When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower-In The Times Of Isabella Stewart Gardner And Her Museum

When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower-In The Times Of Isabella Stewart Gardner And Her Museum 

 

By Sam Lowell

 

When I was much younger, after I had gotten out of the Army and was all raw from the experience, had had a close call with having to go to Vietnam and was “saved” only by some last minutes self-imposed graces I was all hopped up on changing the way this society did business, the way those in charge treated people from soldiers to workers to the dispossessed and homeless to the hobos, bums, and tramps who I ran with for a while. One of the way stations that I was attracted to for a while was the Marxist analysis of capitalist society. At that time I was thrilled by the analysis of how to overturn the system through some revolutionary purge of the old society and the creation of new forms of communal existence. Very appealing then and now although it does not look like I will see anything like those possibilities created this side of the grave.

 

All of the above a roundabout way of saying something that I found at the time very odd about the Marxist analysis but which makes more sense now. Marx and his followers were ready to concede that capitalism was not only a necessary stage of more effective and productive way gathering up the collective good of society as against earlier forms of production and distribution such as in feudal times. Was willing to say that at certain stage of history that capitalism was progressive in undertaking certain tasks. That hard fact was true in his own times as he projected forward. Capitalism then unlike in the 20^th and now 21^st century still had something progressive to offer despite its contradictions.    

 

Even in America, even in the late 18^th century in the age of the robber barons who grabbed everything not nailed down with every hand, there was still a spark of progressive thought and action. In short in time span of the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a woman born into wealth and who married wealth, from before the American Civil War until after the First World War such socially important tasks as creating a museum for everybody to see great works of art in accrued to those scions of the capitalist class. Now we will not inquire too closely into how she purchased some of her prized possessions, not will be inquire into how they got into the country, nor even about the fact that she could drive as hard a bargain against her fellow robber barons confederates but I for one am glad, glad as hell to live close enough to go see what she pirated away over there in the Back Bay. So if you need one, or can only think of one example of a time when the bourgeoisie was in full flower-think Mrs. Gardner.    

 

*THEIR MORALS AND OURS, INDEED!-LEON TROTSKY ON REVOLUTIONARY MORALITY

Click on title to link to Leon Trotsky's Internet Archives copy of "Their Morals and Ours". A must read for every radical in order to understand the revolutionary "code" we stand by, although much distorted by almost a century of Stalinist and Social-Democratic distortion.

BOOK, REVIEW

THEIR MORALS AND OURS, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1969

One of the most tragic results of the Stalinization of a significant part of the international workers movement in the 20th century was the steep decline in the norms of revolutionary morality. In fact a persuasive argument can be made that the Stalinist lies, distortions and destruction of revolutionary cadre, as well as untold innocents, dragged the workers movement to a moral level below even the abysmal bourgeois hypocrisy of modern day liberalism and social democracy. But, although one would be hard pressed to refute that idea that is an argument for another day. Here, Leon Trotsky, as he had done in the political struggles to defend the ideas of the socialist revolution raised his lonely voice to defend revolutionary morality against the onslaught of Stalinist falsifiers, liberal cynics, social democratic hypocrites and some of his faint-hearted intellectual former ‘supporters’ who were beginning their rapid retreat from revolutionary politics in the run-up to World War II.

Trotsky’s argument is fairly simple and straightforward. Not only do the ruling classes own the means of production and control the educational, cultural and state apparatuses but impose their concept of morality on their society. Thus it follows, in order to break the stranglehold of the ruling classes, it is necessary for revolutionaries to develop their own moral sense- outside and in counter position- to the ruling classes. That truth may not be the most profound idea that Trotsky ever uttered but in light of the rise of fascism, the Stalinist Moscow Purge trials and the Stalinist role in the destruction of the Spanish Revolution in the 1930's that formed the backdrop for his analysis it needed saying-and needs repeating today. No militant can hope to change society for the better if he or she does not make a clean break from bourgeois norms of morality, period.

