Tuesday, August 30, 2016

*****No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues

*****No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues 
 
 
 
Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).       

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire all of which both men knew little about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes. What caused the most fears and consternation was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that they had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they didn’t think about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on them.    

The biggest problem though was trying to decipher all the various tendencies in the socialist movement. Ralph, maybe Sam more so, though if everybody wanted the same thing, wanted a better and more peaceful system to live under then they should all get together in one organization, or some such form. The split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, later the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and still later the split between Stalinists and Maoists had their heads spinning, had then thankful that they did not have to fight those fights out.

All in all though they had the greatest respect for Trotsky, Trotsky the serious smart intellectual with a revolver in his hand. Had maybe a little sympathy for the doomed revolutionary tilling against the windmills and not bitching about it. Maybe feeling a little like that was the rolling the rock up the hill that they would be facing. That admiration of Trotsky did not extend to the twelve million sects, maybe that number is too low, who have endlessly split from a stillborn organization he started when he felt the Communist International had stopped being a revolutionary force, the Fourth International. Sam brought up a Catholic would make Ralph laugh when he compared those disputes to the old time religious disputes back in the Middle Ages about how many angels would fit on the tip of a needle. They, after spending the summer in study decided that for a while they would work with whoever still needed help but that as far as committing to joining an ongoing organization forget it. 

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected his ultimate decision, some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke.

Then the endless wars came Iraq I (old man Bush’s claim to fame) although too short to get Ralph and Sam off their couches, Serbia, the big flare-ups in the Middle East name your country of the day or week where the bombs, United States bombs no matter the disguise of some voluntary coalition of the “willing.” The thing that galled Ralph though was the attempts to do war “on the cheap” with killer-drones in place of humans and war materials. The gall part coming from the fact that despite the new high-tech battlefield each succeeding President kept asking for “boots on the ground” to put paid to the notion that all the technology in the world would not secure, as he knew from painful experience in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the ground which needed to be controlled. So the grunts would have to be rolled out and the drones, well, the drones would just keep like all bombs, manned or unmanned, would keep creating that damn collateral damage.    

So the wars drove them back to the streets as “elders” but then things like the Great Recession (really depression except for the rich who did not fallout of high office buildings this time like in 1929) and the quicksilver minute response of the Occupy movement where they spent much time for the short time the movement raised its head publically.

More troubling recently had been the spate of police brutality cases and murders of young black men for being black and alive it seemed. Ralph and Sam had cut their teeth in the movement facing the police and while they were not harassed as a matter of course except when they courted the confrontations they did know that the cops like a lot of people think, a lot of people in the movement too, were nobody’s friends, should be treated like rattlesnakes. Every fiber of their bones told them that from about high school corner boy days. Still how were a couple of old white guys with good hearts going to intersect a movement driven by young mostly black kids who were worried about surviving and who for the most part were not political. They both longed for the days when the Black Panthers could get a hearing from that crowd about self-defense but also about the dirty role of the cops in keeping the ghetto army of occupation in full force.  

Everywhere they went, to each demonstration, rally, vigil, speak-out they would see a new cohort of the young earnest Marxist-types hocking their newspapers and leaflets. Sam thought one time, maybe more than one time, that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could.

 

 

As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

Here is what Sam wrote about the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement that might just smite the dragon:

Listen up. No, I am not black but here is what I know. Know because my grandfather, son of old Irish immigrants before the turn of the 20th century, the ethnic immigrant group which provided a hard core of police officers in the City of Boston and surrounding towns back then, and now too for that matter, told me some stuff (and you can get a good sense of although fictionalized in Dennis Lehane’s novel, The Given Day. The “surrounding towns” part as they left the Irish ghettoes in South Boston and Dorchester, the latter now very heavily filled with all kinds of people of color, and moved first to Quincy and Weymouth then for some to the Irish Rivera further south in Marshfield and places like that). Those Irish also provided their fair share of “militants” in the “so-called” Boston Police Strike of 1919.

