On The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “The Summer Of Love Experience” At DeYoung Art Museum In Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “The Summer Of Love Experience” At DeYoung Art Museum In Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

By Special Guest Social Commentator Alex James 

[I noted in an earlier introduction to a commentary by my oldest brother Alex that I had been “commissioned” by him and the surviving corner boys who had made the treks west for the Summer of Love, 1967 to put together a tribute book on their experiences. Alex, a lot closer to the action of the 1960s than I ever could be having only been touched by the experience around the edges and mostly second-hand through stories and research is again today’s special guest commentator since the subject matter is again about the Summer of Love, 1967 its 50^th anniversary now being commemorated in places like San Francisco and Berkeley. His previous commentary had been about an exhibit at the Berkeley university museum entitled Hippie Modernism: the struggle for utopia and in that introduction I mentioned that he would be doing a commentary on an exhibition at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park entitled The Summer of Love Experience which had first sparked his interest when he saw an advertisement for the project on a passing Muni bus. He will discuss his take on that today.

To explain further that “commissioned” mentioned above has to do with compiling a wide ranging series of writings, sketches really, and reminisces on the theme of the “Summer of Love, 1967” to be made into a small tribute book in honor of his and his “corner boys” from the Acre section of North Adamsville long departed friend Peter Paul Markin. It was Markin who was the main connection between them and the events which transpired in the Bay Area that long ago and which arguably changed their lives forever. Of if not changed forever put a big kink in the way that they were originally heading.]              

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I might as well mention again as I did in the Hippie Modernism commentary that I am usually not much for writing outside of my business interests or I should say my law practice which is my business interest and leave the biting or witty commentary and penetrating social analysis my youngest brother, there were six of us to divvy up the social chores, Zack, who has made a career out of such endeavors. Except events this spring around the almost half-forgotten Summer of Love, 1967 which I, and the rest of the guys I hung around with all through public school, had been as Zack said one time “washed clean” by that extraordinary “new breeze” that got a big tailwind from that happening. “Happening” a word very closely associated with all the crazy, goofy, outlandish and in some sad instances pathetic things that went on when we were forced to head west and see what it was all about. “Forced” which is exactly the right word by one mad monk of a man, Peter Paul Markin, known as the “Scribe” from junior high school on after he had been given that moniker by the acknowledged leader of the Acre corner boys, Frankie Riley who has written something for the tribute book that Zack mentioned.

I mentioned in the previous article and it bears repeating here that Markin was a small letter “prophet” unlike a capital letter prophet like Allan Ginsberg who blew Markin away with his Howl in high school which he would recite to us when he was half drunk (or later half-stoned) and which we could have given a fuck about at the time since all we cared about was grabbing petty larceny dough, girls, and fast cars not always in that order, after all was said and done, what little good it ever did him in the long haul to “check out the new breeze coming over the land.”

All that will be, or already has been, detailed in the little tribute book we asked Zack to put together with his sketches on those times and our, the surviving corner boys’ remembrances, in honor of Markin. Like Zack said in his introduction I had been in San Francisco for a law conference and was walking up Geary Street and noticed an advertisement for the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park which was presenting an exhibition titled The Summer of Love Experience. Before I went to that exhibition I snuck over to Berkeley for their exhibit after I overheard a conversation between two old geezers about an exhibit over in Berkeley at the University art museum. They didn’t give the title of the exhibition at the time. Had just said it was about hippies. But when I went to look it up it had the title, the very interesting title-Hippie Modernism: the Struggle for Utopia I couldn’t resist before I left Frisco taking that exhibit in on two counts; it was an unusual way to describe a certain modernist artistic sensibility that I think we were trying to create and a very apt way to describe what the whole “seek a newer world” experience was about (a term Markin used incessantly via Robert Kennedy via Alfred Lord Tennyson when it counted when that man epitomized at the top what might have been before his assassination if the Molochs had been defeated), or what we thought we were trying to do. Zack has mentioned in a few of his sketches that we have faced more than forty years of blow-back from the Molochs (thank Allan Ginsburg’s Howl for that term) which show no signs of abating soon for not creating that utopia, or something close to it. He was right as rain on that score.               

