one Wilhelm Sorge, him, put on the blue uniform of the Union side and go down south, south somewhere and fill in a spot in the depleting armies of the North. There were plenty of farm boys and mill hands eager to lay down their heads on some bloody battlefield with a white tombstone for a pillow for that cause.

No, as well, he had not changed his mind one bit about how his employers had been “robbed” since the military actions had started the previous year and the flow of cotton had been so diminished that he was only working his clerk’s job at the Sanborne and Sons warehouses three days a week, and the factor job was being held up indefinitely. The damn Lincoln naval blockade and the wimpy position of the British in their Ponius Pilate washing hands on the matter had wreaked havoc on supplies coming through. He was supplementing that meager wage working for Jim Smith, the former neighborhood blacksmith now turned small arms manufacturer, who was always in need of a smart clerk who also had a strong pair of hands and back to work on the artillery carriages that he produced on order from Massachusetts Legislature for the Army of the Potomac. And, no, one thousand times no he had not changed his mind about the nigra stinks that had bothered him when they had worked at the Sanborne warehouses in the days before secession when those locations were filled with beautiful southern cotton that needed to be hauled on or off waiting ships dockside.

What was making Wilhelm really pensive though, making him think every once in a while a vagrant thought about joining up in the war effort was that all his friends, his old Klimt school friends and Goethe Club friends had enlisted in one of the waves of the various deployments of Massachusetts-raised regiments. Those friends had baited him about his manhood even as he offered to take them on one by one or collectively if they so desired to see who the real man was. Moreover he grew pensive, and somewhat sheepish, every time he passed by the German graveyard on Milk Street where he could see fresh flowers sticking out of urns in front of newly buried soldier boys. Soldier boys like Werther Schmidt, his school friend, whose mother was daily prostrate before his fresh-flowered grave. He would cross the street when he spied her all in black coming up the other way for he could not stand the look she would give him when she passed. Gave him like he, not some Johnny Reb or more likely some disease, had been the cause of poor Werther’s death.

But who was he kidding. Lately Wilhelm Sorge had not become pensive as a result of pressure from his father and friends, nor about his reduced circumstances, nor about Negro stinks but about what Miss Lucinda Mason thought of him. Miss Lucinda Mason whose father, like his, was a “high abolitionist” and was instrumental in assisting in forming the newly authorized regiments in Massachusetts. And while her father was mildly tolerate of Wilhelm’s slackness about serving his country Lucinda, while smitten by her German young man met at a dance to raise funds for the Union efforts of all places, continually harped on the need for him to “enter service” as she called it. And of course if the rosy-cheeked, wasp-waisted Miss Lucinda Mason harped on an issue then that indeed would make a man pensive. Yes, it was like that with young Wilhelm about Miss Lucinda Mason.

The Problem With Colonialism-Nicole Kidman And Sean Penn’s “The Interpreter” (2005)-A Film Review

The Problem With Colonialism-Nicole Kidman And Sean Penn’s “The Interpreter” (2005)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

The Interpreter, starring Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, directed by Sidney Pollack, 2005

Everybody with the slightest familiarity with Africa under colonial rule, European colonial rule, knows that those powers carved up the continent to their liking, their pleasure and just as in the Middle East after World War I did not consider ethnic, tribal or any other rational arrangement when their had their wanting habits on. And basically as each colonial territory gained its freedom by hook or by crook those arbitrary lines of division were left in place. Left in place for whatever the liberation fighters could put together stable or not. That is the background for the film under review, The Interpreter, with the odd proviso that the film looked at how that carving up affected the whites, or a couple of the whites, who fought in the struggle for liberation. Or thought that was what they were doing.

How do you get to the interpreter part, the title of the picture part? Easy. That is where Silvia, played by Nicole Kidman, a white ex-liberation fighter in a fictitious African country who eventually ahd a change of heart and laid down her weapon, comes in (she and her brother had joined the resistance, the “new” post-colonial resistance, after the President of the country had mined the rural areas and their parents and sister were blown away from one such land mine). Silvia was now an interpreter at the United Nations. Unfortunately one night in the building after an evacuation she overheard a conversation in Ku, a dialect she knew from her country so there was no mistaking that what the conversation was about was a plot to kill the President of her country of origin. The guy whose landmines had killed her family.

This where colonialism effects and where yesterday’s freedom fighters get wrapped in tyranny and corruption. That President once the hope of the nation upon liberation has turned into another garden-variety dictator who has moreover been accused of ethnic cleansing atrocities as part of his keeping power. The International Criminal Court (which by the way in the real world the United States does not recognize, did not sign the accords establishing that body and don’t expect it to do so anytime soon) wanted to put him on trial. He was going to the United Nations to speak before the General Assembly to lay out his case, to conjure up some excuse to get off the hook.

That is where things get tricky, where what Silvia had overheard and reported to her superiors, gets involved in international diplomacy (and intrigue). The U.S. Secret Service which has a unit charged with protecting foreign dignitaries is put on the spot. Or rather crack agent Tobin, played by Sean Penn is put on the spot. He didn’t believe what Silvia overheard, or maybe better as he delves into her background what her agenda was in the whole matter. They go back and forth and Tobin eventually saw that what she overheard was the real thing, or what they thought was the real deal. As it turned out this nasty President and his henchmen had killed off the opposition (including Silvia’s brother who stayed in the armed struggle against the President) and had cooked up the whole assassination scheme to cover their tracks, to gain sympathy against those ICC indictments. Silvia, beside herself once she had found out that her brother had been murdered along with her lover by the President’s henchmen, was able to get into the “safe room” where the President after the bogus assassination attempt was being held in order to get her revenge. Tobin talked her out of that rash action. The President would thereafter goes before the ICC and Silvia was expelled from the United States.

In the end no romance between the magnetic pair of Kidman and Penn but a better than average thriller centered on the problems, the serious problems, with neo-colonial Africa.

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night -One Night With You- Sam’s Song

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night -One Night With You- Sam’s Song

By Allan Jackson

[Hey it is my dime. Okay, here goes why I say that smartass remark just now. As readers may know as about one half dozen sections ago of this seventy-odd sections series hailing the coming of rock and roll age of the baby-boomer generation I have had the by-line to a series that I was instrumental in nurturing after old friend Sam Lowell did some fancy negotiating on my behalf. The idea for me in these introductions was to make comments on some of the action in the sketches or to tell what I or the writer, mostly I, was thinking about putting the piece together.

