This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
We write in solidarity and ask that you join in the resistance movement. This past week has been particularly difficult and challenging with the inauguration of President Trump and the slew of executive orders he has issued. We have seen the North Dakota and the XL Pipelines authorized again, the wall at the U.S. Mexican border ordered, funding denied for sanctuary cities, mortgage relief denied to home owners of modest income, and efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act underway. The impact these actions will have on disenfranchised andmarginalized communities and our environment will be huge.
The issue of deportation is hitting particularly hard immigrants and their families. Cities like Boston which have large numbers of immigrants will be effected the most. In response, we are seeing rapid mobilization and action happen across the country. Tomorrow in Boston there will be a "March and Speak Out to Resist Deportations" with the Boston May Day Committee. The march will start in Chinatown and end with a rally at the statehouse. There will be a host of speakers from the immigrant community. There will be speakers from Mass Action AgainstPolice Brutality, Socialist Alternative, DSA, CISPES, Chelsea Uniendose en Contra de laGuerra, and North Shore Antifa. In additionDr. Jill Stein, the 2016 Green Party Presidential candidate, will speak in solidarity. We must demand a pathway to citizenship for all immigrants. Further, sanctuary cities should not be punished for holding a higher moral and ethical groundby providing a safe place to live for immigrants. We are including the link to the Facebook event and flyer for the march.
We must march and stand united with our brothers and sisters in the struggle. In this fight there is no other political party that will take a stand. We strongly encourage all Green Party members to become active in their local chapters and join any peaceful actions of resistanceand protest. Together let us build leadership in our communities in the mutual effort to fight oppression and social injustice. The fight has only begun and there will be much more to come.
In Solidarity,
Darlene Elias
David Gerry
Co-chairs Green-Rainbow Party
Green-Rainbow Party · 232 Highland Ave, Arlington, MA 02476, United States
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The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 237, Winter 2016-2017, newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.
On 25 November 2016, supporters of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment protested in Dublin and solidarity demonstrations were held in cities around the world. Passed in 1983, the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution guarantees the “right to life of the unborn” and grotesquely equates the life of a pregnant woman with an embryo or foetus. While abortion had already been illegal under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, the Eighth Amendment has ensured that it remains illegal in all cases bar when the very life of the woman is under threat. Three years ago, following tremendous popular outrage over the death of Savita Halappanavar, who had been denied what could have been a life-saving abortion, the government passed legislation establishing a torturous process which a woman must go through to obtain a termination of her life-threatening pregnancy. That law, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, repealed the offence of “procuring a miscarriage” as stipulated in the 1861 law, but replaced it with a more far-reaching offence, “to intentionally destroy unborn human life,” for which the penalty was set at up to 14 years imprisonment.
To get abortions, Irish women are forced to travel to Britain (as did more than 3,400 in 2015) or illegally import abortion pills (Misoprostol and Mifepristone) ordered online. The numbers who use such pills are unknown, but the demand for them is shown by the number of customs seizures: over 1,000 pills in 2014. Abortion is a simple and safe medical procedure which should be available to all as part of the health service. Bans on it heap more expense and stress onto women and are particularly onerous for poor, young and immigrant women who cannot afford to travel or are not allowed to do so. They may also endanger women by deterring them from seeking medical assistance in the event of complications from taking abortion pills.
Repeal of the Eighth Amendment is necessary, but by itself repeal will not bring any actual abortion rights in Ireland. Comrades from the Spartacist League/Britain participated in a November 26 solidarity protest in London, and raised demands reflecting what Irish women actually need, not only in the South but also in Northern Ireland where abortion is outlawed: For free abortion on demand, North and South!
Abortion is politically explosive because it provides women with some control over whether or not to have children. This raises the spectre of equality for women and threatens to undermine the family, the main source of women’s oppression. The liberation of women requires the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of a workers state. The working class in power will lay the ground for the disappearance of religious obscurantism and the replacement of the institution of the family by collective means of caring for and socialising children and by the fullest freedom of sexual relations.