So much for cutting up old touches now on to the DeYoung exhibit that was a lot less academically oriented as one would expect from a general audience production. I might mention here that at both Berkeley and DeYoung the overwhelming majority of the visitors were relics from the generation of ’68, people who had been through that amazing 1960s burn-out and had survived although I was shocked by the number of fellow seniors who were cane-bound, walker-bound, or roller-bound. Not a good sign for people who were probably somewhere between sixty and seventy-five. On the sunnier side I did make a coterie of people laugh when I asked whether this was an AARP meeting. I also wondered what today’s teens to twenty somethings would make of such an exhibit if they ever by accident found themselves in the bowels of the museum where the exhibit was being held. Probably like we did yawn and chortle over the odd way we carried on and what was the big deal anyway. But enough of that.      

What the folks at DeYoung had done was put together several rooms full of posters (posters which back in the day put up around town on walls and lampposts the old fashioned way to communicate, yeah primitive looked at now in the age of Internet/Facebook flash communications, and in selected known hippie hang-out bookstores and “head” shops if you my drift merely to advertise upcoming concerts but now at least the bulk of the selections certainly worthy of mention in the same breathe as pop art that came in the wake of the new dispensation), a glimpse of what the fashion of the day, hippie garb, looked like, photographs  and of course music which continues to define a lot of what was happening in that fateful summer of 1967 if not the whole damn decade.

Summer of Love is something of a misnomer in the sense that there had been a tremendous build-up all through 1966 and the spring of 1967 with an escalating number of concerts, festivals and social events like be-ins and “acid,” you know LSD, tests and would carry over at least until 1968. Markin had gone out there in the spring of 1967 after unwisely, very unwisely, dropping out of Boston University at the end of his sophomore year to “find” himself a thing a lot of kids were doing, according to one caption at least 100, 000 kids descended on the town during that period. Markin had come back in late summer to preach the word (that “preach” not always ironic since once he got the bug in his ear about something he would keep bugging us about it like in high school his always harping on Allan Ginsburg’s Howl  a poem that I have mentioned elsewhere the rest of us could have given a fuck about-then) and round up whoever he could to go back west with him. By the time he “recruited” me and a few others it was early fall so you can see the pull of the place held even after that actual summer was over.           

Looking at the poster art, there must have been a couple of hundred of them all together, beyond the artistic question of where they fit in as representative of the times culturally, I was amazed about how many concerts and festivals were being presented during those times. You could have gone to the Avalon, as we did, Fillmore, Golden Gate Park, also as we did on a whim on any given weekend and not been disappointed since some group was performing-for free or a couple of dollars-literally. One poster featuring an iconic group of the time, Jefferson Airplane, and a host of other well-known bands had been priced at five dollars. That is five dollars and that was for a three day concert-five dollars total. I mentioned in the Berkeley article that a few years ago I spent many hundreds of dollars getting so-so tickets for a Stones concert. I had to point out those ticket numbers to people standing around looking at the poster art and they couldn’t believe it either. The biggest thing that I noticed beyond frequency and ticket price was how many of the bands-that just mentioned Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Doors, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead were based in right in the area and that the sound that would define a generation’s musical taste had been created and nourished out there-on the cheap.                

I mentioned that there was also a lot of mannequin-etched fashions displayed and some of it was very good but somehow the presentation did not ring true. Maybe it was the mannequins all slender and appealing like live models these days and maybe it was the push to show high fashion back then for the celebrities and the well-off who wanted to show they were hip. But I recall that most of us wore tee-shirts and jeans boy and girls, and did not give a damn about fashion. Some people, me too when I was high and was on Captain Crunch’s magical mystery tour yellow brick road converted school bus, would create a momentary look, maybe wear a cowboy hat (me) or buckskin coat (Markin) or pretend they were pirates (Jack Callahan, the former high school football star who Markin somehow got to go out, and Bart Webber who actually had been getting ready to take over his father’s printing business) but usually we dressed simply(and changed less frequently than socially requirements would dictate especially after a three day high). Second-hand clothing from Goodwill, the Sallys and the like was a big deal and whoever was in charge of the production of these fashions had missed the point, had gotten the notion of what people were wearing from what say Neiman-Marcus thought was the “hippie” look. The only ones who went out of their way to be “dressy” were the drag queens in a grouping called the Cockettes which would hang around and look “beautiful” but that was for camp not a generation’s style.          