Today though my dime is floating back to a comment I made when I was spending hard earned time defending myself against half the crazy rumors that surfaced after I was dismissed as site manager here and had gone “underground” for a while. One of the vicious rumors had me living in San Francisco with alternatively either a transvestite, today transgender, or a drag queen not necessarily the same thing and living high off the hog and high on the opium bonk bong.

Christ. I was in San Francisco no question but looking for money from people I know since I was unemployed and needed dough quick to keep up with alimony (three alimonies and collective college tuitions. Looked for some dough from my old friend (and one-time lover) Madame La Rue (her longtime brothel names not her given name) who now runs a high class whorehouse catering mostly to wealthy Asian businessmen with a taste for the wild side. Looking as well for some dough from Ms. Judy Garland, aka, Timmy Riley from the old growing up neighborhood in the Acre section of North Adamsville. He had fled as soon as he could once he knew he had kindred out there trying to collectively survive in a town not unfriendly to the different of all categories. I had helped both out financially and they have subsequently been very successful Timmy running a high end club for the tourist trade featuring the best drag queens on the West Coast. It is Timmy from his time before Ms. Judy Garland I want to talk about today. A worthy dime

This whole going back to Timmy thing got started when after Frank Jackman, another old Acre neighborhood corner boy, was as Sam Lowell called it “outed” for having been listed as the by-line in the early part of this series by current site manager Greg Green. That was after he decided after several attempts to reach the younger generation by force-marching everybody into doing film reviews of the Marvel and DC comic book super-heroes gone to cinema once the older writers revolted led by Sam Lowell to go back to the real audience-the baby boomers of the 1960s and not having anything current and liking my series from the archives. Of course I was departed, “underground” and the series had a common use copyright so Greg conned Frank into the by-line. I found out about it, was enraged that one of the two or three productions in a long career that I was very proud of was being “stolen” from me and contacted Sam to negotiate a by-line for me to finish the series.

While negotiations were going on, and somewhat stalled at a couple of points, old friend and a financial angel of this publication Jack Callahan did the by-lines and mainly at my request heroically tried to bat down some of the more wretched and dingbat ones. That is where Jack brought up the rumor that I had been living all doped up with a drag queen in Frisco town. Later when I got my byline I took a little space to give more details of what had really happened when I disappeared in order to give my take on swatting the more egregious rumors down. I mentioned Ms. Judy Garland, aka Timmy from the old neighborhood without going into great detail about a lot of the horror that Timmy had to go through in order to be a corner boy in the old days against his real inner identity. Even twenty years ago I would not whatever abstract feelings I had in support of gay rights, or the more generic right to sexual self-identity have mentioned word one about Timmy, let me call him Timmy but know his persona and singing style are pure Judy Garland, or mentioned that I personally knew and was helping out a drag queen-a flaming one (Timmy’s term which we both laugh about) and an utterly beautiful gay man.

We have talked about it lately but you would not believe what inner suppressions Timmy had had to go through to stick with the corner boys-including leading the charge against some poor gay guy down in Provincetown when we have our infamous and shameful “kicks” when we were in high school, or just out of high school. All I should really have to say is early 1960s (well before Stonewall made the initial public turn about gay life and gay harassment) working poor Acre corner boys and one should even if not a baby-boomer know what was what concerning “fags” “faggy” behavior, anything that smacked of the feminine or not macho although that word was not used at the time amount sprawling corner boys. Corner boys being corner boys for the fact that they, we held up a corner of some store the most important one for us Tonio’s Pizza Parlor because we didn’t have freaking money a lot of times for cars, girls, dates or much of anything. But a lot of it was the camaraderie, that feeling that thick or thin guys had your back whatever it was. And dear sweet Timmy was right out there with us. Like I said beat that poor gay guy up just to keep up with us. Jesus.

I like to think that maybe I “knew” what Timmy was really about back in those days but that is mainly retroactive bullshitting myself (Timmy will appreciate the term) because I was as homophobic as the next guy. Steered clear of the drag queens (if kind of fascinated by them in that way when something very different comes your way) ever since the day my deeply Roman Catholic mother warned me and my brothers never to go to the Shipwreck, an old abandoned beached cruise ship where the local drag queens performed just outside of Nantasket Beach. Every time we went by there we would get the drill. My slight contention about Timmy’s identity was that I was utterly shocked when one night in sophomore year in high school Timmy was performing in a school play dressed up as, well, Miss Judy Garland and singing Over the Rainbow like he meant it. But that was a school play and right after he was back in boys’ clothing and the next night we were back to hanging at Tonio’s. It was just a freaking play-right. Right there ready to do the midnight creep Markin had planned and Frankie Riley led to grab us some fast dough. (Timmy claims that his performance that play night was not his realization that he was different from us. Said it was not until he went to NYU in the Village and saw both gays as straight gay men and gay men as flaming drag queens that he kind of knew who he was but still tried to deny it for a while. The whole thing was confusing-still is he says.)

Timmy for whatever reason despite having gone out to California with us in the Summer of Love, 1967 basically stayed in North Adamsville with his aging parents until he could not stand it anymore. When he told his parents what he was they kicked him out of the house (recently when I went back to town I heard a similar story about a young gay guy whose father drove him to the MBTA station and told him to never come back to town or he would shoot his own flesh and blood so not everybody has gotten the word or bought into the idea of leaving the sexually different alone). When he tried to talk about it to whoever was around then Bart Webber I know, probably Jack Callahan too and most certainly Frankie Riley they basically disowned knowing him, maybe were not ready to ride him out of town on a rail but they couldn’t figure out what had happened to the guy who was the biggest gay-basher around. Then he headed to Frisco. (All those guys have changed their positions 180 degrees since then but Timmy is still a little wary when they meet according to Jack. When we heard, and that included me that he was working in Maxie’s, then the primo drag queen review out in the Bay Area we couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that Timmy liked to wear female attire (oops flaming attire).

