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
*Poet's Corner- Bertolt Brecht's "To Those Born After"- In Honor Of Julius And Ethel Rosenberg Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the heroic communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed by the American state on June 19, 1953.
To Those Born After
I
To the cities I came in a time of disorder That was ruled by hunger. I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar And then I joined in their rebellion. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles, I lay down to sleep among the murderers, I didn't care for much for love And for nature's beauties I had little patience. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time, My speech betrayed me to the butchers. I could do only little But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily: That's what I hoped. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small, Our goal lay in the far distance Clearly in our sights, If for me myself beyond my reaching. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness That you've not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries More often than shoes, Through the war of the classes despairing That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realised Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly. Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness, Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer Do human beings still treat themselves as animals, Look back on us with indulgence.
An Encore -The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind
Jack Callahan thought he was going crazy when he thought about the matter after he had awoken from his fitful dream. Thought he was crazy for “channeling” Jack Kerouac, or rather more specifically channeling Jack’s definitive book On The Road, definite in giving him and a goodly portion of his generation that last push to go, well, go search a new world, or at least get the dust of your old town growing up off of your shoes, that had much to do with his wanderings. Got him going in search of what his late corner boy, “the Scribe,” Peter Paul Markin called the search for the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (Markin always capitalized that concept so since I too was influenced by the mad man’s dreams I will do so here). Any way you cut it seeking that new world that gave Jack his fitful dream. That “driving him crazy” stemmed from the fact that those wanderings, that search had begun, and finished shortly thereafter, about fifty years before when he left the road after a few months for the hand of Chrissie McNamara and a settled life. Decided that like many others who went that same route he was not build for the long haul road after all.
But maybe it is best to go back to the beginning, not the fifty years beginning, Jesus, who could remember, maybe want to remember incidents that far back, but to the night several weeks before when Jack, Frankie Riley, who had been our acknowledged corner boy leader out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys from about senior year in high school in 1966 and a couple of years after when for a whole assortment of reasons, including the wanderings, the crowd went its separate ways, Jimmy Jenkins, Allan Johnson, Bart Webber, Josh Breslin, Rich Rizzo, Sam Eaton and me got together for one of our periodic “remember back in the day” get-togethers over at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few block down Massachusetts Avenue from where Jimmy lives. We have probably done this a dozen time over the past decade or so, more recently as most of us have more time to spent at a hard night’s drinking (drinking high-shelf liquors as we always laugh about since in the old days we collectively could not have afforded one high-shelf drink and were reduced to drinking rotgut wines and seemingly just mashed whiskeys, and draino Southern Comfort, and that draino designation no lie, especially the first time you took a slug, the only way to take it, before you acquired the taste for it).
The night I am talking about though as the liquor began to take effect someone, Bart I think, mentioned that he had read in the Globe that up in Lowell they were exhibiting the teletype roll of paper that Jack Kerouac had typed the most definitive draft of his classic youth nation travel book, On The Road in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1957. That information stopped everybody in the group’s tracks for a moment. Partly because everybody at the table, except Rich Rizzo, had taken some version of Kerouac’s book to heart as did thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of certified members of the generation of ’68 who went wandering in that good 1960s night. But most of all because etched in everybody’s memory were thoughts of the mad monk monster bastard saint who turned us all on to the book, and to the wanderings, the late Peter Paul Markin.
Yeah, we still moan for that sainted bastard all these years later whenever something from our youths come up. It might be an anniversary, it might be all too often the passing of some iconic figure from those times, or it might be passing some place that was associated with our crowd, and with Markin. See Markin was something like a “prophet” to us, not the old time biblical long-beard and ranting guys although maybe he did think he was in that line of work, but as the herald of what he called “a fresh breeze coming across the land” early in the 1960s. Something of a nomadic “hippie” slightly before his time (including wearing his hair-pre moppet Beatles too long for working class North Adamsville tastes, especially his mother’s, who insisted on boys’ regulars and so another round was fought out to something like a stand-still then in the Markin household saga). The time of Markin’s “prophesies,” the hard-bitten Friday or Saturday night times when nothing to do and nothing to do it with he would hold forth, was however a time when we could have given a rat’s ass about some new wave forming in Markin’s mind (and that “rat’s ass” was the term of art we used on such occasions).
We would change our collective tunes later in the decade but then, and on Markin’s more sober days he would be clamoring over the same things, all we cared about was girls (or rather “getting into their pants”), getting dough for dates and walking around money (and planning small larcenies to obtain the filthy lucre), and getting a “boss” car, like a ’57 Chevy or at least a friend that had one in order to “do the do” with said girls and spend some dough at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants (mandatory if you wanted to get past square one with girls, the girls we knew, or were attracted to, in those days).
Markin was whistling in the dark for a long time, past high school and maybe a couple of years after. He wore us down though pushing us to go up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see guys with long hair and faded clothes and girls with long hair which looked like they had used an iron to iron it out sing, read poetry, and just hang-out. Hang out waiting for that same “fresh breeze” that Markin spent many a girl-less, dough-less, car-less Friday or Saturday night serenading us heathens about. I don’t know how many times he dragged me, and usually Bart Webber, in his trail on the late night subway to hear some latest thing in the early 1960s folk minute which I could barely stand then, and which I still grind my teeth over when I hear some associates going on and on about guys like Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez, the one I heard later started the whole iron your long hair craze among seemingly rationale girls. Of course I did tolerate the music better once a couple of Cambridge girls asked me if I liked folk music one time in a coffeehouse and I said of course I did and took Markin aside to give me some names to throw at them. One girl, Lorna, I actually dated off and on for several months.
But enough of me and my youthful antics, and enough too of Markin and his wiggy ideas because this screed is about Jack Kerouac, about the effect of his major book, and why Jack Callahan of all people who among those of us corner boys from Jack Slack’s who followed Markin on the roads west left it the earliest. Left to go back to Chrissie, and eventually a car dealership, Toyota, that had him Mr. Toyota around Eastern Massachusetts (and of course Chrissie as Mrs. Toyota).
