The Cold Civil War Has Started -Resist Trump's Agenda: National Inauguration Protests
|
Saturday, December 17, 2016
The Cold Civil War Has Started -Resist Trump's Agenda: National Inauguration Protests
******I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night In Mind
******I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Recently Sam Eaton an old friend of mine from high school days down at Carver High School in Southeastern Massachusetts did a review for the well-regarded and informative American Folk Music blog where he is listed as a regular contributor for Bob Dylan’s then latest CD brought out in 2014, Shadows In The Night. [Subsequently in 2015 Columbia Records brought out Volume 12 f the apparently never-ending bootleg series this one centered on a 6 CD set of outtakes, mistakes, variations, songs that didn't make the albums, and whatnot from Dylan's fruitful 1965-66 period but that is old-time well-know music so doesn't really count as a latest CD. Sam had yet to review that compilation since he is not sure that he should not just go back and review the original albums; Blonde on Blonde, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited.]
Sam had sent me a copy of the review after I had reunited with him when I was looking for information via Google about my Carver High School Class of 1964 50th anniversary class reunion via the “magic” of the Internet where Diana Rico (nee Kelly) along with her reunion committee had set up a class reunion website which he had joined thus proving that the Internet seems to be able to ferret out anybody who has ever put the slightest information on any website (and which has been recorded by our “friends” at NSA and other “big brother” operations done in “our interest” by the American government but enough of that for now as that is a subject worthy of another time). I then bought the CD on Amazon and after listening did my own amateur review, since writing such things is something I like to do in my spare time, which is essentially based on a lot of Sam's observations in that American Folk Song review. The reason for depending on Sam's observations is that while this album is slightly different from Dylan's early folk song work I have never really been able to do anything but grind my teeth when I hear such music and particularly Dylan's. Unlike Sam I am no folk music aficionado.
The album a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley songwriter fest, Frank Sinatra, in the days when there was something of an unwritten code or maybe not unwritten but assumed by the division of labor that the singer and songwriter were strangers in the night in another sense. Songwriters for the most part wrote the lyrics and singers gobbled up what they were presented with. (Also later, after a semi-successful screen career where he did excellent work in the film adaptations of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity and Nelson Algren’s wrenching The Man With The Golden Arm and some notoriety as the leader of a rat pack of Hollywood and Los Vegas celebrities, named the “Chairman of the boards,” the boards being the stage upon which his fame rested as a singer, actor and hail fellow, well met.) In that review Sam noted that such an effort to go back to an aspect, an off-shoot of the great American Songbook of which Dylan knew so much even early on before he became famous as the “king of folksingers” was bound to happen if he lived long enough.
[Fir those who have forgotten, who had only a vague remembrance from parents' radio listening in the 1950s to the exclusion of rock and roll listening, or were too young Frank Sinatra was the cat's meow in those day. Later, after a semi-successful screen career where he did excellent work in the film adaptations of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity and Nelson Algren’s wrenching The Man With The Golden Arm and some notoriety as the leader of a rat pack of Hollywood and Los Vegas celebrities, he was declared named the “Chairman of the boards,” the boards being the stage upon which his fame rested as a singer, actor and hail fellow, well met.)Sam had sent me a copy of the review after I had reunited with him when I was looking for information via Google about my Carver High School Class of 1964 50th anniversary class reunion via the “magic” of the Internet where Diana Rico (nee Kelly) along with her reunion committee had set up a class reunion website which he had joined thus proving that the Internet seems to be able to ferret out anybody who has ever put the slightest information on any website (and which has been recorded by our “friends” at NSA and other “big brother” operations done in “our interest” by the American government but enough of that for now as that is a subject worthy of another time). I then bought the CD on Amazon and after listening did my own amateur review, since writing such things is something I like to do in my spare time, which is essentially based on a lot of Sam's observations in that American Folk Song review. The reason for depending on Sam's observations is that while this album is slightly different from Dylan's early folk song work I have never really been able to do anything but grind my teeth when I hear such music and particularly Dylan's. Unlike Sam I am no folk music aficionado.
The album a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley songwriter fest, Frank Sinatra, in the days when there was something of an unwritten code or maybe not unwritten but assumed by the division of labor that the singer and songwriter were strangers in the night in another sense. Songwriters for the most part wrote the lyrics and singers gobbled up what they were presented with. (Also later, after a semi-successful screen career where he did excellent work in the film adaptations of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity and Nelson Algren’s wrenching The Man With The Golden Arm and some notoriety as the leader of a rat pack of Hollywood and Los Vegas celebrities, named the “Chairman of the boards,” the boards being the stage upon which his fame rested as a singer, actor and hail fellow, well met.) In that review Sam noted that such an effort to go back to an aspect, an off-shoot of the great American Songbook of which Dylan knew so much even early on before he became famous as the “king of folksingers” was bound to happen if he lived long enough.