From what Timmy told me toward the end of the 1970s a few years after Scribe died with a couple of slugs in his head after what we all assume was a busted drug deal and I was out visiting Josh Breslin those years in the late 1960s even out in user-friendly Frisco he struggled to survive since there were about six very good Judy Garland drag queens working the clubs and so he lived on the dole. My attitude had changed some on a little of this but the real reason was Timmy, well, Timmy was Timmy one of the corner boys and the ethos of having the back your corner boys was so strong that I had to help him out. Now with one of my own kids living in an openly gay relationship I have a better grip on the whole thing then I just would sent along some money and then when Timmy made his break-through I helped finance his club and the rest is history. Who would have thought. Allan Jackson]

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Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out sometimes in such a contrary fashion in this wicked old world. Not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin who will be more fully introduced in a moment (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased about it by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked to tease him, tease him when they wanted to show their interest usually, and his first ill-advised wife, Martha, a heiress of the local Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully since they sensed right away that he was not one of them, to impress her leafy horse country Dover suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names).

Neither of those expressions referred to however dated back to their youth since neither Sam nor Peter back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to explain their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use although each in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning” business they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Peter when they had reconnected a number of years before after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the “better angels of their nature” on a more regular basis. Some might call this nostalgic glancing back, especially by Peter since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that back then Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culturally-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “ding-dong daddy” leader Fritz Fallon (that “ding-dong max daddy” another expression coined, or picked up from somewhere by Peter so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written and needed to play on Peter’s vanity) who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and is still there although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generations now run by some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That made Phil’s among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore Street far from beaches. Night haunting boys far from sweated sun, tanned daytime beaches, with their equally pale, black dress-etched “tramps,” well known in the in boyos network at the high school for those few adventurous enough to mess with an off-hand “from hunger” girl looking for kicks and a fast ride in some souped-up Chevy or on back of fat hog Harley, the bike of choice around the town. Although tanned daytime beaches rumors had it that the beach, the isolated Rock Island end, had been the site of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” publicly virginal girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks. Rumors they remained until Sam ran into Sissy Roswell many years later who confessed that she and the “social butterfly” prom/fall dance/ yearbook crowd of girls that she hung around with on a couple of occasions had been among the briny rocks with the bad ass biker the summer after graduation when school social ladders and girls’ locker room talk didn’t mean a thing. Yeah, just like the Madonna tramps looking for kicks, looking for the minute wild side with guys that they would probably never see again and who could have cared less about their fake virginal status as long as the put out, put out hard and fast, before running off to college or finding some high-end stockbroker to pay the freight.

Getting back to Harry’s though, a place where cops with their patrol cars parked conspicuously in front of the store during the daytime placed their bets with “connected” Harry who used the store as a shabby front for the bookie operation and to fence Red’s nighttime work (the store had about three cans of beans and a couple of cans of soup on the shelves but did have a great big Coca-Cola ice chest filled with soda and a classic Madame La Rue pinball machine). Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify to the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion. So the tame corner boys at Phil’s were more than happy to hang out there where the Rizzos were more than happy to have them spent dough on the jukebox and pizzas except on Friday family pizza night set up to give Mom a rest for once not until after nine (and Tonio Rizzo the zen-master pizza maker secretly, since these corner boys were, if tame, still appealing looking to passing girls glad to have then around at that hour to boost the weekend sales). Moreover this spot provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or maybe a stray “nice” girl turned tramp after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of with local sports who bet with him on the strength of Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy Fallon). See Johnny was pretty poor even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods in those days (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer, called Mr. Toyota, down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from). Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty and virile to some “young thing” (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as Peter would later claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”).

Maybe, depending on whatever intelligent he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him Johnny would be all sympathy, or maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulable reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Peter who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest. Everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys. Spreading ugly rumors about a guy whose girl he was interested in a specialty. But the guy was like Teflon, nobody ever thought to take him out for his actions they were so dependent on his information to keep their place in the social pecking order.

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an item. An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheapjack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it is about old time corner boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in, gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old day, like he kept going back to, back in the day he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five.

Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1964” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to joint to keep up with what was going on with developments there. He would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned, a long story about a slight ill-advised flirtation with an old flame classmate although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him. But mostly in the end he could not face going home, came to believe what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again).

After Sam had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to those past forty years or so years Sam looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing) of who had joined and found the names of Peter Markin. He had to laugh Peter had been listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought. He also found the name of corner boy Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Peter, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless, and found down along a railroad trestle in New Jersey, after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s).

Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private cyberspace e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad. The time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Peter knew that, knew it better than anybody else but in order to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what Sam saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulations.

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston (read: where he did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world, and how the world had changed so much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He now regretted that he had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for his one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Peter goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Peter, as Sam has already noted, provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls. Who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t had his monthly quota of college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a term Jimmy constantly used then, and now, so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner). Who was “unapproachable,” probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of the now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way through Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square- name your term existence). Strangely Markin made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will though, Peter never after that Melinda Loring mistake, had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and into what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes at the Brattle Theater that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head when he went on and on about French films, especially those films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band) but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music. (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly folk music stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it).

That folk music was how Peter had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille. Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own under twenty-one memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for short periods both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac-drenched On The Road for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Peter, not so much later in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover in the Markin home phone). He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworth’s protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to they were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War we-are-fighting- against- the- Russians-terror North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Peter was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion, and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested American foreign policy at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic he received when classmates found out they were in communication had not gotten that much less hostile to what Peter had to say about this wicked old world, you already know the genesis of that term, right), was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice.

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackson, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he took a dive (Peter’s words).

Told a redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless). Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in a feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the gnaw, probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Peter was on his soapbox.

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Peter that although he had heard the word “blog” he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writer were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters roam free to state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah, that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking to other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s on and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period.

Sam was amazed at the topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he delved into the struggle to build his printing shop. He told Peter that he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second-run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panthers or guys like that, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but he could not remember the titles. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Peter also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches. That is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots. Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below:

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *The Latest From "The Industrial Workers Of The World" (IWW, Wobblies) Website

Click on the headline to link to the latest from "The Industrial Workers Of The World" (IWW, Wobblies) Website.

Markin comment:

I know this organization, sadly, is a mere shadow of its former self but the name evokes strong memories of "Big Bill" Haywood, the martyred Joe Hill, Vincent St.John, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in her younger days, the young James P. Cannon, the martyred labor organizer Frank Little, and also a million other things that were good and honorable about the part of the American labor movement under its influence at the turn of the 20th century. As the 21st century turns we can still learn a lot from those old time labor militants who won their spurs in the IWW.

