A View From The Left-Down With Obama’s Deportations!-Central American Refugees: Let Them Stay!

Workers Vanguard No. 1082	29 January 2016

Down With Obama’s Deportations!-Central American Refugees: Let Them Stay!

 

Once again, the nativist, anti-immigrant rants spewed by the leading Republican presidential hopefuls all but assure a massive Latino vote in November for the Democrats, the “lesser evil” party of racist U.S. imperialism. Barack Obama first waltzed into the White House with the heavy backing of Latino voters in 2008, having promised a “path” to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. But that path was marked with a giant exit sign.

With a record-breaking 2.5 million deportations already during Obama’s presidency, the administration rang in its last year in office by ordering a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) raids over New Year’s weekend in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. Those targeted had mainly fled extreme violence and poverty in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Scores were deported, dozens were dragged into federal detention centers, and thousands more were left terrified that they would be next.

Obama has, in effect, issued a death warrant for many of the refugees, mainly women and children, being expelled. Since their story first grabbed headlines in 2014, when an estimated 100,000 Central American refugees crossed the border, at least 83 people have been killed after being sent back. The same conditions of desperate poverty and violence—a hell created and reinforced by over a century of U.S. imperialist subjugation—led to a new spike in border crossings by Central Americans in late 2015. The homicide rate in El Salvador swelled by 70 percent last year, surpassing that of Honduras as the world’s highest for a country not in the midst of war. Women are particularly compelled to flee, subject to terror, rape and extortion by gangs and military thugs.

The “choice” for the millions of undocumented immigrants who risk their lives to set foot in this country is either to hide in the shadows or to languish in shoddy, overcrowded I.C.E. dungeons. The immigration detention facilities strewn across the country, including for-profit prisons, are mandated by Congress to fill a daily “bed quota” of 34,000. They are notorious for violence and mistreatment, including insufficient food and water. In late October, dozens of Central American women went on hunger strike in a Texas facility to protest the brutal conditions and to demand their immediate release.

Last summer, a federal judge ordered the swift release of children and their parents from family detention centers, noting their “deplorable conditions.” The government has appealed that order while continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to detain families. With no access to government-provided legal counsel, non-citizens caught in this prison web rely on volunteer attorneys and immigrant advocacy groups for information on appeals and asylum claims. After exposing procedural violations, abuse or inadequate medical care inside detention centers, some lawyers and activists report being prohibited from meeting with their clients.

The current roundups and deportations are the latest anti-immigrant attacks by the capitalist rulers, which have helped feed a general assault on the wages and living conditions of all working people. The bosses fan the flames of anti-immigrant chauvinism and racial hostility to pit workers against each other, the better to divide and weaken the labor movement. It is of vital interest for labor and all fighters against exploitation and oppression to demand: No deportations! Free all the detainees! For full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Everyone who makes it into this country should have all the rights of those born here.

Fleeing U.S.-Made Hellholes

The recent raids struck fear into Latino families from coast to coast. Many of Obama’s fellow Democrats, like Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez, expressed anger about the raids, which the White House defended as a way to deter further waves of refugees. Gutierrez & Co. complained that they were not consulted ahead of time, clearly concerned that the Democrats’ “friend of immigrants” image may be fading. Just hours before Obama’s State of the Union speech, some 140 Congressional Democrats issued a statement criticizing the roundups as “ineffective” and suggesting a more “humane” policy in line with “time-honored American values.”

Those “values” are defined by the capitalist rulers’ drive to further amass profit through their system of exploitation and oppression, turning the screws on workers and the oppressed at home and carrying out imperialist plunder abroad. U.S. subjugation of its Latin American “backyard” is part of a world imperialist order in which a handful of advanced capitalist countries dominate and exploit the more backward ones, in turn spurring mass emigration. In Central America, the miserable poverty of the masses—the backdrop to the murderous gang wars—is the product of imperialist depredation. The corrupt local bourgeoisies preside over this brutal system, viciously suppressing the working class and peasantry. As we spelled out in a fuller article on Central American refugees (WV No. 1050, 8 August 2014), the social fabric of these countries was ripped apart by the dirty wars of the 1980s against leftist insurgents and by the increased militarization that accompanied the “war on drugs.” Added to that toll is the economic ruin brought about by the U.S.-imposed Central American Free Trade Agreement.

Secretary of State John Kerry recently announced a “resettlement” program for Central American asylum seekers that would set up processing centers run by the United Nations in nearby Latin American countries—a way for the U.S. to keep the refugees out. Equally cynical was a December 2014 White House initiative that encouraged Central American children to apply in their home countries for refugee status. Out of the more than 6,000 minors who applied, exactly five arrived in the U.S. last year. The U.S. has bolstered the Mexican government in its own crackdown on Central Americans trying to reach El Norte by giving it tens of millions of dollars. Of the estimated 400,000 Central Americans crossing into Mexico annually, the Mexican state arrested almost 93,000 between October 2014 and April 2015.

Many have set their hopes on Obama’s November 2014 executive order that professes to give over four million undocumented immigrants temporary reprieve from deportation and a chance at work permits. While the prospect of some of the undocumented not being deported would be welcome, the measure would apply only to those in the country at least five years and to parents of U.S. citizens. It would require immigrants to register with the government, pass background checks and pay exorbitant fees for a shot at three years of legal status. Even if they get this, they would have no job protections or government benefits. Nevertheless, the proposal was too much for GOP governors, who got a federal judge to block the plan. The issue will now be decided by the Supreme Court.