Going back to the Great Depression/World War II period that our parents, we the baby-boomers parents (although Dylan born in 1941 missed the big generation of '68 boat but for Sam’s purpose that was okay Dylan got tagged as an honorary '68er) slogged through for musical inspiration. Going back to something, some place that when we were young and immortal, young and thinking that what we had created would last forever we would have, rightly, dismissed out of hand. And since Dylan has lived long enough, long enough to go back to some bygones roots here we are talking about something that let us say in 1970 Sam would have dismissed as impossible. Dismissed as the delusional ravings of somebody like Sam’s older brother, Mason, who hated almost everything about the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. Hated both before he did two tours in Vietnam beginning in 1965 even before the big call-ups after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, enlisting naturally, without a scratch on him, before he got married to his high school sweetheart who had waited, had waited through those two long tours for him maybe sensing that he would come through unscratched, got his little white picket house in hometown North Carver away from his South Carver working class son of a bogger (cranberry bogs the only thing that keep the town together back then and for which it had been famous for generations), and after when he would, along with the lovely bride stand in front of abortion clinics and spew hateful words and make threatening gestures against poor bedraggled young women (mainly) up against it after some guy left her in the lurch to worry and fret about bringing another baby into this wicked old world. In addition "fag" bait (without the bride as far as Sam knew, they were not exactly on the best of terms then, or now for that matter) every guy in town whose had a word to say about peace and went crazy when somebody mentioned that gays ("in the closet gays") had served in the military during his war. Mason would think nothing of punching any guy who he thought was “light on his feet” (lesbians he seemed, according to Sam, he skipped for some reason), had been ready to spill blood it seemed to cut off the heads of anybody who wanted to breathe a new fresh breath not tinged with our parents’ worn out ways of doing business in civil society.
A whole dissertation or at least a serious long article could be written about how the gap of maybe three years, graduating in say 1961 like Mason and 1964 like Sam created a whole divide in social/political/cultural attitudes in many families. Not all but many where the fresh breeze of the Kennedy Camelot minute dream breeze had not been strong enough to check the desire of the former grouping to serve one’s country, right or wrong, marry one time forever, and get that little white fence house that was a step, maybe two, up from Ma and Pa and go down and dirty with every right-wing yahoo who promised to "take the country back" and you can fill in the blanks on your own about who from when things came to a head.
A whole dissertation or at least a serious long article could be written about how the gap of maybe three years, graduating in say 1961 like Mason and 1964 like Sam created a whole divide in social/political/cultural attitudes in many families. Not all but many where the fresh breeze of the Kennedy Camelot minute dream breeze had not been strong enough to check the desire of the former grouping to serve one’s country, right or wrong, marry one time forever, and get that little white fence house that was a step, maybe two, up from Ma and Pa and go down and dirty with every right-wing yahoo who promised to "take the country back" and you can fill in the blanks on your own about who from when things came to a head.
Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, today’s AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. Dylan’s call, clarion call if you will of Blowin’ In The Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (those dropped “gs” a sign of the folk informally and a general mid-country Midwest phenomenon) written and sung by him which began a trend in music that pulled the mythical Tin Pan Alley marquee down (and a lot of non-singing-instrument composers and professional studio musical on to cheap street) were direct assaults on whatever Grandfather Ike, the Cold War death bombs mentality or the deep freeze cultural and personal red scare which had carried the country (and Frank) through the 1950s.
The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins/Jerome Kern, Sam who along with his interest in rock and roll, urban blues and protest-tinged folk music a la Dylan (and Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Utah Phillips, Tom Paxton and a group of other who I forget that Sam was always talking about ) also knew about and hence his status as “professional” amateur archivist and reviewer so forgive me if I have left anybody of importance out. Have I missed anybody of importance, probably, probably missed some of those Rogers and Hart Broadway show tunes teams, and so on.
That proposition though, at least as it pertains to Bob Dylan as an individual, seems less strange as Sam pointed out to me if you were not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s as he was although folk music beyond a few Dylan tunes sung by others as I said before made my teeth grind, left me flat and even with Dylan it was an iffy proposition when he was cranky-voiced in live performances like one time, maybe 1964, when Sam, at Sam’s insistence, forced me since I had access to a car to go down to the Newport Folk Festival one hot July night to hear “the bard ” and he croaked out his set. Those were the days though when even I realized that whether Dylan wanted that designation or not, he was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.
In the end Dylan did not want it, ran from it (with the “help” of a serious motorcycle accident which kept him out of the live limelight, holed up in Woodstock along with musicians who would be the Band, the rock and roll back-up band for Dylan when he went electric in 1965 and later on their own, although not out of big time album making, that being a rather prolific album period for him, did not want to be the voice of a generation, had no banner to wave, no sign to hold up for humanity as say Joan Baez, an ex-girlfriend or something like that, and Phil Ochs did, although he liked and wanted to be “king of the hill” in the music department of that generation, no question.
Wanted too to be the king hell troubadour entertaining the world for as long as he drew breathe, as long as he had a song to sing (in what kind of voice god only knows, reptilian the last time I heard him previously a few years ago on some aspect of his never-ending tour gig and Sam said in that review of the Sinatra tribute album that they must have had to come up with some miracles of modern “fixer man” music technology to get his voice to sound even as bad as it did on his Sinatra-etched covers which were just short of spoken verses like some New Jersey Best Western hotel lounge lizard act) and he has accomplished that, the longevity part.
What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career though has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. As he is quoted as saying in a 2015 AARP magazine article connected with the release of his Frank Sinatra tribute what he hoped was that like Frank he sang to, not at, his audience. Just like Frank did when he was in high tide around the 1940s and 1950s and our bobby-soxer mothers were tripping all over themselves like he was Elvis or something and throwing who knows what his way, maybe, notes with telephones numbers and promises of the best time he ever had. That sensibility is emphatically not what the folk protest music ethos was about but rather about stirring up the troops, stirring up the latter day Gideon’s Army to go smite the dragon, to right a few, maybe more, of the wrongs of this wicked old world. Dylan early on came close, stepped into Mississippi for a day or so, then drew back, although it is hard to think of anybody from our generation except maybe Joan Baez and Phil Ochs who wrote and sang to move people from point A to point B in the social struggles of the times.