In Ireland, the Catholic church has long been one of the central pillars of capitalist rule. The bishops were among the driving forces behind the passage of the Eighth Amendment and have been the staunchest opponents of even the slightest loosening of the ban on abortion. Ireland today is a vastly different society to what it was in 1983, as shown by the resounding yes vote in the 2015 referendum allowing gay marriage. Of course the church called for a no vote in that referendum and the Vatican’s secretary of state called its passage “a defeat for humanity.” Today the church is rightly despised by wide swathes of the population and its “moral” teachings about sexuality are widely disregarded. Recent opinion polls have consistently shown a clear majority in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment and decreasing the restrictions on abortion.
Yet the church continues to wield tremendous power in Irish society. It still runs the vast majority of schools, and many hospitals operate under a Catholic “ethos.” Shadowy Catholic lay organisations like Opus Dei and the Iona Institute work to ensure they exert great influence in health, education and the media. And a great number of politicians, not least Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Enda Kenny, persist in showing obeisance to the Vatican.
The November 25 protests were held on the day before the first full meeting of a “Citizens’ Assembly” established by the Irish government that is to put forward proposals on the question of the Eighth Amendment. As Irish governments have done for the last 33 years, the real purpose of the Citizens’ Assembly is to kick the issue of abortion down the road. Its eight days of meetings are being spread over four months; its proposals are expected around June 2017 and they will then be examined by a parliamentary committee which will make recommendations to the government. Any changes to the Constitution would then need to be approved by the Irish parliament and then be put to the public in a referendum, which the government has said will not be held until 2018 at the earliest.
Enda Kenny recently travelled to Rome in preparation for Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland in August 2018 for the Vatican’s World Meeting of the Family which will come with a security price tag of €20 million [$21 million]. While there, Kenny ran his plans for the Citizens’ Assembly by the pontiff, who presumably gave it his blessing. The government was quick to make it clear that Francis’ visit would not coincide with any abortion referendum, but the visit will surely be used to whip up clericalist fervour.
On October 27, the government used the prospect of the Citizens’ Assembly to block a bill proposed by TDs [Members of Parliament] from the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party (under their current parliamentary guise, the Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit [AAA-PBP]) to hold a referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment. Independent TDs on whom the government relies also voted to block the bill, including those like Katherine Zappone who are on record as being in favour of repealing the Eighth. The Labour Party voted to hold the referendum, but when it was part of the last government it opposed holding such a referendum.
Labour’s social-democratic tails in the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party have long counselled an incremental approach to the fight for abortion rights. First they called to “legislate for the X case,” for which in 1992 the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was permitted to save the life of the pregnant woman including if she was threatening suicide. That two-decade campaign resulted in the 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, which in fact copperfastened the ban on abortion. Now their energies are devoted to the campaign to repeal the Eighth. Both the SP and SWP (as well as several of their front groups) are members of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, a class-collaborationist lash-up which includes a range of bourgeois feminist and gay rights groups, several trade unions and Amnesty International. The latter recently displayed its anti-communist credentials by joining Catholic reactionaries in condemning Irish president Michael D. Higgins for praising the deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The only way to win any meaningful abortion rights (as well as decent health and childcare) is through mass struggle against the capitalist state and the reactionary anti-woman forces behind it, not least the Catholic church. It is only the working class which has both the social power to successfully wage such a struggle and the interest in achieving free access to this safe medical procedure for all women in Ireland. To lead this struggle it is necessary to forge a workers party committed to the destruction of the capitalist system through workers revolution—the only way to open the road to emancipation for women.
*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Several years ago, I guess about four years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police acting in concert with other American governmental bodies I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary and radical intellectuals, or those who had pretensions to such ideas to take their rightful place on the activist left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines. Or wherever they were hiding out, hiding out maybe as far back in some cases as the Vietnam War days which saw much of the current senior contemporary academia turn from the streets to the ivied-buildings, maybe hiding out in bought and paid for think tanks with their bright-colored “wonk” portfolios like some exiles-in-waiting ready to spring their latest wisdom, maybe posing as public intellectuals although with no serious audience ready to act on their ideas since they were not pushing their agendas beyond the lectern, maybe some in the hard-hearted post 9/11 world having doubts about those long ago youthful impulses that animated "the better angels of their natures" have turned to see the “virtues” of the warfare state and now keep their eyes averted to the social struggles they previously professed to live and die for, or maybe a la Henry David Thoreau retiring to out in some edenic gardens in Big Sur or anywhere Oregon like some 60s radicals did never to be heard from again except as relics when the tourists pass through town.