In a lot of ways Markin was only the messenger, the prodder, because when he eventually convinced us all to read the damn book at different points when we were all, all in our own ways getting wrapped up in the 1960s counter-cultural movement (and some of us the alternative political part too) we were in thrall to what adventures Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were up to. That is why I think Jack had his dreams after the all-night discussions we had. Of course Markin came in for his fair share of comment, good and bad. But what we talked about mostly was how improbable on the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of our generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.” Add in that he also was a “jock” (no slur intended as we spent more than our fair share of time talking about sports on those girl-less, dough-less, car-less weekend nights, including Markin who had this complicated way that he figured out the top ten college football teams since they didn’t a play-off system to figure it out. Of course he was like the rest of us a Notre Dame “subway” fan), a guy who played hooky to go read books and who hung out with a bunch of corner boys just like us would be-bop part of his own generation and influence our generation enough to get some of us on the roads too. Go figure.
So we, even Markin when he was in high flower, did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, and of the limits of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, Jack Kerouac’s, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando we saw on Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater movie screens and above all his “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who along with Jack wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from. Yeah, gave us a road map to seek that “newer world” Markin got some of us wrapped up in later in the decade and the early part of the next.
Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers, us, only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac who thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.
Here the odd thing, Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s and a couple of vagrant road trips in the 1950s before fame struck him down was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” was decisive.
But enough of the quasi-literary treatment that I have drifted into when I really wanted to tell you about what Bart Webber told me about his dream. He dreamed that he, after about sixty-five kinds of hell with his mother who wanted him to stay home and start that printing business that he had dreamed of since about third grade when he read about how his hero Benjamin Franklin had started in the business, get married to Betsy Binstock, buy a white picket fence house (a step up from the triple decker tenement where he grew up) have children, really grandchildren and have a happy if stilted life. But his mother advise fell off him like a dripping rain, hell, after-all he was caught in that 1960s moment when everything kind of got off-center and so he under the constant prodding of Markin decided to hit the road. Of course the Kerouac part came in from reading the book after about seven million drum-fire assaults by Markin pressing him to read the thing.
So there he was by himself. Markin and I were already in San Francisco so that was the story he gave his mother for going and also did not tell her that he was going to hitchhike to save money and hell just to do it. It sounded easy in the book. So he went south little to hit Route 6 (a more easterly part of that road in upstate New York which Sal unsuccessfully started his trip on). There he met a young guy, kind of short, black hair, built like a football player who called himself Ti Jean, claimed he was French- Canadian and hailed from Nashua up in New Hampshire but had been living in Barnstable for the summer and was now heading west to see what that summer of love was all about.
Bart was ecstatic to have somebody to kind of show him the ropes, what to do and don’t do on the road to keep moving along. So they travelled together for a while, a long while first hitting New York City where Ti Jean knew a bunch of older guys, gypsy poets, sullen hipsters, con men, drifters and grifters, guys who looked like they had just come out some “beat” movie. Guys who knew what was what about Times Square, about dope, about saying adieu to the American dream of their parents to be free to do as they pleased. Good guys though who taught him a few things about the road since they said they had been on that road since the 1940s.
Ti Jean whose did not look that old said he was there with them, had blown out of Brockton after graduating high school where he had been an outstanding sprinter who could have had a scholarship if his grades had been better. Had gone to prep school in Providence to up his marks, had then been given a track scholarship to Brown, kind of blew that off when Providence seemed too provincial to him, had fled to New York one fine day where he sailed out for a while in the merchant marines to do his bit for the war effort. Hanging around New York in between sailings he met guys who were serious about reading, serious about talking about what they read, and serious about not being caught in anything but what pleased them for the moment. Some of this was self-taught, some picked up from the hipsters and hustlers.
After the war was over, still off-center about what to do about this writing bug that kept gnawing at him despite everybody, his minute wife, his love mother, his carping father telling him to get a profession writing wasn’t where any dough was, any dough for him he met this guy, a hard knocks guys who was something like a plebeian philosopher king, Ned Connelly, who was crazy to fix up cars and drive them, drive them anyway. Which was great since Ti Jean didn’t have a license, didn’t know step one about how to shift gears and hated driving although he loved riding shot-gun getting all blasted on the dope in the glove compartment and the be-bop jazz on the radio. So they tagged along together for a couple of years, zigged and zagged across the continent, hell, went to Mexico too to get that primo dope that he/they craved, got drunk as skunks more times than you could shake a stick, got laid more times than you would think by girls who you would not suspect were horny but were, worked a few short jobs picking produce in the California fields, stole when there was no work, pimped a couple of girls for a while to get a stake and had a hell of time while the “squares” were doing whatever squares do. And then he wrote some book about it, a book that was never published because there were too many squares who could not relate to what he and Ned were about. He was hoping that the kids he saw on the road, kids like Bart would keep the thing moving along as he left Bart at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on their last ride together.
Then Bart woke up, woke up to the fact that he stayed on the road too short a time now looking back on it. That guy Ti Jean had it right though, live fast, drink hard and let the rest of it take care of itself. Thanks Markin.
If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go Round At 83-Once More Into The Time Capsule
By Music Critic Bart Webber
Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in (and the former two never got over since they will still tell a tale or two about the times if you go anywhere within ten miles of the subject-I will take my chances here because this notice is important) all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. That is where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, Collins and a whole crew of younger folksingers who sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
But there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some other colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s where some of those names played but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.
Yeah, out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is different, where what the novelist Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. Tough too when you landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes.
The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. She was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember her cover of her classic Old Devil Time that night-yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels
Rosalie's friend Malvina Reynolds
CD Review
Washington Square Memoirs: The Great Urban Folk Revival Boom, 1950-1970, various artists, 3CD set, Rhino Records, 2001
"Except for the reference to the origins of the talent brought to the city the same comments apply for this CD. Rather than repeat information that is readily available in the booklet and on the discs I’ll finish up here with some recommendations of songs that I believe that you should be sure to listen to:
Disc One; Woody Guthrie on “Hard Travelin’”, Big Bill Broonzy on “Black , Brown And White”, Jean Ritchie on “Nottamun Town”, Josh White on “One Meat Ball” Malvina Reynolds on “Little Boxes”, Cisco Houston on “Midnight Special”, The Weavers on “Wasn’t That A Time”, Glenn Yarborough on “Spanish Is A Loving Tongue”, Odetta on “I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain”, The New Lost City Ramblers on “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down”, Bob Gibson and Bob Camp on “Betty And Dupree”, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on “San Francisco Bay Blues”, Peggy Seeger on “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, Hoyt Axton on “Greenback Dollar” and Carolyn Hester on “Turn And Swing Jubilee”."