Above all though was the music of the times to be heard as you went around the various galleries complete with video effects making one, making me wish, I had a joint, you know some dope, you know getting high. I was tapping my toes throughout and totally flipped out when I heard the group It’s a Beautiful Day doing White Bird from their first album which I hadn’t heard in years and the Byrds’ doing Eight Miles High  I was ready to dance, dance and party down. As I mentioned earlier though my fellow veterans mostly looked like they couldn’t believe they had done such stuff when younger and looked so physically ravaged that there was no “party” in them. Markin in his happier days would not have been happy to see what that “fresh new breeze” he kept harping on had turned out to be like, what the survivors, the walking wounded looked like. But as I said in my last article and which is turning into something of a mantra for me this 50^th anniversary of Summer of Love-“Twas bliss to be alive.” See this exhibit if you are in Frisco town anytime between now and August 20, 2017.

[I did not want to put this last point in the main body of my article but one, just one, photograph still haunts me. It was a photograph from a 1968 police “runaway” board filled with photographs of runaways being sought be anxious and worried parents who were desperate to find their kids. Not all of the Summer of Love was beautiful and not every kid who went out west survived literally, some wound up in some mental ward. The kids all looked like any all-American kids, white kids, before the “devil” got to them. A lot of photographs were from high school yearbooks. Markin, who also looked mostly like the all-American boy except a little nerdish, sad to say was not alone in not surviving the whole experience.]   

       

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.

The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the "youth nation" part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)

It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back in the 1950s that had them all scared like hell that society was going down in the ditch. No, it was like he could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill out  Gypsy Anne at the Skee game of which he was an expert at.

(For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit youths around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute once you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked nowadays, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) 

And Edward did win his Gypsy Anne a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later (and by the way “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told him  they were if approached the right way).  No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when his hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while thereafter.

That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley. Markin, despite a serious larcenous heart which would eventually do him in, read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the jail-break thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late.  (For the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was a nine o’clock close just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including for Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).

Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual were well behind the curve  and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.

Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him.

But Markin was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.

That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music that had passed for rock(what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that). Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.

More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground.  But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung out and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.

He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before,   who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.

That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, the Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.

One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.

Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.

So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.”  So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).

Then came 1964 and  Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.

That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid.  Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:                   

“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, after they had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by after giving up their "slave" names.)

Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long lonely mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.

And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”  except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).

Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that had his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic way out in the streets, in the school boys' and girls' lavs Monday mornings before school when some Ben or Lisa would lie like crazy about their sex bouts weekend, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)     

Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."

And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:      

“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little shorter than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester.  

And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."

Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)

They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and had purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck on your journey though, young travelers, good luck.

In Massachusetts Support The Safe Communities Act-Don't Support Aiding ICE Immigrant Round-Ups

In Massachusetts Support The Safe Communities Act-Don't Support Aiding ICE Immigrant Round-Ups  

From The Marxist Archives-Karl Liebknecht-No Unity With The Class Enemy-Build The Resistance

From The Marxist Archives-Karl Liebknecht-No Unity With The Class Enemy-Build The Resistance  

