The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- Botticelli’s 115th Dream-With Botticelli’s “Venus” In Mind

The 50^th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- Botticelli’s 115^th Dream-With Botticelli’s “Venus” In Mind

By Special Guest Alex James

[Frankly my oldest brother Alex, who after all is over ten years older than I am, and I have never been all that close. Maybe that is natural due our age differences and of his decided and vocally not wanting to have an unruly younger brother tagging along while he and his vaunted corner boys did their thing. Later the gap widened as his lawyerly pursues were far removed as a rule from my own social and cultural concerns. A few weeks ago though, knowing that I write for a number of blogs, including here at American Left History, and in various smaller print journals he approached me on behalf of he and his “corner boys,” at least the ones still standing some fifty years later, to help organize and write a small tribute booklet in honor of their fallen comrade and fellow corner boy, Peter Paul Markin, who led them west in the great Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967 explosion. I took on the tasks after Alex explained to me that he had been smitten with a nostalgia bug when he had gone to a legal conference out there by an exhibit at the deYoung Museum out in Frisco town, The Summer of Love Experience, being presented to honor the 50^th anniversary of the events of that summer.

Fair enough. I was glad to help out since I only knew the events second-hand and have always been interested in writing about and have written extensively about that period. As a result I had thought that the experience of putting out a small publication where we had to maybe for the first time in our lives work closely together “bonded” Alex and me somewhat. Fair enough again. Now though the guy is all hopped up, maybe showing signs of senility for all I know, about an exhibition he had seen at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where they have Botticelli’s Venus on display. As far as I know Alex could have given a rat’s ass about art, about the Renaissance back in the day or anything since not connected with his law practice. But the other day he asked me for some space here to talk about how that Botticelli painting at the exhibition reminded him about some love interest he had had during that summer of love period. What can I say. He is after all my brother.  Zack James]       

   

[I had written the basics of the small piece I wished to present here about a young girl that I had met out in San Francisco, Jewel Night Star, when I was out there after the Scribe [Peter Paul Markin] got a bunch of us to head out west in late summer 1967. (I will explain that whole moniker business, that serious need to “reinvent” ourselves below but just know now that I was always known out there as Cowboy, or Cowboy Angel, depending on my mood, the day, hell maybe the drug intake) That was before I read my youngest brother Zack’s introduction. I felt compelled to add a note here to announce to what he always likes to call a “candid world” that I am neither senile nor have I been in the past, a past Zack, tied up with his various writing projects about times that he has only lived through vicariously totally oblivious to the call of culture, to the call of art and artifact. What more can I say though as he is my host here. Oh, yes, he is also after all my brother. Alex James.]

I would be the last person in the world to deny that memories, good and bad, creep up on a person sometimes in unusual ways. (Of course in my law practice I have had to pay short shrift in general to anything to do with memory on behalf of my clients but that is out of professional necessity to keep the buggers from huge jail time or cash outlays.) Recently this came home to me in a very odd way. I had been out in San Francisco to attend a law conference which I do periodically to confer with other lawyers in my special areas of concern when as I was entering the BART transit station on Powell Street I noticed on a passing bus an advertisement for an exhibition called The Summer of Love Experience being put on at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of that wild west experiment. That set off the first series of memory bells which forced me to take some time out to go see what they had produced about those long ago times.                    

See, strange as it may seem given my subsequent total emergence into my law practice (at times just to keep afloat with three unhappy ex-wives and a parcel of kids, some happy some not, to support which almost killed me about ten years ago with a crush of college tuitions) I had been one of those tens of thousands of young people who drifted west to see what the whole thing was all about in San Francisco in the summer of love, 1967. Zack has probably told you that when I came back from this recent Frisco trip I gathered those of my old hometown corner boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville who as Zack stated were “still standing” to put together a small tribute book in honor of the event dedicated to the memory of the late Peter Paul Markin, the guiding spirit who led us out West like some latter day prophet.  

Mad monk Markin (and he really was we all called him the Scribe after our leader Frankie Riley gave him that moniker  in junior high school after Markin once had written some total bullshit homage to him and it hit the school newspaper and ever after the Scribe was his “flak” writing some stuff that was totally unbelievable about the real Frankie Riley whom we knew was seven kinds of a bastard even then) had gone out in the spring of 1967 after dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year and had come back in late summer telling us the “newer world” he was always yakking about (and which we previously had given a rat’s ass about) was “happening” out there. He conned, connived, and begged but six of us beside him (and ever after also including Josh Breslin from up in Olde Sacco, Maine whom the Scribe met out in Frisco who was not a North Adamsville corner boy but whom we made one since he was clearly a kindred spirit)   went out and stayed for various lengths of time. I had gone back out with Markin after his “conversion” plea and stayed for about a year, mostly, as with all of us one way or another riding Captain Crunch’s “merry prankster” converted yellow brick road bus (the latter Markin’s term).     