Malvina Reynolds on “Little Boxes”. Like everyone else from the “Generation of ‘68” who paid attention to folk music on their way to greater social and political consciousness I know this song from Pete Seeger’s rendition. I only knew the name Malvina Reynolds much later. I only ‘knew’ the musical work of Ms. Reynold much later through the efforts of Rosalie Sorrels who did a whole CD compilation of Malvina's work (reviewed in this space). The lyrics to “Little Boxes”, by the way, are a very concise and condensed expression of the way many of us were feeling about the future bourgeois society had set up for us back in the early 1960s. As the song details-it was not pretty. I submit that it still is not pretty.
Malvina Reynolds: Song Lyrics and Poems
Little Boxes
Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1962 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1990. Malvina and her husband were on their way from where they lived in Berkeley, through San Francisco and down the peninsula to La Honda where she was to sing at a meeting of the Friends’ Committee on Legislation (not the PTA, as Pete Seeger says in the documentary about Malvina, “Love It Like a Fool”). As she drove through Daly City, she said “Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”
Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1 Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes all the same. There's a green one and a pink one And a blue one and a yellow one, And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses All went to the university, Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same, And there's doctors and lawyers, And business executives, And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course And drink their martinis dry, And they all have pretty children And the children go to school, And the children go to summer camp And then to the university, Where they are put in boxes And they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business And marry and raise a family In boxes made of ticky tacky And they all look just the same. There's a green one and a pink one And a blue one and a yellow one, And they're all made out of ticky tacky
Reflections On Memorial Day, 2017 At The Vietnam Memorial Wall-Fritz
Taylor’s Endless War
By Josh Breslin
Fritz Taylor, Vietnam veteran, 1969-1971, 4th
Infantry, always claimed long after he had gotten “religion” on the questions
of war and peace, after he had earned the right to oppose the bloody damn thing
having been up close and personal that some of his fellow veterans had been
shortchanged when it came to the crying wall, crying for him every time he went
down to D.C. and was drawn to, had to pay his respects to his fallen comrades.
He knew that each name inscribed on that black granite had paid their dues. No
question.
This year he happened to be in D.C. on Memorial Day and so
as it turned out quite by accident his “duty” to his fallen comrades,
especially hometown boys Eric Slater and Jimmy Jenkins Fritz forever etched in
stone there, he had caught part of the annual ceremony. Righteous Fritz who
went he went over to the peace side of the equation probably had logged more
jail time than was good for him with acts of civil disobedience when he wanted
to make a point about the current wave of endless wars, moreover did not have
any issue when new names of those who were missing in action somehow had gotten
repatriated or had been accounted for by some other method. (See above for
additions to this year’s crying wall). What grieved Fritz was those like his
friend from Vietnam days, Johnny Ridge, a working class kid from Steubenville
out in Ohio near the river who after many years of suffering psychic wounds received
in Vietnam jumped into that Ohio River. Or another friend from anti-war soldier
days, Manny Gibbons who spent his last few years fighting cancer which the doctors
directly related to his exposure to Agent Orange. There were others whose
stories he knew but those two accounts will do to make this point.
Fritz, righteous Fritz, that day once again promised his
lost comrades that he would work until he went to his own not too distant death
to get their names etched in stone. Vietnam will never end for one Fritz John
Taylor, or a lot of other guys either.
The List Of The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class of 1969 Expands-With The Art Of The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.E. Cannon In Mind.
T.E. Cannon Self_Portrait
By Si Lannon
Frank Jackman was confused, no, rather baffled, no again, was not sure that he should not take it for an omen. And he a man who laughed at omens, portents and other such mumbo-jumbo in his time, learned to be distrustful of such early on in hard knocks growing up day. What had him in a dither, what had him exercised as he did his morning toilet was how many associations with the year 1969, more specifically the Vietnam War Class of 1969 he had turned up once he had decided to “come out of the closet” (funny a term these days associated with gays and others proclaiming proudly their sexual orientations and identities) about his own battles during that period. The immediate cause for his consternation, for him thinking that maybe he should start to pay attention to the signs was that he had gone on assignment to the art exhibit at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem twenty-five miles north of Boston featuring the works of the late Native-American artist T.E. Cannon.
As Frank entered the exhibit area he noticed two things on the entrance wall describing what was ahead. The first was that while they were a million miles apart in a way with where they grew up, their racial and ethnic make-ups, and what paths they had pursued they were both members of the baby-boomer generation, more specifically for our purposes the Generation of ’68 which had come of age in that decade and went through all the ups and downs of that experience with which we are now being inundated with 50th anniversary commemorations. An added signpost of Frank’s confusion. Both had ironically, or maybe portentously is a better way to put the matter, been born in 1946 at the very start of the generational curve that was to peter out late in the 1960s giving way to Generation X and millennials. The second, and again for our purposes probably more important is that Cannon had served part of his Army hitch in the year 1969 with the 101st Airborne Division in 1969. That set off another round of explosions in Frank’s head about his own 1969 part of the equation since 1969 was the year he had accepted induction in the Army after being drafted. His story was quite different.
Frank over the previous couple of years in the fuse over the 50th anniversary commemorations had become more aware of the pivotal part the events triggered in 1969 by that induction (he would laughingly, later laughingly, called it his indentured servitude) had played in much of his subsequent life, for good or evil. Not surprisingly he had kept quiet about his own experiences like a lot of that Class of 1969 who actually had gone to Vietnam and were trying to live it down by drowning it out, drowning it out unsuccessfully as it turned out in many cases. As Frank talked to fellow veterans from that period while he was reporting on various anti-war political events for the on-line American Left History he found a surprising number of them had some relationship to 1969 and so that perked up his interest in telling his own story which was dramatically different from theirs. In the muddle of what he was trying to do he wanted by publicizing his own experience, and in quiet nighttime moments desperately wanted, to be part of that Vietnam War Class of 1969. His story has been told elsewhere in these pages under the title Frank Jackman’s Fate-With Bob Dylan’s Masters of War In Mind and so need not detain us except that Frank too had orders for Vietnam but getting up his Irish decided to refuse to go costing him a total of thirteen months in an Army stockade and another six months of other kinds of restrictive movements.
(Interesting there seems to have been something of a divide beginning with the Tet Offensive results in 1968 which set those from 1969 apart from earlier Vietnam War classes whom he found were less shamed or destroyed by their war experiences coming home. Nothing that he could put down as some sociological truth but with enough anecdotal force to take notice).