What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook that he began to gather in his mind early on (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back where he is up in some European hotel room with Joan Baez and Bob Neuwirth singing Hank Williams ballads like Lost Highway or stuff from the Basement tapes, either set, the recently released five CD set in the never-ending bootleg set or the rarer “Genuine Basement” tape which is where he runs the table on a few earlier genres, especially country and show tunes). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now he has added his hero Frank Sinatra to his version of the songbook (at least he called him his hero but Sam said he would be hard-pressed to name one song Dylan covered of Frank’s in the old days even as a goof.)
Sam said (an I agree somewhat, as much as I am going to with folk songs that can still make my teeth grind) that he may long for the old protest songs, the songs that stirred his blood to push on with the political struggles of the time like With God On Our Side which pushed him (and dragged me along in his wake, for a while) into the ranks of the Quakers, shakers, and little old ladies and men in tennis sneakers in the fight for nuclear disarmament, songs from the album pictured above, you know Blowin’ In The Wind which fit perfectly with the sense that something, something undefinable, something new as in the air in the early 1960s and The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that, the roots music and not just Woody but Hank (including an incredible version of You Win Again), Tex-Mex working later with George Sahms of the Sir Douglas Quintet, the Carters, the odd and unusual like the magic lyric play in Desolation Row, his cover of Charley Patton’s Highwater Rising or his cover of a song Lonnie Johnson made famous, Tomorrow Night, but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the “queen”).
Having not heard Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (for Sam it was always about the lyrics not the voice although in looking at old tapes from the Newport Folk Festival on YouTube his voice was actually far better then than I would have given him credit for) I said to Sam I really did wonder, like he did, though how much production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly as the “Chairman of the boards,” to run the pauses and the hushed tones Frank knew how to do to keep his audience in his clutches. Yeah, still what goes around comes around.
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Struggle For Socialism In Venezuela- A Guest Commentary
Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article about the historic problems that communist have had when confronting Latin American populist bourgeois nationalist forces and political movements.
From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days Of......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars
From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days Of......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars
President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A Story Goes With It-Observe Her Birthday December 17th
President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A
Story Goes With It-Observe Her Birthday Today
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/commute-chelsea-mannings-sentence-time-served-1
President Obama Pardon Chelsea
Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A Story Goes With It-Observe Her Birthday
December 17th
By Fritz Taylor
[The organization that the two
men, Ralph Morse and Bartlett Webber, in the story below belong to, Veterans
for Peace, has been a long-time supporter of the struggle for freedom for
heroic whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Veterans for Peace has supported Chelsea
since the organization found out in the summer of 2010 through Courage to
Resist, an organization dedicated to publicizing the plight of military
resisters, that she had been arrested and through a long process wound up in
solitary confinement down at the Quantico Marine Base south of Washington in
Virginia. She had been charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of
documents via Wiki-leaks to a candid world. Many of them documenting the
cover-up at all levels of military atrocities by American soldiers, mercenaries
under contract to the American government or within the American-led coalition.
The most graphic and infamous piece of evidence of such actions was a tape of a
helicopter crew gunning down unarmed civilians in Iraq which is available on YouTube
under the title Collateral Murder and
laughing about it afterwards. (That tape, the entire tape, all thirty-nine
minutes is permanently part of the record in the Manning case placed there at
trial by the defense team. No one ever challenged the veracity of the tape
although no one was ever charged with any crimes either.)
Chelsea was held in pre-trial
confinement for over three years (opening an appeal question about
constitutional speedy trial rights-applicable even in the military courts. Her
solitary confinement (for her own good either because she was then a suicide
risk by one account or because her fellow soldiers would be so outraged by her
whistle-blowing that they feared for her safety by another-take your pick) at
Quantico lasted almost a year before she was due in part at least to a public
outcry and rallies of hundreds at the gates of Quantico for her release she was
placed in Fort Leavenworth. (Here is the military logic tough-every time she
had to appear for some matter before the court at Fort Meade she would be flown
back and forth after the conclusion of whatever had transpired.) Ms. Manning
(Private if you prefer her rank) has after an over two month trial been
convicted of a number of charges including several counts of espionage under a
law going back to World War I and sentenced to a thirty-five year sentence as a
result of being court-martialed in the summer of 2013 and is currently being
held in the all-male barracks at Fort Leavenworth out on the prairies of
Kansas.
Ralph and Bart first heard
about the details of the case in the fall of 2010 when they received an e-mail
from the American Civil Liberties Union announcing a forum to be held at Boston
University to publicize the case. (Bart was not sure that he had not seen something
about the matter earlier on Boston Indy
Media where Anonymous, a radical underground group, had places news about
the case and of course the leaks would have been by then public knowledge but
this forum was the first active part they played in the case.) They both
attended that forum and as a result have been ever since involved one way or
another in Chelsea’s defense. Their first action was to “pony up,” these are
working-class guys so pony up is right, some money for the defense. (Courage To
Resist was/is the repository for raising and accounting for all legal defense
monies since the beginning. As stated above that organization has had a long
history of supporting military resisters-for military whistle-blowers as well.)
There were many reasons why
this case had appealed to them personally but the strongest reason was that
they were “paying their dues” as Bart put it while speaking about the case one
Saturday afternoon at a vigil for Chelsea at historic Park Street Station on
the Boston Common for not having had the courage during their own military
service during the Vietnam War to “buck the system.” For a long time, actually
since the last days of the Vietnam War when they supported an anti-war G.I.
coffeehouse near Fort Devens about forty miles outside of Boston, they had no
opportunity to get involved in a military resister case so once this case
surfaced they were “all in.” (After they “got religion” on the war issue they
had done their respective peace activist works through various mostly ad hoc organizations and for the past
several years through VFP. The last time I checked they were still “all in.”