Major sections of the bourgeoisie have long demanded that Washington put some order into what they see as a dysfunctional immigration system. Obama’s “reforms” and serial waves of deportations both serve that aim. At the same time, policy differences in the bourgeois parties at bottom reflect the needs of different sectors of the ruling class, some of whom are more dependent on exploiting immigrant labor than others. Nonetheless, both Democratic and Republican administrations have instituted greater border controls and enforced restrictions on immigrants’ rights.

The rulers’ policies are mainly but not solely designed to maintain a pool of low-wage labor, with immigrants kept in constant fear that any challenge to their exploitation will bring I.C.E. agents to their doors. More broadly, anti-immigrant campaigns strengthen the repressive powers of the capitalist state, which are especially used against black people and other minorities as well as to suppress working-class struggle. Repression against immigrants (especially Muslims) in the name of the “war on terror” has served as the leading edge in an assault against the democratic rights of the mass of the population, helping also to inflame national chauvinism and ethnic hatred.

The Lesser-Evil Con

The Democratic Party has for years banked on the fears among black people, women and others of what a victory for the nakedly racist, reactionary Republicans might unleash. Against the likes of the egomaniacal demagogue Donald Trump, even Marco Rubio, a darling of anti-Communist gusanos, has been under fire from his Republican competitors for his “soft” immigration posture because he once supported a “path to citizenship” for some undocumented immigrants. In addition to Trump’s smearing of Mexicans as rapists and murderers and his calling for all Muslims to be barred from entering the U.S., both he and Ted Cruz are pandering to the yahoos by saying they would deport all eleven million undocumented immigrants.

As for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, who established her credentials as a future Commander-in-Chief in her years as Secretary of State, backed Obama’s earlier expulsion of refugees but now claims she won’t be the next “deporter in chief” if elected president. Bernie Sanders, who has a long record of support to U.S. imperialist wars and occupations, clucked his tongue over Obama’s “inhumane” approach to the Central American refugee crisis. Say what they will on the campaign trail, “deporter in chief” will be in the job description of whoever makes it to the White House. Regulating the flow of immigrant labor is one of the tasks of the CEO of U.S. capitalism.

Toward the end of the widely reviled Bush administration, massive demonstrations in 2006 for immigrant rights gained nationwide attention. The bourgeois politicians, church officials and labor officials who led the protests consciously directed them into Democratic Party electoralism, with the common chant, “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.”

In a January 6 statement, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka criticizes the I.C.E. roundups and offers that union halls might become temporary sanctuaries for refugees, at least until “full and fair legal proceedings” take place. Pious words from a union officialdom that has barely lifted a finger to defend immigrants. The labor movement should be opposing all deportations and launching organizing drives to bring immigrant workers, with or without papers, into the unions. Such a struggle, which is necessary to revitalize the unions in this country, is undermined by the labor tops’ loyalty to the capitalist Democratic Party and their embrace of the “national interests” of U.S. imperialism. Unlocking the social power of the working class—with white, black, Latino and other workers fighting together against their common capitalist enemy—requires a struggle for a new leadership of labor, one based on the political independence of the workers from all capitalist parties and state agencies.

As Marxists, our task is not to advise the bourgeoisie on alternative immigration policy, which would necessarily mean accepting the parameters of a system predicated on exploitation and oppression. Our call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants is part of the struggle to advance the class consciousness and solidarity of the multiracial working class. The workers need their own party, one that will link the defense of immigrants to the cause of black freedom and the fight for labor’s emancipation from wage slavery. Such a party is necessary to prepare the working class for the revolutionary battle to end capitalist-imperialist rule and build a planned economy under a workers government.

Socialist revolution is the necessary precondition to the economic reorganization of human society through freeing the productive forces from the fetter of private ownership. Immigrant workers are slated to play a crucial role in this fight. As we wrote in the 2000 Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S.:

“The vast numbers of immigrant workers now toiling in U.S. factories can be a powerful leaven to the class struggle here, as many of them come from countries with stronger traditions of labor militancy and anti-capitalist struggle. Likewise, these workers are a natural pool for recruitment to the revolutionary party and such recruits can constitute a nucleus for organizing Trotskyist parties in their native lands. For socialist revolution from the Yukon to the Yucatán and throughout the Americas!”

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 [this night was several years before the recent 2015 announcement that that central spot for the blues tradition and up and coming newer musical genre was closing after a forty year run], 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 and picked up by Ralph along the way when drinking his life-time scotch whiskey became verboten after a bad medical check-up about ten years before Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired kind of naturally. A lot of their conversations of late, the last few years as they slid into retirement Ralph giving the day to day operations of his specialty electrical shop over to his youngest son and Sam giving the day to day management of his high volume printing business to his longtime employee, Jimmy Jones, who held the place together at the beginning while Sam headed West with a gang of other Carver corner boys in search of the great blue-pink American West night that animated much of the late 1960s had centered on their lifetime of common musical interests (except folk music which Sam came of age with, caught the drift as it came through Harvard Square where he would hang out to get out of the house when tensions boiled  o to some extent but which mostly even with Bob Dylan anti-war protest songs made him grind his teeth.