Frank had written plenty about other cohorts of the Generation of ’68, the merry pranksters, not Ken Kesey’s originals but Captain Crunch’s whose led another cohort of mischief makers on their own yellow brick road converted school bus, from the Summer of Love days, the guys from the neighborhood, his corner boys who were a lightning rod from down at the base of society for what was going on in youth nation in those days and later, when he had had his own woes about fellow Vietnam veterans who had had a hard time coming back, of adjusting and had essentially dropped out of mainstream society. Had written about that band of brothers under the bridges of Southern California from inside reflecting his own turbulent war past and outside when he felt a very strong need to keep the faith with his brothers who had been thrown on the scrap heap by their government and the average citizen who di not give a fuck once the war madness was over.
But the 1969 guys were cut from a different cloth. Sure, they had many of the same PTSD symptoms of the lost boys out in the arroyos, the junkies on cheap street strung out on Golden Triangle dreams but somehow had survived well enough to get back in the real world. Sometimes it was, is a close thing with guys like Pat who went on to do work as an environmentalist after doing MAC-V military intelligence and who still is afraid to be alone in his house at night, like Dan who ran a successful logging business after running the rack on every known drug, legal and illegal reflected in five, count them five, marriages, beautiful Doc who had done triage with the 101st Airborne and came home to work the public hospital circuit but who like some small fry McBeth stills see the blood red moons of field hospitals. Howie who didn’t go because of a childhood injury that never healed correctly but whose number came up in ’69 and damn if they weren’t so desperate they were ready to take him. Almost blind John the same way. Ian from up in Maine whose two ex-wives never ever knew he had been in the Central Highlands of Vietnam when all hell was breaking loose there.
But enough about those guys who have had almost as much ink spilled in these pages by others as Frank because his assignment and his thoughts too were on the remarkable works of Cannon who gave him a whole new perspective on what Native American art was all about beyond the ancient, so-called primitive stuff he had seen in most art museums. In line with that thought he had also recently gone to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where a newer, small exhibit in the American wing was paying homage to, and trying to correct, the long history of neglect and third-class citizen of Native American art in its own exhibitions which had been relegated to the dreary basement of that wing. Maybe that told the tale another way.
(Frank had never been sure even when he had been acting site manager in on-line times and before that as managing editor at hard copy publications about what was the correct term in the age of identity politics in reference to what he had learned as a kid in school and through television and movies about what had been called “Indians.” Terms seem to drift between “Native American” the term used at the Cannon exhibit “indigenous peoples” and “first nations” so he would stick with the first which had been the case at the exhibit)
Frank had become increasingly aware especially through his associations with veterans who in 2017 had gathered to defend against the pipelines at Standing Rock out in the Dakotas that Native Americans had been disproportionally represented in the American military with all the pathologies connected with that experience which he recognized from his own personal observations of his friends and those he had met along the way. Some were proud in the ancient warrior traditions to serve in the military like it as somewhere in some hidden gene. Cannon seems to have gone for the simple reason that he had been called up and rather than be drafted he enlisted. He did his time as well as anybody else but like a lot of guys was ambivalent about the war he had participated in and about his won role in it. As noted above not an uncommon reaction from serious creative types who were baffled by what they had experienced, by what they and others did to people with whom that had no quarrel. People, mostly peasants, workers on the land like his own people who had the same reverence for what the land gave (and took away) as those far away peasants.
Cannon went no holds barred in what he saw in his Native American environment from the proud but beaten warriors who could roam the ranges no more to the women of steel who held communal life together to the wizen elder shamans and soothsayers who really did believe in the portents Frank never could get around his head to his secret dreams of Anglo girls fussing in the night with the son of then thousand years of warrior life. Frank had to laugh thinking about those infinite number of connections which bound him to one T.E. Cannon. Then he remembered the story the late Markin had told one fireside night out in California working their way south on the Captain Crunch’s mad monk caravan. Markin and a couple of other guys had been out in Joshua Tree and had been sucking down all the hallucinogenic drugs they could gather mostly peyote buttons and maybe some righteous mescaline and had started to dance, dance the dance of ten thousand years of canyon life and had worked themselves into such a dither that they thought there was some connection between what they were doing and the light flickering off the canyon walls calling them onward. Yeah, Cannon Frank thought would have appreciated that story, would have let Frank into that vaunted Class of 1969 on the strength of that story alone.
The List Of The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class of 1969 Expands-With The Art Of The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.E. Cannon In Mind.
T.E. Cannon Self_Portrait
By Si Lannon
Frank Jackman was confused, no, rather baffled, no again, was not sure that he should not take it for an omen. And he a man who laughed at omens, portents and other such mumbo-jumbo in his time, learned to be distrustful of such early on in hard knocks growing up day. What had him in a dither, what had him exercised as he did his morning toilet was how many associations with the year 1969, more specifically the Vietnam War Class of 1969 he had turned up once he had decided to “come out of the closet” (funny a term these days associated with gays and others proclaiming proudly their sexual orientations and identities) about his own battles during that period. The immediate cause for his consternation, for him thinking that maybe he should start to pay attention to the signs was that he had gone on assignment to the art exhibit at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem twenty-five miles north of Boston featuring the works of the late Native-American artist T.E. Cannon.
As Frank entered the exhibit area he noticed two things on the entrance wall describing what was ahead. The first was that while they were a million miles apart in a way with where they grew up, their racial and ethnic make-ups, and what paths they had pursued they were both members of the baby-boomer generation, more specifically for our purposes the Generation of ’68 which had come of age in that decade and went through all the ups and downs of that experience with which we are now being inundated with 50th anniversary commemorations. An added signpost of Frank’s confusion. Both had ironically, or maybe portentously is a better way to put the matter, been born in 1946 at the very start of the generational curve that was to peter out late in the 1960s giving way to Generation X and millennials. The second, and again for our purposes probably more important is that Cannon had served part of his Army hitch in the year 1969 with the 101st Airborne Division in 1969. That set off another round of explosions in Frank’s head about his own 1969 part of the equation since 1969 was the year he had accepted induction in the Army after being drafted. His story was quite different.