Politics and morality obviously are not counterpoised but flow from the nature of the task. If the politics are not revolutionary then it is hard to see how the moral compass that leads to a revolutionary life can be. Again, Stalinism in its political guise as a form of international class collaborationism blurred the lines between what to a revolutionary is the norm and an ‘amoral’ or ‘anti-moral’ world-weary bureaucratic response. And that tension has not stopped with the defeat of Stalinism. Because leftists did not defeat Stalinism politically but rather it collapsed from its own internal moral decay and ineptitude that line has never been straightened out. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than today when revolutionaries use the bourgeois institutions against others in the labor movement, including other revolutionaries, to further their aims. Yes, of course we use these alien institutions when we fight the oppressors-that is part of our arsenal. No, we do not ask (really beg) the class enemy to adjudicate disputes within the labor movement. Learn to fight the political struggle for socialism the proper way. To get the necessary foundation for that way read this little book.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin With Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” In Mind

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube entry for Bob Dylan performing Like A Rolling Stone.

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in the first installment of this series in this space, provided courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seemed to think I still had a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came 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 (California, 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.”

These sketches have been done on an ad hoc basis, although the format of this story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .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 heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here 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 1979 sketch had an off-beat story, hell in this case very off-beat, that brought him down to the ravines. But see he, Allan “Red” Bradley (hereafter called Red, the only name he would answer to from friend or foe alike after about age ten he informed me) out of the low red clay back water tobacco road North Carolina night, like Jean LeBlanc whose story I have already related and a lot of other guys I ran into did not want to talk about ‘Nam, about his war- weary troubles in the “real world” or about how he got himself hoboed up a continent away. He, they, seemed to “enjoy” some amnesia net over that ‘Nam period and who was to blame them for what they saw, and did. No Red wanted to talk about the time just after Vietnam, early 1970s time, the time when he was the be-bop daddy (his term) of the Fayetteville (NC) Fort Meade(MD) and Fort Devens (MA) night with the girls (women, my term), a time when if he had made few right moves inside his head or left before all hell broke loose over his head, or something like that things might have been different. I like to finish up these introductions placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Red Bradley’s sign was that of the rolling stone:

That night, that night a few months after it had all turned utterly bad back in 1975 maybe a little into 1976, I had dreamed of two brunettes, two blondes and a red-head, jesus, cut the dream cord, cut it quick because I am about to be sick, sick from some jumped up snow, snow the current dream cutter. Yah, it all started with that dream, that five girl, three-colored dream but that was just the candy-coated cover, the real story you don’t want to hear, maybe but it, that dream got me to thinking about back in the day rolling stone stuff (and, no, not the band, and, no, not some mad Dylan troubadour riff thing connecting me with my, his, their generation). But the dream reoccurred, reoccurred with that same quintet, and an absurd mystery about a guy in a hungry night, and nowhere to go, and nowhere to deal with five snow dream figures, what was it, yes, two brown, two yellow, one red, hair color not skin. That was the start, that was the reoccurring start, but that was not the story, not by a long shot. Lets’ call it a snow dream, a dope dream it could have been any addiction- affliction but let’s just call it by its right name, a snow dream, and be done with it.

[Kenny Jackson, whose story I have already related previously and who travelled with Red for a few months around the mean streets of L.A. and was close to him at the time of this story because Red was in Kenny’s words a “colorful guy,” clued me in on Red’s way of talking, of making a grand gesture before he got to serious stuff. When I reviewed my notes to try to bring life to Red’s story I at first forgot about that comment and could make neither heads nor tails out of the following lines until I remembered Kenny’s remark. Of course Red, kind of a smart guy in a street way, maybe half- smart, and we will leave it as that had to preface his whole spiel by making the following remarks which, according to my notes, he insisted be included. The remarks moreover were made after Kenny had gotten Red sobered up for a couple of months so he thought he was king of the world. Sober here, by the way, when referenced by the veterans in these sketches is all inclusive-alcohol, drugs, love, hate, cons, etc. –JLB]