One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 and beyond still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses they professed to be fighting for (and with not a little hostility from that same work-a-day mass hostile to people hanging out and not working, or not doing much of anything, as well but mainly indifference to the fight these idealistic youth were pursuing, really their fight too since that had been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the banks who got bailed out, the mortgages companies who sold them a false bill of goods, the corporations more than ready to send formerly good paying jobs off-shore leaving Wal-Mart for the unemployed. Now a few years later it is apparent that they, the youth of Occupy have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating via the main bourgeois parties who let the whole thing happen (witness the New York mayor’s race, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders et. al) or have not quite finished licking their wounds (they couldn’t believe as we elders could have told them after all the anti-Vietnam War actions, including the massive May Day 1971 arrests that the government had no problem crushing their own, their own young if they got out of line).
Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy out in the streets I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery, the flow of ideas, some half-baked on their faces but worthy of conversation and testing, the gist for any academic. In short, those who would come by on Sundays and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines about what they saw but held back. (I would argue and this may be the nature of the times that the real beneficiaries of Occupy were all those film students and artists, media-types who made the site their class project, or their first professional documentary.) Now in 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially against the banks who led the way downhill and who under the sway of imperialism's imperative made it clear finance capitalism writ large is in charge) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama and his hangers-on, Democrat and Republican, with might and main is still intact (with a whole ready to take his place come 2016).
The needs of working people although now widely discussed in academia and on the more thoughtful talk shows have not been ameliorated (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations). All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date. ****** No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and when that revolution began to seriously go off the rails followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution in less developed capitalist countries and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.
The conclusion that I originally drew from that initial observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenburg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.
In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation of '68) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carried us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.
Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
It is almost a political truism that each generation of radicals and revolutionaries will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size and importance of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not felt they needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.
As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle, an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.
And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem was that “he was the problem” with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives out in bloody nomadic jungles of the American continent). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion codifying the experiences of the third Chinese revolution that the countryside (the “third world with its then predominant peasantry now increasingly proletarianized) would defeat the cities (mainly the West but the Soviet Union as well in some circles) that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside though intense globalization. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?
*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The
Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Eaton
Sure 1920s guys, gals too, black guys, black
gals sweating out their short, brutalized lives on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland along the river in Mississippi or some
such number of acres, probably it didn't matter to have an official count on the acres to them because all of the land went endlessly to the horizon and the work too had plenty to have the blues about. Had suffered the double whack of having to put up with Mister's Mister James Crow laws to boot which only added to the misery of those endless acres. Sure maybe some woe begotten
poor white trash down in hard-boiled Appalachia in those famed hills and hollows had plenty of blues too although they did not call them that even in those few integrated evenings when the whole town went to Rence Jackson's dirty red barn in need of a serious paint job but this is about the blues, the musical blues and not some
general social issues commentary. So those “no account” whites don’t play a role here at this time, don't play except as devotes of generic old country British Isles ballads like the ones collected by Francis Child back in the 1850s which thrilled the Brahmins of Brattle Street on a wild utilitarian Saturday night. Actually
whites in general don't play a role in the blues since their access to such songs by the likes of the various Blinds, Robert Johnson, and the belting barrelhouse mamas would be minimal in an age when "race" record pieced everybody off into their own tangent. They will not play a role until the music heads north in a generation, or so, and the “white
negro” hipsters (to use big daddy Norman Mailer’s term for the little daddies who hung around the back streets of cool, Harlem 125th Street cool at that time), “beats (to use Jack
Kerouac term hustled from some dead-pan beat down hustler, a white negro hipster if it came right down to it named Huncke via high brow John
Clellon Holmes for Christ sake),” folkies (to use the Lomaxes’, father and son,
expression), college students (to use oh I don’t know the U.S. Department of
Education’s expression), and assorted others (junkies, grifters, midnight
sifters, drifters on the wing, winos trying to sober up, good time prostitutes, the denizens of Hayes-Bickford's, the Automat, places like that, no hip as a rule)
decided that that beat in their heads had Mother Africa who spawned us all had
to be investigated but all that indeed was later. Like I said the real blues aficionados, if only by default, had their say, had their lyrics almost written for them by the events of everyday human existence what with talking in their own "code words" about how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him, Mister, and his
just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous
children (righteous when they, his children and their children smote the dragon
come freedom summer times, come Mississippi and Alabama too goddamn times but that is a story for their generations to tell I
want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s and their doings).