That will tell you something about them, about how razor sharp that military
service had made them about the folly of
war and about the importance of the Chelsea Manning case, especially as now as
the long drag of her sentence and her environment has worn her down and she has
attempted suicide twice in the past few months. (Google the Chelsea Manning
Support Network for details.) So Frank Jackman’s phrase “she must not die in
jail” in the headline is not a rhetorical flourish. Not at all. F.T.]
******
“You know it is a crying shame
that the Chelsea Manning case has fallen beneath the cracks, that her plight as
the only woman prisoner in an all-male prison out there in the wheat fields of
Kansas, out at Leavenworth has been ignored except for an occasional news note
or yet another petition for President Obama to do the right thing like he has
with the draconian drug cases and pardon her, to commute her sentence to time
served, to the six plus years she has already been tossed away behind the
walls,” yelled Ralph Morse over to Bart Webber while they were preparing to set
up a banner proclaiming that very idea as part of a birthday vigil for Chelsea
on her 29th birthday on this cold December day. The banner
“President Obama Pardon-Chelsea Manning-“We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind”
with two copies of a photograph of her as some friendly artist had drawn of an
image her as she might look like if she could express her full sexual identity (see
above) and not the Army’s hard-ass male version since she had “come out” as a
transgender woman shortly after her sentencing in 2013 had been inspired, the
last part anyway by their fellow VFPer Frank Jackman. Frank had had his own
very personal “war” against the military during his war, again Vietnam, and had
served time in an Army stockade for refusing to go to that war. He always said
that the one thing the Army did teach him was that you did not leave your
fellow soldiers behind, and sometimes that might be the only reason left to
fight. He thought it appropriate that peaceful veterans could express that same
sentiment about a political prisoner who once the notoriety of the case faded
could use plenty of that sentiment.
(Ralph thought to himself while
he was yelling over to Bart and cutting some wind holes in the banner to cut
the sometimes fierce winds that passed through the Boston Common that he would
never get over those basic training drill sergeants during his time in the
military during the Vietnam War, never get over being spooked by them that if
you did not toe the mark you would wind up in Leavenworth and here he was
supporting a young transgender whistleblower who wound up in that very place after
having done what he should have done-resist- but he cowered to those redneck
drill sergeants. Well even 60-somethings can learn a thing or two from the
younger crowd.)
“Yeah, between the fact that
she had to in order to protect herself against maltreatment from a bunch of
goddam threatening guards who told her to “man up” at Leavenworth after she was
convicted and sentenced to those hard thirty-five years in 2013 “come out” as a
transgender woman and the overriding blow-up over the Snowden revelations which
took all the air out of any other whistle-blower case Chelsea got the short end
of the stick,” replied Bart also yelling his comment across to Ralph against
both the windy day and the constant stream of loonies, crazies and con men and
women who populated the environs around the Park Street subway station at
Boston Common on any given Saturday of while both men could tell a million zany
stories about between the hours of one and two in the afternoon when the space,
or part of it, was given over to peace
action groups and other left-wing political organizations.
(That business about formerly
Bradley having to reveal her true sexual identity the day after her sentencing
had been a personal safety necessity against the taunts of the guards out in
Leavenworth as both men had been told by a man from Courage To Resist who knew
the inside story when they asked why she had “come out” so soon after the
sentencing which threw a lot of supporters off-center who had not been privy to
the sexual politics involved although some stuff had come out courtesy of the
Army about her sexual identity in order to diminish her heroic actions.)
Oddly, or maybe not so oddly at
that, Bart, as he told Ralph later that day when they were sitting in a bar
having a couple of drinks to warm themselves up against the coldness of the day
thinking about the day’s action that he too had been thinking about how
incongruous it would have been in his old working class neighborhood in
Riverdale to be supporting a transgender soldier condemned to Leavenworth, a
“transvestite,” a drag queen they would have called her not then making the
subtle distinctions that have evolved on questions of sexual identity. Had that
day thought about the time that he and his corner boys, that is what they
called each other back then when there were corners for dough-less guys to hang
around on, that one summer they had travelled down to Provincetown, even then a
gay and other odd-ball Mecca for the specific purpose of baiting the drag
queens, faggots and dykes along with getting the usual drunk to gather courage.
Jesus.
Ralph thought to himself as he continued
to cut a few wind holes in the banner proclaiming the need for President Obama
to grant Chelsea her pardon that he had come a long way (and Bart too) since
the fall of 2010 when they learned that Chelsea (then using her birth name
Bradley but here we will use her chosen now legal name and assume everybody
understands that this is the same person we are talking about) was being held
essentially incommunicado down at the Quantico Marine Base (strange location since
Chelsea was in the Army and the various branches of the services jealously
guard their prerogatives) in solitary and their organization, Veterans for
Peace, had called for demonstrations to have her released even then, or at
least taken have her taken out of solitary and stop being tortured (not some small “peacenik” charge or propaganda super-charged
to gain sympathy for the victim of government repression since the appropriate
United Nations rapporteur had made such a finding in her case concerning her
pre-trial treatment). Ralph and Bart had been among the very first to set up a
rally (not at Park Street but in Davis Square over in Somerville where Bart had
lived for the previous decade) and they had been committed to her defense ever
since. The weekly shout-out on Friday afternoons is the place where Ralph not
known a as a public speaker but more as a “Jimmy Higgins” figure (a rank and
filer who did the odd chores to insure the success of the event) began get his
“voice,” get his political facts in a row with at first maybe a minute speech.