While out there I had many good sexual and social experiences but the best was with a young gal whom I stuck with most of the time who went by the name Jewel Night Star as I went by the names Cowboy or Cowboy Angel depending on my mood. I make no pretense to know all of the psychological and sociological reasons at the time or thereafter but these monikers we hung on ourselves were an attempt to “reinvent” ourselves. Break out of the then conventional nine to five, beat the commies, and buy lots of stuff world our parents tried to drive a nail in our hearts about. Some people changed their monikers, their personas every other week but I stuck with my based on the simple love that I had had for Westerns growing up and since we were in the West it seemed right. Markin’s Be-Bop Kid was an overlay from his hearty interest in the “beats” who by 1967 were passe, who were being superseded by what was beginning to be called the “hippies.” Such were the times. The Jewel Night Star moniker when she told me about it one night was based on her eyes which in a certain light looked like diamonds, like twinkling stars. As long as I knew her she stuck with that moniker as well.            

Funny when I was out in Frisco for the conference and went to the museum I didn’t think anything about her. Had been through a small succession of women after she left the bus and as I have mentioned have had a whole raft of women since then, married and unmarried. I just mainly “dug” the scene at the museum and thought about the great music we heard (when they played White Bird by It’s a Beautiful Day I freaked out since I had not heard that song in ages), about the plentiful and mostly safe dope we did (we had an unwritten pact among the North Adamsville corner boys not to do LSD, “acid” after Markin explained his “bad trip” on the substance and after we had seen more than a few people going crazy at concerts and need medical attention), and about how we could “outrage” bourgeois society by our dress, our free spirits and, well, our goofiness if it came right down to it. (Tweaking those who were trying to drive those nails into our hearts.)

Then last week, or the week before, I got this postcard advertisement from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston asking me to join their membership. (I assume somehow that having paid my admission to the deYoung on-line I had become a prime target for every museum from Portland East to Portland West). The ‘hook” on the other side of the postcard was that with a paid up membership I could see Botticelli’s Venus up close and personal. A view of that image on that postcard lead me directly, I say straight line directly, to my first memories of Jewel Night Star in maybe the fifty years since that summer of 1967 time.         

In the early fall of 1967 Markin and I had hitchhiked out across the whole country to Frisco. (I can see every mother grimace at that idea now, or then for that matter.) I won’t go into the details about how we got out there which I have written about in that tribute book the guys and I put together and Zack edited. Besides this is about Jewel not about some Jack Kerouac On The Road -influenced fling on our parts. Markin had had some contact with this guy, this wild man, Captain Crunch, who had somehow, most people who knew anything about it agreed that it was through a dope deal, gotten a yellow brick road converted school bus which he was travelling on up and down the West Coast picking up kindred spirits and letting them stay in and around the bus. (The attrition rate was pretty high most people staying a few weeks and then getting off or told to find another way to travel by Mustang Sally, the Captain’s sort of girlfriend, I never did figure out their actual relationship in all the time I was on the bus, if they stole stuff, didn’t keep fairly decent personal hygiene or let the drugs make them too weird and in need of some medical help.) When we got out West the Captain’s bus was stationed in Golden Gate Park and after the Scribe (then going under the moniker the Be-Bop kid-no more Scribe okay) introduced us and the Captain thought I was cool (and I thought he was as well) I was “on the bus.”              

A couple of weeks later the Captain was talking about taking a slow trip south to a place in La Jolla for the winter where he had a friend. The idea was that we would “house-sit” what turned out to be a mansion since that friend was one of the first serious high distribution drug dealers getting his product directly from south of the border only thirty or forty miles away in Tijuana.  We were all for it (me since every place was a new place for me in California and I was curious). It was on that trip as we headed toward Big Sur down the Pacific Coast Highway, a place called Todo el Mundo that I met Gail Harrington, Jewel Night Star.