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW, Wobblies)

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor

Click on the title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archive's copy of his appreciation of the IWW (of which he had been, at one time, a member). "The IWW".

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

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Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

Thursday, April 04, 2019

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The Hard Years Of War-A Sketch-Wilhelm Sorge’s War

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The Hard Years Of War-A Sketch-Wilhelm Sorge’s War

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the last year of which we are commemorating this month.

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Wilhelm Sorge’s father, Friedrich, was beside himself when, on opening the front page of his Boston Gazette that raw mid- April 1861 day, he read of the attacks on Massachusetts Sixth Volunteers down in secession-hungry, rebel-loving, negro-hating Baltimore. Friedrich had been a political partisan his whole life starting as a young man in his native Germany where he had been an ardent “Red Republican,” a working-class stuff who expected that the Revolution of 1848 would have led to the co-operative republic that they, the working stuffs, so well deserved, and for which they bled on the barricades. The “red” part came from his adherence to the Workman Co-Op in his home town of Cologne which was influenced by the ideas of Marx, LaSalle and even the Frenchman, Proudhon. Now here in Boston among the exiled German community, those who had had to flee for their lives, once the reaction pulled the hammer down and the “night of the long knives” had begun its now decade plus reign in Germany he had tempered his “red” spirit a little, but just a little, and had been an active participant in the slave abolitionist movement in Boston siding with the more activist wing around the fiery Brahmin Wendell Phillips and ex-black slave Frederick Douglass out in Rochester in New York where he published his Northern Star.

As early as the fall 1859 he had known deep down in his bones that the reaction to the martyred Captain John Brown’s execution, North and South, could only lead to bloody conflict before long. He had admired Captain Brown the one time he had heard him speak, or rather had seen him, some 19^th century great God Jehovah avenging angel, in Boston when he was trying to raise money for what was then an unknown expedition which turned out to be the attempted slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry. Friedrich had also taken the lead, not without opposition from some of the more conservative German working men from the waterfront cotton warehouses who worried about their jobs, in commemorating the valor of Captain Brown after he had been hung down in traitorous Virginia.

His party’s, the Republican Party’s victory in the presidential election with dark horse Abraham Lincoln’s fractured election victory in 1860 only confirmed that terrible conflict suspicion (fractured since he got no Southern electoral votes and in a four man race had only a minority of the non-decisive popular vote). Friedrich had been among the first, remembering back to those ’48 barricade days which they had established a little too late, to argue that every young able-bodied man who had his same thoughts should organize themselves into militias, to prepare for the coming fight arms in hand. Moreover he had offered his services as an instructor or in whatever capacity he could be most useful.

In early January 1861, as civil war approached with various Southern states refusing to acknowledge the election results and were convening sessions to discuss and vote on secession, Friedrich was delighted when the men of Massachusetts began to form volunteer militia units. Many workers in the textile cities of Lowell and Lawrence, many German-American artisans and skilled workers among them some known to him, were the first to join a new infantry regiment, the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, when it was formally organized on January 21, 1861. All through the winter and early spring, the men met regularly to drill. Friedrich assisting in small arms tactics and the construction of defensive fortifications. In March, they were issued uniforms and Springfield rifles and told to be ready to assemble at any time. When Fort Sumter was attacked on April 12th, the men of the Massachusetts Sixth knew their time had come.

Three days later, the newly inaugurated President Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers to serve for three months. They were ordered to Washington, D.C. to protect the capital and lead the effort to quash the "rebellion." The Sixth Massachusetts gathered with other regiments in Boston on April 16th. The Boston Gazette captured the feelings of many when it published one soldier's letter home: "We have been quartered since our arrival in this city at Faneuil Hall and the old cradle of liberty rocked to its foundation from the shouting patriotism of the gallant sixth. During all the heavy rain the streets, windows, and house tops have been filled with enthusiastic spectators, who loudly cheered our regiment . . . The city is completely filled with enthusiasm; gray-haired old men, young boys, old women and young, are alike wild with patriotism." Among those on the streets stood gray-haired Friedrich Sorge in his “Red Republican” regalia dusted off for the occasion. And down in surly Maryland that fine regiment had tasted their first blood.

Friedrich, after reading the hated news from Baltimore, became solemn thinking of past skirmishes back home in Germany where friends and comrades had fallen under hails of bullets when he had read of several soldiers, brave boys, killed and wounded when some pug-ugly crowd tried to block their passage forty or so miles further south to defend Washington, to defend the Republic. He thought again how just a few days before Boston had celebrated the departure of that regiment, as it would others later, including the prideful 54^th Massachusetts Regiment ordered by Governor Andrews filled to the brim with freed and escaped black men many recruited by his friend Douglass, going down to defend the capital in Washington. To defend against the threats of the insurrectionary separatists who were attempting to form their own country based on the slave trade, the slave economy, and the lucrative cotton trade that had been fueled by the world’s increase in textile production as such technological changes in the previous few decades had allowed more production with less labor to feed a world looking for cheap clothing and bedding.

Just then Friedrich thought about how if he had not been so old and the little shop he had built from scratch once he and his family had landed on American shores after that first London exile did not need to be run personally by him he would have gone with the boys south to show the rebels a thing or two about human worth. Friedrich as he told one and all of late, especially those young German immigrants who knew not of battles in the old country, had been in military action before, back in the days in Europe, in Germany, in 1848 when they, he and his fellow students were trying to get a democratic government installed in his native Cologne. They/he had failed and rather than face a long term jail sentence with three young children to feed, including his eldest Wilhelm, he and his wife had fled first to Paris and then when that spot became inhospitable to radical German immigrants to London and then to Boston (via New York) where he had set up his small print shop.