By naturally Ralph meant, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. Songs like The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid like Ralph born and raised in Troy, New York a strictly working class town then, and now,  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 all the animals of the farm kingdom and their distinctive noises that still rattled Ralph’s head on hard drinking night if he got melancholy for his tortured childhood; Humpty Dumpty, a silly grossly overweight holy goof of the rankest order, an egghead to boot and that didn’t mean intellectual, far from it, who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression, that hell or high water expression, or used it in the high Roman Catholic Saturday-go-to-confession-to confess those damns, hells, and fucks that had entered you vocabulary through osmosis and Sunday-go-to-communion-to-absolve-all-sins Morris household out in Troy where Ralph still lives; and,  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 but thinking about it later what were they really doing up there. All this total recall, or mostly total recall showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. you have embraced that music as a child 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 sketch is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Sam nodded his head in agreement then chimed in with his opinion the music of junior high school as he thought, looking behind the bartender’s head to the selection of hard liquors displayed with the twinkle of an eye, about switching over to a high-shelf scotch whiskey, Haig &Haig, 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. (Sam unlike Ralph suffering no medical warning about the dire consequences to his system about throwing down a few shots since his health was in better shape than Ralph, Ralph having taken a beating in that department with whatever hellious chemical his government, or rather the American government for which he refused to take any credit or blame, was throwing on the ground of Vietnam from the nightmare skies during that long, bloody lost war).

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, getting back to junior high, Sam thinking about 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 had gotten him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on the poor, benighted man 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 said amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult in any era, 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 on the side in those days, not unlike these days, when teachers couldn’t live on their teaching incomes led an old-time, old time to Sam and his classmates Benny Goodman-style swing and sway big band at special occasions and as a regular at the Surf Ballroom over in Plymouth on Friday nights), who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks. Thus  you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance, God Bless America, 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 the Dasher 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. And they were not putting their three selections for a quarter to hear hokey Home on the Range.   

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 as he chuckled to himself and turned a little confession red although he not been into that stifling confession box on his gamy knees in many years, and it would not be nice either). Ralph 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 against the Nips (his father’s term for the dirty bastard Japanese) 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, guys like 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 or could hardly wait to hear when the jukebox guy came into Doc’s to put the latest selections in (and to have his hand greased by Doc for “allowing” those desperately desired songs onto his jukebox to fill his pockets with many quarters, see he was “connected” and so along with the jukebox hand over fist money-maker cam the hand).

That mention of transistor radios got Ralph and Sam 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 since they had moved from the bar to a table near the stage to get a better view of the band if they were to make it through both sets that night (and Ralph thinking, just this once, just for this bluesy night he would “cheat” a little on that scotch whiskey ban). This transistor thing by the way for the young who might wonder what these old geezers were talking about since it was clearly not iPods 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, her word whether she knew the exact meaning or not, meaning all hot and bothered, 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 Berry telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, all had to move over because there was a new sheriff in town.  Bo Diddley asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate. Buddy Holly 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, WBZ and later WCAS. 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 Sam although he would shutter his ears if Sam played some folk stuff).

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 (and plenty taken away when the soldiers and sailors, white soldiers and sailors came home on the overcrowded troop transports looking to start life over again and raise those families they dreamed about in the muds of Europe and the salty brine of the atoll Pacific). 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, think about Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll, 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 down in Newport when everybody who was anybody that high school and college kids wanted to hear in that folk minute showed up there.  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 while American rockers were basically clueless until the Brits told them about their own roots music) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band. 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. And he and his band did just that. Yes, that blues calling from somewhere deep in the muds is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    

A View From The Left-Peace Action-Help us elect Bernie Sanders

Frank Jackman comment:

Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. I do so here.  

 

Help us elect Bernie Sanders

​Dear MAPA activists,As you know, MAPA announced our endorsement of Bernie Sanders on Tuesday, and the national organization followed on Wednesday. There is energy out there: our posts received the largest response on Twitter of anything we have ever done! (by far).   Now, let's organize that energy.We are reaching out to our members and supporters to vote for Bernie Sanders for President in the Massachusetts primary on March 1, and to join the campaign!

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From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series- Fritz John Taylor’s –“With Juana From Down Sonora Way In Mind”

From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series- Fritz John Taylor’s –“With Juana From Down Sonora Way In Mind”

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

In the first installment of this series of sketches space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, 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 late 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 in Los Angeles, 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, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, 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 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 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, 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, and the one I am recalling in this sketch from 1979 fits this description, 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 the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or as is the case here with Fritz John Taylor, got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way. Some stuff he told me when he started skidding down the pole after riding high for a while. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Fritz’s sign was that of that dark night Juana rose perfume smell.
*******
“United States," answered Fritz Taylor to the burly “la migra” U.S. border guard who was whip-lashing the question of nationality a mile a minute at the steady stream of border-entering people, and giving a cursory nod to all but the very most suspect looking characters, the most illegal Mexican- looking if you want to know. Yes, American, Fritz thought, Fritz John Taylor if they looked at his passport, his real passport, although he had other identification with names like John Fitzgerald, Taylor Fitzgerald, and John Tyler on them, as he passed the huge "la migra” U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at El Paso on the American side across from old-time Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. Juarez, a city in passing that March, 1972 day that looked very much like something out of Orson Welles’ 1950s Touch of Evil, except the automobiles were smaller and less flashy and the graft now more expensive, and no longer guaranteed to grease the rails, the illegal rails; drugs, women, illegals, gambling, fenced goods, you name it. But just then he didn’t want to think about greasing any rails, or anything else illegal for that matter.

Fritz thought again, this time with easier breathing, whether "la migra” had looked at his passport or not, he was glad, glad as hell, to be saying his nationality, his American, gringo, Estados Unidos, call it what you will citizenship, something he never thought possible, not after Vietnam, not after all the shooting and killing of his thirteen month tour of hell (one month R&R included, a month in Hawaii where he thought he must have set the world record for boozing, mostly scotch, low-shelf scotch to make his dough last, dope-sniffing from opium to cocaine to brother and sister, reefer was the least of it, whoring, some paid, some free what did it matter when a man had his wanting habits on, whoring running through the Kama Sutra and a couple of other tricks not listed in that volume that one of the girls, a white girl too from respectable parents back on the mainland who was looking for kicks, odd-ball kicks and found a partner, for a while, willing to indulge her, Angelina her name, ask her how she got that tattoo on her upper inner thigh and why, if you ever run across her in Lima, Ohio) except these last three weeks down south of the border had been almost as bad, and no more profitable, Fritz profitable. Now that he breathed gringo air, American air he could tell his story, or tell parts of it because he was not quite sure that parts might not still be inside the statute of limitations, for him or his former confederates. So some stuff was better left unsaid.