Here is how the scene played out as near as I can figure from a wide-ranging reading of most of the lyrics from that time (and always remember when you speak of "blues," speak of the folk in general this is mostly an oral tradition handed down and bastardized as it gotten handed down so there are very few definitive lyrics but rather more a sense of what miseries were being talked about. How Mister James Crow said every day of
the week, even the Lord’s Day, Sunday that if you were black, get back, if you
were white and right you were alright and proved it by separate this and separate that,
keeping his street clear of stray “negros,” yeah, with small “n” if he was
being kind that day, another today socially not acceptable expression if not,
telling the brethren to go here, not go there, look this way but not that (and
by all means not peeking at his womenfolk), walk there but not here, or face
nooses and slugs for his troubles. So yeah the blues almost cried out to be the
order of things. Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse
share-cropper-ing and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the
leavings he didn’t want, meaning what he couldn’t sell to his profit as the
rest.
Yeah, so there is no way that black
guys could not have had the blues back then except some old nappy Tom who didn’t
get the word but they were far fewer than you might think the others just fumed at
who knows what psychic costs (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child
of the blues, maybe second step-child via in your face if there is space hip-hop
nations, the angry ones who put words to the rages of the modern “post racial”
American society that somebody has jerked them around with lately). Hey and to
Mister’s miseries, very real, very scary when the nightriders came, woman
trouble (maybe at night the worse kind of trouble if Mister wasn’t in your face
all day with her where you been, do this, do that, put it right here, put it right there),
trouble with Sheriff Law (stay off the sidewalks, keep your head down, stay
down in the bottom lands or else) and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you
mess with his woman, get your own (or face his razor and gun down on Black Mountain).
Plenty of stuff to sing about come
Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his
home-made brew, freshly batched, which insured that everybody would be at
Preacher Jack’s Sunday service to have their sins, lusts, greeds,
avarices, covets, swaggers, cuts, from the night before (or maybe just minutes
before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for
listening to the “devil’s music” (funny because come the white rock and roll
teen explosion a generation later Mister, some Mister, said that too was the devil’s
music which confused those clean cut angelic angst-filled teens although not enough
to stop listening to Satan and his siren song) by a guy like Charley Patton,
Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner, loving his whiskey
more than somewhat which Howlin’ Wolf took him to task for down in Newport one
year in the early 1960s at a jam session, and a preacher man), Lucky Quick,
Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out
from under Mister and his Mister James Crow laws by singing the blues and
making them go away.
That’s the guys, black guys and they
had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when
guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from small label record companies
like Paramount, RCA, the radio company looking to feed the hours on their stations
with stuff people would listen to (could listen to in short wave range times and hence
regional roots work). They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together
getting black people, black people with enough money (and maybe a few
white hipsters, Village, North Beach, Old Town denizens tired of the same old,
same old if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s
“beat” thing), buy, in this case, “race records,” that they might have heard on
that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and
found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in
the Southern hill-billy mountains, and hills and hollows too).
But those black blues brothers were not
what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money
for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who
got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered
under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were
though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of
double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the
code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects
reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would
cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy
took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol
and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number
of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend. Some sound advice too
like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about
cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is
all there to be listened to.
And the queen, the self-anointed queen,
no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse
blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing
else. But there is more to her claim than mere record sales since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two
hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s (untimely in the
Mister James Crow South after an car accident and they would not admit an
empress for chrissakes into a nearby white hospital, yes, rage, rage against
the night unto the nth generation-black lives matter).
Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys,
black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, Tin Pan Alley kind of guys in
places like high holy Harlem and Memphis, Saint Louis would write stuff for her,
big fat sexy high white note sax and chilly dog trombone players would back her
up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dog’s tail with her
lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need (and you know
she needed a little sugar in her bowl just like Bessie and a million, million
other women, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what
that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on),
the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s
music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy
Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets
when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to
the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all. From
down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to
bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high
and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder after losing that
bout with TB coughing, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with
the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every
conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.