Workers Vanguard No. 1104 27 January 2017 TROTSKY LENIN No to Unity with Class Enemy! (Quote of the Week) Today, the reformist left calls for “unity” to fight against Trump. This boils down to uniting behind the Democratic Party, political representatives of the class enemy. Writing in 1918, as the German Revolution was unfolding, revolutionary leader Karl Liebknecht warned against the dangers of unity with those defending the capitalist order. Liebknecht, along with Rosa Luxemburg, belatedly split with the socialist conciliators who wanted to unite with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had betrayed the working class by supporting German imperialism during World War I. In January 1919, shortly after founding the German Communist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces at the behest of the SPD government and the revolution was defeated. Unity! Who could yearn and strive for it more than we? Unity, which gives the proletariat the strength to carry out its historic mission. But not all “unity” breeds strength. Unity between fire and water extinguishes the fire and turns the water to steam. Unity between wolf and lamb makes the lamb a meal for the wolf. Unity between the proletariat and the ruling classes sacrifices the proletariat. Unity with traitors means defeat. Only forces pulling in the same direction are made stronger through unity. When forces pull against each other, chaining them together cripples them both. We strive to combine forces that pull in the same direction. The current apostles of unity, like the unity preachers during the war, strive to unite opposing forces in order to obstruct and deflect the radical forces of the revolution. Politics is action. Working together in action presupposes unity on means and ends. Whoever agrees with us on means and ends is for us a welcome comrade in battle. Unity in thought and attitude, in aspiration and action, that is the only real unity. Unity in words is an illusion, ​self-​deception, or a fraud. The revolution has hardly begun, and the apostles of unity already want to liquidate it. They want to steer the movement onto “peaceful paths” to save capitalist society. They want to hypnotize the proletariat with the catchword of unity in order to wrench power from its hands by reestablishing the class state and preserving economic class rule. They lash out at us because we frustrate these plans, because we are truly serious about the liberation of the working class and the world socialist revolution. Can we unify with those who are nothing more than substitutes for the capitalist exploiter, dressed as socialists? Can we, may we join with them without becoming accomplices in their conspiracies? Unity with them would mean ruin for the proletariat. It would mean renouncing socialism and the International. They are not fit for a fraternal handshake. They should be met not with unity, but with battle. The toiling masses are the prime movers of social revolution. Clear class consciousness, clear recognition of their historic tasks, a clear will to achieve them, and unerring effectiveness—these are the attributes without which they will not be able to complete their work. Today more than ever the task is to clear away the unity smokescreen, expose half measures and halfheartedness, and unmask all false friends of the working class. Clarity can arise only out of pitiless criticism, unity only out of clarity, and the strength to create the new socialist world only out of unity in spirit, goals, and purpose. —Karl Liebknecht, “The New ‘Civil Peace’” (19 November 1918), printed in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (Pathfinder Press, 1986)

A View From The Left- South Carolina Bitter Union Defeat at Boeing For a Class-Struggle Fight to Organize the South!

Workers Vanguard No. 1110	21 April 2017

South Carolina

Bitter Union Defeat at Boeing

For a Class-Struggle Fight to Organize the South!

In a serious defeat for the labor movement, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) lost a representation vote, by a three-to-one margin, at Boeing’s assembly plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, on February 15. Workers had been hammered by company propaganda, intimidation and threats, from the break room to the living room, morning, noon and night. But while the aerospace giant and a cabal of capitalist politicians, area manufacturers and anti-union outfits brought out the long knives, IAM leaders ducked the fight that was necessary to win this organizing effort in the open shop South. Pursuing the same entirely legalistic strategy that has led to one setback after another, the union tops—with their commitment to corporate profitability, their appeals for aid from false “friend of labor” Democrats and their dependence on the good graces of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—squandered an opportunity for a major labor breakthrough. At the end of the day, a union’s right to exist is won or lost in struggle, not at the ballot box.

The union defeat in Charleston is far-reaching. It is a blow to Boeing South Carolina workers, who will remain at the mercy of grinding speedup, ever-changing work rules, doctored performance evaluations and other management dirty tricks, while earning on average $8 an hour less than their IAM-organized counterparts in Washington State. Having lost the vote, the IAM has now pulled out of Charleston, abandoning its supporters just as the company is moving to impose layoffs.

It is a blow to unionized Boeing workers, whose demonstrated ability to shut down Seattle-area production through solid strikes once gave them great clout. In recent years, the IAM tops have pushed huge concessions and a ten-year no-strike pledge onto the workers in the face of company threats to move more work to its non-union operations. It is a blow to working people across South Carolina, the country’s least unionized state, where the poverty rate increased over the last decade despite a surge in auto and other manufacturing jobs.

Indeed, the IAM’s defeat at Boeing is a blow to working people across the U.S., as the Southern labor system of no unions and low pay continues to expand nationwide. A graphic example is the spread of union-busting “right to work” laws, now on the books in 28 states, including onetime Midwest union strongholds. These statutes were first passed during and after World War II in the Jim Crow South to undermine integrated industrial unions and were sanctioned at the federal level by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The “right to work” zealots, then and now, have combined vicious anti-unionism with virulent racism, often in cahoots with the Ku Klux Klan and other race-terrorists. On February 1, a national “right to work” bill was reintroduced in the House of Representatives by Iowa’s Steve King (who has drawn the praise of former KKK grand wizard David Duke) and Joe Wilson of South Carolina.

What the bosses call “union avoidance,” and workers know as union-busting, is closely intertwined with anti-black racism, which the capitalists wield to further the exploitation of black and white workers alike. This is especially so in states of the former Confederacy and the Charleston plant was no exception. Its managers, charged with making the factory “Stay Union Free,” are known for heaping abuse particularly on black workers, who make up a third of the workforce.