Yah, it started in ‘Nam really, Fritz thought, as he traced his life-sized movements back in time while he started for a bus, a gringo bright yellow and green El Paso Transit bus that would take him to a downtown hotel where he could wash the dust of Mexico, wash that clotting dust of the twenty hour bus ride from Cuernavaca off his body, if not his soul. Hell, he confessed to himself, a thing he would be very reluctant to mention to others, others impressed by his publicly impervious persona, if it hadn’t been 'Nam, it could have been any one of a thousand places, or hundred situation a few years back, back when he first caught the mary jane, ganga, herb, weed, call your name joy stick, delight habit, tea was his favorite term of rite though. And then he graduated to girl, cousin cocaine when that became the drug of choice and then mainly cheaper that high-grade reefer.

Or, maybe, it really started in dead-end Clintondale when he graduated from high school and with nothing particular to do, allowed himself, chuckling a little to hear him call it that way now, allowed himself to be drafted when his number came up. And drafted, 1960s drafted, meant nothing but 'Nam, nothing but 'Nam and grunt-hood, and that thirteen months of hell, minus one, the boozing, doping, whoring one. And maybe, just maybe, it was even earlier than Clintondale high school days, days when he just hung around Sammy’s garage, watching him tool up some old Chevy or Dodge to make all the valley boys twist in the wind when early morning “chicken runs” beckoned down around the far end of Squaw Rock, took more days off from school than he should have and maybe spent too much time in the back seat of one of Sammy’s cars down the other end, the lovers’ end of Squaw Rock with older girls, Sammy’s “cast-offs,” that only made him restless, restless to break out of one-horse Clintonville. Or reaching down deep the hard fact that he grew up, grew up desperately poor, in the Clintondale back alley projects and so had spent those precious few years of his life hungry, hungry for something, something easy, something sweet, and something to take the pain away.

But mainly he was looking for something easy. And that something easy pushed him, pushed him like the hard fates of growing up poor, down Mexico way, down Sonora way, mostly, as his liked to hum from a vaguely remembered song, some old time cowboy song, on any one of his twenty or so trips down sur. Until, that is, this last Cuernavaca madness, this time there was no humming, no sing-song Mexican brass band marching humming. But stop right there, Fritz said to himself, if he was ever going to figure what went wrong, desperately wrong on this last, ill-fated trip, he had to come clean and coming clean meant, you know, not only was it about the get to easy street, not only was it to get some tea (and later cousin cocaine like he said) delight to chase the soul pain away, but it was about a woman, and as every guy, every women-loving guy, even honest women-loving guy, will tell you, in the end it is always about a woman.

Always about a woman from hard-hearted Irish Catholic Cecilias like he knew, kid knew with their novena books in one hand and their red dress come hither flick with the other, yes, knew them backwards and forwards, to kicks-loving Angela. Knew the score since from kid time or some other combinations foxed out later but a woman, no question. Although not always about a woman named Juana, his sweet Juana. Although, maybe the way she left him hanging by his thumbs in Mexico City before the fall, not knowing, or maybe caring, of his danger, he should be a little less forgiving. Yah, that’s easy to say, easy off the hellish now tongue, but this was Juana not just some hop-head floozy out for kicks.

Jesus, he could still smell that sweetness, that exotic Spanish sweetness, that rose something fragrance Juana always wore (and don’t tell her if you run into her down Sonora way, and you will if you are looking for grade A dope for sure, drove him as crazy as a loon), that smell of her freshly-washed black hair which got all wavy, naturally wavy, and big so that she looked like some old-time Goya senorita, all severe front but smoldering underneath. And those big laughing eyes, yah, black eyes you won’t forget, or want to. Yes, his thoughts drifted back to Juana, treacherously warm-blooded Juana. And it seems almost sacrilegious thinking of her, sitting on this stinking, hit every bump, crowded, air-fouling bus filled with “wetbacks,” sorry, braceros, okay, going to work, or wherever they go when they are not on these stinking buses.

Yah, Juana, Juana whom he met in Harvard Square when he first got back to the world and was looking to deep-six the memories of that 'Nam thing, deep-six it with dope, mope, cope, and some woman to chase his blues away. And there she was sitting on a bench in Cambridge Common wearing some wild seventy-two colored ankle-length dress that had him mesmerized, that and that rose something fragrance. But that day, that spring 1970 day, what Juana-bonded him was the dope she was selling, selling right there in the open like it was some fresh produce (and it was). Cops no too far off but not bothering anyone except the raggedy drunks, or some kid who took too much acid and they needed to practically scrape him off the Civil War monument that centered the park and get him some medical attention, quick.

See Juana, daughter of fairly well-to-do Mexican “somebodies,” needed dough to keep her in style. He never did get the whole story straight but what was down in Sonora well-to-do was nada in the states. She needed dough, okay, just like any gringa dame. And all of that was just fine by him but Juana was also“connected,” connected through some cousin, to the good dope, the Acapulco Gold and Colombian Red that was primo stuff. Not the oregano-laced stuff that was making the rounds of the Eastern cities and was strictly for the touristas, for the week-end warrior hippies who flooded Harvard Square come Saturday night. So Juana was to good tea like Owsley was to the acid scene, the maestro.