We had stopped at a campsite where there was a party that was still going after about the six days before we got there so everybody was, using a term of art from those days “wasted.” I was grabbing a joint from somebody when this young woman came up to me and asked for a hit, for a “toke” for some grass. Her look. Well just check out the Botticelli Venus above that accompanies this piece and you get an idea. Tall, thin, hair braided, as was the style when a lot of young woman were on the road and didn’t want to, or couldn’t hassle with that daily chore to look beautiful stuff. Just as we guys grew our hair long and grew beards to avoid having the hassle of shaving. She had on a diaphanous kind of granny dress that showed her shape in detail. Nice. The granny dresses also a question of convenience and an expression that a woman’s shape was not as important as whether she was “cool” or not. But the best thing about her beyond being a Botticelli vision, a dream, what did I call it in the title to this piece. Yes, his 115^th dream, was that she was very friendly, and a little flirty, in a nice way unlike all the girls from North Adamsville that I knew who might be nice but who thought sex was a mortal sin before marriage, maybe ever.

At first I was a little disoriented when we hit Frisco and joined up with the bus since the girls were really without much guile friendly in a way that it was easier talking to them than the Bible between the knees girls I was used to. By the time we got to Todo el Mundo I had had a few dalliances, a few what we called back in the neighborhood, “one night stands” which didn’t go anywhere and nobody worried about it but I was still unsure about what to expect from the young women who were travelling that same “road” we were travelling. So I was kind of shy a little around Jewel at first since she struck me as something out of the Renaissance, something out a painting by Botticelli who before he “got religion” later in his life under the influence of Savonarola which I had seen in an art book when I was taking an art course in high school (and have been unable to find in recent Internet searches looking for that exact painting). They were mostly young countesses and merchants’ daughters who had time on their hands and whom Botticelli was interested in painting for profit and for a different look than the inevitable Holy Family, Jesus, religious paintings that were becoming overdone and passe. (I thought it was funny how many of his young women looked like Northern European women since I had a fixed idea of dark-eyed, dark haired, dark complexion Italian women who I saw at school or in the Little Italy neighborhood that started about ten blocks from the Irish-dominated Acre.)              

Well Jewel was not from Renaissance Italy but from Grand Rapids in Michigan. Had come west when she finished her first year at Michigan after she had heard one night on a date what the folk singer at the club she was attending talked about the music explosion going on out there. She had been out for several months and had headed south to Todo el Mundo when she thought things had gotten too weird in San Francisco. She had hitchhiked down with a guy who was heading further south to Los Angles but she was just then content to stay along the rugged rural coast for a while. Which she would have done for longer she said except when I asked to travel south on the bus she agreed. But that was a few weeks later.           

I suppose I have been somewhat beaten down in the women department because I had forgotten how easy to be with. Jewel was, I guess, thinking back she was one of those “flower children” that we kept hearing about. Meaning nothing more than she was whimsical, was relatively hassle-free and liked nothing better than to roam the hills around Todo el Mundo and the hardscrabble beaches in the area. With me in tow.  All of this may sound kind of simple-minded, kind of what is the big deal about his woman. But look at the look of Venus above, look at that faraway look and that twisting of her braids and you will get an idea of what Jewel was like. Look at Botticelli’s Venus eyes and you will see the same night star that I finally saw in Jewel’s.     

Like I said we stayed together more or less for most of that year I was out there until in the spring of 1968 Jewel said she was getting tired of the road and wanted to either settle down out in the desert, out in Joshua Tree where several communal groups were being formed or head back home to school. I didn’t like either idea although a few months later I would head back east to finish college. We agreed that our paths were going in different directions and one day she told me that she had purchased a bus ticket to Joshua Tree (actually when I went out there many years later Twenty-nine Palms the nearest bus stop then). The next day was the last day I saw her. Although we had agreed to keep in touch that like a lot of things in those days it never happened.  I wonder if she is still alive wherever she is if those eyes of hers still sparkle in a certain angle like a night star. I hope so.  

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967 -Jim Morrison and The Doors- WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW! Zack James comment: My oldest brother, Alex, who was in the thick of the Summer of Love along with his corner boys from North Adamsville above all the later Peter Paul Markin who led them out to the Wild West said that the few times that he/they saw The Doors either in Golden Gate Park at free, I repeat, free outdoor concerts or at the Avalon or Fillmore which were a great deal more expensive, say two or three dollars, I repeat two or three dollars that The Doors when they were on, meaning when Jim Morrison was in high dungeon, was in a drug-induced trance and acted the shaman for the audience nobody was better. Having been about a decade behind and having never seen Morrison in high dungeon or as a drug-induced shaman but having listened to various Doors compilations I think for once old Alex was onto something. Listen up. CD REVIEW THE BEST OF THE DOORS, ELECTRA ASYLUM RECORDS, 1985 In my jaded youth I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House , Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike, and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music and so on. The subject of the following review, Jim Morrison and the Doors, is an example. The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derives from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Some of that influence is apparent here in this essentially greatest hits album. More than one rock critic has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of the Doors. If you want to trace their evolution more broadly, or chronologically, other CDs do an adequate job but they are helter-skelter. This CD edition has, with maybe one or two exceptions, all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll for keeps. A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960’s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour)- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including this writer, felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people. Know this as well. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty years of “cultural wars” in revenge by his protégés, hangers-on and their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967 -Jim Morrison and The Doors- WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

