"The Times Are Out Of Joint"- I Am Already Tired, Heartily Tired, Of The Obamiad

Commentary

Well, never let it be said that this blogger doesn’t give everyone his or her “fifteen minutes of fame”, as the late Andy Warhol is said to have put it. That goes for the lowliest worker to the American imperial president. With the exception of the very pressing issue of the fight against the Obama Afghan war policy, both as to troop escalation and funding, this writer has held off from in-depth comment about the new regime. However, ever since the dust has settle on the last Inaugural ball, if not before then I have had this aching feeling that something is not right here. As the headline to this entry says- “the times are out of joint”.

Readers of this space are aware that the fundamental political axis that drives the commentary here is an oppositional anti-capitalist perspective. Thus, last fall, during the lead up to the November 2008 presidential elections I called for a NO vote for Obama, McCain, Nader (Independent) or McKinney (Green). However, Obama’s victory led me to a ‘feeling’ that a new wind was blowing in the American political universe that, sooner or later would, accrue to the benefit of leftist militants. I encapsulated that ‘feeling’ in the slogan, somewhat jokingly- "After Obama, Us". The truth of that slogan right now is neither here nor there for what concerns me is that right from the Inaugural Address this Obama ship has been listing, badly. I came of political age with John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address with its soaring rhetoric and call to the “better angels of our nature” in modern times. Although I long ago, as I have detailed elsewhere in this space over the past year or so, gave up on the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social change that speech still stands as a benchmark for bourgeois political rhetoric.

And this is not merely some nostalgia for the good old days (that did not exist, in any case). Nor is it a rebuke at the new technologies that have created the Obama aura or changed the nature of the way bourgeois electoral politics are practiced here. What bothers me is rather those continuing pictures from places like New Orleans, Detroit or other “Rust Belt” cities where formerly employed, mainly black, workers are lining up for charity, or in order to fight ‘pursue’ minimum wage careers as places like Wal-Mart. Or the continuing occupation of the black ghettos by hostile police forces prone to shoot first and ask questions later, as recent headlines have made apparent in places like Oakland, California . The outlines of that alleged “post-racial” society that was supposed to be ushered in by Obama are beginning to look very thin on the ground.

On another front we can all have a good laugh over the arrogance of the muffed Cabinet choices, grind our teeth at Obama’s emphasis of the forces that are to benefit form his stimulus package and rage at the misplaced mechanics of the financial bail-out plans that continue to reward those finance capitalists who got us into this fix in the first place. All of the above have given me a very different ‘feeling’ from that of last fall that Obama and his cohorts are in way over their heads. Only in comparison with the out-going Bush regime do they look good. That, my friends, is a very low bar to cross. All of this makes me think that we may not have the luxury of that “After Obama, Us” slogan. We had best get to that task of building a workers party that fights for a workers government. Pronto.

Channeling Bobby Kennedy 2019 -From The Archives -On Bobby Kennedy- A Personal View From The Left On The Anniversary Of His Assassination

On Bobby Kennedy- A Personal  View From The Left On The  Anniversary Of His Assassination

Commentary

Every political movement has its ‘high holy days’, its icons and its days of remembrance. We on the international labor left have our labor day-May Day. We pay tribute each January to the work of Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. Some of us remember the assassination by Stalin of the revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Others celebrate November 7th the anniversary of the Russian revolution in 1917. The Democratic Party in the United States is no exception to those symbols of group solidarity. They have their Jefferson- Jackson dinners, their nomination conventions and their remembrances of their modern political heroes like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and so forth.

It is somewhat ironic that at just the time that when presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a recent addition to the Democratic Party pantheon of heroes and heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, is claiming the nomination of the party that the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968 is being remembered in some quarters. That event holds much meaning in the political evolution of this writer. The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was the last time that this writer had a serious desire to fight solely on the parliamentary road for political change. So today he too has some remembrances, as well.

In the course of this year I have read (or rather re-read) and reviewed elsewhere the 1960, 1968 and 1972 presidential campaign writings of Norman Mailer and those of 1972 by Hunter Thompson. I have, additionally, written reminiscences of my own personal political evolution that point to 1968 as a watershed year personally and politically for those of us of the Generation of ’68. Just a quick thumbnail sketch of my own political trajectory that year will give the reader a flavor of the times.

I committed myself early (sometime in late 1967) to the reelection of Lyndon Johnson, as much as I hated his Vietnam War policy. Why? One Richard M. Nixon. I did not give Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent campaign even a sniff, although I agreed with his anti-war stance. Why? He could not beat one Richard M. Nixon. When Booby jumped into the race and days later Johnson announced that he was not going to run again in I was there the next day. I was a senior in college at the time but I believe I spent hundreds of hours that spring working the campaign either out of Boston, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Why? Well, you can guess the obvious by now. He COULD beat one Richard M. Nixon.

It was more than that though, and I will mention more on that below. I took, as many did, his murder hard. It is rather facile now to say that something of my youth, and that of others who I have talked to recently about this event, got left behind with his murder but there you have it. However, to show you the kind of political year that it was for me about a week after his death I was in the Hubert Humphrey campaign office in Boston. Why? You know why by now. And for those who don’t it had one name- Richard M. Nixon.