Fitz thought back, as that rickety old bus moved along heading, twenty-seven-stop heading, downtown trying to be honest, honest through that dope-haze rose smell, that black hair and those laughing eyes (and that hard-loving midnight sex they both craved when they were high as kites) about whether it was all that or just the dope in the beginning. Yah, it was the Columbia Red at first. He was just too shattered, 'Nam and Clintondale shattered, to know when he had a woman for the ages in his grasp. But he got“religion” fast. Like every religion though, godly or womanly, there is a price to pay, paid willingly or not, and that price was to become Juana’s “mule” on the Mexico drug runs.

To keep the good dope in stock you had to be willing to make some runs down south of the border. If not, by the time it got to say some New York City middle man, it had been cut so much you might as well have been smoking tea leaves. He could hear himself laugh when she first said that tea leave thing in her efforts to enlist him. But by then he had religion, Juana religion, and he went off on that first trip eyes wide open. And that was probably the problem because it went off without a hitch. Hell, he brought a kilogram over the border in his little green knapsack acting just like any other tourist buying a cheap serape or something.

And like a lot of things done over and over again the trips turned into a routine, a routine though that did not take into consideration some of the greater not-knowing, maybe not knowable things, although he now had his suspicions, things going on, like the cartelization of the international drug trade, like the squeeze out of the small unaffiliated tea ladies, like Juana, and placing them as mere employees like some regular corporate structure bad trip. But the biggest thing was Juana, Juana wanted more and more dough, and that meant bigger shipments, which meant more Fritz risk, and later Fritz and Tommy risk (Tommy, ah, let’s just leave it at Tommy, rest his soul, face down in some Cuernavaca muddy craven back alley with two slugs in his back from when some cartel guy got jumpy when Tommy moved the wrong way, or maybe just moved when el jefe was present as thing went awry). And on this last trip it mean no more friendly Sonora lazy, hazy, getting high off some free AAA perfecto weed after the deal was made and then leisurely taking a plane (a plane for chrissakes) from some Mexican city to Los Angeles, or Dallas, depending on the connections. And then home.

This time, this time the deal was going down in Cuernavaca, in a church, or rather in some side room of a church, Santa Maria’s Chapel, in downtown Cuernavaca, maybe you know it if you have been there it's kind of famous. He didn’t like the switch, but only because it was out of the routine, a habit he learned in ‘Nam and that saved him more than once. What he didn’t know, and what his connections on the other side should have known (and maybe did, but he was not thinking about that part right that minute) was that the Federales, instead of chasing Pancho Villa’s ghost like they should have been doing, were driving hard (prompted by the gringo DEA) to close down Cuernavaca, just then starting to become the axis of the cartels further south.

And what he also didn’t know, until too late, was that Juana, getting some kind of information from some well-connected source in the states, had fled to Mexico, first Mexico City where he had met her to make connections further south, and then back to her hometown of Sonora he heard later. So when the deal in Cuernavaca went sour, after he learned at the almost the last minute that the deal was “fixed,” he headed Norte on the first bus, first to Mexico City and then to El Paso. And there he was, now alighting from that yellow green bus, ready to walk into that fresh soap. As he got off he though he staggered for a minute, staggered in some kind of fog, as he “smelled,” smelled, that rose fragrance something in the air. He said to himself, yah, I guess it's still like that with Juana. If you read this and are down Sonora way and see her tell her Fritz said hello.
*******
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues Lyrics

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez

And it's Eastertime too

And your gravity fails

And negativity don't pull you through

Don't put on any airs

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there

And they really make a mess outa you.



Now if you see Saint Annie

Please tell her thanks a lot

I cannot move

My fingers are all in a knot

I don't have the strength

To get up and take another shot

And my best friend, my doctor

Won't even say what it is I've got.



Sweet Melinda

The peasants call her the goddess of gloom

She speaks good English

And she invites you up into her room

And you're so kind

And careful not to go to her too soon

And she takes your voice

And leaves you howling at the moon.



Up on Housing Project Hill

It's either fortune or fame

You must pick up one or the other

Though neither of them are to be what they claim

If you're lookin' to get silly

You better go back to from where you came

Because the cops don't need you

And man they expect the same.



Now all the authorities

They just stand around and boast

How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms

Into leaving his post

And picking up Angel who

Just arrived here from the coast

Who looked so fine at first

But left looking just like a ghost.



I started out on burgundy

But soon hit the harder stuff

Everybody said they'd stand behind me

When the game got rough

But the joke was on me

There was nobody even there to bluff

I'm going back to New York City

I do believe I've had enough.

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes -50-50

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes -50-50

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

50-50

 

I’m all alone in this world, she said,
Ain’t got nobody to share my bed,
Ain’t got nobody to hold my hand—
The truth of the matter’s
I ain’t got no man.

Big Boy opened his mouth and said,
Trouble with you is
You ain’t got no head!
If you had a head and used your mind
You could have me with you
All the time.

She answered, Babe, what must I do?

He said, Share your bed—
And your money, too.