Here is what he said when I was a kid and has been etched in my brain since my youth. Cops are not workers, cops are around to protect property, not yours but that of the rich, cops are not your friends because when the deal goes down they will pull the hammer down on you no matter how “nice” they are, no matter how many old ladies and old gentlemen they have escorted across the street (and no matter how friendly they seem when they are cadging donuts and… at so coffee shop on their beat).  And every time I forget that wisdom they, the police remind me, for example, when they raided the Occupy Boston encampment late one night in October 2011 arresting many, including a phalanx of Veterans   for Peace defenders, for no other reason that the “authorities” did not want the campsite extended beyond the original grounds and then unceremoniously razed the place in December 2011 when the restraining order was lifted without batting an eye.

Now this is pretty damn familiar to the audience I am trying to address, those who are raising holy hell in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York (and as I write about North Charleston down in South Carolina) about police brutality, let’s get this right,  about police murder under the color of law. And those who support the, well, let’s call a thing by its right name, rebellion.

Here is what my grandfather, or my father for that matter, did not have to tell me. They, and I ask that you refer to the graphic above, DID NOT need when I came of age for such discussions that I had to be careful of the cops as I walked down the street minding my own business(unless of course I was in a demonstration rasing holy hell about some war or other social injustice but I had that figured already). Did not need to tell me that I was very likely to be pulled over while “walking while Irish.” Did not suggest, as the graphic wisely points out, that I would need to have more identification than an NSA agent to walk down my neighborhood streets. Did not need to tell me that I would suffer all kinds of indignities for breathing.                        

He, they, did not have to tell me a lot of things that every black adult has to tell every black child about the ways on the world in the United States. But remember what that old man, my grandfather, did tell me, cops are not workers, cops are not friends, cops are working the  other side of the street. That old man would also get a chuckle out of the slogan-“Fuck The Cops.” If more people, if more white people especially, would think that way maybe we could curb the bastards in a little.  

***Once Again, On The Spanish Civil War- A Guest Commentary

Click on title to link to a guest commentary of the Trostkyist position on the Spanish Civil from the blog of Renegade Eye.

Monday, August 29, 2016

Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night


Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night
 
 
A YouTube film clip of the Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic? to set the mood for this piece.


 
By Josh Breslin
 
Frankie Riley, the old corner boy leader of the crowd, our crowd of the class of 1964 guys who made it and graduated, not all did, a couple wound up serving time in various state pens but that is not the story I want to tell today except that those fallen brothers also imbibed Frankie’s wisdom (else why would they listen to him for they were tougher if not smarter than he was) about what was what in rock and roll music in the days when we had our feet firmly planted in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, had almost a sixth sense about what songs would and would not make it in the early 1960s night. Knew like the late Billy Bradley, my corner boy when my family lived on the other side of town back then, did in the 1950s elementary school night what would stir the girls enough to get them “going.” And if you don’t understand what “going” meant or what “going and rock and roll together in the same sentence meant then perhaps you should move along. Why else would we listen to Frankie, including those penal tough guys, if it wasn’t to get into some girl’s pants. Otherwise guys like Johnny Blade (and you don’t need much imagination to know what kind of guy and what kind of weapon that moniker meant) and Hacksaw Jackson would have cut of his “fucking head’ (their exact expression and that is a direct quote so don’t censor me or give me the “what for”).
 
But that was then and this is now and old, now old genie Frankie had given up the swami business long ago for the allure of the law profession which he is even now as I write starting to turn over to his younger partners who are begging just like he did in his turn to show their stuff, to herald the new breeze that the austere law offices of one Francis Xavier Riley and Associates desperately needs to keep their clients happy. In that long meantime I have been the man who has kept the flame of the classic days of rock and roll burning. Especially over the past few years when I have through the miracles of the Internet been able between Amazon and YouTube to find a ton of the music, classics and one-shot wonders of our collective youths and comment on it from the distance of fifty or so years.
 
I have presented some reviews of that material, mostly the commercially compiled stuff that some astute record companies or their successors have put together to feed the nostalgia frenzy of the cash rich (relatively especially if they are not reduced to throwing their money at doctors and medicines which is cutting into a lot of what I am able to do), on the Rock and Roll Will Never Die blog that a guy named Wolfman Joe had put together trying to reassemble the “youth nation” of the 1960s who lived and died for the music that was then a fresh breeze compared to the deathtrap World War II-drenched music our parents were trying to foist on us.         
 