If you, as I do even now while I am out here on the wild streets of L.A. trying to make my comeback, even now when my soul is fresh, every once in a while as least from a comfortable distance need to hear about boozers, losers, dopesters, snow dreams, hipsters, fallen sisters, midnight sifters, grifters, drifters, the driftless, small-time grafters, hoboes, bums, tramps, the fallen, those who want to fall, Spanish Johnnies, stale cigarette butts, whiskey-soaked barroom floors, loners, the lonely, sad sacks, the sad and others at the margins of society then this is your stop. Red Bradley is going to give it to you straight, straight as a crooked man knows how. I was one of them, one of the snow birds, and I fell, fell big time.

My words, maybe, are an acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring when I gather myself up to storm heaven looking for busted black-hearted angels, for blonde girls with Monroe lips or maybe Joni Mitchell falling hair, for brunettes who had sense to quit while they were ahead with or without falling hair, for demon red-heads with old time neighborhood Irish hearts and poet’s souls, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. Christ almighty for all the misbegotten.

Endless tramp, no, bum and note the difference, walked streets, waiting for the next fix. Waiting really for some god miracle, some murmured pray sacrilege and redemption seeking miracle. Waiting for all the accumulated messes of this world, this made world to seep into the gutter. Waiting for all past history, all past memoir better, all past sorrows, given and received, all pass two roads taken, wrong road chosen, all personal hurts, given and taken, all past vanities to break down in the means streets, and closure. No, not closure, relief. Waiting, yah, waiting but to no avail. And so all roads, chosen and unchosen closed, all forward turned back, all value devalued, all this ….

[After that Red got serious-okay]

Jesus, for a few years after ‘Nam I had it made, had it made in the shade with women. Let me tell you before ‘Nam I had a fistful of girls, total, since the time I started noticing them, noticing their shapes turning along with my own desires. Nice big-hearted red-headed neighborhood Irish girls not afraid to smite god late on Saturday night before showing up chaste, virgin mary chaste, I promise, for early Sunday mass, sometimes with me in tow just to prove their conquests and their sullen virtue. Irish girls too, not big-hearted, brunettes usually maybe with some heathen English blood in them ,with a handful of rosary beads in one hand and blushed unfulfilled lust in their hearts, and minus me in tow. Later a few off-hand blondes with loose morals and big time Monroe dreams and nice Jewish girls off on their first goy adventures looking, looking hard, for some fierce blue-eyed devil, and finding him.


I wasn’t complaining about how few I had then and I am not now but after ‘Nam was the best women time. See after ‘Nam, oh around late 1971 and 1972, I got involved with some anti-war stuff, with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) stuff because some of the stuff I saw in ‘Nam just freaked me out, and some of the stuff me and my buddies did too. But I don’t want to get into war stories. I want to get into anti-war stories because that is the only way you’ll make sense of what I am saying.

See I would go to G.I. coffeehouses that had been springing up all over the place near military bases around that time and talk to guys still in and all that. I went on speaking tours sometimes and with my southern accent and my anti-war war “cred” guys would listen up to me for a minute. But the real deal was the chicks [read: women] who started hanging around the coffeehouses after getting tired of just marching in the streets every spring and fall and wanted to be around guys who had seen it all and lived to tell about it. Why I still don’t know and I didn’t care as long as they gave me a tumble. I did that speaking and organizing stuff for a couple of years around Fort Bragg down in North Carolina and Fort Meade in Maryland. Then I headed further north to Fort Devens in Massachusetts. [He had been there about two years after I helped start that one. It was weird to meet him in L.A. several years later along an abandoned ravine, right.] That was where things started to fall apart.

See Boston and Cambridge (the nearest big city action to Fort Devens) was filled with women who, like I said before, wanted to be around guys who had seen it all. So it was like taking candy from a baby, sort of. Those were the days when you could be seeing several chicks at one time, unlike back before ‘Nam when unless you were very careful one guy, one girl was strictly the norm out in open anyway. So I loaded up with my standard two blondes, two brunettes, and my always needed one red-head.