 

Langston Hughes

 

The whole world knew, or at least the important parts of that world, that summer of 2012 downtown Boston world (near the Common say from the Public Gardens to Newbury Street but also near birth place Columbus Avenue), knew that Larry Johnson was Ms. Loretta Lawrence’s every day man (and it goes without saying her every night man too). Make no mistake, girls, women, even though they didn’t hold hands in public or throw public kisses at each other, they were an an “item.” Loretta at five-ten and rail thin, fashion model day thin and what in the old days was called a very light “high yella,” mixed blood from some old South Mister’s wanting habits and some “passing for white” along the way but in any case very highly sought after just then for coffee table magazine shoots didn’t look like trouble, but anytime a a woman gave Larry a side glance look Loretta’s eyes said keep your hands off. And they did, those in the fashion industry, mostly her fellow models, and maybe a few longing sidewinder guy designers too. But somebody had Larry’s attention and Loretta was going to get to the bottom of it.

It had all started back in February when Larry asked her for a hundred dollars one night, out of the blue. Now Larry had been on a tough stretch ever since the financial collapse in 2008 (although it only bagged him in early 2010) when the markets went crazy and he got caught short, and since business was bad he eventually got that old dreaded pink slip from the big finance company that had hired him straight out of the Harvard Business School MBA program to diversify their employee mix. (Larry found out later that one manager, who had publicly said he was crazy to get him had told a friend of his that he hired Larry to add “color” to his staff). Nobody was hiring so he had just been kind of living off his old time bonuses, and a little of this and that.

 

Funny, funny now, Larry and Loretta had met at a bar down in the financial district where he had stopped off for a drink after passing his resume around for about the umpteenth time and she had just finished a shoot (for a cosmetic company as they were trying to expand their markets that had keyed on her for her ravishing looks, brown hair, brown eyes, very light brownish high cheek-boned skin which was a plus since whatever diversity there was in the fashion market the hard fact was there was a drop off when dark as Africa black women graced the covers of most magazines or other advertising venues) down near the water at International Place and her photographer had offered to buy her a drink. His eyes met hers, her eyes met his in return and before anyone really knew it he had moved in on her like something out of one of those old time thriller romance novels that you read and at the end can’t believe that you spent your good hard-earned rest reading and cannot believe either that the “she” of the story would be so stupid in the end to have gotten mixed-up with a wacko like that.

Larry had moved in on her too, literally, after a few weeks of downy billow talk and his argument (which she was okay with, she wasn’t saying she wasn’t) that two could live as cheaply as one (which isn’t true but close enough) and he could cut down on expenses during his rough patch. And it was nice, nice to have a man around, with man’s things, a man’s scent, and a man’s silly little vanities that she had not experienced since Phil (she would not use a last name because Phil was well known, too well-known) had left her a few years back. Every once in a while though she would notice a ten here or a twenty there missing from her pocketbook but figured that either she, spendthrift she, had spent it on some forgotten bobble or Larry had taken it for some household thing and didn’t report the fact (although she, they, had insisted on a collective counting of expenses). Then came the night of Larry’s official request. And she gave it to him, a loan, a loan was all it was. The first time.

After a few more requests for dough, and the granting of those requests, Loretta started to try to figure out what the heck he was doing with the dough (he said it was to help get a job, or he needed new shirts, or something, something different each time). Then she thought about Phil, not about the money part (Jesus, he had thrown his dough at her when he was strong for her, called her his little money-machine and laughed) but as he started losing interest in her he stopped showering the money because he was seeing another woman on the side and showering it on her (that “her” being a friend of hers, and not even beautiful, just smart). And so she started thinking that Larry, Larry the guy who was sharig her bed every night (every night so it had to be a daytime dalliance), was having another affair. She resolved that Larry would get no more money, no more loans, as he called them and if she found out that he was two-timing her that woman had better leave town because, two-timer or not, bum-of-the-mouth or not, he was her man and she had told one and all hands off. And she meant it.

Break With The Two Parties Of Wall Street- A Cautionary Tale In The Age Of Bernie Sanders -New Hampshire Postscript

Break With The Two Parties Of Wall Street- A Cautionary Tale In The Age Of Bernie Sanders -New Hampshire Postscript

 

By Frank Jackman

Fall 2012

 

 

 

Bradley Fox had to laugh when he heard the news about Sam Lowell. Sam had told Bradley a few years ago, sometime in the early fall of 2012 amid the hurly-burly of that presidential election year, when they had first met at an anti-war rally on Boston Common after the very first rumblings of going to yet another war, this time in Syria, was uppermost on the Democrat Obama Administration’s mind that he continued to hold the Democratic Party responsible along with the Republicans for their continuing bi-partisan support for every war that comes along, every war opportunity as well it had seemed of late. Sam had said that while the Democrats “talk the talk” about avoiding war, or stopping the onslaught of the military budget as a drag on the possibilities of taking care of some serious domestic social questions when the deal goes down they en masse vote for the war budgets. The big general one, you know the six or seven hundred billion dollar one, AND the supplemental ones for operations like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or wherever else they want to throw some mud. In short, they don’t as a party, as a capitalist party the way Sam had put it to Bradley that day “walk the walk.”

That pro-imperial policy by the Democrats meant that under no conditions could Sam support any Democratic Party candidate- at the federal level anyway. Had said to Bradley during the course of their conversation that had been his position at least since the early 1970s when he had gone through hell in the Army in his opposition to the Vietnam War and saw the Democrats as complicit as the Republicans when they did not make motions to cut off the Vietnam War budget requests. Consistent anyway on both side, Sam calling for “no” votes to the war budgets and the Democrats (with few exceptions) giving up the ghost with all arms and feet.  

That was then but this was now, now being 2016 and according to Bradley’s sense of things, and what he had supposed was Sam’s, yet another bummer of presidential campaign between Democrats and Republicans in America has begun to unfold. And guess who has since the first of the year been in the thick of the campaigning supporting Bernie Sanders as he makes a bid to be the Democratic Party candidate. Not as an Independent which would have given Sanders a nod for support but as a tried and true candidate right in the heart of the beast. Yes, one Samuel Lowell. So all that business about being anti-war, forcing whoever wanted his vote, or support, having to take the pledge to vote against the war budgets as a minimum step in the right direction was so much hot air when the deal went down.