That work, those short sketch commentaries, became the subject for conversation between Frankie and me when he started to let go of the law practice (now he is “of counsel” whatever that means except he get a nice cut of all the action that goes through the office without the frenzied work for the dollars) and we would meet every few weeks over at Jack’s in Cambridge where he now lives since the divorce from his third wife, Minnie. So below are some thoughts from the resurrection, Frankie’s term, for his putting his spin on “what was what” fifty or so years ago when even Johnny Blade and Hacksaw Jackson had sense enough to listen to his words if they wanted to get into some frill’s pants.
 
“Okay, you know the routine by now, or at least the drift of these classic rock reviews. [This is the sixth in the series that I had originally commented on but which Frankie feels he has to put his imprimatur on just like in the old days- JB] The part that starts out with a “tip of the hat” to the hard fact that each generation, each teenage generation that is makes its own tribal customs, mores and language. Then the part that is befuddled by today’s teenage-hood. And then I go scampering back to my teenage-hood, the teenage coming of age of the generation of ‘68 that came of age in the early 1960s and start on some cultural “nugget” from that seemingly pre-historic period. Well this review is no different, except, today we decipher the drive-in restaurant, although really it is the car hops (waitresses) that drive this one.
 
See, this series of reviews is driven, almost subconsciously driven, by the Edward Hopper Nighthawk-like illustrations on the The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era CDs of this mammoth set of compilations (fifteen, count them, fifteen like there were fifteen times twenty or so songs on each compilation or over three hundred classic worth listening to today. Hell, even Frankie would balk at that possibility).
 
In this case it is the drive-in restaurant of blessed teenage memory. For the younger set, or those oldsters who “forgot” that was a restaurant idea driven by car culture, especially the car culture from the golden era of teenage car-dom, the 1950s. Put together cars, cars all flash-painted and fully-chromed, “boss” cars we called them in my working class neighborhood, young restless males, food, and a little off-hand sex, or rather the promise or mist of a promise of it, and you have the real backdrop to the drive-in restaurant. If you really thought about it why else would somebody, anybody who was assumed to be functioning, sit in their cars eating food, and at best ugly food at that, off a tray while seated in their cherry, “boss" 1959 Chevy.
 
And beside the food, of course, there was the off-hand girl watching (in the other cars with trays hanging off their doors), and the car hop ogling (and propositioning, if you had the nerve, and if your intelligence was good and there was not some 250 pound fullback back-breaker waiting to take her home after work a few cars over with some snarl on his face and daggers in his heart or maybe that poundage pounding you) there was the steady sound of music, rock music, natch, coming from those boomerang speakers in those, need I say it, “boss” automobiles. And that is where all of this gets mixed in.
 
Of course, just like another time when I was reviewing one of the CDs in this series, and discussing teenage soda fountain life, the mere mention, no, the mere thought of the term “car hop” makes me think of a Frankie story. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie from the old hell-fire shipbuilding sunk and gone and it-ain’t-coming-back-again seen better days working class neighborhood where we grew up, or tried to. Frankie who I have already told you I have a thousand stories about, or hope I do. Frankie the most treacherous little bastard that you could ever meet on one day, and the kindest man (better man/child), and not just cheap jack, dime store kindness either, alive the next day. Yeah, that Frankie, my best middle school and high school friend Frankie.
 
Did I tell you about Joanne, Frankie’s “divine” (his term, without quotation marks) Joanne because she enters, she always in the end enters into these things? Yes, I see that I did back when I was telling you about her little Roy “The Boy” Orbison trick. The one where she kept playing Running Scared endlessly to get Frankie’s dander up. But see while Frankie has really no serious other eyes for the dames except his “divine” Joanne (I insist on putting that divine in quotation marks when telling of Joanne, at least for the first few times I mention her name, even now. Needless to say I questioned, and questioned hard, that designation on more than one occasion to no avail) he is nothing but a high blood-pressured, high-strung shirt-chaser, first class. And the girls liked him, although not for his looks although they were kind of Steve McQueen okay. What they went for him for was his line of patter, first class. Patter, arcane, obscure patter that made me, most of the time, think of fingernails scratching on a blackboard (except when I was hot on his trail trying to imitate him) and his faux “beat” pose (midnight sunglasses, flannel shirt, black chinos, and funky work boots (ditto on the imitation here as well). And not just “beat’ girls liked him, either as you will find out. Certainly Joanne the rose of Tralee was not beat sister (although she was his first wife). 
 