In fact, Boeing has an extensive history of racial discrimination. This manufacturer refused to hire a single black person for over 25 years from its 1916 founding, and long afterward maintained segregated bathrooms and lunchrooms while restricting black workers to less desirable job classifications. To make any significant headway in the South and beyond, the unions must take up the fight against black oppression. Black workers, who make up the most oppressed and militant section of the working class, are the potential vanguard of any organizing drive.

A serious mobilization of labor power in response to recent racist atrocities in the Charleston area—the murder of nine black people in the Emanuel AME Church by a white-supremacist in June 2015 and the cop killing of Walter Scott two months earlier, among others—would have been a strong declaration by the unions to the besieged black population: “We’ve got your back.” By demonstrating the union movement’s willingness to wage a fight in the interests of working people and the oppressed, any such action could have helped propel both black and white Boeing workers into the ranks of the IAM.

But this perspective was not that of area union officials, least of all those of the IAM. The powerful Charleston longshore union, ILA Local 1422, while participating in community rallies over the massacre and making its union hall available to activists, didn’t attempt to bring to bear its strongest weapon: a work stoppage that could have shut down the Port of Charleston. For its part, the state AFL-CIO’s response to the Emanuel AME Church massacre was to encourage union members to pray. In any event, the self-defeating IAM bureaucracy sought to “win” community support through very different methods: cutting checks for charity events, which some groups returned because a union was not the right “fit.”

The Boeing organizing drive didn’t have to end this way. An IAM victory at the crown jewel of South Carolina manufacturing would have opened a crack in the dam of anti-union opposition and given a shot in the arm to labor organizing across the South. A union leadership worth its salt would have prepared workers for battle in a hostile territory where the racist ruling class revels in trampling on labor, black people, immigrants and the poor; the other side was certainly ready for a fight. Not the IAM bureaucrats though, or the rest of the pro-capitalist trade-union officialdom. The head of the IAM International, not to mention the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka, couldn’t even be bothered to make an appearance in Charleston.

It is hardly going to convince the undecided to sign up, and risk all, if when Boeing berates the union as a “divisive” force that will insert itself into the relationship between workers and managers, IAM organizers cry: “False!” In fact, Boeing South Carolina workers sorely need a force to battle the profit-gouging bosses—that is, a union rooted in the understanding that the interests of workers and their exploiters are counterposed. Wages, benefits and working conditions are ultimately decided by the struggle between these opposing classes.

Playing nice with the class enemy is the road to ruin. In 2015, the IAM withdrew a request for a unionization vote at the Charleston plant, declaring that, due to intimidation and threats against union organizers, it was “impossible to hold a free and fair election.” But the union continued to play by the bosses’ rules and maintained vain hopes in Democratic Party politicians. The IAM rushed to call the recent vote before Donald Trump could fill two vacancies on the NLRB and scrap rules adopted by appointees of Barack Obama (who was in the hip pocket of Chicago-based Boeing). The union tops push the illusion that if we only elect more “labor friendly” Democrats, the capitalist state’s labor laws can be used to benefit workers. Truth is, that rulebook is stacked against the unions and is designed to shackle labor’s social power—its ability to shut down production.

The unleashing of that power in the tumultuous class battles of the 1930s is precisely what built the industrial unions in this country. The turning point was 1934, when three major citywide strikes were guided to victory by leaderships, all avowed socialists, intent on fighting it out class against class and who understood the importance of combating the racial and other divisions that are deadly to proletarian unity (see our pamphlet Then and Now). In those and subsequent struggles that forged the CIO industrial unions, workers won by standing up against the might of the capitalists and their security guards, police and National Guard. The CIO organizing drives shattered the color bar in basic industry, drawing large numbers of black workers into the unions, although they were largely confined to the hardest and dirtiest jobs and were the last hired and first fired.

At the same time, the CIO leaders undermined working-class militancy by preaching faith in the capitalist Democrats and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Over the ensuing decades, the class-collaborationist policies of the union bureaucracy increasingly spelled disaster for organized labor. The recent defeat in South Carolina was prepared by a series of betrayals by the IAM tops. Boeing bought the Charleston plant from Vought Aircraft in 2009. The IAM had represented Vought’s workforce, but the day the purchase was completed, a petition to decertify the union was filed. A rotten contract voted the previous year at a meeting attended by only 13 members had turned many workers off to the IAM. Boeing’s promises to send the plant assembly line work for the 787 “Dreamliner” and a half-hearted IAM effort to retain its foothold gave Boeing a non-union operation in the Deep South.