Let me leave it like this for now with
two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch
while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman allpain, pathos
and indignity as her good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing.
That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you
have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need
a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless
you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records
and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things
just went awry but maybe you can see the light of day then grab the old Bessie
Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums (four double record
sets from beginning to end) and just start playing you won’t want to turn the
thing off once Bessie gets under your skin. That’s what I done more than once
when I was down on my luck living in flea-bitten rooming house in a cold-water
flat with me and my bed, bureau, desk and chair and a battered old RCA record
player and just let it wail, let the fellow stew-ball tenants usually behind on
their rents anyway howl against the night. Bessie was on the square.
Reflections
On Inauguration Day, 2017-The First Days Of The Resistance-Down With The Trump
Government! Build The Resistance!
By Fritz
Taylor
Frank
Jackman, the old time 1960s radical, sometimes writer and a guy who thought he
knew a few things about the world, about the American world anyway was as
bowled over as anybody on the morning after. No, not the morning after some
drunken carouse or tome virtuous sexual escapade as had happened many a time
although the latter not much of late but The morning after the 2016 election to
wake up his Internet server homepage announcing that one Donald J. Trump had
been a surprise victor in the American presidential race against one Hillary
Rodham Clinton, heiress of the Clinton high-flying, well-financed and organized
political dynasty soon to turn to dust (or had already turned to dust and we
just catch up with the fact the morning after).
It wasn’t like Frank had not
seen certain signs that there was an uprising going on down at the base of
society, the base of society that he was very familiar with since that stratum
was where had had come from, come from the Riverdale “projects,” had come of
age there. So he knew of hunger, of being hungry for the main chance, of not
getting the fucking brass ring, of being left behind although truth to tell he
had survived and not badly so he was little rusty in the hunger department.
Yeah, Frank knew that there were a lot of frustrated angry people out in the
vast American dark night, some who loathed the idea that a black man had been
President of the United States for not one but two terms. Loathed the idea that
a well-educated articulate woman might just take over the reins of power right
after him, who loathed the idea that their cities and towns were looking a lot
more like a world-wide melting pot than the old stand-by white European melting
pot they had grown up with whether or not they had read old Professor Moynihan
on the subject, who loathed that everybody but them and theirs was getting
ahead in the globalization race to the bottom, and who loathed the whole
political correctness thing that one Donald J. Trump was saying was fucked up.
He knew all
that by heart but Frank had more current experiences going through the saw mill
of the discontents down at the base that should have tipped him off more
decisively to avoid that morning surprise. He and his golfing buddies, Sid,
Kaz, Keith and Pat had during the whole previous year been around golf courses,
public golf courses not Trump venues where older white guys go to die-or pass
away the time until then. (The standing joke among that golfing brethren was
that if Trump won he would privatize those public courses or burn them
down-take your pick).They had run into serious Trump supporters along the way
from guys who said they had voted for Obama or had not voted for a long while but
had sent money to the billionaire Trump and wished him god speed. But Frank had
been carried away just as much as the whole traditional and social media
networks being way off the mark (except followers of the trollers who were
wreaking havoc on the planet for kicks-and the “fake news” in favor of Trump) by
the improbability of a political novice who was not a general like Grant or
Eisenhower beating a seasoned political operative and her vaunted organization
like a gong.
Shame on him
for believing anything the paid pundits, commentators, bloggers, gurus and
their tenacious hangers-on had to say about anything, anytime on any subject.
That was then though, the morning after blues. By that late afternoon Frank had
regrouped himself and began to understand what he needed to do to project his
new political profile. He had been rather neutral about the outcome of the
election prior to that morning since for a variety of other reasons he would be
opposing Mrs. Clinton and her very upfront and frankly scary war policies which
she intended to thrust on the country when she was sworn in (and he had taken
much flak from friends and loved ones for not believing that there was a
qualitative difference between this pair of rogues). But the reality of the
Trump triumph and the accompanying sweep of everything in sight by the ghoulish
Republicans, those who favored him or not, who had their own reactionary agenda
to push through had placed him on immediate war footing.