By the end of that series of vigils which were switched the busier intersection
at Central Square in Cambridge you could hardly get the “mic” out of his hand.
Bart who had some college behind him where he had to take a debating class as a
requirement his freshman year tended to give the pitches about what people
could to support Chelsea, usually a set five minute speech.
(That shout-out designation was
simply current usage for such events in the wake of the Occupy movement where
the term took on an almost religious mantra quality. Also acceptable and used
at other times including the event that Brad and Ralph were helping stage this
day- vigil, rally or whatever other appropriate name you want to call an event
where people were free to express their opinions about Chelsea’s case and other
causes which made sense to speak of and a few times budding folk singers who
also hung out in the space would come by and sing some song, especially David
Rovacs tribute to Chelsea’s heroic action.)
Both men freely admitted and it
bears repeating here that what was driving them on this case more fervently
that other peace and progressive actions they had been involved with over the
decades had been their own admittedly sorry response to “their” war, Vietnam. In
Ralph’s case joining the Army, meaning volunteering for three years and in
Bart’s case by accepting induction into that same Army for the mandatory two
years had caused then after the fact, after their military service to “get
religion” on the questions of war and peace. Ralph had gone out of his way to
join up as soon after high school as he could. Had bought in hook, line and
sinker all the admittedly paper-thin anti-communist domino theory reasons
provided by the government any given week to justify their actions. Hell, the
hard truth and Ralph was hardly alone in this a young man was looked down at in
his old Forsythe Street section of Troy if he waited for the draft board to
come calling for him to get on the ball. Most of the guys he knew were already
in or getting ready to. The neighborhood had already lost a few guys over in
Vietnam, a few more had come back as shells of their former selves. Ralph in
any case like his class had done his “tour” in Vietnam without a peep although
already he knew that he had to do something to let people know what really was
going on-mostly straight out murder and mayhem against people that he had no
quarrel with-after he got out if he survived to calm the horrible pit that
never left his stomach one he got “in country.”
Bart had had more qualms about
the war, had seen no way though that he could escape the draft once the draft
board tagged him. Like Ralph most of his friends and neighbors supported the
war, the guys doing their service, a few not coming back as in all wars. While
he made a few more noises about his feelings about the war while he was in
uniform he had kept quiet mostly, kept the drill sergeant-driven “you don’t
want to wind up in Leavenworth” quiet. He did not wind up going to Vietnam as after
Tet in 1968 when all hell broke loose which signaled either endless war or an
ordered retreat the military authorities were beginning to pull back the troops
during his time. He often wondered though if he had gotten orders for Vietnam
what he would have done. Probably gone quietly like his wife, his very
patriotic wife whose two brothers were doing second tours in ‘Nam wanted him
too when the deal went down. No Canada or jail for him. To his shame as he told
the military resister one night at a VFP general meeting after hearing about
what Frank had done during his time (this is about Chelsea but Frank had done
time in the Army stockade for refusing to go to Vietnam).
They saw the Chelsea case as
pay-back to a real hero, maybe the only hero of the Iraq War and had worked
like seven dervishes on the case. More importantly had kept the faith even
after the case inevitably went off the front pages and became a cypher to the
general population. The case like all high publicity and high stakes political
prisoner cases had been front and center for a while, say from the time of the
Wikileaks exposes with their endless documentation of the nefarious activities
of the American and other governments in covering up everything that could be
covered up in order as both Ralph and Bart knew from their short Army
experiences to “cover your ass” to the verdict and sentence at trial. After
that unfortunately even some supporters drift away and the thing becomes
yesterday’s news in the welter of some new case (here the Snowden case took a
lot of the air out since his revelations were current unlike Chelsea’s which
dealt with pass atrocities and had personal effects on almost everybody in the
cyberspace universe meaning almost everybody). Yesterday’s news to everybody
but the defendant who has to do the hard time while the attorneys sniff around
for issues on the long drawn out appeal. That is the hard reality of political
prisoner cases, especially when it seems the trial was “fair” and the defendant
had been convicted of a crime after all.
Not doing what was right at the
time of your confrontation with your own war a very powerful now lifelong
impetus to push on in the face of indifference and hostility among the general
public these days. Both men had agreed once the fanfare had died down that
along with keeping the case in the public eye as best they could they would
commemorate two milestones in Chelsea’s life yearly-the anniversary of her
incarceration by the government now over six years in May and her birthday in
December (her 29th). That was why Ralph and Bart were struggling
with the downtown winds to put their banner in place. These days they were not
taking the overall lead in setting up such events but had responded to a call
by the Queer Strike Force to do so and they were following that organization’s
lead to rally and to make one last desperate push to get Chelsea a pardon. They
had urged everybody who had not done so to sign the on-line petition to
President Obama (see link above) to commute her sentence to “time served.” That
on-line petition needed one hundred thousand signatures in order to get an
official response from the White House about the matter (it also had to be done
in a thirty day period). They were still short so hence the urgency of their
calls. Everybody agreed, willingly or not, that under the impending Dump the
Trump regime that Chelsea’s chances of a pardon were about zero, maybe less. So
the rally. And so too the desperation in Ralph and Bart’s own minds that the
slogan their fellow VFPer Frank Jackman had coined-“we will not leave our
sister behind” would now fall on deaf ears, that she would face at least four,
maybe eight years of hard ass prison time-time to be served as a man in a
woman’s body when the deal went down. Worse that Chelsea had already attempted
twice earlier in the year to commit suicide and the hard fact emblazoned in the
added sentence on their banner-“she must not die in jail” had added urgency.
