Sunday, November 08, 2015

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

 

 

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber

One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in Johnny D’s over in Somerville, over near the Davis Square monster Redline MBTA stop sipping a couple of Anchor Steam beers, a taste acquired by Sam out in Frisco town in the old days on hot nights like that one waiting for the show to begin Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. (The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid although you might not have designated yourself as such at that age to learn a little about the dying profession of family farmer and about farm machinery, Old MacDonald, ditto on the family farmer stuff and as a bonus the animals of the farm kingdom, Humpty Dumpty, a silly overweight goof who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression or used it in the high Roman Catholic Morris household out in Troy, New York where Ralph grew up and still lives, Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure looking for water like they couldn’t have gone to the family kitchen sink tap for their needs showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. in case you have forgotten.) Music embedded in the back of your mind, coming forth sometimes out of the blue even fifty years later (and maybe relating to other memory difficulties among the AARP-worthy but we shall skip over that since this is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Or as in the case of music in junior high school as Sam chimed in with his opinion as he thought about switching over to a high-shelf whiskey, his natural drink of late, despite the hot night and hot room beginning to fill up with blues aficionados who have come to listen to the “second coming,” the blues of James Montgomery and his back-up blues band. That “second coming” referring to guys, now greying guys, who picked up the blues, especially the citified electric blues after discovering the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim and James Cotton back in their 1960s youth, made a decent living out of it and were still playing small clubs and other venues to keep the tradition alive and to pass it on to the kids who were not even born when the first wave guys came out of the hell-hole Delta south of Mister James Crow sometime around or after World War II and plugged  their guitars into the next gin mill electric outlet in places off of Maxwell Street in Chicago, nursing their acts, honing their skills.  

Yeah, that hormonal bust out junior high weekly music class with Mr. Dasher which made Sam chuckle a bit, maybe that third  bottle of beer sipping getting him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on him that time when the rhyming simon craze was going through the nation’s schools. Thinking just then that today if some teacher or school administrator was astute enough to bother to listen to what teenage kids say amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult, in an excess of caution old Mister Dasher might be in a peck of trouble if anyone wanted to be nasty about the implication of that innocent rhyme.  Yeah, Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher, who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks so you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death. (Sam and his corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore found out later that he was motivated by a desperate rear-guard action to wean his charges away from rock and roll, away from the devil’s music although he would not have called it that because he was too cool to say stuff like that, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as they all lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain.)  

Ralph agreed running through his own junior high school litany with Miss Hunt (although a few years older than Sam he had not run through the rhyming simon craze so had no moniker for the old witch although now he wished he had and it would not be nice either). He added that some of the remembered music  reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in Ralph’s case was the music that got his parents through his father’s soldierly slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to her door telling her the bad news World War II. You know, Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam’s and Ralph’s generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters  and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of their own generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what they wanted to hear when they had their transistor radios to their ear up in their bedrooms.

That mention of transistor radios got them yakking about that old instrument which got them through many a hard teenage angst and alienation night. That yakking reflecting their both getting mellow on the sweet beer and thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again if they were to make it through both sets that night. This transistor thing by the way for the young was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like an iPod or MP3 except you couldn’t download or anything like that. Primitive technology okay but life-saving nevertheless. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously strictly only played the music that got all of our parents through their war before the rock break-out made somebody at the station realize that you could made more advertising revenue selling ads for stuff like records, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, and cool clothes and accessories than refrigerators and stoves to adults).

Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, they could hear Elvis sounding all sexy according to one girl Sam knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television, Chuck telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, that they all had to move over, Bo asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate, Buddy crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming all with his raucous High School Confidential  from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.

The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired by Sam through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once he got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, Sam didn’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.  (Sam later carried Ralph along on the genre after they had met down in Washington, D.C. in 1971, had been arrested and held in detention at RFK Stadium for trying to shut down the government if it did not shut the Vietnam War, had become life-long friends and Ralph began to dig the blues when he came to Cambridge to visit).