Well, the long and short of it was that Frankie, late 1963 Frankie, and the...(oh, forget it) Joanne had had their 207th (really that number, or close, since 8th grade) break-up and Frankie was a "free” man. To celebrate this freedom Frankie, Frankie, who was almost as poor as I was but who has a father with a car that he was not too cheap or crazy about to not let Frankie use on occasion, had wheels. Okay, Studebaker wheels but wheels anyway. And he was going to treat me to a drive-in meal as we went cruising the night, the Saturday night, the Saturday be-bop night looking for some frails (read: girls, Frankie had about seven thousand names for them)
 
Tired (or bored) from cruising the Saturday be-bop night away (meaning girl-less) we hit the local drive-in hot spot, Arnie’s Adventure Car Hop for one last, desperate attempt at happiness (yeah, things were put, Frank and me put anyway, just that melodramatically for every little thing). What I didn’t know was that Frankie, king hell skirt-chaser had his off-hand eye on one of the car hops, Sandy, and as it turned out she was one of those girls who was enamored of his patter (or so I heard later). So he pulled into her station and started to chat her up as we ordered the haute cuisine, And here was the funny thing, now that I saw her up close I could see that she was nothing but a fox (read: “hot” girl).
 
The not so funny thing was that she was so enamored of Frankie’s patter that he was going to take her home after work. No problem you say. No way, big problem. I was to be left there to catch a ride home while they set sail into that good night. Thanks, Frankie.
Well, I was pretty burned up about it for a while but as always with “charma” Frankie we hooked up again a few days later. And here is where I get a little sweet revenge (although don’t tell him that).
Frankie sat me down at the old town pizza parlor [Tonio’s Pizza Parlor of blessed memory-JB] and told me the whole story and even now, as I recount it, I can’t believe it.
 
Sandy was a fox, no question, but a married fox, a very married fox, who said she when he first met her that she was about twenty-two and had a kid. Her husband was in the service and she was “lonely” and succumbed to Frankie’s charms. Fair enough, it is a lonely world at times. But wait a minute, I bet you thought that Frankie’s getting mixed up with a married honey with a probably killer husband was the big deal. No way, no way at all. You know, or you can figure out, old Frankie spent the night with Sandy. Again, it's a lonely world sometimes.
 
The real problem, the real Frankie problem, was once they started to compare biographies and who they knew around town, and didn’t know, it turned out that Sandy, old fox, old married fox with brute husband, old Arnie’s car hop Sandy was some kind of cousin to Joanne, second cousin maybe. And she was no cradle-robber twenty-two (as if you could rob the cradle according to Frankie) but nineteen, almost twenty and was just embarrassed about having a baby in high school and having to go to her "aunt's" to have the child. Moreover, somewhere along the line she and cousin Joanne had had a parting of the ways, a nasty parting of the ways. So sweet as a honey bun Arnie's car hop Sandy, sweet teen-age mother Sandy, was looking for a way to take revenge and Frankie, old king of the night Frankie, was the meat. She had him sized up pretty well, as he admitted to me. And he was sweating this one out like crazy, and swearing everyone within a hundred miles to secrecy. So I’m telling you this is strictest confidence even now fifty years later and long after his divorce from her. Just don’t tell Joanne. Ever.

Heading Toward The Danger When It Counted In The Red Scare 1950s Night-The Saga Of The Golden Rule


Heading Toward The Danger When It Counted In The Red Scare 1950s Night-The Saga Of The Golden Rule

 











Frank Jackman:




Those of us who grew in the blessedly behind us Red Scare Cold War 1950s night and who innocently suffered through the torments of ducking our heads and asses down in some forlorn school basement come air-raid drill time missed a few things. Didn’t get to know much more than if we didn’t duck those heads and asses we were doomed. Like if the “big one,” and everybody from about first grade on knew the big one meant that the Russkies, Uncle Joe and his minions, had set the trail for total destruction had really occurred some candy-ass basement was going to save us. What we didn’t know because nobody gave a rat’s ass to tell us we would have been just as well off staying right at our desks in the classroom because when and if the big one blew around Boston town we were goners anyway.