Zack James comment: My oldest brother, Alex, who was in the thick of the Summer of Love along with his corner boys from North Adamsville above all the later Peter Paul Markin who led them out to the Wild West said that the few times that he/they saw The Doors either in Golden Gate Park at free, I repeat, free outdoor concerts or at the Avalon or Fillmore which were a great deal more expensive, say two or three dollars, I repeat two or three dollars that The Doors when they were on, meaning when Jim Morrison was in high dungeon, was in a drug-induced trance and acted the shaman for the audience nobody was better. Having been about a decade behind and having never seen Morrison in high dungeon or as a drug-induced shaman but having listened to various Doors compilations I think for once old Alex was onto something. Listen up.         

CD REVIEW

THE BEST OF THE DOORS, ELECTRA ASYLUM RECORDS, 1985


In my jaded youth I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House , Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike, and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music and so on. The subject of the following review, Jim Morrison and the Doors, is an example.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derives from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Some of that influence is apparent here in this essentially greatest hits album.

More than one rock critic has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of the Doors. If you want to trace their evolution more broadly, or chronologically, other CDs do an adequate job but they are helter-skelter. This CD edition has, with maybe one or two exceptions, all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll for keeps.

A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960’s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour)- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including this writer, felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty years of “cultural wars” in revenge by his protégés, hangers-on and their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"- Allen Ginsberg's "America"

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"- Allen Ginsberg's "America"

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation.  Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).              

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.     

Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Commentary

There was a time when Allen Ginsberg's poetry 'spoke' to me and, and I am sure, to others from the "Generation of '68". His 'beat'/pacifist take on the struggle for power- heal thyself- rang through many heads-until the beasts got serious at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, and in other locales, before and after, as well. Still Ginsberg's mid-1950's poetry shook things up for lots of people. Here's why.

"America" by Allen Ginsberg, 1956

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels--In Pete Seeger’s House- The Real “Walk The Line” Couple, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels--In Pete Seeger’s House- The Real “Walk The Line” Couple, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash

DVD Review

Rainbow Quest, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Roscoe Holcomb, Jean Redpath, Shanachie, 2005

In a year that has featured various 90th birthday celebrations it is very appropriate to review some of the 1960’s television work of Pete Seeger, one of the premier folk anthologists, singers, transmitters of the tradition and “keeper” of the folk flame. This DVD is a “must see” for anyone who is interested in the history of the folk revival of the 1960’s, the earnest, folksy style of Pete Seeger or the work of the also tradition-oriented , although that fact was previously unknown to me, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash (she of the famous Carter Family tribe. How is that for traditional bloodlines?). This is not only a musical treat seeing the real subjects of the hit movie of a few years ago, “Walk The Line” that got me interested, at least somewhat, in Johnny Cash’s music but filled with information about the Carter Family that I have been interested in for a long time. Pete, by the way, couldn’t be more pleased in working with this pair and they regale us with some old Carter Family songs like “Worried Man Blues”.


Also included on this DVD is a performance by the legendary Kentucky mountain music man Roscoe Holcombe that John Cohen, a previously reviewed performer on this series with the New Lost City Ramblers, did great service to the folk revival by bringing out of the Kentucky hills in the early 1960s to the wilds of ….. Greenwich Village. Pete wears his “world music” hat in this segment as well as he also brings in Scottish folksinger Jean Redpath in to link up the music of the Scotch-Irish immigrant Kentucky hills and the old country. A nice folk history moment.

This DVD contains some very interesting and, perhaps, rare television film footage from two of Pete Seeger shows, packaged in one DVD, entitled “Rainbow Quest” (the whole series consists of six DVDs). Each show is introduced (and ends, as well) by Pete singing his old classic “If I Had A Golden Threat” and then he proceeds to introduce, play guitar and banjo and sing along with the above-mentioned artists.