The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t work at all without kudos to blues chords, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through Sam’s brain.

What did not take a long time to do once Sam got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when he saw him perform. Once Sam had seen him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There the Wolf was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that polished professionalism when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered early on in their career as they had covered many other Chess Records blues numbers, as had in an ironic twist a whole generation English rockers in the 1960s) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band and playing like god’s own avenging angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did. They both hoped that greying James Montgomery, master harmonica player in his own right, blew the roof off of the house as they spied the wait person coming their way and James moving onto the stage getting ready to burn up the microphone. Yes, that blues calling is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

 


A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s where the name Woody Guthrie had been imprinted on lots of work by the then “new breed” protest/social commentary troubadour folk singers like Bob Dylan (who actually spent time in Woody’s hospital room with him when he first came East from Hibbing out of Dinktown in Minneapolis and wrote an early paean called Song To Woody on his first or second album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who made a very nice career out of being a true Woody acolyte and had expected Dylan who had subsequently moved on, moved very far on to more lyrical work to do the same), and Stubby Tatum, probably the truest acolyte since he was instrumental in putting a lot of Woody’s unpublished poems and art work out for public inspection and specialized in Woody songs, first around Harvard Square and then wherever he could get a gig, which to say the least were not among the most well know or well thought out of Woody’s works. After some thought I pinpointed the first time I heard a Woody song to a seventh grade music class, Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well and would probably have him up before some board of inquiry just because a bunch of moody, alienated hormonally-crazed seventh graders were into a rhyming fad that lasted until the next fad a few weeks or months later, when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of the world music songbook made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land. Little did we know until a few years later when some former student confronted him about why we were made to learn all those silly songs he made us memorize and he told that student that he had done so in order to, fruitlessly as it turned out, break us from our undying devotion to rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Wanda, Brenda, Bo, Buddy, the Big Bopper and every single doo wop group, male or female. If anybody wants to create a board of inquiry over that Mister Dasher indiscretion complete with a jury of still irate "rock and roll will never die" aficionados you have my support.   

In thinking about Woody the obvious subsequent question of when I first heard the late Pete Seeger sing, a man who acted as the transmission belt between generations, I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time, the first wave of performers, I heard as I connected with the emerging folk minute of the early 1960s. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man, some old time Jehovah cometh Calvinist avenging angel, singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (who turned out to be folk historian and seminal folk revival figure Dave Von Ronk, who as far as I know later from his politics had no particular religious bent,if any, but who sure sounded like he was heralding the second coming). I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene (a song that in the true oral tradition has many versions and depending on the pedigree fewer or more verses, Lead Belly’s being comparatively short). In those days, in the early 1950s I think, the Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush.

Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger who along with the father and son Lomaxes  did so much to record the old time roots music out on location in the hills and hollows of the South, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized (although now much of that early commercial music makes up the key folk anthology put together by Harry Smith and which every self-respecting folkie performer in the early 1960s treated like a bible). Pete put a lot of it together, a lot of interests. Got the young interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle.

Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. But Pete also put his pen to paper to write some searing contemporary lyrics just like those “new breed” protest folk singers he helped nurture and probably the most famous to come out of that period, asking a very good question then, a question still be asked now if more desperately than even then, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.  Now a new generation looks like it too is ready to pick up the torch after the long “night of the long knives” we have faced since those days. The music is there to greet them in their new titanic struggles. 



The Struggle Continues … Four Ways To Support Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Chelsea Manning

The Struggle Continues … Four  Ways To Support Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Chelsea  Manning

*Sign the public petition to President Obama – Sign online http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/chelseamanning  “President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning,” and make copies to share with friends and family!