The thing though as the American government started to pull everybody out of Indochina the anti-war movement and the dough for anti-war coffeehouses started to dry up. But I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to put two and two together. Hell, I didn’t want to. And here is why. After a couple of soft years and with all the chicks I wanted I began to get a feeling that the world owed me a living, a soft touch living and so I lived off some of those five women in the dream. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes separately.

Then the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or whatever they wanted to call it at the V.A. hospital kicked in. Anyway between the anti-war action dying down and not having much to do otherwise and having my hands full with the chicks I started doing some serious cocaine. Yah, the snow bird, “my girl,” my real girl. I had had a few tastes in ‘Nam but in those days I was strictly a boozer, a whiskey and water chaser guy. I didn’t really like or understand the potheads, opium-eaters and junkies. Not then.

Coke was cheap mainly except you needed about a ton of it to feel alright all the time. And I needed a ton of it because I needed to feel alright all the time after a while. And that is where things really got busted up. I was “borrowing” money like crazy from one chick or another. I had a regular “Ponzi” scheme going at one point. I would borrow a hundred from one, buy my goods, and then borrow another hundred from another chick to pay the first chick back and so on.

I was also running some dope myself through a connection down Sonora way in Mexico “pimping” a couple of so-so girlfriends (not the five) to make ends meet after a while. Christ I was “muling” them and myself a few times just to score some dope. One time I almost wound up face down in a dusty Sonora back alley, like I guy I knew in Cambridge, when I tried to go “independent.” Jesus, that was close and every once in a while I think about that poor bastard who they found face down in that damn alley and think that could have been me. That pimping thing by the way was not some professional thing but just telling the chicks to sleep with some dope-dealers in return for dope. They were serious hopheads too as that was what gravitated toward you, or clung to you, on the way down. Still it was pimping and I am sorry about that part.

At some point the thing got weird, real weird, maybe after a few months as I started losing girlfriends, the real ones, one after the other until one day I finally realized through a snow storm that I had gone from five to zero and the cheap streets of Boston, friendless.

Here is how I remember that descent, or part of it- Five AM, dark turning to a shade lighter, after a hard ground under the Eliot Bridge bed night, cold October cold with all newspapers, Herald, Globe, upscale New York Times used for a pillow and for ground cover yelling about some guy named Jimmy Carter and about how he is saved. [Must have been 1975-76 or there about.] Running for president too. The guy will need more saving that I need I thought. Ironic though, just that minute when I needed to be saved. Lord saved, mercy saved, some humble Marcia (my main squeeze and the one who stuck it out longest, a brunette) saved (although I did not know it, know it for a very long time, too long and too late).

Long walk along the Charles River, supermarket double brown bag (laughed at Mexican luggage we used to call it) for all worldly possessions. A tee shirt, maybe two, underwear, socks, a half rank pair of pants , another shirt to match the one I was wearing, a comb, and a bar of soap, Dial, and done. All worldly possessions reduced almost to grave size.

Long walk to safe downtown Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, and five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. My street bathroom, a splash (unlike those ocean wave splashes on ancient dream North Carolina cape wind nights now faded) of water on the face, some precious soap, paper towel for a wash cloth, haphazard combing (hell, I was not entering a beauty contest, jesus, no), some soap under the tee shirt for underarms and done. Worldly beauty done.

Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out under some other Eliot Street Bridge bungalow (switched nightly to avoid cop riffs and fellow tramp rip-offs). Walk, stopping for an occasional library break , for a quick nod out, really, and quick read, not some political book though, those days, Genet, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac (not On The Road magic but Big Sur traumas), and such self-help books. (Ironic.)

And minute plan, plan, plan, plain mex paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Waiting for the next fix. Desolation row, no way home.

And then, half sneaking out of town, half desperate to get away and start fresh I walked to the entrance of the Massachusetts Turnpike near the Coca-Cola warehouse in Cambridge put my thumb out and started heading west, west anywhere west. With genetic memories of two brunettes, two blondes and a red head permanently etched in my brain to disturb my sleep.