That “war
footing” idea was no literary flourish although those same friends and loved
one would tell you that Frank was entirely capable of such flourishes but an
understanding that it would be necessary to begin the resistance to Trump and
his government whatever it looked like (and in the end it looked very much like
a rogue’s gallery of the 1% that he had been campaigning against for the
previous decade or so-in who were being tagged by Trump in person in some cases
to put their grimy fingers on the affairs of state). That afternoon he wrote a
blog for a website, American Politics,
that he wrote for occasionally arguing that the election results along with the
general dead-end trend of American politics and the extreme divisiveness pulling
society apart, putting it into two distinct and visible camps had confirmed
against his better hopes from the evidence of the past year that the
country was in a state of cold civil war (with the unstated implication going
back to ante-bellum times that the nation was on the cusp of that turning into
a “hot” one).
From that
afternoon on he would when making commentary use that slogan or mantra if you
will-“the cold civil war has started” whenever he posted anything politically
relevant on his various sites (although a strong argument could be made that it
had only come into the open and that had started years before-at the very
beginning of the Obama era-maybe earlier on the economic side with the
tremendous loss of decent jobs). Frank though is, has been an activist, a
left-wing of some sort of activist since he was a kid. Since back in 1960 when
he was a slip of a teenage boy hanging out with Quakers and pacifists
publicly protesting against the escalation of nuclear weaponry in favor of
disarmament. So the axis of his slogan was not to make abstract and academic
political points, he would leave that to the egg-on-face pundits and
bull-shitters but to help prepare for the social struggles ahead once old Trump
was sworn in. To get people prepared to go into the streets since the electoral
process had proven bankrupt. He argued and would continue to argue that unlike
the died-in-the-wool Democrats who were miffed about how unfair things had
turned out and looked forward to some future utopian electoral victory with a
“better” candidate that the resistance needed to be organized on the
streets-and maybe given the way the political deck was stacked the only place
that mattered for the duration.
Of course
you can only effectively argue about what needs to be done when something
happens-something like the inauguration of one Donald J. Trump and so Frank
would point out that from day one, from noontime come January 20th
the resistance needed to be publicly organized. What Frank meant, what he determined was necessary to show his new
state of mind was that he decided he would go down to Washington on
Inauguration Day and protest the swearing in of the next President of the
United States. This was no mean task since Frank had purposefully avoided going
to that event for all of his long political life seeing the event as a waste of
time (and in recent years worthless as a place to protest since there were so
many restrictions placed on protestors as to defeat the purpose). Helping him
in his decision to go down the few hundred miles from his home in Dalton about
forty miles west of Boston was that the next day there was to be a Women’s
March on Washington and so the weekend would be one of activity and
struggle.
Frank had
over the previous several years since he had slowed down his professional
activities as a lawyer been to Washington on a number of occasions to protest
the Obama war policies in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and wherever else
that administration was bloodying its hands and also in defense of the heroic
Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning when his trial was going on at Fort
Meade just outside Washington. (As one of his last acts in office Obama would
commute Chelsea’s horrendous thirty-five year sentence for essentially telling
the truth about American atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq via his Wiki-Leaks
revelations to his thankful credit from supporters and opponents like Frank
alike).
Of late
Frank usually would fly to Washington but this time he decided to drive the
four hundred or so miles in order to take three young passengers with him who
had no resources to go otherwise. He would foot the travel bill since the cost
of travel by car would be about the same as a flight for himself. (One an Iraq
War veteran who was trying to stabilize his life after a serious bout with
drugs and two graduate students who by definition are poverty-stricken) He had also decided to use his hotel loyalty
points in Baltimore order to have lodging for all four since anyplace closer
would have been over-the-top expensive and given the lateness of his decision
to go most protester-friendly places like U/U churches were filled up and or
spoken for. On the 19th of
January having picked up the three guys in Cambridge they headed south to
Washington to do political battle the next day.
The next day
after spending a restless and talkative night at that Baltimore hotel location
the four men headed by car to the nearest Metro station at Glenmont on the Redline
to get to downtown Washington. The train was not crowded (as opposed to the
next day’s efforts, the gigantic Women’s March, where they would have to wait
for a long time both to get into that same station and to board the train) and
they made downtown in good time (and didn’t have to worry about where to park
amid all the restrictions on the streets that day). They got off at Judiciary
and proceeded to head toward the security checkpoint on Fourth near the
National Gallery of Art so they could get a spot on the parade route to give
Trump the old raspberry on opening day. (One of the reasons that Frank in
recent years had decided not to go to any Inaugurations to protest was the
whole security apparatus set-up, the “running of the gauntlet,” which
effectively acted to tamp down any serious in-your-face protest so he knew that
they would be limited in what they could carry for signs, etc.)