You  can also call (Comments”202-456-1111), write The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, e-mail-(http://www.whitehouse.gov’contact/submitquestions-and comments) to demand that President Obama use his constitutional power under Article II, Section II to pardon Private Manning now.
*Start a stand -out, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, in your town square to publicize the pardon and clemency campaigns.  Contact the Chelsea Manning SupportNetwork for help with materials and organizing tips http://www.chelseamanning.org/

*Contribute to the Chelsea  Manning Defense Fund- now that the trial has finished funds are urgently needed for the pardon campaign and for future military and civilian court appeals. The hard fact of the American legal system, military of civilian, is the more funds available the better the defense, especially in political prisoner cases like Private Manning’s. The government had unlimited financial and personnel resources to prosecute Private Manning at trial. And used them as it will on any future legal proceedings. So help out with whatever you can spare. For link go to http://www.chelseamanning.org/

*Write letters of solidarity to Private Manning while she is serving her sentence. She wishes to be addressed as Chelsea and have feminine pronouns used when referring to her. Private Manning’s mailing address: Chelsea E. Manning, 89289, 1300 N. Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304.

Private Manning cannot receive stamps or money in any form. Photos must be on copy paper. Along with “contraband,” “inflammatory material” is not allowed. Six page maximum.

*Call: (913) 758-3600-Write to:Commander U.S. Detention Barracks 1301 N Warehouse Rd
Ft. Leavenworth KS 66027-Tell them: “Transgender rights are human rights! Respect Private Manning’s identity by acknowledging the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ whenever possible, including in mail addressed to her, and by allowing her access to appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT).” (for more details-http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html#!/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html

******



Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

 

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

 

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27th birthday in December with a rally (and will again this year on her 28th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              



Markin comments (Winter 2014):   


There is no question now that Chelsea Manning’s trial, if one can called what took place down in Fort Meade a trial in the summer of 2013 rather than a travesty, a year after her conviction on twenty plus counts and having received an outrageous thirty-five year sentence essentially for telling us the truth about American atrocities and nefarious actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else the American government can stick its nose that her case has dropped from view. Although she occasionally gets an Op/Ed opportunity, including in the New York Times, a newspaper which while recoiling at the severity of the sentence in the immediate reaction did not question the justice of the conviction, and has several legal moves going from action to get the necessary hormonal treatments reflecting her real sexual identity (which the Army has stonewalled on and which even the New York Times has called for implementing) to now preparing the first appeal of her conviction to another military tribunal the popular uproar against her imprisonment has become a hush. While the appeals process may produce some results, perhaps a reduction in sentence, the short way home for her is a presidential pardon right now. I urge everybody to Google Amnesty International and sign on to the online petition to put the pressure on President Barack Obama for clemency.                   


I attended some of the sessions of Chelsea Manning’s court-martial in the summer of 2013 and am often asked these days in speaking for her release about what she could expect from the various procedures going forward to try to “spring” her from the clutches of the American government, or as I say whenever I get the chance to “not leave our buddy behind” in the time-honored military parlance. I have usually answered depending on what stage her post-conviction case is in that her sentence was draconian by all standards for someone who did not, although they tried to pin this on her, “aid the enemy.” Certainly Judge Lind though she was being lenient with thirty-five years when the government wanted sixty (and originally much more before some of the counts were consolidated). The next step was to appeal, really now that I think about it, a pro forma appeal to the commanding general of the Washington, D.C. military district where the trial was held. There were plenty of grounds to reduce the sentence but General Buchanan backed up his trial judge in the winter of 2014. Leaving Chelsea supporters right now with only the prospect of a presidential pardon to fight for as the court appeals are put together which will take some time. This is how I put the matter at one meeting:


“No question since her trial, conviction, and draconian sentence of thirty-five years imposed by a vindictive American government heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning’s has fallen off the radar. The incessant news cycle which has a short life cycle covered her case sporadically, covered the verdict, covered the sentencing and with some snickers cover her announcement directly after the sentencing that she wanted to live as her true self, a woman. (A fact that her supporters were aware of prior to the announcement but agreed that the issue of her sexual identity should not get mixed up with her heroic actions during the pre-trial and trial periods.) Since then despite occasional public rallies and actions her case had tended, as most political prisoner cases do, to get caught up in the appeals process and that keeps it out of the limelight.”            