Sam’s reasoning and the pressures of politics require a little explaining though in order that others who might be thinking of breaking their opposition to the Democrats (the myriad Republicans running helter-skelter are beyond the pale) might take a little pause before leaping into the abyss. That is the idea Bradley had in mind after he had heard the news from Bart Webber when he thought about how a stand-up anti-war guy like Sam could fall down like that. They, remember, had of all things met at an anti-war rally. Bradley, considerably younger than Sam, had only in 2012 begun to feel queasy about where this country was going, queasy too about the endless wars even under an administration of a guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize and when the war cries to get knee-deep into the Syrian Civil War began to be heard he had decided that he needed express public opposition to those efforts. He had heard through the Internet grapevine that a bunch of peace organizations like Peace Action, United for Justice and Peace, the Quakers and others were planning a rally for a Saturday in later September on the Common to express their opposition.    

Bradley, not used to public demonstrations of his political views (then), was a little leery as he emerged from the depth of the Park Street subway station where there were about fifty people milling around, carrying signs mostly anti-war signs against the continuing wars in various spots in the Middle East. He had not expected a huge crowd, hadn’t since about 2002 when the war drums for Iraq had started and millions, not including him then, had marched in the streets of the world in a desperate attempt to stop a bloody senseless war there but he had been intimidated by the smallness of the rally a bit. Also by the flotsam and jetsam that pass through that historic protest area on their ways to other business or as with the homeless just hanging out. Then a guy wearing a Veterans For Peace shirt, carrying a VFP dove-emblemed flag swirling in the wind, a Socialist Alternative button on his jacket and a small stack of leaflets came up to him and asked if he was there for the demonstration. He had said “yes.”              

That was Bradley’s introduction to one Sam Lowell, although that would not be their last meeting, not by a longshot. That day though Sam had presented some important ideas to Bradley about the nature of American society, about how almost all the establishment power structure went along with the endless wars and that it was the wars among other things inherent in the inequities of the capitalist system that led to the bloodshed and led to not getting lots of more positive things done. Bradley listened with some interest because some of what Sam had to say were things that had been upsetting him of late. The fact that Sam was an actual veteran didn’t hurt either, the voice from those who served carried weight with him (although when he found out the details of Sam’s story later he had more admiration for anti-war veterans who didn’t fold). Then Sam passed Bradley a leaflet (see about) which took him aback for a moment.

The headline-“Break with the two parties of Wall Street” confused him. See Bradley had for the four pervious election cycles since he had come of voting age had voted for the Democratic candidate for President, saw that as his only option and something he had been proud of in 2008 when he cast a vote for the first black President. He had asked Sam what that meant, asked him who he would be voting for. That day Sam gave him a short explanation since he had other responsibilities day around organizing the rally about why he had broken with the two parties. Had mentioned as well why as a small gesture in the right direction he knew he would be voting for the Green Party candidate-Jill Stein. He also told Sam that the organization he supported (although he said he was not yet a member) Socialist Alternative was doing the same thing.

Sam also suggested that if Bradley wanted to know more about why he (and SA) were not voting for the Democrats (for Obama) he would be happy to meet with him and discuss that matter. Bradley gave Sam his e-mail address and Sam a few days later followed up with an e-mail inviting him to meet at his convenience. As for the rally he had been glad that he had gone, glad that he had made that small public anti-war gesture and seriously thought about meeting up with Sam.                  

A couple of weeks later Sam and Bradley met at the Blackbird Café where Sam went through his paces after Bradley had asked about Sam’s political history and about why he refused to vote for the Democrats against the beastly Republicans and why his vote for the Green Party was not wasted energy. Sam had said that he had grown up in a working-class family with very strong ties to the Democrats going back to the FDR era and that he himself had after college expected to pursue a career in politics through the Democratic Party. Had as late as 1968 been a crazed Bobby Kennedy supporter campaigning for him all over the country and after he was assassinated went to work on the Humphrey campaign (also all over the country). Reason: a classic one, a “lesser evil” one if you wanted to know the truth-one Richard M Nixon who was the number one bad ass politician that everybody rightly feared would be elected and continue the Vietnam War forever. Of course Hubert Humphrey been neck-deep in the machinations of the Lyndon Johnson escalations of the war but Sam had not seen things that way-then.   

In 1969 Sam had been drafted into the Army and that event had changed everything. He had allowed himself to be inducted which he found out after a very few days of basic training was a mistake. All the signs were that he was being trained for nothing else but to kill “commies” in Vietnam. No go. He had no quarrel with Vietnamese peasants among other reasons. Without going into all the details Sam when he had gotten orders for Vietnam after completion of Advanced Infantry Training (and that training signified only one thing because Uncle Sam only needed, desperately needed, grunts, foot soldiers, cannon-fodder in one place that year-Vietnam) decided to refuse to go. He wound up spending the better part of the next two years in the stockade, or waiting to go into the stockade, although he finally got out with an honorable discharge ordered by the federal district court in New Jersey where he was being held in detention at Fort Dix. That critical experience, and the reflection that after all the Democrats, his previously beloved Democrats had been neck-deep in the escalations as well as Nixon, was the initial crack. Further reading, thinking, association with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, associations with various independent socialist types and later in the 1980s Veterans for Peace flushed out the other reasons for breaking with the Democrats (the Republican wing of the two parties of Wall Street was so much hot air since he would then, and now, never consider supporting that group of heartless bastards).          