One final note: This is a piece of folk history. Pete Seeger is a folk legend. However, the production values here are a bit primitive and low budget. Moreover, for all his stature as a leading member of the folk pantheon Pete was far from the ideal host. His halting speaking style and almost bashful manner did not draw his guests out. Let’s just put it this way the production concept used then would embarrass a high school television production class today. But, Pete, thanks for the history lesson.

Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review

Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review

Book Review

By Zack James   

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, New York, 1920     

Josh Breslin, the old time cultural critic, mostly in the music and film milieu but occasionally with an adventurous foray into the printed word which had caused him more anguish from angry authors, had to laugh a couple of years back when approaching retirement after many years of free-lance journalism for publishing houses, small presses and an occasional off-beat journal he decided that he would review a wide selection of books by authors long dead. As one might expect he would therefore not have to deal with those troublesome and irate authors since they would have been long in the grave and beyond care for what some early 21^st century adventurer might have to say, or not say, about some literary gem. Or so he thought when he attempted to do a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early coming of age novel, This Side Of Paradise.     

Now everybody, everybody that counted for Josh anyway, mostly other reviewers and their hangers-on knew that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s masterwork, knew that it was one of the great classics of the old-time “dead white men” pantheon. He would not when reviewing Paradise try to take that masterpiece away from its proper place in the literary pantheon but instead to tweak a few laconic noses he decided to argue that Paradise was on a level with Gatsby, that it should book-end the classic. Published such deliberate effrontery in several small literary journals and more importantly the literary blog, American Musings, a blog which several well-paid professional book reviewers, college professors, semi-literate high school English teachers, a smattering of graduate students in American Literature and most importantly a cohort of doctoral and post-doctoral literary lights out to make a reputation as gunslingers in the mad dash of that lightless world read and wrote for. Naturally the damn thing caused something of a fire storm as a result. Maybe you did not hear about it if you are not a devotee of such endeavors and just went about your life in ignorance of such earth-shattering blazes. But in that good night circle guns were drawn and ready, acid was added to the pen of many who saw that they could take down a two-bit has-been reviewer who obviously had not read anything since about age twelve-except maybe comic books.

That was the exact reaction that Josh had expected, had savored the prospect of igniting on fire. Had worried, worried to perdition that when he wrote the review nobody, no sensible person could, give a rat’s ass (his corner boy expression never entirely dismissed from his adult vocabulary) a couple of books almost one hundred years old from a guy who was on that “dead white men” extinction list mentioned above. He smiled with secret glee when the first review by a lonely undergraduate student who was trying to muscle herself up the food-chain by condemning Josh to East of Eden took him to task for even mentioning both books in the same universe much less in the same small breathe. Dared Josh to come up with one paragraph, one which she put in bold-face for emphasis as if Josh was some errant schoolboy that came up to that last couple of paragraph when voice Nick talks after Gatsby’s bloody demise about the feeling of those long ago Dutch sailors who came upon the “fresh, green breast of land” that would later become Long Island and had upon viewing had inflamed their sense of wonder. A paragraph she had written her freshman term paper on for American Literature which the professor had given her an A on-so there.

Josh, again acting as the provocateur, in return cited the dance scene in the club in Minneapolis with Amory and his prey, Isabelle, as he attempted against all convention to grab a small kiss from her sweet lips. Argued that after all Paradise was about the roamings and doings a young adult trying to figure out his place in the world and who was finding it not easy to find his niche. Josh contrasted that with the too uppity habits of a small-time hood from nowhere USA hustling whatever there was to hustle trying to step up in class out with the big boys and got pushed back down the heap once he got in over his head with Daisy and what she stood for-wealth, conformity and letting the servants clean up the mess.        

That comment seemed to have put that earnest undergraduate in her place since she went mute before Josh’s logic but no sooner had that dust-up settled down that Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary efforts of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances. So the battle raged.    

Josh laughed as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison. Let the sparks fly.   

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Pete Seeger's The Emperor Is Naked Today

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Pete Seeger's The Emperor Is Naked Today       

During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example  we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!

THE EMPEROR IS NAKED TODAY-O!

As the sun
Rose on the rim of eastern sky
And this one
World that we love was trying to die
We said stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
Your child may be the one to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Four winds that blow
Four thousand tongues, with the word: survive
Four billion souls
Striving today to stay alive
We say stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
Why don't we be the ones to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Men - have failed
Power has failed, with papered gold.
Shalom - salaam
Will yet be a word where slaves were sold
We say stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
We yet may find the way to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Originally titled "As the Sun"
Words and Music by Pete Seeger (1970)
(c) 1977, 1979 by Fall River Music Inc.