Over the past year or so Chelsea Manning has been honored and remembered by the Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade in Boston in such events as the VFP-led Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, the Memorial Day anti-war observance, the yearly Gay Pride Parade, the Rockport July 4th parade, the VFP-led Veterans Day Peace Parade, and on December 17th her birthday. We have marched with a banner calling for her freedom, distribute literature about her case and call on one and all to sign the pardon petitions. The banner has drawn applause and return shouts of “Free Chelsea.” The Smedley Butler Brigade continues to stand behind our sister. We will not leave her behind. We also urge everybody to sign the Amnesty International on-line petition calling on President Obama to use his constitutional authority to pardon Chelsea Manning


http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-one-year-after-her-conviction-chelsea-manning-must-be-released-2014-07-30  


Additional Markin comment on his reasons for supporting Chelsea Manning:


I got my start in working with anti-war GIs back in the early 1970s after my own military service was over. After my own service I had felt a compelling need to fight the monster from the outside after basically fruitless and difficult efforts inside once I got “religion” on the war issue first-hand. That work included helping create a couple of GI coffeehouses near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down at Fort Dix in New Jersey in order for GIs to have a “friendly” space in which to think through what they wanted to do in relationship to the military.


Some wanted help to apply for the then tough to get discharge for conscientious objection. Tough because once inside the military, at least this was the way things went then, the military argued against the depth of the applying soldier’s convictions and tended to dismiss such applications out of hand. Only after a few civil court cases opened up the application process later when the courts ruled that the military was acting arbitrarily and capriciously in rejecting such applications out of hand did things open up a little in that channel. Others wanted to know their rights against what they were told by their officers and NCOs. But most, the great majority, many who had already served in hell-hole Vietnam, wanted a place, a non-military place, a non-GI club, where they could get away from the smell, taste, and macho talk of war.


Although there are still a few places where the remnants of coffeehouses exist like the classic Oleo Strut down at Fort Hood in Texas the wars of the past decade or so has produced no great GI resistance like against the Vietnam War when half the Army in America and Vietnam seemed to be in mutiny against their officers, against their ugly tasks of killing every “gook” who crossed their path for no known reason except hubris, and against the stifling of their rights as citizens. At one point no anti-war march was worthy of the name if it did not have a contingent of soldiers in uniform leading the thing. There are many reasons for this difference in attitude, mainly the kind of volunteer the military accepts but probably a greater factor is that back then was the dominance of the citizen-soldier, the draftee, in stirring things up, stirring things up inside as a reflection of what was going on out on the streets and on the campuses. I still firmly believe that in the final analysis you have to get to the “cannon fodder,” the grunts, the private soldier if you want to stop the incessant war machine. Since we are commemorating, if that is the right word the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I check out what happened, for example, on the Russian front when the desperate soldiers left the trenches during 1917 after they got fed up with the Czar, with the trenches, with the landlords, and the whole senseless mess.


Everyone who has the least bit of sympathy for the anti-war struggles of the past decade should admire what Chelsea Manning has done by her actions releasing that treasure trove of information about American atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere. She has certainly paid the price for her convictions with a draconian sentence. It is hard to judge how history will record any particular heroic action like hers but if the last real case with which her action can be compared with is a guide, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, she should find an honored spot. Moreover Chelsea took her actions while in the military which has its own peculiar justice system. Her action, unlike back in Vietnam War times, when the Army was half in mutiny was one of precious few this time out. Now that I think about she does not have to worry about her honored place in history. It is already assured. But just to be on the safe side let’s fight like hell for her freedom. We will not leave our sister Chelsea behind.              