Frank over the previous couple of years in the fuse over the 50th anniversary commemorations had become more aware of the pivotal part the events triggered in 1969 by that induction (he would laughingly, later laughingly, called it his indentured servitude) had played in much of his subsequent life, for good or evil. Not surprisingly he had kept quiet about his own experiences like a lot of that Class of 1969 who actually had gone to Vietnam and were trying to live it down by drowning it out, drowning it out unsuccessfully as it turned out in many cases. As Frank talked to fellow veterans from that period while he was reporting on various anti-war political events for the on-line American Left History he found a surprising number of them had some relationship to 1969 and so that perked up his interest in telling his own story which was dramatically different from theirs. In the muddle of what he was trying to do he wanted by publicizing his own experience, and in quiet nighttime moments desperately wanted, to be part of that Vietnam War Class of 1969. His story has been told elsewhere in these pages under the title Frank Jackman’s Fate-With Bob Dylan’s Masters of War In Mind and so need not detain us except that Frank too had orders for Vietnam but getting up his Irish decided to refuse to go costing him a total of thirteen months in an Army stockade and another six months of other kinds of restrictive movements.
(Interesting there seems to have been something of a divide beginning with the Tet Offensive results in 1968 which set those from 1969 apart from earlier Vietnam War classes whom he found were less shamed or destroyed by their war experiences coming home. Nothing that he could put down as some sociological truth but with enough anecdotal force to take notice).
Frank had written plenty about other cohorts of the Generation of ’68, the merry pranksters, not Ken Kesey’s originals but Captain Crunch’s whose led another cohort of mischief makers on their own yellow brick road converted school bus, from the Summer of Love days, the guys from the neighborhood, his corner boys who were a lightning rod from down at the base of society for what was going on in youth nation in those days and later, when he had had his own woes about fellow Vietnam veterans who had had a hard time coming back, of adjusting and had essentially dropped out of mainstream society. Had written about that band of brothers under the bridges of Southern California from inside reflecting his own turbulent war past and outside when he felt a very strong need to keep the faith with his brothers who had been thrown on the scrap heap by their government and the average citizen who di not give a fuck once the war madness was over.
But the 1969 guys were cut from a different cloth. Sure, they had many of the same PTSD symptoms of the lost boys out in the arroyos, the junkies on cheap street strung out on Golden Triangle dreams but somehow had survived well enough to get back in the real world. Sometimes it was, is a close thing with guys like Pat who went on to do work as an environmentalist after doing MAC-V military intelligence and who still is afraid to be alone in his house at night, like Dan who ran a successful logging business after running the rack on every known drug, legal and illegal reflected in five, count them five, marriages, beautiful Doc who had done triage with the 101st Airborne and came home to work the public hospital circuit but who like some small fry McBeth stills see the blood red moons of field hospitals. Howie who didn’t go because of a childhood injury that never healed correctly but whose number came up in ’69 and damn if they weren’t so desperate they were ready to take him. Almost blind John the same way. Ian from up in Maine whose two ex-wives never ever knew he had been in the Central Highlands of Vietnam when all hell was breaking loose there.
But enough about those guys who have had almost as much ink spilled in these pages by others as Frank because his assignment and his thoughts too were on the remarkable works of Cannon who gave him a whole new perspective on what Native American art was all about beyond the ancient, so-called primitive stuff he had seen in most art museums. In line with that thought he had also recently gone to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where a newer, small exhibit in the American wing was paying homage to, and trying to correct, the long history of neglect and third-class citizen of Native American art in its own exhibitions which had been relegated to the dreary basement of that wing. Maybe that told the tale another way.
(Frank had never been sure even when he had been acting site manager in on-line times and before that as managing editor at hard copy publications about what was the correct term in the age of identity politics in reference to what he had learned as a kid in school and through television and movies about what had been called “Indians.” Terms seem to drift between “Native American” the term used at the Cannon exhibit “indigenous peoples” and “first nations” so he would stick with the first which had been the case at the exhibit)
Frank had become increasingly aware especially through his associations with veterans who in 2017 had gathered to defend against the pipelines at Standing Rock out in the Dakotas that Native Americans had been disproportionally represented in the American military with all the pathologies connected with that experience which he recognized from his own personal observations of his friends and those he had met along the way. Some were proud in the ancient warrior traditions to serve in the military like it as somewhere in some hidden gene. Cannon seems to have gone for the simple reason that he had been called up and rather than be drafted he enlisted. He did his time as well as anybody else but like a lot of guys was ambivalent about the war he had participated in and about his won role in it. As noted above not an uncommon reaction from serious creative types who were baffled by what they had experienced, by what they and others did to people with whom that had no quarrel. People, mostly peasants, workers on the land like his own people who had the same reverence for what the land gave (and took away) as those far away peasants.
Cannon went no holds barred in what he saw in his Native American environment from the proud but beaten warriors who could roam the ranges no more to the women of steel who held communal life together to the wizen elder shamans and soothsayers who really did believe in the portents Frank never could get around his head to his secret dreams of Anglo girls fussing in the night with the son of then thousand years of warrior life. Frank had to laugh thinking about those infinite number of connections which bound him to one T.E. Cannon. Then he remembered the story the late Markin had told one fireside night out in California working their way south on the Captain Crunch’s mad monk caravan. Markin and a couple of other guys had been out in Joshua Tree and had been sucking down all the hallucinogenic drugs they could gather mostly peyote buttons and maybe some righteous mescaline and had started to dance, dance the dance of ten thousand years of canyon life and had worked themselves into such a dither that they thought there was some connection between what they were doing and the light flickering off the canyon walls calling them onward. Yeah, Cannon Frank thought would have appreciated that story, would have let Frank into that vaunted Class of 1969 on the strength of that story alone.
In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Robert Seth Hayes
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
When Soldiers Of Fortune Held Forth In The Central American Night (And Were Well Paid)- Tom Cruise’s “American Made” (2017)-A Film Review
DVD Review
Bart Webber
American Made, starring Tom Cruise, 2017
If you are going to be a drug smuggler you had better be the best liar, con man, sell-out artist you can be otherwise you are going to wind up in some dirty, dusty back road someplace with a couple of slugs in your head and an unmarked grave in some stinking potter’s field far from home. This I know. All of this the lying, conning (including to close long-time friends), selling-out and falling down in some abandoned arroyo south of the border happened to my old time high school friend Peter Paul Markin (the real Markin not Allan Jackson who formerly headed the operations at this publication and took the Markin moniker as an on-line identity-and nobody complained). Yeah, Markin fell under the bus after making it through not unscathed in Vietnam and was never quite the same especially when that golden age hippie minute evaporated under the counter-offensive of the night-takers who have been running the show in this country ever since. But Markin was small time, was just trying to feed his serious cocaine habit at the end (a no-no if you are smuggling and tasting the product at the same time) when he made a fatal move to go “indy” down in Mexico and got nothing but two slugs in the head and a potter’s field grave for his efforts.