[When I last heard from Kenny Jackson in late 1979 he had not heard from Red in several months. The only conclusion he, or I, could draw was that Red had gone back to his snow dreams. That was the way things were out in the ravine world. After than I lost contact with Kenny (who was putting his life in order) as well so there is no ending one way or the other to this story.]

*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind

*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind  

From The Pen Of Sam Eaton

Sure 1920s guys, gals too, black guys, black gals sweating out their short, brutalized lives on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland along the river in Mississippi or some such number of acres,  probably it didn't matter to have an official count on the acres to them because all of the land went endlessly to the horizon and the work too had plenty to have the blues about. Had suffered the double whack of having to put up with Mister's Mister James Crow laws to boot which only added to the misery of those endless acres. Sure maybe some woe begotten poor white trash down in hard-boiled Appalachia in those famed hills and hollows had plenty of blues too although they did not call them that even in those few integrated evenings when the whole town went to Rence Jackson's dirty red barn in need of a serious paint job but this is about the blues, the musical blues and not some general social issues commentary. So those “no account” whites don’t play a role here at this time, don't play except as devotes of generic old country British Isles ballads like the ones collected by Francis Child back in the 1850s which thrilled the Brahmins of Brattle Street on a wild utilitarian Saturday night. Actually whites in general don't play a role in the blues since their access to such songs by the likes of the various Blinds, Robert Johnson, and the belting barrelhouse mamas would be minimal in an age when "race" record pieced everybody off into their own tangent. They will not play a role until the music heads north in a generation, or so,  and the “white negro” hipsters (to use big daddy Norman Mailer’s term for the little daddies who hung around the back streets of cool, Harlem 125th Street cool at that time), “beats (to use Jack Kerouac term hustled from some dead-pan beat down hustler, a white negro hipster if it came right down to it named Huncke via high brow John Clellon Holmes for Christ sake),” folkies (to use the Lomaxes’, father and son, expression), college students (to use oh I don’t know the U.S. Department of Education’s expression), and assorted others (junkies, grifters, midnight sifters, drifters on the wing, winos trying to sober up, good time prostitutes, the denizens of Hayes-Bickford's, the Automat, places like that, no hip as a rule) decided that that beat in their heads had Mother Africa who spawned us all had to be investigated but all that indeed was later.

Like I said the real blues aficionados, if only by default, had their say, had their lyrics almost written for them by the events of everyday human existence what with talking in their own "code words" about how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him, Mister, and his just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous children (righteous when they, his children and their children smote the dragon come freedom summer times, come Mississippi and Alabama too goddamn times but that is a story for their generations to tell I want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s and their doings).

Here is how the scene played out as near as I can figure from a wide-ranging reading of most of the lyrics from that time (and always remember when you speak of "blues," speak of the folk in general this is mostly an oral tradition handed down and bastardized as it gotten handed down so there are very few definitive lyrics but rather more a sense of what miseries were being talked about. How Mister James Crow said every day of the week, even the Lord’s Day, Sunday that if you were black, get back, if you were white and right you were alright and proved it by separate this and separate that, keeping his street clear of stray “negros,” yeah, with small “n” if he was being kind that day, another today socially not acceptable expression if not, telling the brethren to go here, not go there, look this way but not that (and by all means not peeking at his womenfolk), walk there but not here, or face nooses and slugs for his troubles.

So yeah the blues almost cried out to be the order of things. Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse share-cropper-ing and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the leavings he didn’t want, meaning what he couldn’t sell to his profit as the rest.

Yeah, so there is no way that black guys could not have had the blues back then except some old nappy Tom who didn’t get the word but they were far fewer than you might think the others just fumed at who knows what psychic costs (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child of the blues, maybe second step-child via in your face if there is space hip-hop nations, the angry ones who put words to the rages of the modern “post racial” American society that somebody has jerked them around with lately). Hey and to Mister’s miseries, very real, very scary when the nightriders came, woman trouble (maybe at night the worse kind of trouble if Mister wasn’t in your face all day with her where you been, do this, do that, put it right here, put it right there), trouble with Sheriff Law (stay off the sidewalks, keep your head down, stay down in the bottom lands or else) and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you mess with his woman, get your own (or face his razor and gun down on Black Mountain).