Sam and Bradley went back and forth that day for a couple of hours and Sam suggested that if Bradley was looking for more information that Socialist Alternative had study groups which he could join and learn more about their perspective. Bradley had attended several classes before he decided that while he would continue to be a public anti-war activist (and other issues too like the death penalty, the fight for a higher minimum wage, stopping immigrant deportations and the like) that he preferred not to belong to any organization since with three growing kids he would not have the time necessary to devote whole-heartedly to the cause. He did later run into Sam (and others as well since it is a very small cadre of those who are interested in fighting injustices in the public square these days) at many events and went out of his way to attend VFP-sponsored events.      

Bradley also took to heart what Sam had said about the two parties of Wall Street although he never really got used to that way of putting it and did not vote for President in the 2012 election cycle (he could not see the gesture of voting for the Green Party as anything but a futile gesture). He had not planned and continues to plan not to vote for President in the 2016 election cycle, although he sorely wished that Bernie Sanders had decided on an independent candidacy so he could work for him.    

As for Sam, Bradley after he had heard that Sam was working for Sanders in New Hampshire canvassing voters in that state (as was Socialist Alternative which was also neck-deep in that campaign), decided to go to Park Street Station where a weekly anti-war rally is held every Saturday (and has been since something like 1998) and where he expected to find Sam standing with his VFP flag. And he was there. When Bradley asked him what in the world had changed about the Democratic Party of Wall Street since the last election cycle he said “that is where the kids are, that is who we who are older have to get to, hell, Bernie is the only game in town, the only one who will stand up to the beasts.”  Yeah, Bradley thought “that was then but this is now” as he remembered that final paragraph from that leaflet that he still had in his home office desk drawer.  (See above and read and weep.)     

Iowa Postscript-Frank Jackman

You already know from the above that Sam Lowell had gone overboard about the supporting the Bernie Sanders Democratic Party Presidential nomination after years, many years, of calling for a break with that party (the Republicans don’t count in this universe, no reason since about 1864 to support them so no reason to call for a break with that organization except for symmetry) and the creation of a labor party to address the pressing issues of the working-class and other oppressed. Immediately after the Iowa caucuses on February 1^st he called up his old high school friend Bart Webber whom he is still in contact with and tried to talk him into going up to Manchester, New Hampshire the next day with him and his longtime companion Laura Perkins to canvass for Bernie in that city in front of the upcoming February 9^th presidential primary. He told Bart that with the groundswell for Bernie in Iowa that he planned to go all out and stay in Manchester until the primary was over. Bart told him he was starting to think about Bernie a bit with all the hubbub but that he couldn’t take the time off to go when he was not sure that he still didn’t prefer the slogan-break from the Democrats this presidential season when it might do some good. As for Bradley Fox he had not wavered from the “break from the Democrats” slogan that he had learned at the feet of that same Sam Lowell in sunnier days. How the mighty have fallen.         

New Hampshire Postscript-Frank Jackman

You already know from the story above the Post-Iowa Postscript that Sam Lowell had gone overboard about the supporting the Bernie Sanders Democratic Party Presidential nomination after years, many years, of calling for a break with that party (the Republicans don’t count in this universe, no reason since about 1864 to support them so no reason to call for a break with that organization except for symmetry) and the creation of a labor party to address the pressing issues of the working-class and other oppressed.

You also know that immediately after the Iowa caucuses on February 1^st he had called up his old high school friend Bart Webber whom he is still in contact with and tried to talk him into going up to Manchester, New Hampshire the next day in order to go all out for Bernie (and to beat Hilary since a n increasing part of his agitation was pure Clinton fatigue after over a quarter of a century of hearing that name and ten million lame excuses for whatever evil things they did personally, but more importantly, politically, especially that Hilary 2002 Senate vote for war in Iraq).

In the case he, they did so canvassing the Manchester neighborhoods that he had not been too since his days with the Eugene McCarthy campaign in blessed 1968 seeing these days the dwindling   Irish remnant which had because of their poor circumstances unable to leave the city as the new waves of immigrants came pouring in. Seeing too the dwindling French-Canadians who had come down generations ago from benighted Quebec to work in the now long gone mills along the Merrimack River. And added to the mix the Africans from all over that continent and the Caribs from all over that sea (all except the Syrians who desperately need to get out and would be a welcome addition to the town Sam thought). He, they had worked the telephones calling until late in the night those who might head Bernie’s way. They had been surprised how many numbers were cellphone numbers after the callees asked how they had gotten their numbers since there is no cellphone directory. Somebody in the campaign had the thing “wired” alright. They also on primary night were in the ballroom as they returns came in and Bernie had “kicked ass.” A good night although after a week in a Best Western motel both agreed that heading home that night was better than staying another day.       

Bart after Iowa had told Sam he was starting to think about Bernie a bit with all the hubbub but that he couldn’t take the time off to go when he was not sure that he still didn’t prefer the slogan-break from the Democrats this presidential season when it might do some good. The pressure from Sam and others, almost everybody he knew from peacenik veterans to left-liberals to hard-core socialists well to the left of anything Bernie was saying had been contacting him to finally get on board before “the train left the station.” He was wavering by the day and would have to make a decision soon in light of the upcoming Massachusetts primary on Super-Tuesday March 1^st  since if he was going in he was not going to just vote but volunteer as Sam and Laura ha done.  As for Bradley Fox, who has come to this Bernie thing as a flash in the pan when the real deal goes down, he has not wavered from the “break from the Democrats” slogan that he had learned at the feet of that same Sam Lowell in sunnier days. How the mighty have fallen.