Which brings us to this so-what based on fact true story about a serious upscale TWA commercial flight go by the book pilot Barry Seal with a taste for the wild side, for the dough side, who converts to drug smuggler extraordinaire in the film under review American Made.
Of course. any time you have a story line involving the CIA, drug cartels, the DEA, Contras and who knows who else you should hold onto your wallet. This is not supposed, at least in the director’s eyes, to be a biopic since Tom Cruise as the lead character Barry Seal, the late Barry Seal and the real one were very much unlike and moreover the story-line holds together better if it is told as on screen. So take the plot for what it is worth but know that Barry had a taste for the wild side beyond the bags full of money he was making in his very useful skilled profession as an ace pilot.
You need a scorecard in any case to work through the cons, lies etc of this one. Barry an unhappy TWA pilot with a gaggle of kids and a good-looking wife meets up with the CIA who need some help with the troublesome growing insurgencies in Central and South America. Barry buys in if the price is right and the plane is fast. Then the CIA wants him to be the bag man for their guy in Panama. Which leads to the fatal collusion with the very interested drug cartels starting their big-time cocaine runs heading north. Naturally through all this Barry is living high off the hog and a charmed live. Until. Until things go awry as he expands his operations and is caught. Not good for a gringo with much information to offer to save his own skin. Vaya con dios Barry once the cartel sends its hit men north. See, high end or low like Markin when you play with that fire it is every person for him or herself. A nice swift moving action film which Mr. Cruise is well-known for with a shade bit more nuance in the role than the usual bang-bang operations he is cinematically involved in.
When The Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon Governments Wasted A Whole Generation of Precious Youth In The Folly Of The Vietnam War Which Caused Every Young Man So Serious Reflection-An Encore-Frank Jackman’s Fate-With Bob Dylan’s Masters of War In Mind
Introduction by Greg Green
Life is full of surprises as everybody over the age of about three knows firsthand even if that hard fact does not stand out and light a fire under you at every possible moment. Take my own situation. A couple of years ago I was working hard at the American Film Gazette managing the overall film review schedule and trying to outdo the legendary publisher Larry Lorton from Film Daily in the number of films we did reviews on. Then Pete Markin (aka Allan Jackson who used that moniker in honor of a fallen hometown friend who taught him and a few of the other writers here a thing or two about the profession although he eventually fell on his own sword which is a story many had detailed here over time and I need not go into) brought me over here to run the day to day operations while he readied himself for retirement or some other project. Jesus, then the Summer of Love, 1967, or rather the 50th anniversary commemoration of the event hit this place like a whirling dervish. I was too young to know much about that time but had heard some pretty raw and scary stuff about from writers here who had been there under Markin’s guidance, the real Markin not Allan. In any case Allan went crazy to make sure the damn event got almost as much coverage after 50 years as when the thing actually got off the ground and created what he and the others hatched up as a re-work on the Generation of ’68.
All well and good. Well not all well and good since the younger writer could in the words of Alden Riley one of the leaders of the Young Turks give a fuck about the fucking Summer of Love, 1967 or any other year in that decade. That led to a show-down and the demise of Allan Jackson, a founding member, and my elevation to site manager and the overall poohbah of this operation. According to what I hear around the water cooler things are calmer now that not everybody has to spent 24/7/365 neck-deep in the 1960s like that was the golden age, like that was the Garden as Lance Lawrence mockingly called it.
All this to say that some of the stuff from the 1960s, and the recently concluded The Roots is the Toots rock and roll series is one example that I was more than happy to give an encore presentation (admittedly after a little nudge froof Eden m Sam Lowell and others), is worth another inspection. That brings us to the real-life story below about what happened to Frank Jackman when he was of draft age in the age when that meant something and meant some tough decisions for a whole generation of young men who didn’t know what the hell to do when their number got called. Yeah, maybe this tale is not the sexiest one on the block, on the lowdown of the 1960s when youth nation went overboard with sex, drugs and rock and roll but fifty years or so later it still reads like a good story that people should know about-and shout from the rooftops about as we enter another year of endless war in the endless wars of our times.
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Jack Callahan’s old friend from Sloan High School in Carver down in Southeastern Massachusetts Zack James (Zack short for Zachary not as is the fashion today to just name a baby Zack and be done with it) is an amateur writer and has been at it since he got out of high school. Found out that maybe by osmosis, something like that, the stuff Miss Enos taught him junior and senior years about literature and her favorite writers Hemingway, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker to name a few, that she would entice the English class stuck with him with through college where although he majored in Political Science he was in thrall to the English literature courses that he snuck into to his schedule. Snuck in although Zack knew practically speaking he had a snowball’s chance in hell, an expression he had learned from Hemingway he thought, of making a career out of the literary life, would more likely wind driving a cab through dangerous midnight sections of town occasionally getting mugged for his night’s work. That Political Science major winding up producing about the same practical results as the literary life though. Those literary designs stuck with him, savior stuck with him, through his tour of duty during the Vietnam War, and savior stayed with him through those tough years when he couldn’t quite get himself back to the “real” world after ‘Nam and let drugs and alcohol rule his life so that he wound up for some time as a “brother under the bridge” as Bruce Springsteen later put the situation in a song that he played continuously at times after he first heard it “Saigon, long gone…." Stuck with him after he recovered and started building up his sports supplies business, stuck with him through three happy/sad/savage/acrimonious “no go” marriages and a parcel of kids and child support. And was still sticking with him now that he had time to stretch out and write longer pieces, and beat away on the word processor a few million words on this and that.
Amateur writer meaning nothing more than that he liked to write and that writing was not his profession, that he did not depend on the pen for his livelihood(or rather more correctly these days not the pen but the word processor). That livelihood business was taken up running a small sports apparel store in a mall not far from Lexington (the Lexington of American revolutionary battles to give the correct town and state) where he now lived. Although he was not a professional writer his interest was such that he liked these days with Jimmy Shore, the famous ex-runner running the day to day operations of the store, to perform some of his written work in public at various “open mic” writing (and poetry) jams that have sprouted up in his area.