(She had as well under some bizarre Army logic been “sentenced” to fourteen
days in solidarity for the first attempt-Jesus, figures both men had blurred
out when they heard that news earlier in the fall.)
Ralph and Bart had met down in
Washington in 1971 after both had been discharged from the Army and had gotten
up some courage, with some prompting from their respective very anti-war
girlfriends (Bart had divorced that gung-ho wife as soon as he got out of the
Army, or maybe she divorced him but the parting was in any case acrimonious and
threats had emanated from those two lifer brother after he had been arrested in
Cambridge at the draft board along with a bunch of Quakers and other angry
gentle people), to go down and get arrested during the May Day actions. Bart’s
anti-war girlfriend, Josie, a lovely gentle woman from, if you can believe
this, Manhattan although she like a lot of NYC kids went west to Wisconsin for
college, had been met at the Morning Report coffeehouse located just outside of
Fort Devens about forty miles west of Boston when they were part of an action
to distribute Daniel Ellsberg’s “hot” Pentagon
Papers. Pretty good credentials to start an affair in those days.
(Ironically forty years later Daniel Ellsberg would be one of Chelsea Manning’s
most fervent public supporters raising a ton of money so that she could have a
complete transcript of all the pre-trial and trial work. A very expensive
proposition without “angels” gathered by Ellsberg to fund the effort of what
would become the longest trial and number of volumes of transcripts in Army
history.)
Ralph’s girlfriend, Sarah, had
been a woman who he had known in high school in Troy but who after leaving the
town and heading to Skidmore blossomed into a fervent anti-war activist. He had
met her in Albany when the local Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW)
whichhe had joined was staging a silent march through the streets of that city
and she had helped plan the event. The lived together for a few years before
she got weary once again of Troy and headed west. He would even now run into
her when several years ago she returned from the Wet after her husband had
passed away among the small diehard crowd of peace activists who could be
counted on to show up at events in that section of upstate New York.
That 1971 May Day event which
was in some ways decisive in both men’s understanding of how hard the struggle
against the American war machine was going to be. In those desperate times when
it seemed like the Vietnam War would never end (seemed endless although now
with Afghanistan entering its sixteenth year the record for endless had definitely
been extended) they tried to help shut down the government if it would not shut
down the war-the Vietnam War. All they got was tear gas, police batons and
several days in RFK stadium for their efforts. Totally unprepared for the
vicious governmental response when under threat. Ralph and Bart had met on the
floor of the stadium when Ralph had noticed that Bart had his VVAW pin on and
had asked where he was from (where he “hailed from” was the way Ralph put it)
and had become fast friends over the years-with the usual periods of absence
from each other’s lives when family commitments got too heavy. They had been
through a lot over the years in the struggle to keep the peace message alive
and well despite the endless wars, and despite the near zero visibility on the
subject over the previous ten plus years.
Both had grown up in very
working class neighborhood respectively as previously mentioned Troy in upstate
New York and Riverdale out about thirty miles west of Boston and had followed
the neighborhood crowds unthinkingly in accepting their war and participating
in the war machine when it came their time. So no way in 1968,1969 say could
either have projected that they would hit their sixties standing out in the
lonesome corners of the American public square defending an Army private who in
many quarters was considered a traitor and who moreover was gay. That was Chelsea’s
public persona then before she came out as a transgender woman.
In the old days they had also gone
along with the “better dead that red,” “if your mommy is a commie turn her in”
red scare dark age Cold War night, “the night of the night-takers” Ralph had
called that time one night when told Bart how he had stood shoulder to shoulder
with his father trying to get some poor bedraggled family out of the Forsythe
Street neighborhood because they were some kind of “reds” (he later had also stood
shoulder to should with his father and neighbor when blacks tried to move into the
neighborhood in the mid-1960s). As far as the sexual preference-sexual identity
stuff went in the old days the best term they could think of to describe their
respective attitudes toward gays was “faggot and dyke”-Jesus. Trans-genders did
not compute didn’t come up on the radar and were dismissed as transvestites and
weirdos whenever Bart would see them strutting their stuff around the Boston Common
on Saturday nights. One time he and his boys had gone to Provincetown, P-town then
as now the summer Mecca in New England for LGBTQers, dressed in drag just to “lure”
the guys down there (and who knows for what non-drunken reason-could have been
insecurities about their own sexual identities they after all were only late
teenagers so who knows)
(That whole Chelsea gay-transgender
issue was already well known to them from some information provided by agents
of Courage to Resist, the organization which was the main conduit for publicity
about the case and in charge of handling the financing Chelsea’s legal
defenses. They also were aware through those same agents about Chelsea’s sexual
identity which all partisans and Chelsea herself had agreed to keep on the
“low” in order not get that issue confused with her heroic whistle-blower
actions during trial and only later revealed by her publicly as a matter of
self-defense as mentioned above.)