That day it
never got to the raspberry on the parade route point though. As Frank and his
companions were standing in the slow-moving security check-point line a group
of young people who later identified themselves to Frank as part of Surge
Washington which had been formed mostly by young people who were students or
who worked in Washington to protest in a peaceful but forceful way the impeding
coronation of Trump sat down in front of the security tent and blocked the
entrance. Classic tried and true honored civil disobedience. Naturally that
event stopped Frank and his companions in their tracks since unlike others
trying to get through the checkpoint they would not cross the line set up by
their fellow protesters. This action, part of several around city, were acts
of symbolic speech and while later he
and his companions would discuss the value of the particular action they were
all under the bane of “picket lines mean don’t cross” an old labor slogan
honored many times more in the breech than the observance.
This action
which was intended to shut down the checkpoint for a couple of hours and then
move on to other such locales wound up being Frank and his companions’
activities for the day and they never did get to the parade route to protest.
So they moved with the protesters whenever they moved.
Not only were they
acting in political solidarity with the protesters but Frank was there to
defend them against the sometimes angry spectators who could not get through
whatever he thought of the tactic. (There were several testy situations when
some Bikers for Trump tried to break the line at Fourth Street but were
dissuaded by the Secret Service agents who had closed the checkpoint tight so
nobody was getting through anyway). Their mostly young faces had heartened him
that there would be another generation to pass the protest torch on to.
Moreover since he was admitted as a lawyer in D.C. he could represent them if
they were arrested. Throughout the day there were arrests around the city, a couple
of hundred according to news sources, but no at any of the actions that Frank’s
groupings were at. So that is how Frank (and his companions) spent his first
day of resistance, his first day as a “soldier” in the brewing cold civil war
which has been unleashed in the American dark night.
[Frank and
his friends would attend the Women’s March on Washington the next day which was
spectacular but really uneventful except as a wonderful realization that there
were plenty of people, plenty of women who had joined, or were ready to join
the resistance. Yes, they came to Washington half a million strong to make a
first full day point.]
Walter Mitty Goes Noir-John
Beal’s “Key Witness” (1947)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Key Witness, starring
John Beal, Trudy Marshall, Jimmy Lloyd, 1947
Recently in reviewing a lesser Humphrey
Bogart noir vehicle, In A Lonely Place
which for my money was didn’t click, I mentioned in passing that not all noir
was created equal. By that reference I had absent-mindedly assumed that there were
certain parameters below which the genre would not fall. That “would not fall”
being somewhere in the sphere of the low budget, low rent, low star power,
B-film which strangely enough back in the day the Hollywood studios depended on
to keep the audiences coming to their theaters (they conveniently owned the
whole line of distribution). However the film under review, Key Witness, the 1947 use of the title
not the 1960s film starring Jeffrey Hunter, no way, seemed determined to go
below the low bar radar even greedy Hollywood should have left on the cutting
room floor.
I also mentioned in that Bogart
review that he had performed more noteworthy iconic roles earlier in his career
which gave rise to the world-weary, world-wary male actors in noir set films.
This film is driven by the “exploits” of a more Walter Mitty-type persona named
if you can believe this-Milton Higby (played by no name John Beal). Milton is a
nine to five draftsman who moreover is henpecked by his every loving wife for
almost everything from not asking for a raise to not cleaning the dishes and whatever
else in between. Cleary we will be treated to no second coming of Sam Spade or
Phillip Marlowe. And we aren’t
The most decisive thing Milton can do
is tell his every loving wife that she should go on a trip to some forlorn aunt.
That decision cleared the way for the craziness to come as Milton under the influence
of a fellow draftsman co-worker goes to the track where he hits it big and inside
of staying at home goes partying with his buddy and his girl-and her girlfriend.
A girlfriend who before long is found on her living room floor very dead by
Milton after he came to from some alcoholic stupor. A fall guy waiting to fall-no
question. He goes on the lam though while every police agency in the country is
looking for him for murder most foul, murder one.