From The New Soldiers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Soldiers- Brother Jacob’s Last Stand


From The New Soldiers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Soldiers- Brother Jacob’s Last Stand  





From The Pen Of Frank Jackman:

A while back, maybe a couple of years ago now, I did a retrospective series of sketches under the working title of Brothers Under The Bridge about guys, about war veterans, Vietnam War veterans that I had started in the late 1970s under the title Going To The “Jungle, a title which reflected the jungles of Vietnam from where they had been and the subsequent hobo jungle where they wound up. I did not have a chance to complete that series since the publication that I was writing them for out in California, the East Bay Eye, like a lot of alternative media operations folded up as the 1960s went into a deep ebb tide and the audience for such journals went back to the professions, academia, and bourgeois politics. Those sketches centered on some groups of returning veterans who could not cope with the “real” world after Vietnam and had built themselves an alternate “community” mostly down in Southern California and who by life’s circumstances later got called the “brothers under the bridge.”

Let me reproduce in part my motivation for that latter series because now for different reasons I am finding out stories about guys and gals from the recent Iraq and Afghan occupations that also can’t cope with the “real” world and are forming, well, I don’t know exactly what they are forming but I damn well know it feels a lot like that long ago “brothers under the bridge.”:

“In the first installment of this series of sketches I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the mid-1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down Los Angeles way, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy for fellow veterans since I had been in the military, grudgingly, during the Vietnam War period although not in combat were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another one down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who I had worked with after my own military service was over knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives on the Internet, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back to the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way…”

With that introduction now, after having recently as a favor to an old high school classmate tried to find his son, Jack, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and upon discharge got caught up in some stuff he could not handle, another generation of soldiers needs to be heard, need their stories told. In the old series I noted that I liked to finish up these introductions by placing the sketches under a particular sign; no question Brother Jacobs’s sign is the sign of the last stand.

This sketch is slightly different from a previous one about Private Jack Dawson’s private war in the aftermath of his service in Iraq and Afghanistan where I knew many details about his life from his father, an old high school classmate of mine, and later Jack himself when I found him down in Southern California. In the case of Brother Jacob I only know from a few chance meetings with him down at Fort Meade and what was presented in his on-line memorial from the Chelsea Manning Support Network about his life. I do know this though that Brother Jacob automatically rates a nod (the old school days “nod” that signified that a guy who you did not know, was not one of your corner boys but who you maybe played some pick-up game against, maybe had in class was “cool”) for his early and fervent support for his fellow soldier, Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley), who was in a heap of trouble with the American government and its military of which she was part for leaking lots of information about American atrocities in Iraq and other information that the government would rather not have us know about on the vital questions of war and peace.

Brother Jacob like many ex-soldiers, myself included, came to Chelsea’s aid once he got “religion” on what seven kinds of hell the American government was up to in Iraq (and Afghanistan).  Brother Jacob was, as we in Veterans for Peace and other ex-soldier supporters, just following the old adage learned early on in basic training-you do not leave your buddy behind. And Brother Jacob and the rest of us will not leave Chelsea behind to face that thirty-five year sentence alone. Now we have Brother Jacob’s memory to honor as we continue our work.

Brother Jacob, Presente!, yeah,  Brother Jacob, Presente !    

 

Out In The Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind


Out In The Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind   

 



From The Pen Of Sam Lowell 
 

Frank Jackman’s old friend Jack Dawson, his old friend from corner boy days starting in the fifth grade down in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston in the 1950s, had a while back written a short review about seeing the film Jersey Boys. Prior to viewing the film with his lovely wife, Anna, Frank had told him a summary of the plot-line (and the song playlist) one night when they were having one of their periodic “watering hole” get- togethers to cut up old touches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston when Frank was in town for a conference. Based on that exchange Jack was determined to see the film. A few days later after seeing the film, seeing how a bunch of “from hunger” working class kids from Jersey (but given the plot-line it could have been lots of places including the “projects” down in Carver where he had come of age), how they made it big, made their fifteen minutes of fame and then some Jack started to think about those old days when chance had caused him to meet Frank after his family had moved from Clintonville in the summer before fifth grade and caused the two of them along with a couple of other corner boys, Red Radley and Jimmy Jenkins, in sixth grade to create their own (imitative) doo-wop group in an attempt to break out of their youthful jails.    