This “open mic” business Zack had embarked on s was a familiar concept to Jack from the days back in the 1960s when he would go to such events in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square and Beacon Hill to hear amateur folk-singers perfect their acts and try to be recognized as the new voice of their generation, or something like that. For “no singing voice, no musical ear” Jack those were basically cheap date nights if the girl he was with was into folk music. The way most of the "open mics" worked, although they probably called them talent searches then, was each performer would sign up to do one, two, maybe three songs depending on how long the list of those wishing to perform happened to be (the places where each performer kicked in a couple of bucks in order to play usually had shorter lists). These singers usually performed in the period in front of the night’s feature who very well might have been somebody who a few weeks before had been noticed by the owner during a previous "open mic" and asked to do a set of six to sixteen songs depending on the night and the length of the list of players in front of him or her. The featured performer played, unlike the "open mic" people, for the “basket” (maybe a hat) passed around the crowd in the audience and that was the night’s “pay.” A tough racket for those starting out like all such endeavors. The attrition rate was pretty high after the folk minute died down with arrival of other genre like folk rock, heavy rock, and acid rock although you still see a few old folkies around the Square or playing the separate “open mic” folk circuit that also run through church coffeehouses just like these writing jams.
Jack was not surprised then when Zack told him he would like him to come to hear him perform one of his works at the monthly third Thursday “open mic” at the Congregational Church in Arlington the next town over from Lexington. Zack told Jack that that night he was going to perform something he had written and thought on about Frank Jackman, about what had happened to Frank when he was in the Army during Vietnam War times.
Jack knew almost automatically what Zack was going to do, he would somehow use Bob Dylan’s Masters of War lyrics as part of his presentation. Jack and Zack ( a Vietnam veteran who got “religion” on the anti-war issue while he in the Army and became a fervent anti-war guy after that experience despite his personal problems) had met Frank in 1971 when they were doing some anti-war work among the soldiers at Fort Devens out in Ayer about forty miles west of Boston. Frank had gotten out of the Army several months before and since he was from Nashua in the southern part of New Hampshire not far from Devens and had heard about the G.I. coffeehouse, The Morning Report, where Jack and Zack were working as volunteers he had decided to volunteer to help out as well.
Now Frank was a quiet guy, quieter than Jack and Zack anyway, but one night he had told his Army story to a small group of volunteers gathered in the main room of the coffeehouse as they were planning to distribute Daniel Ellsberg’s sensational whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various spots around the base (including as it turned out inside the fort itself with one copy landing on the commanding general’s desk for good measure). He wanted to tell this story since he wanted to explain why he would not be able to go with them if they went inside the gates at Fort Devens.
Jack knew Zack was going to tell Frank’s story so he told Frank he would be there since he had not heard the song or Frank’s story in a long while and had forgotten parts of it. Moreover Zack wanted Jack there for moral support since this night other than the recitation of the lyrics he was going to speak off the cuff rather than his usual reading from some prepared paper.
That night Zack was already in the hall talking to the organizer, Eli Walsh, you may have heard of him since he has written some searing poems about his time in three tours Iraq. Jack felt right at home in this basement section of the church and he probably could have walked around blind-folded since the writing jams were on almost exactly the same model as the old folkie “open mics.” A table as you entered to pay your admission this night three dollars (although the tradition is that no one is turned away for lack of funds) with a kindly woman asking if you intended to perform and direct you to the sign-up sheet if so. Another smaller table with various cookies, snacks, soda, water and glasses for those who wished to have such goodies, and who were asked to leave a donation in the jar on that table if possible. The set-up in the hall this night included a small stage where the performers would present their material slightly above the audience. On the stage a lectern for those who wished to use that for physical support or to read their work from and the ubiquitous simple battery-powered sound system complete with microphone. For the audience a bevy of chairs, mostly mismatched, mostly having seen plenty of use, and mostly uncomfortable. After paying his admission fee he went over to Zack to let him know he was in the audience. Zack told him he was number seven on the list so not to wander too far once the session had begun.
This is the way Zack told the story and why Jack knew there would be some reference to Bob Dylan’s Masters of War that night:
Hi everybody my name is Zack James and I am glad that you all came out this cold night to hear Preston Borden present his moving war poetry and the rest of us to reflect on the main subject of this month’s writing jam-the endless wars that the American government under whatever regime of late has dragged us into, us kicking and screaming to little avail. I want to thank Eli as always for setting this event up every month and for his own thoughtful war poetry. [Some polite applause.] But enough for thanks and all that because tonight I want to recite a poem, well, not really a poem, but lyrics to a song, to a Bob Dylan song, Masters of War, so it might very well be considered a poem in some sense.
You know sometimes, a lot of times, a song, lyrics, a poem for that matter bring back certain associations. You know some song you heard on the radio when you went on your first date, your first dance, your first kiss, stuff like that which is forever etched in your memory and evokes that moment every time you hear it thereafter. Now how this Dylan song came back to me recently is a story in itself.
You remember Eli back in October when we went up to Maine to help the Maine Veterans for Peace on their yearly peace walk that I ran into Susan Rich, the Quaker gal we met up in Freeport who walked with us that day to Portland. [Eli shouted out “yes.”] I had not seen Susan in about forty years before that day, hadn’t seen her since the times we had worked together building up support for anti-war G.I.s out at the Morning Report coffeehouse in Ayer outside Fort Devens up on Route 2 about thirty miles from here. That’s when we met Frank Jackman who is the real subject of my presentation tonight since he is the one who I think about when I think about that song, think about his story and how that song relates to it.
Funny as many Dylan songs as I knew Masters of War, written by Dylan in 1963 I had never heard until 1971. Never heard the lyrics until I met Frank out at Fort Devens where after I was discharged from the Army that year I went to do some volunteer anti-war G.I. work at the coffeehouse outside the base in Army town Ayer. Frank too was a volunteer, had heard about the place somehow I forget how, who had grown up in Nashua up in southern New Hampshire and after he was discharged from the Army down at Fort Dix in New Jersey came to volunteer just like me and my old friend Jack Callahan who is sitting in the audience tonight. Now Frank was a quiet guy didn’t talk much about his military service but he made the anti-war soldiers who hung out there at night and on weekends feel at ease. One night thought he felt some urge to tell his story, tell why he thought it was unwise for him to participate in an anti-war action we were planning around the base. We were going to pass out copies of Daniel Ellsberg’s explosive whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various location around the fort and as it turned out on the base. The reason that Frank had balked at the prospect of going into the fort was that as part of his discharge paperwork was attached a statement that he was never to go on a military installation again. We all were startled by that remark, right Jack? [Jack nods agreement.]