After the company set up 787 work in South Carolina, the IAM bureaucrats played right into the bosses’ “divide and rule” by campaigning to “protect Seattle jobs” while insulting their class brothers and sisters in South Carolina. The head of IAM District 751 in Seattle declared: “If they continually offload and go into areas of nonskilled workers, they’re just not going to have that quality product.” The company held up such despicable statements, as well as an IAM-filed NLRB lawsuit to return the 787 work to Washington State, to convince South Carolina workers that the union didn’t give a damn about them.

A union leadership that aims to win battles for labor would have committed to organizing the workforce wherever Boeing shifted production and to ensuring that its workers receive top wages and benefits. Instead, the IAM bureaucracy has offered up its services to the company as labor contractors. This participation in the capitalist game of dog-eat-dog competition for jobs, including against workers the union is putatively trying to organize, is the antithesis of the very purpose of the unions: to unite workers in struggle against their common exploitation.

The IAM officialdom’s toxic policy of pitting worker against worker is even more virulent in the case of workers overseas. Peddling “America First” protectionism, the union tops wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes and tie the interests of the working class here to maintaining the competitive edge of U.S. imperialism. Thus, when Trump toured the Charleston plant two days after the union representation vote, the IAM International issued a statement not denouncing the union haters’ victory celebration but advising the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism to “urge Boeing to bring jobs home.”

Such “Made in the USA” chauvinist bleating is an obstacle to much-needed international labor solidarity and fuels racism against black and immigrant workers. Bemoaning “cheap labor” abroad also serves to mask the treachery of the labor bureaucracy, which in the name of sacrifice for American corporations has fueled a race to the bottom, greatly expanding the pool of cheap labor at home. In contrast, the importance of unity in struggle was shown by the union organizing victory at Smithfield meatpacking in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in 2008. During that 15-year battle, the heavily black and immigrant workforce mobilized in action to beat back union-busting attacks, including attempts by la migra to round up immigrant union activists.

Boeing is but one example of the “Southernization of labor.” Organizing the South is long overdue. The union bureaucrats occasionally give lip service to doing so, but any such campaign is anathema to these labor lieutenants of capital. A serious and sustained organizing drive would involve a level of class and social struggle that challenges the very foundations of the American capitalist order, not least the entrenched racial oppression of black people. In the class battles to come, the unions must champion the fight for black rights as well as full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

The question of transforming the unions into battalions of class struggle and champions of the oppressed is a political one. There must be a fight to replace the trade-union bureaucracy with a leadership dedicated to the complete independence of the working class from the bosses, their government and their political representatives. Workers need their own party, one whose goal is not just to improve the present conditions of the working class but to do away with the entire system of wage slavery and racial oppression and replace it with a planned, collectivized economy under a workers government.

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2017 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Six

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2017 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Six  

From The American Left History Blog Archives –May Day 1971

Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let- her-rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some Iowa/Kansas wheat field night fantasy this trip.

No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war America (post-World War II so as not to confuse the reader) in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.

More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.

Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were (are), had their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct, nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).

The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”

So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (I think) but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.

Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.

And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.’s finest, I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)

Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.

*********

“Everybody in the Che May Day collective head to the house on 14^th Street near Dupont Circle for last minute instructions, some food, some sleep and some solidarity,” came a voice ringing through the air near the campfire on the National Mall around midnight where Frank Jackman, a spare blanket over his shoulders, was huddled to keep warm and awake. The guy who yelled in the direction of the campfire, a guy in long hair and beard looked like any of about five thousand other guys, except Frank Jackman knew the guy was Benjy Warren, the well-known organizer of the Harvard take-over a couple of years before. Frank, after some agonizing (he had just gotten out of an Army stockade after a year’s time) had decided to take part in the May Day 1971 actions. Yes, he wanted to participant in this action-as advertised-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government” after seeing the too festive atmosphere of the Saturday mass rally. In his mind the ante had been upped.