What got Jack thinking along those lines was that Frank had seen the film with his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, who had told Frank she had trouble “getting into” the story line at the beginning because as Frank told Jack before he gave him the details of the film about the rise and fall of the iconic early 1960s group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the scenes were far too removed from her own strait-laced middle-class upbringing in Manhattan. Laura did said that she assumed that part of the film had dovetailed with Frank’s experiences in his own youth and as well with the kind of things he have been writing about from that period lately. The kind of things that Frank and Jack discussed at their sessions about growing up absurd in the 1950s since they had recently rekindled their friendship after many years of going their own ways. Laura had been right about that, about going back to the mist of time and grabbing some thoughts about how those days had formed him, for better or worse, no question.

Frank’s purpose had not though been to put paid to some ghosts of the past like a lot of guys he knew were interested in doing by physically revisiting growing up hometowns like Josh Breslin going back up to Olde Saco in Maine and getting the wits scared out of him that somebody might recognize him at every turn he made, like brawny Bart Webber going to re-flame old sports dreams by attending the home football games with other old geezers from his high school, or like one of his other pals, Jimmy Jenkins who had gone to his fiftieth class reunion and came away more depressed than anything else since all the old gang, those still walking, talked about was various medical conditions and their grandchildren which left him cold. No, that part was done with this late in the game and the fates had called their shots on that saga already.

Moreover he certainly did not intend to evaluate, Jesus, not to always evaluate how this or that thing that happened back then turned the great Mandela any particular but merely to put together some interesting tidbits for Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of other his other later acquaintances Josh Breslin and Phil Larkin who were from the same era when everybody got together at the Sunnyville, or at the Kennebunk Pub up in Maine where Josh lived when they all tired of the city and needed to be washed clean by the ocean spray off the fearsome blue-green Atlantic Ocean. 

Of course lately Jack had been, feeding off Frank’s tidbits, writing sketches about his own musical coming of age time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time frame that the Four Seasons had blossomed. Frank and Jack both agreed that except for the classic doo wop be-bop song, Sherri, they were not fans of the Four Seasons although unlike other groups and singers of the time Jack did not hate their sound. What had perked Jack’s interest in this film was the corner boy aspect, Jersey corner boy aspect, which was not all that unlike his Carver corner boy growing up saga.        

In fact at certain points the early story of the guys who formed the core of the original group, Frankie, Tommy and Nick was so very, very similar to parts of Jack’s corner boy experiences that he had to laugh. The options for corner boys, guys who grew up “from hunger” in the working class neighborhoods, usually “the projects,” around the country had those same options once they came of age, the Army one way or another many times under some judge’s “trying to make a man out you” threat of the Army or jail, for those who rap sheets were too long to warrant options then just jail or for a guy they knew, Slammer Johnson who was as tough as they come at age twelve and even older guys, serious corner boys who knew a thing or two about whipsaw chains and brass knuckles the reformatory feared him, became famous in certain nefarious circles. Jack knew that part, knew that “wanting habits” hunger that all the young guys in Carver were trying break from, break from when they saw Elvis or Jerry Lee burning stages up and so he and the boys had tried the latter, the fame game, at one point.

It all started in the summer before sixth grade when doo wop was all the craze after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had asked the magic question-why do fools fall in love- and drove the song by the same name to the top of the charts. There were other guys groups (girls who were cruising to the top the charts too they really weren’t interested in because there was no way they could get anything to help them from girl groups) that hit it big, the Five Satins, The Dubs, The Chasers, The Be-Bop Boys and a bunch of others, mostly black guys (and an occasional girl mixed in) which they knew from watching American Bandstand in the afternoons after school. The black aspect was not a big deal, or they didn’t think much about it since the only time they saw black people was on television and beside they, meaning mainly Jack figured their niche would be as white guy doo-woppers. Again it was not all thought out in such a refined manner what was thought out was that fame part, thought out big time.   

That summer was when these corner boys’ natural leader, Red Radley, driven to distraction by the notion of fame got them together around their corner every night to practice. Since there were not any stores in the “projects” their corner had been in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School, on hot summer nights all lit up brightly since the night basketball leagues would be holding forth across the field. So under “the street lights” just like those New York City and Philly guys they sang. Sang the doo-wop craze stuff which Frankie Limon and the Teenagers had started and which Red following Jack’s lead figured they could cash in on.