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Pete Seeger's The Emperor Is Naked Today

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Pete Seeger's The Emperor Is Naked Today       

During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example  we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!

THE EMPEROR IS NAKED TODAY-O!

As the sun
Rose on the rim of eastern sky
And this one
World that we love was trying to die
We said stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
Your child may be the one to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Four winds that blow
Four thousand tongues, with the word: survive
Four billion souls
Striving today to stay alive
We say stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
Why don't we be the ones to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Men - have failed
Power has failed, with papered gold.
Shalom - salaam
Will yet be a word where slaves were sold
We say stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
We yet may find the way to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Originally titled "As the Sun"
Words and Music by Pete Seeger (1970)
(c) 1977, 1979 by Fall River Music Inc.

The 60th Anniversary Of "On The Road"- Jack Kerouac - On the Road (jack singing)

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- We Must Learn To Speak Russian-Russia October 1917

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- We Must Learn To Speak Russian-Russia October 1917      

A while back, last year, during the American presidential election campaign of 2016 at a point where the two major contenders, now President Donald Trump and now failed contender Hillary Clinton had been nominated by their respective organizations, I was under constant and hard-core pressure from personal friends and political associates to let up on my opposition of support to the candidate of either of the major parties. I had planned, and had made my stance clear early on to one and all, that I planned to cast a protest vote for Green Party candidate once socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign went down in disgraceful flames (disgraceful because of the horrible way he was treated by the Democratic Party establishment which went out of its way, way out of its way, to favor weak-kneed leading candidate Clinton). On November 8^th I did just that here in Massachusetts whose Electoral College votes were overwhelming won by Mrs. Clinton. 

The gist of my opposition to the two major party candidates was that I could discern no qualitative difference between war-hawk Clinton and war-hawk Trump, the issues around war and peace being the central reason that I have steadfastly opposed both major parties since my military service during the Vietnam War. A war whose long duration like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started by one party’s president (Johnson in the case of Vietnam and avidly pursued by another before the fall of Saigon, Nixon/Ford). While I was not, and have not been, agnostic on my differences on other social and personal liberty issues that war and peace issue has always anchored my politic perspectives since the old days. And those personal friends and political associates have known that as well. Yet as the general election campaign progressed, if that is the right word for the down and dirty slug-fest between both candidates which nobody could rightly accept as reasonable political discourse, they continued their drumbeat. Something in that hard sell twisted me to become more adamant in my opposition-in my seeing that there was as the late great American novelist Gore Vidal no stranger to mainstream politics only “one ruling party in America with two branches-Democratic and Republican.”

I wrote a number of blogs and other commentaries as a result all along this line which not only included my opposition to the two parties but my fervent desire to get on with the real business of people with my brand of politics-organize against the endless wars and home and abroad. Here is a sample of my thinking at the time:

“Now several years ago, maybe late 2007, early 2008 when one Barack Obama made his presence felt on the American national political stage and sought to slay the dragon, to slay what we would come to find out was the dragon lady but who just then was in the first blush of her endless drive to win the Oval Office I noted that the Hillary-Obama race for the Democratic Party nomination looked like a breath of fresh air and although I would not have voted for either for love nor money I decided to try to chronicle the beginning storms of the campaign that year. (In the interest of full disclosure I voted for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party that year a natural choice as a black and woman with a political past which she need not be ashamed of and who had at least a passing acquaintance with the truth-a big plus that year after all the bullshit was cleared away)   

“Early on though somewhere around the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary (which Hillary had won late by a hair and kept her campaign alive) in 2008 I gave up the enterprise as so much blather and as so much hot air and realized that the “promise” of 2007 had turned to ashes as neither candidate could give the approximate location of the truth in a time when all hell was breaking loose in the economy and working people, the working poor were being beaten down mercilessly by what would be called the Great Recession of 2008. And as we witness in 2016 working people, hard-working working people of all ethnic, racial and gender identifications have been taking it on the chin lo these many years. Taken it on the chin so they have in some cases fervently listened as one Dump the Trump (sorry I could not resist that slam, not the worst thing that will ever happen to that ill-bred bastard) lulls them to sleep with his balderdash, with his contempt for those who have so fervently supported him despite any good sense. We will find no truth coming from anywhere in that precinct. Worse this year milady Hillary has lost all her slight girlish charms from 2008 and is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of next week’s coronation as war-monger-in-chief.      