For an innocent guy he makes all the wrong
decisions as he hits the hobo/tramp/bum highway picking up a fellow tramp along
the way. They stumble into a dead guy and Milton decides that the best way out is
to assume the dead man’s identity. Nice move. Except that somewhere in nowhere Arizona
he got hit by a car and wound up in a hospital which assumed he was the dead man.
More importantly the dead man was the missing scion to some serious fortune and
so Milton accepted that role when a lawyer and then his “father” came to claim
him. Whee.
Things go along swell for several
months including his “father’s” backing for some novelty inventions that he had
worked on. The stuff flew out of the factory doors. But this is where things
got dicey. His work buddy (played by no name Jimmy Lloyd) and his every loving
wife (played by no name Trudy Marshall were trying to clear his name and glammed
onto his new life. No problem. No problem when the dead woman’s estranged husband
had confessed to the murder most foul, murder one. Except now Milton was on the
spot for the killing of his “father’s” real son. Yeah, they had the gallows
ready to hang him high, hang him real high. Except just before midnight his old
tramp buddy came in and cleared him. And the whole crew lived happily ever after
one big happy family including the tramp –literally. My reaction after watching
this vehicle was WTF. That says it all.
Bogie On The Edge-
Humphrey Bogart’s “In A Lonely Place” (1950)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
In a Lonely
Place, starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, directed by Nicolas Ray, 1950
Not all noir
is created equal and not all Bogie films (Humphrey Bogart of “don’t Bogart that
joint” of blessed memory) are either. Although the film under review, In A Lonely Place, an off-hand look at the frills and foibles of
Hollywood back in the day when the studio bosses ran the show and ran everybody
ragged is an acknowledged respectable example of the noir it does not pack the wallop
of such vehicles as Sunset Boulevard
and Out Of The Past. Moreover
although some critics have claimed that Bogart’s acting as the troubled screenwriter
Dixon Steele is among his best work for me the character of Steele does not
hold a candle to his iconic roles as Captain Morgan in To Have And Have Not, Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep and Sam Spade in The
Maltese Falcon.
Here is what
makes this a very good film and Bogie’s performance if not great then a good
secondary effort. Dix Steele like a lot of guys went off to war during World
War II which may have contributed to his lack of success as a screenwriter
working the Hollywood rackets after the war. May have also contributed to his
erratic and combustible behavior (maybe some heavy boozing too). Looking for
some worthwhile project to write up his agent convinces him to do an screen adaptation
of a book. He is skeptical, an attitude which is confirmed when a wannabe
starlet cum hat check girl at his local gin mill hangout reads the book and
tells him the outline of the plot. A stinker-no question (although the hat
check girl was all dreamy-eyed about it). The problem is that the hat check girl
told him the story line after he had cajoled her into telling him about the
plot in his apartment (after declaring no romantic intension). Well that is not
really the problem if you thing about it but the fact that after Dix gave her
cab fare home she wound up very dead in some canyon ditch the next morning.
Enter prime
suspect Dix. It all adds up. His violent behavior shown a couple of times at
the gin mill and out on the mean Hollywood streets , far-fetched story of the girl
in his place just to recite a plot-line, and his ungentlemanly conduct of not
seeing her to the cab after midnight. Even I had him figured for the fall-for a
while. To the rescue though comes one B-film starlet, Lauren, played by real
life B-movie queen Gloria Grahame (and really a very good actor who never got
the juicy roles she deserved) who lived in an adjacent apartment and who claimed
she had seen Dix at his place at the time of the murder. Thanks, babe. Naturally
besides the thanks Dix figured to make a big play for the good-looking Lauren who
seemed interested in return. They start up what became a tempestuous love affair
which on the positive end has Dix working like seven banshees on some real writing.
On the negative
side though the coppers, including a guy who served under Dix in the war, have
him targeted as the fall guy for all the obvious reasons mentioned before. Dix
falls down though, can’t take the pressure, had recurring bouts of violent
behavior which only added fuel to the fire of the coppers’ suspicion of his
involvement in the hat check girl murder. That affected Lauren who became rightfully
afraid of Dix and in the end ran out on him after he puts his hands on her. Too
late, the “in a lonely place” too late Dix and Lauren find out from the coppers
that the hat check girl’s jealous boyfriend had confessed to the murder. So it
goes.