After setting the newspaper down Friedrich resolved that he would talk to Wilhelm, now eighteen and strong, about joining up in one of the regiments that was being formed daily in the town on orders from the governor and legislature and do his part to save the republic which had provided a haven for his family. Moreover, and this information of necessity was held closely among the German immigrant community of Boston and the now far-flung other German communities out in the Midwest farmlands and Texas settler lands, Friedrich had not only been a “red republican,” in the generic sense that a lot of ‘48s who were on the barricades espoused some socialist ideas but had been a converted follower in the Workmen’s Co-Op of the well-known (in Europe if not in America) communist thinkers and activists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Had been a sympathizer of their Communist League before everything got busted up in 1849 and 1850. He therefore held “advanced” views about the way the downtrodden of the earth should and could be treated. Here in Boston, not always to his benefit in the German community or to his profit in his print shop contracts, he was known as a “high abolitionist” of the Wendell Phillips school and become known beyond the German community as one who thrilled to the actions of Captain John Brown of blessed memory down in Harper’s Ferry (and had previously raised monies in the community at the behest of Theodore Parker to aid the anti-slavery forces in Kansas in the mid-1850s when they were in desperate need of arms, including Captain Brown). Yes he would speak to his son that evening at dinner.

That evening the two Sorges, father and son, had their first serious household dispute. Like many a son Wilhelm wanted to distance himself from his father’s activities, no matter what those activities were, no matter how good the cause. Wilhelm wanted to make a name for himself in the new land. So when Friedrich broached the subject of military service to Wilhelm he answered flatly “no.” No, he was not going to jeopardize his rising position in the firm of Sanborne and Son, the largest cotton merchants in Boston, to go save Mr. Lincoln’s bacon (he used another word but we will be kind here). He, moreover, considered himself like his employers, Charles and son Franklin, a “Cotton Whig,” a person who stood to benefit from increased cotton production to feed that never-ending stream of textile goods the world was demanding. So no, no indeed, one Wilhelm Sorge, moving up in the American world, was not going to try to save the old Union as it was, not as long as cotton was king. Moreover while he was at it he did not care a whit about freeing “nigras,” about the need to get them out of servitude. He had not been his father’s son getting all weepy about their plight down south. He, moreover, had to deal with them, freed slaves but still nirgas, in the Sanborne warehouses every day as they moved the heavy bales of cotton every which way and their bodies  “stank” stank to high heaven and he was not going to risk getting shot up for some heathen voodoo stink. No, no thank you.

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of Jack Kerouac-It Must Have Been Something In The Water- Old Textile Mill Town Along The Merrimack Lowell-The Strange Combination of James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of Jack Kerouac-It Must Have Been Something In The Water- Old Textile Mill Town Along The Merrimack Lowell-The Strange Combination of James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac

By Bart Webber

This is what Laura Perkins learned as she did what she calls research in her on-going self-selected art works series called Traipsing Through The Arts while she was researching various 19^th century artists for precedent for her general theory that sex and erotica in all its forms is what drove all serious 20^th century art. (21^st century art is an open question but check her series for that since that is beyond what I want to discuss.) One James Abbott McNeil Whistler, the butterfly-drenched guy who embarrassed his mother by fobbing her off as a study in black and white, or gray or whatever color he was able to purchase on credit in London when he short of cash and had tapped out with his friends who he in any case never paid back. As it turned out Whistler at least, if not his as all mothers are sainted mother whatever color he painted her, who Laura was not able to find out her place of birth in time for the publication of this piece was born in Lowell, Massachusetts along the path of the Merrimack River at a time when the Lowell boys were starting to crank out their red brick mills and con red-cheeked farm girls into sweated labor for little wages.

Now Laura has been pounding on Whistler’s reputation as a philandering and no-account deadbeat who when short of cash would hustle his mistress of the moment (what in those quaint days they called whatever his favorite at the time “living without benefit of clergy”) either out onto the cold and foggy London streets or when times permitted some leeway would procure (read: pimp) that mistress by way of one of his painting to some Mayfair swell and he, they were able to paint, break bread for a few more days. His most notorious example was his bold and brash “advertisement” called The White Girl” (latter when he had run her into the T.B. ground and abandoned her for the next best thing he would name it a study in white or symphony in white or some such bull but I have insisted on the original title). See he put the poor girl all in high collar long dress white like some innocence virgin which would spark the interest of some lustful Mayfair youth. Such a youth or whoever was willing to pay the freight would know she was available after Whistler placed the work at his dealer’s gallery by a very usual coded method-the wolf’s head and fur that she was standing on. After serious research by her “ghost” adviser (Sam Lowell who works here as well mainly doing film reviews) in ancient procuring traditions it was found out that the wolf’s head and as importantly the fur signified she was “available,” a tradition started in the time of the Whore of Babylon.

There was plenty of other negative energy around the name of the nefarious Whistler including full scaled orgies and the like but mainly it was about his silly notion that he was doing everything according to the principle of “art for art’s sake.” Everybody at the water cooler laughed at that lame excuse for a theory, art aficionado or not, knowing that was a total fraud. Knowing that was the last refuse of the scoundrel, the fallback position for any number of artistic swindles and theories making Laura’s sex theory seem very respectable and germane.

In a way the less said about Whistler and his Lowell connection the better since he, wisely, early in life fled the town (after some scandal with one of the Lowell mill owner’s daughters) and headed for fresh start England where he proceeded to foul the air there as well. Needless to say, nobody unlike with Kerouac is hyping his relationship to the city with parks and yearly festivals. Still there is that artistic, creative root that I want to deal with to connect him in the long chain with actress Bette Davis and writer Jack Kerouac the other two Lowell born personalities in the triad. (Sally Hansen, the poet, also Lowell born while worthy of some monogram did not fit in easily with the trio I have projected and will get a separate piece later.)

I was driven by two factors in putting this piece together. Si Lannon’s 2017 piece in American Film Gazette and republished in American Left History when he went that publication to sit on the newly created Editorial Board in discussing Bette Davis, Jack Kerouac and the symbolic Lowell connection and this year’s on-going pieces by Seth Garth commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the too young death of Jack Kerouac. Along the way the Whistler factor kind of dove-tailed to show that the town produced more than sweated textiles to the world at one time (although by Jack’s growing up time the signs were clear that the mills were “running south” for cheaper labor and eventually off-shore).