Later that night after the
birthday vigil was over and Ralph and Bart were sitting at Jack’s over in
Cambridge near where Bart lives having a few shots to ward away the cold of the
day’s events both had been a bit morose. (Ralph has after bouncing around on the
West Coast and New York City for years picking up wives along the way after
that last divorce moved back to hometown Troy after he father was too ill to care
for himself and then after he passed away took over the family house which
looks with few updates almost like it had back in the days when Ralph and his father
were “smoking” out reds, commies, and holding blacks at arm’s length side by
side on old Forsythe Street.) The event had gone as well as could be expected for
a political prisoner case that was three years removed from the serious public
eye. Ralph and Bart both speculated that there must be something like a law of diminishing
returns on these types of cases once the verdict and sentence has been rendered
and the mainstream media move on to the next 24/7 event that just has to be
covered. Of course then the prisoner is left to fight his or her future battles
out of the public as paper-heavy appeals slowly work their way through the court systems. The winter holiday season
is particularly tough as Bart knew when he was sentenced to thirty days for “criminal
trespass” and to show jailhouse solidarity all six convicts decided to not pay
the fine and went to jail instead. The winter holidays were when the sentences
came up and although Bart was not a big fan of Christmas not being able to celebrate
the occasion made the time that much tougher.
As the pair sat, talked, and
compared notes they found that the usual small coterie of “peace activists” had
shown up and a few who were supporting Chelsea as a fellow transgender to
listen to the usual speeches and pleas to sign the on-line petition to the
White House to trigger a response from the President on the question of a
pardon (see link above-the petition in the end got the 100, 000 on-line
signatures it needed in order for the White House to be required to officially respond
to the request-here the commutation of Chelsea’s sentence to “time served”).
(That lack of response by the greater LGBTQ community to Chelsea’s desperate
plight all through the case had had Ralph and Bart shaking their heads in
disgust as the usual reason given was that all energies had to be expended on
getting gay marriage recognized. This in the days before the U.S Supreme Court
rulings in favor of gay marriage. The twice divorced Ralph and three times
divorced mumbled to themselves over that one. Moreover there was some push back
about her actions being traitorous and/or that she was “grandstanding”-Jesus).
Ralph and Bart were in
melancholy mood no question since they had long ago given up any illusion that
the struggle against war and for some kind of social justice was going to be
easy but the prospects ahead, what Ralph had called the coming “cold civil war”
under the tutelage of one Donald Trump had them reeling as it related to
Chelsea’s case. If Obama ignored her case, the likely situation before January
20th then she was in for a very long wait before there was any realistic
possibility of clemency again. They bantered back and forth about how many
actions they had participated in since they got the news of the case that a
young whistle-blower was being held for telling the world about the cover-up of
countless atrocities committed by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (via
Wiki-leaks, not the mainstream media who would not touch making the information
that Chelsea had gleaned for love or money).
There were the trips to
Quantico down in hostile Virginia in order to get Chelsea out of the “hole,”
get her out of Marine base solitary. The last stand-out across from the main entrance
to the base had been one of the few times that Ralph, and remember he was in
Vietnam for a year and they both had faced down the brunt of the action when the
cops went berserk on May Day, 1971, had been afraid, hell, scared, at what might
have occurred if the government had used the full force it had on hand. Had
been personally afraid of some “bad shit” coming down since the cops looked like
they were ready for bear. As it was there were a few dozen arrests and some
very forceful pushing around by the cops and MPs. Barr mentioned at the time
that they should have known there was going to be trouble for they had parked
up the road at the Marine museum which turned out to be a staging area for the governmental
forces and there had seemingly been contingents from every local, state and
federal law enforcement agencies in the D.C. area. All in all an incredible
array of cops and military personnel all to “monitor” a few hundred supporters.
Bart figured out later that unlike in D.C. where some kind of demonstration,
sit-I, acts of deliberate civil disobedience are all in a day’s work for the security
forces out in the boondocks of nowhere Triangle, Virginia they were not used to
such activity and frankly over-reacted.
There had also been trips to
the White House to proclaim their message as part of various other ‘anti-war
actions, including the time they were arrested when they had hand-cuffed (plastic
hand-cuffed, okay) themselves to the iron fence that surrounds the White House.
(They paid the fines after being held for a few hours processing through-there should
have been cops from Virginia there to see what proper reaction to non-violent
demonstrations are like). The several trips during the trial down at Fort Meade
in Maryland where they had to laugh about being on a military base for the
first time in decades (they had been barred many years back for demonstrations
on a military base against the Reagan administrations war against Central
America). Those trips in summer heat which affected Bart considerably were to
sit in the court room and show Chelsea physical solidarity while she was going through
the arduous trial. (The trial itself on a day to day basis was like any other such
event rather boring except at points like the time the defense had the full
thirty-nine minutes of the damning video called Collateral Murder where helicopter gun crews in their search for
enemies blew away some unarmed civilians-and laughed about it afterwards.) Of course
the weekly vigils for almost three years at various locations around Boston and
the suburbs before the case went to trial and over the previous three years the
fight to keep the case in the public eye.
As they finished up their last
shots of whiskey against the cold night both Ralph and Bart agreed though that
come May they would be out commemorating Chelsea’s seventh year in the jug if
Obama did not do the right thing beforehand. They both yelled as they went
their separate ways (Ralph was staying with his daughter in Arlington) old
Frank Jackman’s coined phrase-“we will not leave our sister behind.” No
way.
Demand clemency for Leonard Peltier
Demand clemency for Leonard Peltier
Dear friends
We invite you to sign this petition in support of Leonard Peltier, wrongly jailed for 40 years. Please circulate to your networks.
Many thanks
PAYDAY
For more info, contact the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee:http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/
| ||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
*From The Place Of Leon Trotsky's Last Exile- The Trosky Museum In Mexico Blog (In Spanish)
Click on the title to link to the "Leon Trotsky House Museum" blog (in Spanish). Some great pictures from his place of last exile and of his death. Long Live His Memory For His Services To The World Working Class. Forward!