That doo wop worked, well, worked for what their other purpose was, gathering interesting girls around them. See, a lot of this had to do with sexually stirrings, with finally noticing that that shapeless girls from class were starting to get shapes and who in the years before had been nuisances but now were, well, interesting. So each night all through that summer as day turned to night they crooned, kept working on their timing, and talking about their look, their niche. At first they were left to themselves maybe the older serious basketball players would chuckle as the left the courts but then one night a couple of girls, girls they knew from class were standing maybe fifty yards away just kind of listening. A few nights later there would be several girls standing at that distance. Jack thought that if they did a song that all the girls could join in on they might come closer. So they switched up and did the Tune-Weavers’ Happy Birthday Baby everybody knew and was easy to sing. The girls came running. The summer passed that way with the boy-girl thing working its virginal way through the old neighborhood.        

But see here is where things broke down. Sure they could draw the local girls in, girls who, well, had sexual stirrings too but here is what happened. The problem though was, unlike Frankie and the Four Seasons, they really did not have any serious musical talent (except Red) and did not at they did have a new angle on the music of the times. Moreover Frank’s voice changed and threw everything off (later Jack’s and then Jimmy’s as well). So, sadly, this edition of the corner boys broke up. Red was bitter since he more than the rest of them was staking his life, his break-out for the ‘from hungers” on musical fame. He would a little later turn against any musical aspirations, get himself into a new career path, the life of crime (which had Jack and to a lesser extent Frank in its thrall for a while, remember they were from hunger too, before they backed off but it was a close thing, very close).

Red would go on to form another corner boy crowd based on the midnight creeps around the houses of the Mayfair swells and some of those corner boys wound up in the Army, a couple dead in Vietnam for their troubles names now etched in black marble down in Washington and on a granite monument on Carver Commons, or in jail (including Red after he failed to make a career singing and who in the end wound up on the short end of a shoot-out with the cops trying to rob a White Hen down in some godforsaken town in North Carolina).       

Those last parts, the parts about the fate of the Reds of the world as against the luck of the Four Seasons is important because no matter how “from hunger” you are you need the talent and the quirky niche in order to survive in the musical world. Even then as became apparent as the film unfolded fame is a very close thing. A couple of twists one way or another and the fifteen minutes of fame is up, gone. And fame as Frankie Valli and the boys found out the hard way despite their hard work doesn’t shield you from life’s woes as the break-up of the group, Frankie’s daughter’s death and the financial problems created by “from hunger” Tommy who thought the money would rain in their faces forever attest to. Not an unfamiliar fame story but one worth telling once again. And the Carver boys story too.   

[By the way as the film moved on to the performance parts when the Four Seasons started getting some breaks, got a natural song-writer, and got tight and in synch both Laura and Anna said they did settle in and liked the rest of the film. And why wouldn’t they as children of that time as well the Carver corner boys when they were glued to their transistor radios up in some midnight wanderlust bedroom listening to the aforementioned Sherri, other like Dawn, Walk Like A Man,  Rag Dog, Big Girls Don’t Cry and all the rest that drove the young girls wild back then.]

 

 

The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left

The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left   
 

Click below to link to The Rag Blog  

http://www.theragblog.com/


Ralph Morris had recently written a letter to his old friend and comrade Sam Lowell from the Vietnam anti-war struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s about how the advent of the Internet and with it the instrument of blogging many old time radicals like themselves had gained a new lease on life or at least some kind of cyber-audience after years of small rallies, small demonstrations, writing for small unread journals and preaching to the choir. Well, maybe not so many old time radicals since that lot has been as subject to the hazards of the actuarial charts as any other aging demographic and additionally subject to the change of heart politics that come over people as they age, and age especially in the post 9/11 world when many of them have unquestionably sided with whatever Washington regime was most belligerent in its use of military weaponry to make Americans “safe” in a dangerous world. Ralph noted a few blogs that he had “followed” (following in cyberspace not requiring anything more than a click to link you in as a follower, or another clink to opt out of status, and not anything as sinister as some cult nightmare thing that every parent worries about happening to their kids) including The Rag Blog out of Texas where he noted that every well-known and half-well-known name from the counter-cultural and oppositional politics of the 1960s apparently had found a home.