A little more is in order about Si Lannon, a writer well known to me for his articles on his and others experiences in the devil’s war, the Vietnam War, that carved a nation in two, maybe more and from which at least culturally it has never recovered mentioned to me one day when he was getting ready to review an old time black and white movie Of Human Bondage for the American Film Gazette for which he still writes occasionally that the female star Bette Davis had been born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Something that he did not know although before moving to North Adamsville about thirty miles south of Boston his early years were spent a few towns over in leafy suburban Westford. Si has been a longtime admirer of another Lowell native Jack Kerouac who torched a placid post-World War II world with his On The Road some sixty years ago (and which we have as Seth Garth mentioned “seemingly endlessly” and he may be right commemorated in this space recently on the sixtieth anniversary of its publication). That got Si thinking that there must be some connection that he could draw between two such iconic celebrities from an old dying mill-town (dying even back then as the mills headed cheap textile labor south and then cheaper foreign shorts worldwide-in their respective birth times 1908 and 1922) that had seen better days beside the inevitable “there must be something in the water” theory.

Taking a tip from Si I have taken my own view on what beside the “water” drove these talents writing in the free-flowing irreverent and shoot from the hip manner of Jack Kerouac who influenced many writers who came of age in the 1960s despite the fact that he “disowned” our hippie lifestyles which drove our narratives.

A river runs through it. The great rushing splurge from the New Hampshire mountains, at least that is what I have been told is source ground zero of the broken- down millwheel towns to the seas and unto the great cold wash Atlantic and there to homeland Europe left behind from desolation days Merrimack (homeland before Lowell migration and Quebec flee failing farms up north looking for factory river work and before them first rosy-cheeked farm girls bringing a little, very little extra cash for bad time harvest insurance and then sullen Irish immigrants from hungry famine ships before the figured out and controlled town politics in the ward-heeler tradition). Merrimack some potent Indian signifier (excuse me Indian when Indian was the name spoken and not the correct Native American or even better indigenous peoples who can stake serious and legitimate claim to sacred ground now ill-trodden over by umpteen colonial generations from frosty mill owners and those rosy-cheeked farm girls and sullen Irishmen as well and no reparations in sight) long before the devils came in their blasted wooden hull ships from across that briny North Atlantic no high note in sight unlike the great big blow out in Frisco town when a skinny black kid blew that one to perdition. (That kid once one checked the genealogy in need of his own reparations from West Coast Africa slave Middle Passage days but he sure could blow that skinny boy sexy sax like some second coming of Johnny Hodges in his Billie Holiday prime and when he saved Duke’s ass more than one time in that corner called a bandstand, a stage with smoked filled room and small café tables filled with changing drinks and undertone sex in the air directly attributable to that phallic sax and player.)

Great rushing river dividing the town between the remember “fake natives,” fake natives the right term having just explained true Natives and a miniature “class” in colonial grab culture, and the on-coming foreigners come to pick up the slack in the bottomless spinning wheel pits (the noise drowning out sing-song voices and whiskey hoarse alike and maybe that is where the sober siren sought his Jack strange mystifying voice and he his throbbing pace that in the end wound up like whiskey breath but that mere speculation since cocaine sister junkie fits or opium bong pipe back room sleeping bag dreams in shady off-beat rooming houses filled with rum-dums and grifters could have played the scene out).

River, two forked river making everybody think without reflection about Hemingway’s two-fisted big hearted river divine forgetting he drew from sparse languages and Jack, come to think of it Bette too, drew from endless chatter and write-downs, come flowing from the great ices of New Hampshire hills laying down sediments (and sentiments, cute and quaint but don’t get too much of either in the post-World War II period when everything came asunder) along a path unto the great turn and ageless rock formation by Pawtucketville Bridge-dividing that town even further (or is it farther) pushing out Highland visions of august majesty not looking at the small stucco-roofed houses the dream of every farm Quebec traveler south to tell the tale of making it in golden streets America.

Ready for a switch up now to tell the female river rush side of the story. Then a poor besotted girl emerges, emerges out of the dust hitting the high trail west landing forlorn and mystified in some fallen angel diner and a gas station town near the Petrified Forest in the Arizona (trees so ancient, think about it, that they have turned to stone some kind of metaphor there-something about staying in one place too long), breaking out from Great Depression hungers side saddle on the golden trains west keeping out of the wrath of the railroad bulls ready to jack club you for your now smelly existence like they were not made of the same clay. Off, way off of, Route 66 heavy-travelled by wandering hobos with not a dime their pockets but some wicked Villon poetry to whip by the pretty girls, even the ones protectively hiding it with jeans, then called no chic dungarees, flannel no shape shirts, work boots and sailor’s cap from some minute on the road love for a square meal. Off way off of Route 66 to be well-travelled in the next generation by hungry guys tired of lunch pail diners off Merrimack Street running hard by the same-named river and dirty grease-spun Esso gas stations at home drift to the cities but need to catch some dust and grit although what they thought of benighted stone trees who knows in between those expansive cities. Strangely that next generation embodied by that Frenchie guy who shared main billing when guys wrote about break outs of broken-down mill towns. But back in sandy wind-driven deserts filled with souvenir rocks (2for $3 the last anybody heard). There some Papa generation before her came out looking for El Dorado or gold something different and landed in two- bit desert stretches and kind of got stuck, got good and stuck there. (Not everybody made it as the skeletons along the way of cattle, horse, and human set among the bramble and down some aching arroyo tell every daredevil passer-by and every sensational dime store penny a word novelist in the days when that “contract” ruled writers on “spec” too just like hobo intellectual and enraptured million word Jacks notebook in his own wear-worthy flannel shirt.)

And there abandoned by a big city dream mother, I’ll say Gay Paree big city just as World War I boomed it last illicit guns and she despite her Villon ways and Verlaine dreams of some Rimbaud needed to get out of town before the gendarmes got their hooks into her for their ten per cent graft, and an ill-defined no account wimp father she came of age dreaming the dreams, funny city girl dreams of faraway places away from the dust and those fucking stoned trees when the wind howls through the age-worn crevices (making one think of other social howls and wolves and Molochs and white-dressed nurses in mental wards for the cure as if some fucking mental hospital would cure what ailed some love-stuck felon and of cool jazz man hipsters grooving on Charlie riffs and be-bop coming of age in some dark night smoke-filled cafes then try it now brother and you will be tarred and feathers even famous Jack tarred for smoking on ill-light television sets and backroom dinosaur hustles and Times Square con artists under the tough as nails Gregory now Saint Gregory but then just a shooting star wordy guy with a jack-roll for salvation which seemed to work since he got a heaven -sent honorific out of the deal hustling the rubes). Her father the king of the species all dressed up and cowardly when it came right down to it. Dreaming book dreams, small printed page books sent from far away by those who could not take the dust, the heat, those howls and once again those fucking night-blinding stone trees which tourists would pay a pretty penny for a chip, a sliver. Jesus. Dreamed fourteenth century or was fifteenth dreams of mad man con man rabble Villon out of some Balzac French novel but real enough speaking about how he could not stay with civil people but sought solace among the petty thieves, the cutthroats, the man murderers (little did she know who would come through door to marvel at her bug-eyes and blinkers making sorry Villon nothing but a second-rate Time Square hustler, hey, pacifist even) , the flotsam and jetsam among the people who lived outside the moat, who did not dream but planned and honest folk beware and watch out.