Well, enough of youthful Cold War horror stories because the really important thing that we did not know, as elementary and junior high school students did not know, was that there were people, brave people anyway you cut it who challenged the conventional wisdom, did not buy into the idea that we all had to suffer the nuclear winter the governmental flaks were warning us about if we didn’t go toe to toe with Uncle Joe and his minions and built more and more thermonuclear bombs. And test then out in what was supposed to be “no man’s land,” out in the deep Pacific. But some brave souls in places like New York and Boston demonstrated against the nuclear madness. And they were brave. But the bravest of them all, the ones we should thank profusely even today, maybe especially today as a new cold war seems to be on the agenda were those serious pacifists who outfitted the Golden Rule and headed toward, not away from, the danger of the nuclear test bomb sites to say, well, to say “stop the madness.” Yeah, stop the madness now. Check out the story of the Golden Rule and its recent restoration to once again go toward not away from the danger.   

Shakespeare In Love-Or In Love With Shakespeare-With The 400th Anniversary Year Of The Bard’s Death In Mind

Shakespeare In Love-Or In Love With Shakespeare-With The 400th Anniversary Year Of The Bard’s Death In Mind

 




Who knows at this point how many expressions, terms, words, playwright ideas, throwaway ideas, mousy idea, idle chatter, barroom fisticuffs, flights of fancy, lost hours of imitative work, faded romance, ill-fated romance, bewitched love-craft, homages, just sayings, bon mots, revels, idle chatter, oops I already said that, murderous intentions, incestuous desires, kingly horses, betrothals, beheadings, beddings, binges, oops same as barroom fisticuffs, groundling up-swells, pixie midnight madnesses, rancorous reconnoiters, plough and stars séances, heterosexual dalliances, homosexual dalliances(remember all those boys in girls’ uniforms, philogists banter, etymological discoveries, runes, druid pithiness, and shear humbug can be laid at the Bard of Avon’s door after 400 plus years but no question plenty can. And in the next one hundred solemn years about ninety percent of the items expressed above things will continue to be thrown at that self-same door. So be it. We are richer by some nth magnitudes for the works.        

Adding their two pence worth is a series on Shakespeare’s influence on the development and neglect of language-the English language mainly but the not unimportant fact that at one time “the sun never set on the British Empire” makes that a much bigger historical fact than a simple national language the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) has been running an episodic year-long project about the Bard’s effects.

Here’s the link-and get ready for 2116 now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/shakespeare/

*****Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits

*****Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits



From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin who fell by the wayside, fell to his notoriously monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places down among the weeds in Mexico, looking for train smoke and dreams if you really thought about the matter, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother-RIP.     

 

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, bourgeois a better term than capitalist or imperialist if you are in America since it gives a better view of the unhindered social norms, the ethos rather than the sheer grab for filthy lucre; you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address, the address of Mister Tom Waits if you missed the headline or missed who is writing this thing (or better "wrote" since this piece is being edited posthumously by Zack James who found this and three companion pieces in the attic of Josh Breslin's Olde Saco family house in Olde Saco, Maine when they were looking to dispose of whatever could be disposed of in preparation for selling the place so Josh and Lana could move in smaller quarters and Josh told him the long and at the end the sad story about Josh's and Markin's meeting out in San Francisco in the summer of love 1960s times and about Markin's awful fate down in Mexico. That story drove Zack to the editing job in order that a genuine mad monk writer could some forty years after his death receive a small recognition of his ambitious talent.) 

Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay once he saw how those coupon-clippers devoured all good sense and sober ethos, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors some hungry Dutch sailors who took what they wanted back the homeland and made a grave attempt to fatten their own chests. Just check out any Dutch master painting to see what I mean.

Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for "you at the expense of me" system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.

If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap,  with blinkers on before you got stuck in the human sink that you have still not been able to get out of) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering,  have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself  into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half-forgotten, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups complete with spoons to measure that coffee out as the very modernist poet once said making his modern statement about the world created since the turn of the 19th century that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes Spanish is the loving tongue, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull  sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, plucked out early by a professor over on Brattle Street back when the Brahmins very publicly ruled the roost, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times), reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter [oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay-Zack James] and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.

If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs, brother even I Iearned early that it was a dangerous world, yeah, learned very early in the Adamsville projects where you got a very real taste of danger before you got too much older than five or six), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark-skinned like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land  and that city on a hill that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half-forgotten remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that sagging bed to perdition and worse losing that thing she had for sex once she started selling it by the hour. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.

So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who had gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes   ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific  trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record [CD or download okay-Zack] and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.

See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. 


Tom Waits once you get the habit gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.

If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.