The only question left was which contingent, what collective, he would adhere to and when he saw and heard Benjy he decided to drift over to Dupont Circle and join the Che contingent. Moreover he decided he could use some indoor sleep, a little food and maybe cadge a few butts since his stash had run out. Once he got to the location, a college apartment if he ever saw one, filled radical books and posters and not much in the way of furniture, he stood with about thirty others listening to Sherry Shaw from SDS fame call on the women to be particularly out front in the morning. The task of this collective, vaguely stated to throw off any cops or snitches, was to head down 14^th Street toward the White House and begin blocking intersections as soon as possible. Somebody naively asked if the police would be out in force and a few snickers ensued (in the event the police/military force was massive) from those who had been in direct actions before. After the obligatory pep talk everybody was encouraged to get a few hours’ sleep since they would be up at five to move out.             

The next morning (really later that morning by the time Frank dozed off) the collective was up and out by about five-fifteen. They began to march down 14^th Street, some in the streets some on the sidewalks, guerilla-style as was the fashion for street actions then. Before they hit M Street thought they were waylaid by a phalanx of cops who began busting heads, and making arrests immediately. Frank, in a rather rookie move, tried to cut through a back alley but Washington, D.C. that day was short on back alleys. He was arrested by a D.C. cop, placed in a paddy wagon, and transported to RFK stadium (the town’s professional football team’s field). And so ended Frank Jackman’s small effort to “shut down the government” with a bunch of students, radicals and other marginal people. He would spent a few days in that stadium before being released.

But see Frank did learn something that day, something that he would remember later. If you really want to shut down the government you better have some people who have the power and the skill to do so and not just the likes of some scraggily ex-soldier...

Those That Sing, Sing-Meryl Streep’ “Florence Foster Jenkins” (2016)-A Film Review

Those That Sing, Sing-Meryl Streep’ “Florence Foster Jenkins” (2016)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, 2016

F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that the rich, and by that he meant the super-rich of his day, the heirs of the robber barons, although we won’t dwell on that point here, are very different from you and me. And in a lot of ways that observation has the ring of truth. But after viewing this film under review, Meryl Streep’s Florence Foster Jenkins, there are apparently some things that all of us seek. In this case some fame for having something other than money. The desire to sing. But as our main character, the lady of the title, played as always to perfection by Meryl Streep, painfully found out in the end not even gads of money can buy a voice that is worthy of performing outside the upstairs attic of your house, if you have an attic. Therein lies the tale to be told here. That and the last few words of the film when Ms. Jenkins’ finds out the inescapable truth the hard way-maybe she couldn’t sing, but she did.   

Here’s the scoop. The scion of some old time robber baron turned respectable, Florence Foster Jenkins, the role played by Meryl Streep, had been a rabid supporter of the New York City culture scene in the first part of the 20^th century up to her death during World War II going as far as to start up clubs to promote, well, to promote her singing. Harmless enough although perhaps a little self-indulgent given the deeper social concerns of the 1930s and the build up to war. The catch though is that dear Florence was tone deaf, couldn’t carry a note to the next room let alone before a serious concert audience. Except for many years she denied her incapacity on the basis that she loved singing so that must be enough to pull her out of her drawing room. And was aided, aided big time by her husband Saint Clair, played by Hugh Grant, (her second husband, the first the Jenkins of her three name monte gave her syphilis which she suffered from for fifty years a remarkable feat of endurance in itself whatever her lack of singing prowess). Every time Florence reared her head and wanted to show her stuff in public Saint Clair had to round up the captive audience and spread plenty of money around. A tough job but in the end he really did do it for love.

Still there was the standing problem of her inability to sing. During the film she got into one of her periodic urges and hired an up and coming composer/pianist who was to accompany her in this latest endeavor. Of course the guy was “from hunger” and was glad to grab the dough until he actually heard her. There was plenty of back and forth between him and Saint Clair along the way but in the end he bought into the delusion. Bought into the idea that he would be playing Carnegie Hall after all. Well you can’t keep something as serious as tone deafness and inability to reach the high note quiet forever when people, people who were not part of the entourage, paid or friends, show up at the concert. Especially any self-respecting newspaper music critic. And that is what did Florence and maybe shortened her life by a severe reaction to the knowledge that people had always been laughing at her. I don’t think old Saint Clair or the myriad of hangers-on did her any favors by their actions. But there you have it. The rich can buy some time while the rest of us are sheltered in our antics. Excellent story line and excellent performances by Streep and Grant because it must be hard to sing so poorly and to coddle such efforts as acting chores.