“Hey there stranger” she spoke quickly to that stranger with the strange pale voice and the paler skin despite walking the sun-drenched walk of the tramp no better than Villon’s men outside the moat and who looked like he had not had three squares in many a moon so that is what she thought when he first came in, came in and recognized in that small book, that funny thought poem by mad monk gone astray Villon and thus was kindred against the Papa silliness and some gas station jockey who tried to make love to her before her time. He was vague, road-wise vague at first but loosened up when that beef stew sunk in and that coffee and cruller made him light-headed talk crazy (the road which do that after a few days on unfettered sun they call it and rightly, desert-addled). So they talked, he called it conversation, and told her that the night-takers descending on the flat land earth, what he meant by that she never figured out, even in the freaking (his term not hers) stone tree desert filled with arroyo-seized skeletons that the day for conversation was quickly coming to froth, which she did figure out, was dangerous beyond whatever small thoughts she had ever had out in that vast night sky thunder-blazed desert. Ditto on that figuring out too except she learned that one the hard way. Naïve kid she thought him the new Messiah come that she has heard about over the blaring radio that made the diner hours go by more quickly so she could retreat into Villon’s manly dreams without distraction. He, the stranger he, laughed and said no vagabond who was out filching (cadging in what he meant she thought) free eats in dust-bitten rocks could claim Messiah-hood, could survive the new age coming and coming quickly right through her door. Her bug-eyes blinkered at that, at her silly illusions when she thought about it later after he was gone, gone to who knows what savior-driven place.

No sooner had the stranger taken his filched food (she still insisted it was cadged and would use that word telling her story whenever anybody asked her if she had actually seen the savior, had maybe slept with him for good measure or at least thought about it as chaste as she was then although filled with the normal young woman coming to terms with her sexuality longings and misconceptions) when the night-takers stormed in (stormed in more than one way bringing half the desert hell with them as boon companion) and made her savior stranger sit on his ass on the floor. Made hell come to pass before the night was through. All over the blighted world too where their brethren, they standing in for the lot just then, felt a fresh, no, a sickening breeze at their backs. (He, the stranger, would comment that the night-takers took their sweet-ass time whenever they descended on some unsuspecting crowd and that those descended upon took their sweet-ass time figuring out how to get rid of the bastards and the latter history would seem to have borne out that truth). Sweet manna.

Then that forlorn stranger had an idea, a good one if somebody beside her thought about it later that he would go mano a mano with the night-takers, would play the gallant when all was said and done (giving lie to the idea that he didn’t have any ideas about defending against the surging night-takers except their time had come). Naturally he lost, better won/lost and left her with her book, her small Villon book, a guy from the fourteenth century or was it the fifteenth and her dreams kind of intact. A few years later some guys in a 1949 Hudson (or was the car a Studebaker) tired of the Route 66 road came by looking for grub, looking for free eats and some whiskey but by then she was long gone to some city that Papa and father could not fathom. Not realizing that young woman or not she was just following their youthful trails to break-out of the cloistered rut but that would be a later reflection when the fires next time (sorry James Baldwin the line was too good not to use for a break-out of a different kind).

[On in the frozen Western night several years and ten thousand thoughts later the no longer girlish girl hung up on old time French bandit-poets, con men, desolation angels, and holy fools, and lost in thought time of the intellectuals far from the blessed stone trees, as far away as she could get to Southern California and so “frozen” ironic she picks up a book, a paperback left on the counter by a forgetful customer who after paying for his Woolworth-quality lunch must have given up all hope. She flips it into her pocketbook to either wait on his owner’s return or for something to read that night, that lonesome stone tree wilderness night that never left her thoughts. That guy, or whoever it was, never returned and so that night she read, read until the early morning hours and then read some more.

Read about a guy, although in her mind it could have be a girl, who had the same wanderlust that drove her west, drove her to the great blue-pink American western night he called it looking for some father that he had never known, maybe if that was not mere metaphor just as she was looking as well although she left some reality time father behind in the rearview mirror, looking forlornly, for that father from some oil-spilled New Jersey shore river to the wind-swept China seas before the Golden Gate Bridge. Looked just like that skinny Negro kid (now Afro-American or black) with his grandmother bought attire was looking for that high white note blowing out of the bay to its own China seas. Looked high and low for the missing brethren who long ago had crossed her path out in the hard stone-tree night when everything was possible but the intellectuals then flabby and ill-disposed to fight the night-takers even to a draw abandoned all hope, decided that primitive man would take the day and crush any free spirits. This guy though flush with the expectations of many new adventures once the night-takers were put to the sword took to the road, took a chance that he could find that father some fucking place-maybe Latimer Street in Denver, maybe Neola, Grand Island, Reno, Winnemucca, Tulsa, Fargo (although give up all hope if you wind up in that locale). She wondered that maybe he had stolen her dreams. Maybe he had stared at the same rivers that drove her desires, yes, just maybe that was the case.]