“Here is the hard truth, the truth neither billionaire Donald nor Wall Street Hillary have a clue about. For working people, for the hard-working people of this country who have been put up against the wall and blindfolded for a while now there is no salvation this side of capitalism, this side of that  defunct system that has had its day and had long ago lost any progressive content that it had in its golden age. “Speak the truth no matter how bitter” and that is the bitter truth as we will, once again learn over the next dreary four years. Yeah, Leon Trotsky, one of his books the place where I first read the truth of that “bitter” phrase, would have said it himself if he was not beyond the pale. You heard it here-think about it okay.”    

I was almost as surprised as everybody else come the morning of November 9^th to find one Donald “Dump The Trump” (no apology for that now) had been an upset winner of the 2016 American election. Although maybe not as surprised as most as I kept hearing a small drumbeat from working class guys and gals too whom I would meet in my work, or somebody would tell me about that there something underground in the political world, something down at the base was happening for Trump. Hell I even heard stuff when I played golf with guys on public golf courses (not Donald’s private ones) in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire that Trump was their guy for jobs, for keeping black and Latinos down, keeping the fucking immigrants out and making America an armed fortress. 

Then as the transition began its awful cycle on the turnover Trump daily almost shocked me, and everybody else like me, with his choices for who would aid him in his government. This is where the “mea culpa” of the title of this piece comes in. I now am ready to concede that there is some qualitative difference between a Trump government and what Hillary’s would have looked like- if only because she would leave us alone. I still stand by my vote of “no confidence” and am still glad, very glad, that I cast my protest vote for Jill Stein but we are in a mess for the next four years no question. Practically speaking though I was down in Washington on January 20^th to express my opposition, no, my resistance to the Trump government on day one.

Down with the Trump government!-Build The Resistance   

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance      

A while back, last year, during the American presidential election campaign of 2016 at a point where the two major contenders, now President Donald Trump and now failed contender Hillary Clinton had been nominated by their respective organizations, I was under constant and hard-core pressure from personal friends and political associates to let up on my opposition of support to the candidate of either of the major parties. I had planned, and had made my stance clear early on to one and all, that I planned to cast a protest vote for Green Party candidate once socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign went down in disgraceful flames (disgraceful because of the horrible way he was treated by the Democratic Party establishment which went out of its way, way out of its way, to favor weak-kneed leading candidate Clinton). On November 8^th I did just that here in Massachusetts whose Electoral College votes were overwhelming won by Mrs. Clinton. 

The gist of my opposition to the two major party candidates was that I could discern no qualitative difference between war-hawk Clinton and war-hawk Trump, the issues around war and peace being the central reason that I have steadfastly opposed both major parties since my military service during the Vietnam War. A war whose long duration like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started by one party’s president (Johnson in the case of Vietnam and avidly pursued by another before the fall of Saigon, Nixon/Ford). While I was not, and have not been, agnostic on my differences on other social and personal liberty issues that war and peace issue has always anchored my politic perspectives since the old days. And those personal friends and political associates have known that as well. Yet as the general election campaign progressed, if that is the right word for the down and dirty slug-fest between both candidates which nobody could rightly accept as reasonable political discourse, they continued their drumbeat. Something in that hard sell twisted me to become more adamant in my opposition-in my seeing that there was as the late great American novelist Gore Vidal no stranger to mainstream politics only “one ruling party in America with two branches-Democratic and Republican.”

I wrote a number of blogs and other commentaries as a result all along this line which not only included my opposition to the two parties but my fervent desire to get on with the real business of people with my brand of politics-organize against the endless wars and home and abroad. Here is a sample of my thinking at the time:

“Now several years ago, maybe late 2007, early 2008 when one Barack Obama made his presence felt on the American national political stage and sought to slay the dragon, to slay what we would come to find out was the dragon lady but who just then was in the first blush of her endless drive to win the Oval Office I noted that the Hillary-Obama race for the Democratic Party nomination looked like a breath of fresh air and although I would not have voted for either for love nor money I decided to try to chronicle the beginning storms of the campaign that year. (In the interest of full disclosure I voted for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party that year a natural choice as a black and woman with a political past which she need not be ashamed of and who had at least a passing acquaintance with the truth-a big plus that year after all the bullshit was cleared away)   