And that night the heroic, our kind of heroic, Frank Jackman told us about the hows and whys of his Army experience. Frank had been drafted like a ton of guys back then, like me, and had allowed himself to be drafted in 1968 at the age of nineteen not being vociferously anti-war and not being aware then of the option of not taking the subsequent induction. After about three week down at Fort Dix, the main basic training facility for trainees coming from the Northeast then, he knew two things-he had made a serious mistake by allowing himself to be drafted and come hell or high water he was not going to fight against people he had no quarrel with in Vietnam. Of course the rigors of basic training and being away from home, away from anybody who could help him do he knew not what then kept him quiet and just waiting. Once basic was over and he got his Advanced Infantry Training assignment also at Fort Dix which was to be an infantryman at a time when old Uncle Sam only wanted infantrymen in the rice paddles and jungles of Vietnam things came to a head.
After a few weeks in AIT he got a three day weekend pass which allowed him to go legally off the base and he used that time to come up to Boston, or really Cambridge because what he was looking for was help to file an conscientious objector application and he knew the Quakers were historically the ones who would know about going about that process. That is ironically where Susan Rich comes in again, although indirectly this time, since Frank went to the Meeting House on Brattle Street where they were doing draft and G.I. resistance counseling and Susan was a member of that Meeting although she had never met him at that time. He was advised by one of the Quaker counselors that he could submit a C.O. application in the military, which he had previously not been sure was possible since nobody told anybody anything about that in the military, when he got back to Fort Dix but just then, although they were better later, the odds were stacked against him since he had already accepted induction. So he went back, put in his application, took a lot of crap from the lifers and officers in his company after that and little support, mainly indifference, from his fellow trainees. He still had to go through the training, the infantry training though and although he had taken M-16 rifle training in basic he almost balked at continuing to fire weapons especially when it came to machine guns. He didn’t balk but in the end that was not a big deal since fairly shortly after that his C.O. application was rejected although almost all those who interviewed him in the process though he was “sincere” in his beliefs. That point becomes important later.
Frank, although he knew his chances of being discharged as a C.O. were slim since he had based his application on his Catholic upbringing and more general moral and ethical grounds. The Catholic Church which unlike Quakers and Mennonites and the like who were absolutely against war held to a just war theory, Vietnam being mainly a just war in the Catholic hierarchy’s opinion. But Frank was sincere, more importantly, he was determined to not got to war despite his hawkish family and his hometown friends,’ some who had already served, served in Vietnam too, scorn and lack of support. So he went back up to Cambridge on another three day pass to get some advice, which he actually didn’t take in the end or rather only partially took up which had been to get a lawyer they would recommend and fight the C.O. denial in Federal court even though that was also still a long shot then.
Frank checked with the lawyer alright, Steve Brady, who had been radicalized by the war and was offering his services on a sliding scale basis to G.I.s since he also had the added virtue of having been in the JAG in the military and so knew some of the ropes of the military legal system, and legal action was taken but Frank was one of those old time avenging Jehovah types like John Brown or one of those guys and despite being a Catholic rather than a high holy Protestant which is the usual denomination for avenging angels decided to actively resist the military. And did it in fairly simple way when you think about it. One Monday morning when the whole of AIT was on the parade field for their weekly morning report ceremony Frank came out of his barracks with his civilian clothes on and carrying a handmade sign which read “Bring the Troops Home Now!”
That sign was simply but his life got a lot more complicated after that. In the immediate sense that meant he was pulled down on the ground by two lifer sergeants and brought to the Provost Marshal’s office since they were not sure that some dippy-hippie from near-by New York City might be pulling a stunt. When they found out that he was a soldier they threw him into solitary in the stockade.
For his offenses Frank was given a special court-martial which meant he faced six month maximum sentence which a panel of officers at his court-martial ultimately sentenced him to after a seven day trial which Steve Brady did his best to try to make into an anti-war platform but given the limitation of courts for such actions was only partially successful. After that six months was up minus some good time Frank was assigned to a special dead-beat unit waiting further action either by the military or in the federal district court in New Jersey. Still in high Jehovah form the next Monday morning after he was released he went out to that same parade field in civilian clothes carrying another homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home Now!” and he was again manhandled by another pair of lifer sergeants and this time thrown directly into solitary in the stockade since they knew who they were dealing with by then. And again he was given a special court-martial and duly sentenced by another panel of military officers to the six months maximum.
Frank admitted at that point he was in a little despair at the notion that he might have to keep doing the same action over and over again for eternity. Well he wound up serving almost all of that second six month sentence but then he got a break. That is where listening to the Quakers a little to get legal advice did help. See what Steve Brady, like I said an ex-World War II Army JAG officer turned anti-war activist lawyer, did was take the rejection of his C.O. application to Federal District Court in New Jersey on a writ of habeas corpus arguing that since all Army interviewers agreed Frank was “sincere” that it had been arbitrary and capricious of the Army to turn down his application. And given that the United States Supreme Court and some lower court decisions had by then expanded who could be considered a C.O. beyond the historically recognized groupings and creeds the cranky judge in the lower court case agreed and granted that writ of habeas corpus. Frank was let out with an honorable discharge, ironically therefore entitled to all veterans’ benefits but with the stipulation that he never go onto a military base again under penalty of arrest and trial. Whether that could be enforced as a matter of course he said he did not want to test since he was hardily sick of military bases in any case.
So where does Bob Dylan’s Masters of War come into the picture. Well as you know, or should know every prisoner, every convicted prisoner, has the right to make a statement in his or her defense during the trial or at the sentencing phase. Frank at both his court-martials rose up and recited Bob Dylan’s Masters of War for the record. So for all eternity, or a while anyway, in some secret recess of the Army archives (and of the federal courts too) there is that defiant statement of a real hero of the Vietnam War. Nice right?
Here is what had those bloated military officers on Frank’s court-martial board seeing red and ready to swing him from the highest gallows, yeah, swing him high.
Masters Of War-Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin’ But build to destroy You play with my world Like it’s your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion As young people’s blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud
You’ve thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain’t worth the blood That runs in your veins
How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I’m young You might say I’m unlearned But there’s one thing I know Though I’m younger than you Even Jesus would never Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die And your death’ll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I’ll watch while you’re lowered Down to your deathbed And I’ll stand o’er your grave ’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
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