Plenty of stuff to sing about come Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his home-made brew, freshly batched, which insured that everybody would be at Preacher Jack’s  Sunday service to have their sins, lusts, greeds, avarices, covets, swaggers, cuts, from the night before (or maybe just minutes before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for listening to the “devil’s music” (funny because come the white rock and roll teen explosion a generation later Mister, some Mister, said that too was the devil’s music which confused those clean cut angelic angst-filled teens although not enough to stop listening to Satan and his siren song) by a guy like Charley Patton, Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner, loving his whiskey more than somewhat which Howlin’ Wolf took him to task for down in Newport one year in the early 1960s at a jam session, and a preacher man), Lucky Quick, Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out from under Mister and his Mister James Crow laws by singing the blues and making them go away.          

That’s the guys, black guys and they had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from small label record companies like Paramount, RCA, the radio company looking to feed the hours on their stations with stuff people would listen to (could listen to in short wave range times and hence regional roots work). They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together getting black people, black people with enough money  (and maybe a few white hipsters, Village, North Beach, Old Town denizens tired of the same old, same old if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s “beat” thing), buy, in this case, “race records,” that they might have heard on that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in the Southern hill-billy mountains, and hills and hollows too).

But those black blues brothers were not what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend. Some sound advice too like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is all there to be listened to.   

And the queen, the self-anointed queen, no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing else. But there is more to her claim than mere record sales since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s (untimely in the Mister James Crow South after an car accident and they would not admit an empress for chrissakes into a nearby white hospital, yes, rage, rage against the night unto the nth generation-black lives matter).

Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys, black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, Tin Pan Alley kind of guys in places like high holy Harlem and Memphis, Saint Louis would write stuff for her, big fat sexy high white note sax and chilly dog trombone players would back her up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dog’s tail with her lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need (and you know she needed a little sugar in her bowl just like Bessie and a million, million other women, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on), the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all.

From down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder after losing that bout with TB coughing, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.

Let me leave it like this for now with two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman all pain, pathos and indignity as her good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing. That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things just went awry but maybe you can see the light of day then grab the old Bessie Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums (four double record sets from beginning to end) and just start playing you won’t want to turn the thing off once Bessie gets under your skin.

That’s what I done more than once when I was down on my luck living in flea-bitten rooming house in a cold-water flat with me and my bed, bureau, desk and chair and a battered old RCA record player and just let it wail, let the fellow stew-ball tenants usually behind on their rents anyway howl against the night. Bessie was on the square.                

*****The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

*****The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

 

 

 Click below to link to the Justice For Lynne Stewart website

http://lynnestewart.org/

Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since last winter (2014) after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners)  who  have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case. 

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on.  Hell, who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago cases, the Washington cases, the military cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness Chelsea Manning) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system. And then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.      

*Stonesmania- The Rolling Stones When The Earth Was Young- "Let It Bleed"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the Rolling Stones performing "Gimme Shelter". Yes, indeed.

CD Review

Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones, Abkco Records, 1969

Hey, in 2009 no one, including this reviewer, NEEDS to comment on the fact that The Rolling Stones, pound for pound, have over forty plus years earned their place as the number one band in the rock `n' roll pantheon. Still, it is interesting to listen once again to the guys when they were at the height of their musical powers (and as high, most of the time, as Georgia pines). This album from their most creative period from 1964 to 1971, moreover, unlike let us say Bob Dylan who has produced more creative work for longer, is the `golden era" of the Stone Age. While this CD has a fistful of "greatest hits" from this period and there are no really bad tracks here the stick outs are "Gimme Shelter"( as always), the title track "Let It Bleed", "Midnight Rambler" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want". Ain't that the truth on that last one.