A young boy who only spoke patois, meaning that he only spoke mother tongue French via Quebec distillations, until he went to school played hooky one day and sat in the lost souls library hoping to find something that would challenge his fevered brain and slip-slopped over to the poetry section and found this guy Villon, a poet of the fourteenth or was it the fifteenth century, who spoke of dreams and crashing out (spoke too of ruffian petty larcenies outside the moat but the boy let it pass because he knew all about that, had passed that stage with his fevered corner boys too poor to do anything but dream of petty larcenies and charms, knew that poet kings only spoke of such to work up a sweat, to deal better with hipsters, con men, sullen fallen women, junkies and assorted felons riding on the railroad jungle tracks). Knew he had kindred in that long- ago poet king and sought out fellows who could understand such dreams, could understand too the patois that he thought in. Would find plenty of hipsters, cons, con men, Molochs, holy goofs, cowboy angels, a teenage Adonis to spar with his brethren soul. Find Moloch, insanity, the clap, jungle fever, whiskey shakes, penniless forsaken highways, lost boys, sullen youth, Zen, chicken shit and on some days, but only some days, he wished he never left that fucking river, that holy of holies Merrimack and had forgone those wistful eyes that he remembered out in cold Winnemucca, Neola, Grand Island, Big Sur nights. Oops, take away that Big Sur part for he learned much out in the wind-drenched barren cave-like rock strewn beaches wind blowing his black frugal hair every which way high as a kite, not whisky so much in those days but plentiful subterranean mary jane (his term other apply as well) to see visions like no other except once in Saint Joseph’s hunger Sunday morning before communion church.

[Weird thoughts along the Merrimack lifeline (remember like bodies made-up, filled with arteries and canals) a fervent solemnly disciplined fourteen year old boy armed with Woolworth’s ten-cent notepads and chewed raw No. 2 pencils, sits arms akimbo, strange gangling not yet athletic fourteen year old position like some latter day saint Buddha seeing all knowing all with hashish pipe tucked into some secret place sitting out with cans of beans and rat shit on desolation row waiting for fires and damnation, in a silent black back row orchestra seat (no red dress girl singing swinging Benny Goodman songs that night to come hither him to perdition and have to ask the eternal boy-girl question-orchestra or balcony-and he would know the answer always know the answer balcony of course she speaking of his silliness- why else would I come into the shadows with you) of the of long gone to condos or cute shops Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street staring intensely at the big white screen suddenly turned to magic motion pictures with a dust storm brewing out in some fucking petrified forest and some girl not his holding off some ragged sweater gas jockey, and having if you can believe this Villion-etched dreams, maybe not outside the moat larceny dreams but not belonging dreams about belonging too.

That desert-bleached girl, young woman serving them off the arm before the break-out waiting, eternally waiting like that fervent fourteen-year old boy for something to happen, for some kicks, for something better than listening to the average swill the customers brought in the door, waiting she thought for culture, or her idea or culture anyway. What grabbed that poor boy though was that scene out of some latter day great American West night when he thought he would be able to choke the Eastern dust from off his shoes and live-and write, always write. So kindred, kindred too when some holy goof hobo, tramp, bum angel Buddha comes traipsing down the road looking for hand-outs and God Jesus that would be the life. He, she, they make small kindred talk and speak of that damn poet, that Villon who knew more than he should about the human condition, more than any fourteen-year old boy anyway (or coming of womanly age girl either).

But before long the dream shattered, the night-takers released from their caves come swooping down like hell’s avenging angels, avenging the lost paradise that he had read a guy by the name of Milton, half-blind had gone on and on about in some heaven’s battle and they the losers-and what of it. But when you take on the night-takers you better realize that you will take some casualties, take some holy sacred blood from the holy earth returned and that ain’t fair, ain’t fair at all but who knows maybe Buddha, Rama. Zoroaster, Jehovah, the unnamed one, planned it out that way. Out the door of that no longer silent black back row orchestra seat he was glad that he had not had some red dress come hither girl to bother him. For he wondered, wondered as he sank his eyes into the white froth of the mighty Merrimack below whether she, that Western tableau desert girl who belatedly found his paperback book in some midnight ham and cheese on rye Woolworth’s and read bleary eyes into that good morning and then read some more would ever acknowledge him, ever read his mind like he read hers.]

Ha, as he tried to climb Bear Mountain with a dollar and a quarter in his stained dungarees (not called jeans then, not around him anyway) splattered flannel shirt and broken toe boots looking for that father he never knew (although his own father had passed on before he knew that he was looking for another father somewhere along the wino camp tracks, some arroyo bush or in some county jail working out a scheme looking too for Adonis father’s sons and close howling friend looking just for Adonis and whatever he had to offer in the sex game-a coded reference then to homosexuality not a big thing in beat crowd circles). Had Route 66 cold because if he could search that highway he would miss some connection, some angst the shrinks called it among the hot rod car, surf board, motorcycle lost winding in stir and some rough trade honey to some beast, boys he would meet out in the great blue-pink American Western night. As he pulled his thumb out of his back pocket he finally relaxed and dug the scene.

Hit long rides and short, mostly lonely truckers looking for company and searching for the sons they had never known, tramp diner stops, railroad stews on nights so cold his broken toe boots seized up on him, grabbed a couple of big rides with big blondes looking for some max daddy to be-bop with and leave in Doc’s drugstore while they waited to be “found” by some Hollywood agent. Took tokay swigs with the best of them, met up with rabid New Jersey poets (already mentioned before in coded Adonis dreams and Father Death the father of us all), New York City Times Square gangster dope peddlers and sainted poets (funny always the poets driving him forward he would have to write that down, Ivy League junkies on the nod, and finally the Adonis of the western night whom he would be-bop with unto the San Francisco Bay dropped that high white note out in the China seas. Yeah, he had it all except maybe those bug eyes from childhood lost in some flophouse. Still on some days, and only on some days, he wished he never had left that fucking river, never that sacred ground river. He wondered if she though that same thought.

(And would have wondered, he always born to wonder if she thought of the bastard symphony in white, in black in every dark color painter hustling his women in paint and if he would have known him as kindred too.)

AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Friday, April 05, 2019

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side-The Hard Years Of War- A Sketch-Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Two

The Problem With Colonialism-Nicole Kidman And Sean Penn’s “The Interpreter” (2005)-A Film Review

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night -One Night With You- Sam’s Song

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *The Latest From "The Industrial Workers Of The World" (IWW, Wobblies) Website

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW, Wobblies)

Thursday, April 04, 2019

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The Hard Years Of War-A Sketch-Wilhelm Sorge’s War

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of Jack Kerouac-It Must Have Been Something In The Water- Old Textile Mill Town Along The Merrimack Lowell-The Strange Combination of James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac

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