Friday, December 16, 2016
Blame It On The Late Sam Phillips, Okay?
CD REVIEWS
25 Sun Rock’n’ Roll Classics, various artists, Sun Records, 2004
Howlin’ Wolf, Roscoe Gordon, Rufus Thomas and an assortment of black blues notables in the early days. Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnnie Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis and an assortment of white rockabilly notables in the mid to late 1950’s. What do they all have in common? Well, one thing, and make that a decisively important one thing, is that they passed through Mr. Sam Phillips’ Sun Records recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee on the way to some kind of career. Amazing. With the possible exception of Chess Records in Chicago, a label that moreover concentrated on the blues, no other studio can claim so much as the catalyst for what became rock & roll in the mid- 1950’s, the youth of the present writer and of his Generation of ‘68.
That said, the impetus for this review of a compilation of Sun Record rock and roll artists is a Public Broadcasting Station’s American Masters series that highlighted the ten years existence of that recording studio. There the format included a generous round of ‘ talking heads’ interspersed with some performances, in this case, to honor the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Sun Records (1950). The ‘talking heads’ in that documentary include several of the artists highlighted here.
This documentary also included many of the old Sun artists who did not attain the stardom of those mentioned in the first paragraph yet who nevertheless had some interesting things to say about the meaning of the Sun Record experience. A recurring theme is that mainly it got them the hell off the farms and out of the fields, especially those damn cotton fields. And they had fun and got paid for it. And met girls! How can you beat that? My take on this is that they were good old boys who got more out of the Sun, if not financially then musically, than they had originally bargained for. And this entire film trip down memory lane, not without a ew barbs, was presided over by the impresario himself, the late Sam Phillips.
As to the present compilation of songs some comments are worth mentioning. As with all such compilations there is some unevenness in the quality of performance. For every Jerry Lee Lewis and "Great Balls of Fire" or Carl Perkins and "Blue Suede Shoes" there are any number of one-shot johnnies like Warren Smith doing the Johnny Cash- written "Rock and Roll Ruby" or Sonny Burgess doing "Red-Headed Woman", both fine if singular efforts. Then there are the merely imitative- of Elvis, Jerry Lee or whoever- like Bill Riley. And then those who never got released like Jack Earls and "Let's Bop". Well, today they all attain immorality collectively with this compilation. Rock on.
25 Sun Rare Blues Classics, various artists, Sun Records, 1997
Most of the points made above about fates of the rock and roll artists apply here as well, except the obvious question of race, both in how the artists were treated personally and financially by Phillips, and the audiences that the artists could perform before that does not get dealt with adequately in the documentary mentioned above except by Rufus Thomas in his fight to trace the roots of rock & roll back to a black musical influence. As to the present compilation some comments are worth mentioning. As with all such compilations there is some unevenness in the quality of performance.
Rufus Thomas on "Married Woman" is fine. As are the performances of Earl Hooker and Sleepy John Estes in his pre-folkie days. Tops for me is Little Milton. One should also note the house musicians like Billy Emerson ( a fine artist in his own right) and hovering around on that old piano the late Ike Turner (can anyone forget his work on "Rocket 88", not on this CD but get it).
I would add this note below that I am doing to all my Sun Record-related reviews taken from the review of the Sun Record documentary because it is appropriate in virtually every instance.
"A note on sound- no, not of this American Masters production which like virtually all PBS productions is technically of high quality. No, I am referring here to the sound in Sun Studio. I do not believe in ghosts or other such things but tell me this. Why, for example, does Johnny Cash in his Sun Records days sound like god’s own creation when on work from other recordings I can take him or leave him? And that goes for Elvis, Carl, Jerry Lee and the others as well. The gods and goddesses of Rock and Roll were smiling on that joint- thanks."
Once Again On Sun Records
25 More Blues Classics, various artists, Sun Records, 2002
Most of the points that I have made in reviewing the fates of the rock and roll artists that passed through the portals of Sun Recording studio apply here as well, except the obvious question of race both in how the artists were treated personally and financially by Phillips and the audiences that the artists could perform before that does not get dealt with adequately in the PBS documentary on the history of Sun Records except by Rufus Thomas in his fight to trace the roots of rock and roll back to the black musical influence. As to the present compilation some comments are worth mentioning. As with all such compilations there is some unevenness in the quality of performance.
Rufus Thomas on "Save That Money" is fine. As are the performances of Earl Hooker and James Cotton, Tops for me is Frankie Ballard’s "Trouble Down The Road". One should also note the house musicians like Billy Emerson (a fine artist in his own right) and hovering around on that old piano the late Ike Turner (can anyone forget his work on "Rocket 88", not on this CD but get it). Mainly though the first volume of this series (25 Rare Blues Classics) is more varied and flows better. Here there is a fair amount of imitation of Muddy Water’s and Howlin’ Wolf’s sound (not bad men to imitate, that is for sure) by musicians who, for the most part, like James Cotton and Walter Horton were just getting warmed up in their careers. They get better later.
I would add this note below that I am doing to all my Sun Record-related reviews taken from the review of the Sun Record documentary because it is appropriate in virtually every instance.
"A note on sound- no, not of this American Masters production which like virtually all PBS productions is technically of high quality. No, I am referring here to the sound in Sun Studio. I do not believe in ghosts or other such things but tell me this. Why, for example, does Johnny Cash in his Sun Records days sound like god’s own creation when on work from other recordings I can take him or leave him? And that goes for Elvis, Carl, Jerry Lee and the others as well. The gods and goddesses of Rock and Roll-and the blues- were smiling on that joint- thanks."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)