"Gimme Shelter" lyrics-Richards, Jagger

Oh, a storm is threatning
My very life today
If I dont get some shelter
Oh yeah, Im gonna fade away

War, children, its just a shot away
Its just a shot away
War, children, its just a shot away
Its just a shot away

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way

War, children, its just a shot away
Its just a shot away
War, children, its just a shot away
Its just a shot away

Rape, murder!
Its just a shot away
Its just a shot away

Rape, murder!
Its just a shot away
Its just a shot away

Rape, murder!
Its just a shot away
Its just a shot away

The floods is threatning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or Im gonna fade away

War, children, its just a shot away
Its just a shot away
Its just a shot away
Its just a shot away
Its just a shot away
I tell you love, sister, its just a kiss away
Its just a kiss away
Its just a kiss away
Its just a kiss away
Its just a kiss away
Kiss away, kiss away

On Making Allies Where You Can-The War Tax Resisters

On Making Allies Where You Can-The War Tax Resisters

 

 

Frank Jackman comment:

 

A long time ago I gave up trying to figure out the best way to combat war, to make the war- makers scream “uncle” (“Uncle Sam,” better). I/we tried to shame them back in the old days of the Vietnam War with marches, vigils, rallies in our local cities and towns, and ultimately Washington when they continued to prove unmovable. Tried to shut down their damn government, unsuccessfully, bitterly unsuccessfully, on May Day 1971 and got nothing but mace, tear gas and mass arrests into the bastinado for our efforts. Tried to get to the front-line fighters of their wars-the mainly working class soldiers, the cannon-fodder, the grunt who fight every war with coffeehouses and advice that it was in their hands. All along that way, working in the background a lot except for the requisite formal endorsement of whatever good work was worth endorsing-on paper anything- stood the War Resisters League with the seemingly simple proposition that if you, meaning you the individual, withheld your war tax money from the government that would dry up their capacity to fund war, and thus put a big crimp in their ability to wage war.

 

Sometimes though a simple proposition turns into its opposite, turns into a nightmare of bureaucratic paperwork when you come right down to the core of the matter. The dear friends at the IRS do not like, very much do not like, folks who do not pay their taxes, for good reasons or bad. Don’t like folks sending in letters in lieu of taxes saying exactly why they are not paying up. So that simple strategy, one might say rational strategy got added by one Frank Jackman to the heap of ideas that did work out so well about stopping the war-makers in their footsteps. Oh, by the way, that has not stopped one Frank Jackman from protesting every way he has been able to raise as much hell as he could with the war-makers.               

 

“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers

“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers

Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers. The words still apply as we head into 2016:

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union! 

*Stonesmania- The Rolling Stones Aging Well (Alright, Just Coming Back Again) - "A Bigger Bang”

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of The Rolling Stones performing "Sweet Neo-Con" from their "A Bigger Bang" album.

CD Review

A Bigger Bang, The Rolling Stones, 2005

Hey, in 2009 no one, including this reviewer, NEEDS to comment on the fact that The Rolling Stones, pound for pound, have over forty plus years earned their place as the number one band in the rock `n' roll pantheon. Still, it is interesting to listen once again to the guys when they were at the height of their musical powers (and as high, most of the time, as Georgia pines). This album represents a comeback from the tail end of their most creative period long ago in conjunction with their 2005 world tour (endless tour, right?), moreover, unlike let us say Bob Dylan who has produced more creative work for longer, is the `golden era" of the Stone Age. The album, however, is a little uneven in spots reflecting, I think, a certain exhaustion of material that they could call totally their own unlike the time when they owned a big chunk of rock 'n'roll in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The real stick out here is the Muddy Waters-like blues "The Back Of My Hand". The other stick-outs here are "Rain Fall Down" and "Oh No, Not You Again" with a slight kudos for "Sweet Neo-Con" from group that has not expressed much politically for a long, long time.