“Early on though somewhere around the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary (which Hillary had won late by a hair and kept her campaign alive) in 2008 I gave up the enterprise as so much blather and as so much hot air and realized that the “promise” of 2007 had turned to ashes as neither candidate could give the approximate location of the truth in a time when all hell was breaking loose in the economy and working people, the working poor were being beaten down mercilessly by what would be called the Great Recession of 2008. And as we witness in 2016 working people, hard-working working people of all ethnic, racial and gender identifications have been taking it on the chin lo these many years. Taken it on the chin so they have in some cases fervently listened as one Dump the Trump (sorry I could not resist that slam, not the worst thing that will ever happen to that ill-bred bastard) lulls them to sleep with his balderdash, with his contempt for those who have so fervently supported him despite any good sense. We will find no truth coming from anywhere in that precinct. Worse this year milady Hillary has lost all her slight girlish charms from 2008 and is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of next week’s coronation as war-monger-in-chief.      

“Here is the hard truth, the truth neither billionaire Donald nor Wall Street Hillary have a clue about. For working people, for the hard-working people of this country who have been put up against the wall and blindfolded for a while now there is no salvation this side of capitalism, this side of that  defunct system that has had its day and had long ago lost any progressive content that it had in its golden age. “Speak the truth no matter how bitter” and that is the bitter truth as we will, once again learn over the next dreary four years. Yeah, Leon Trotsky, one of his books the place where I first read the truth of that “bitter” phrase, would have said it himself if he was not beyond the pale. You heard it here-think about it okay.”    

I was almost as surprised as everybody else come the morning of November 9^th to find one Donald “Dump The Trump” (no apology for that now) had been an upset winner of the 2016 American election. Although maybe not as surprised as most as I kept hearing a small drumbeat from working class guys and gals too whom I would meet in my work, or somebody would tell me about that there something underground in the political world, something down at the base was happening for Trump. Hell I even heard stuff when I played golf with guys on public golf courses (not Donald’s private ones) in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire that Trump was their guy for jobs, for keeping black and Latinos down, keeping the fucking immigrants out and making America an armed fortress. 

Then as the transition began its awful cycle on the turnover Trump daily almost shocked me, and everybody else like me, with his choices for who would aid him in his government. This is where the “mea culpa” of the title of this piece comes in. I now am ready to concede that there is some qualitative difference between a Trump government and what Hillary’s would have looked like- if only because she would leave us alone. I still stand by my vote of “no confidence” and am still glad, very glad, that I cast my protest vote for Jill Stein but we are in a mess for the next four years no question. Practically speaking though I was down in Washington on January 20^th to express my opposition, no, my resistance to the Trump government on day one.

Down with the Trump government!-Build The Resistance   

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!  

This should be our mantra-“Keep building the resistance”-we have them on the run a little now-we have to keep up our organizing it is the only way-forget about the electoral process now the streets are our only defense against this cold civil war which has landed on our doorsteps. Remember too other earlier movements like the black civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement started small-very small especially the latter-keep the faith    

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!  

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman 

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men … (and I added women too)-lines from “Protest” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Usually when I want to grab a line or two from some poem it would more likely by from say Bertolt Brecht’s “To Those Born After,” Langston Hughes’ “Homage To John Brown” or Claude McKay’s “Let’s Us Die Like Men (and I would add women here again) and not some relatively obscure American poet but when the point is made so succinctly I could not resist using the damn thing as it disturbed my sleep one night    

Ella Wheeler Wilcox whatever her vices or virtues as an American working the ways of the late 19^th and early 20^th century had it exactly right-had a mantra that we need to live by these dark days on the American frontier (the frontier not Harvard Professor Turner’s old idea about the closing of the frontier once you hit the Pacific Ocean with all its consequences for a restless people ever since but the outer edge of civil society). We must continue to resist the Trump government with whatever resources we have. And whatever hubris we can gather in to keep us from the storm that has gathered right on our doorsteps.

Most of us didn’t want this fight, the older ones of us thinking that maybe we could pass on under conditions of an armed truce with the imperial government. But then the cold civil war descended on us and we had to pick sides, those of us who see the necessity of picking sides when bans are in place, when walls are being built and when the rich, no, hell no, the super-rich have literally stepped up to besieged every social program that our people need to face the next day. And act. Act to build the resistance which these days looks like it will need to be on the order of the French Resistance in World War II.

Do you really want to bend your head down when the deal, the hell train coming, goes down and your kids, if you have kids, your grandkids if you have grandkids, or just your own conscience asks you what did you when it was time to speak up. Remember Ella had it right, right as rain.

Here is Bertolt Brecht's "To Those Born After" if you need further reason-

I

To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

II

You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.

And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence. 

Bertolt Brecht