Ralph encouraged Sam to “follow” that blog to see what he meant. Sam did so for a while and wrote back to Ralph that he thought it was ironic that so many still-living personalities from that time like Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohr, the late Carl Davidson and a host of others who had run themselves ragged (and others, too many others, many leaving the movement never to return as a result ) with whatever ill-conceived theory they could come up with to seem “smart” against the most vicious powerful enemies of all humankind, chiefly in the "heart of the beast," the United States government.

Life, or at least the life of their theories, has not been kind to them and now a goodly number of them (check the Rag Blog if you don't believe is what both Ralph and Sam recommended when another old radical friend discounted what they had seen)  have made that unkind condition a basis for further muddying the waters when what we need is some clarity. Sam and Ralph had always been rank and file radicals in the days when being so was a badge of distinction and still carry on the struggle as best they can while aging less than gracefully. That aging though apparently has not stopped Sam from getting bilious about those who “led” back in the day and who when the deal went down and the government unleashed its fangs went back to academia, the think tanks, and the small unread journals while guys like him who kept the faith have done so at some considerable personal expense.


So Sam never a theorist, never a writer although not a Jimmy Higgins (a guy who set up the chairs at meetings stuff like that) decided to write something about those old time radicals still selling the same snake oil as they did in sunnier days. Here is what he had to say straight up:    
 

When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers back in the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” (that expression not made up by me but my old time radical friend Ralph Morris who serve some time in prison for participating in various actions and who saw that the people he was being led by make their significant actions in that year) we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics (mainly Communist Party, Socialist Worker Party adherents, an occasion labor union bureaucrat devotee of the moribund Socialist Party, Max Shachtman on a rant, Albert Shanker ditto, some left-overs from the Workmen’s Circle and ageless Wobblies). (The designation “Generation of ’68 " for those not in the know signifying 1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the general population [the military leaders and a few civilians in their more candid moments knew years before what a lost deal it was] to the American bourgeois political party  upheavals that led to Chicago Democratic Party Convention shedding of any pretense of civility in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits of that student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought once the struggle for power, for state power was seriously on the agenda and we had to look elsewhere for some segment of society that had the social power to lead that struggle.)

Those scorned old leftists, again mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on (thuggish  Stalinists to boot) who survived the 1950s red scare by keeping their heads down (not a cowardly thing, the only cowardly thing being “snitching” to save your worthless neck when the "red-hunters" came knocking at your door, to do that surviving by any other means necessary including that down-turned head waiting for sunnier days when you could once again get a hearing in the public square) or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare by keeping their heads down (ditto on the above) as they carried the revolutionary torch forward and who had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us.


Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face-rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress. Yeah, sure easy to see now but then as the poet said “to be alive was very heaven.”

Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy beyond taking to the streets and trying to shut down specific targets were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going or not except cautionary tales but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.

Problem is that unlike our ‘68 generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be, should be youthful voices crying to the high heavens. (Recent small stirrings out of the remnant of Occupy and Black Lives Matter do not negate the  greater youthful indifference to our message.)  That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And one of the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.          

So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody with some kind of name familiar to me and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections recorded no question are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that  would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the  last forty plus years. That socialist “paradise” is still as forlorn and faraway as ever. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.

Recently I wrote a short piece, Looking For A Few Good Revolutionary Intellectuals, on a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out and I named some of the possible locations that I had noted they were hiding away in). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back (Fall, 2011), the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class (classes) and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.

I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that it is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its capitalist globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high-speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics; immigration, the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days are now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against the robber barons should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.   

One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out,  more times than I care to mention included my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.