SWEET NEO CON
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

You call yourself a Christian
I think that you're a hypocrite
You say you are a patriot
I think that you're a crock of shit

And listen, I love gasoline
I drink it every day
But it's getting very pricey
And who is going to pay

How come you're so wrong
My sweet neo con.... Yeah

It's liberty for all
'Cause democracy's our style
Unless you are against us
Then it's prison without trial

But one thing that is certain
Life is good at Haliburton
If you're really so astute
You should invest at Brown & Root.... Yeah

How come you're so wrong
My sweet neo con
If you turn out right
I'll eat my hat tonight

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah....

It's getting very scary
Yes, I'm frightened out of my wits
There's bombers in my bedroom
Yeah and it's giving me the shits

We must have loads more bases
To protect us from our foes
Who needs these foolish friendships
We're going it alone

How come you're so wrong
My sweet neo con
Where's the money gone
In the Pentagon

Yeah ha ha ha
Yeah, well, well

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...
Neo con

*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now

*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Several years ago, I guess about four years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police acting in concert with other American governmental bodies I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary and radical intellectuals, or those who had pretensions to such ideas to take their rightful place on the activist left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines. Or wherever they were hiding out, hiding out maybe as far back in some cases as the Vietnam War days which saw much of the current senior contemporary academia turn from the streets to the ivied-buildings, maybe hiding out in bought and paid for think tanks with their bright-colored “wonk” portfolios like some exiles-in-waiting ready to spring their latest wisdom, maybe posing as public intellectuals although with no serious audience ready to act on their ideas since they were not pushing their agendas beyond the lectern, maybe some in the hard-hearted post 9/11 world having doubts about those long ago youthful impulses that animated "the better angels of their natures" have turned to see the “virtues” of the warfare state and now keep their eyes averted to the social struggles they previously professed to live and die for, or maybe a la Henry David Thoreau retiring to out in some edenic gardens in Big Sur or anywhere Oregon like some 60s radicals did never to be heard from again except as relics when the tourists pass through town.

One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 and beyond still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and 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 they professed to be fighting for (and with not a little hostility from that same work-a-day mass hostile to people hanging out and not working, or not doing much of anything, as well but mainly indifference to the fight these idealistic youth were pursuing, really their fight too since that had been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the banks who got bailed out, the mortgages companies who sold them a false bill of goods, the corporations more than ready to send formerly good paying jobs off-shore leaving Wal-Mart for the unemployed. Now a few years later it is apparent that they, the youth of Occupy have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating via the main bourgeois parties who let the whole thing happen (witness the New York mayor’s race, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders et. al) or have not quite finished licking their wounds (they couldn’t believe as we elders could have told them after all the anti-Vietnam War actions, including the massive May Day 1971 arrests that the government had no problem crushing their own, their own young if they got out of line).

Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy out in the streets I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery, the flow of ideas, some half-baked on their faces but worthy of conversation and testing, the gist for any academic. In short, those who would come by on Sundays and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines about what they saw but held back. (I would argue and this may be the nature of the times that the real beneficiaries of Occupy were all those film students and artists, media-types who made the site their class project, or their first professional documentary.) Now in 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially against the banks who led the way downhill and who under the sway of imperialism's imperative made it clear finance capitalism writ large is in charge) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama and his hangers-on, Democrat and Republican, with might and main is still intact (with a whole ready to take his place come 2016).

The needs of working people although now widely discussed in academia and on the more thoughtful talk shows have not been ameliorated (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations). All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.          
******
No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and when that revolution began to seriously go off the rails followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition  and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere  that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution in less developed capitalist countries and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

The conclusion that I originally drew from that initial  observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenburg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation of '68) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carried us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.

It is almost a political truism that each generation of radicals and revolutionaries 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 mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size and importance 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 (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 felt they 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.

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle, an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem was that “he was the problem” with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives out in bloody nomadic jungles of the American continent). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion codifying the experiences of the third Chinese revolution that the countryside (the “third world with its then predominant peasantry now increasingly proletarianized) would defeat the cities (mainly the West but the Soviet Union as well in some circles) that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside though intense globalization. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?