But let us get back to that other, more virtuous, political motive for supporting Bobby Kennedy. It was always, in those days, complicated coming from Massachusetts to separate out the whirlwind effect that the Kennedy family had on us, especially on ‘shanty’ Irish families. On the one hand we wished one of our own well, especially against the WASPs, on the other there was always that innate bitterness (jealousy, if you will) that it was not we who were the ones that were getting ahead. If there is any Irish in your family you know what I am talking about.

To be sure, as a fourteen year old I walked the neighborhood for John Kennedy in 1960 but as I have mentioned elsewhere that was a pro forma thing. Part of the ritual of entry into presidential politics. The Bobby thing was from the heart. Why? It is hard to explain but there was something about the deeply felt sense of Irish fatalism that he projected, especially after the death of his brother, that attracted me to him. But also the ruthless side where he was willing to cut Mayor Daly and every politician like him down or pat them on the back and more, if necessary, to get a little rough justice in the world. In those days I held those qualities, especially in tandem, in high esteem. Hell, I still do, if on a narrower basis.

This next comment will I hope put the whole thing in a nutshell. Recently I was listening to a program commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Robert Kennedy’s assassination on National Public Radio where one of the guests was the journalist and close Kennedy friend Pete Hamill. Hamill, who was in the Los Angeles hotel celebrating the decisive California primary victory when the assassination took place, mentioned that a number of people closely associated with Kennedy at that time saw history passing through their hands in a flash. By that they meant, sincerely I am sure, that the last best change to beat Nixon and hold off the "Night of the Long Knives" had passed.

Well, if nothing else they were right in one sense and here is where one including this writer, as politically distance from Kennedy’s party as I am today, could appreciate the political wisdom of Robert Kennedy. In his incisive way Kennedy cut to the chase and through all the political baloney when he said that Richard Nixon represented the dark side of the American spirit. True words, I would only add these words-the dark spirit that the world has rightly come to fear and loathe. Forty years later and one hundred years politically wiser I can still say though - Bobby Kennedy, oh what might have been.

The Fire This Time-The Cold Civil War Cometh-Who Will Go Down In The Mud (And Win) Against The Trump Machine-Channeling Bobby Kennedy, 1968-The Times Call For A Street Fighter-Bernie Sanders’ Time Has Come        

By Frank Jackman

Last year well before the presidential candidates as least publicly started putting their eggs in their respective baskets I made a big deal, a big splash out of commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, our beloved Bobby who I have shed more than one cyber-tear over just saying his name (and some misty moments off computer). Like many past events in this publication that death required some commentary as a watershed moment not just for me personally but as a point where things could have gone the other way in a perhaps dramatic fashion. So beyond a tear for my (and Bobby’s) youthful idealism gone awry it was also a “what might have been” moment. History in the conditional is always problematic but there you have it.  

A great part of why I, a senior in college who had basically completed his course work, worked like seven dervishes as a youth organizer all along the Eastern part of the country for Bobby was that I feared for the fate of the country if one Richard Milhous Nixon had been elected POTUS (Twitter speak). That prospect in the wake of the disastrous Goldwater campaign in 1964 against Lyndon Baines Johnson which had opened the floodgates to get the Republican back somewhere off the edge of the cliff made Nixon and his henchmen the “chosen” choice early on. As it turned out my “prophecy” turned out to be correct as Nixon’s presidency brought us to the brink of the breakdown of republican rule (small “r” let’s be clear).         

Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the subsequent Nixon victory over Humbert H. Humphrey also had personal consequences since I had projected, not without reason, that if Bobby had gone on to be nominated by the Democrats (which seemed more certain after the fateful California primary victory over tough opponent Senator Eugene McCarthy, the Irish poet-politician) and finished off Nixon’s so crooked he needed a corkscrew for his valet to fit him into his pants every morning I would be in line for a political job most likely in Washington which would have gone a long way toward my childhood dream of being a political make and shaker in the traditional sense. Without a doubt part of that whirling dervish Spring of 1968 was the threat of the draft hanging over my head without some kind of political pull. (I have come to realize through many, many conversations with the male segment of my “Generation of ‘68” that every guy had that Vietnam War decision with no good choices hanging over his head one way or another).

The lasting memory though was of fear for the fate of the country for a man who truly believed in a modern-day version of the “divine right of kings,” that he was above the law. You can see where this is leading. As I have written and others like my old friend Seth Garth from my growing up Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville I was drafted, was trained as an 11 Bravo, an infantryman, at a time when the only place that skill was needed just then was in Vietnam. After much anguish and confusion, I would refuse the orders to go and wound up in an Army stockade and a long legal battle to get my freedom. The long and short of that experience was that my personal political perspective changed from concern over becoming a maker and shaker to being concerned more about issues like war and peace, social justice and being a thorn in the side of whatever government was in power. From the outside. I have kept that perspective for the past fifty years being involved in many issue campaigns, some successful others like the struggle against the endless wars and bloated military budgets not so.       

Back to Bobby Kennedy. Everybody knows what trouble, serious trouble, what I have called in the title to this piece and elsewhere for the past few years “the cold civil war” we are in now (this predated the Trump presidency which has only put the push toward hot civil war on steroids). Now when another POTUS, Donald J. Trump, really believes in the modern-day version of the “divine right of kings” and has upped the ante some old-time feelings have reemerged. In other words, conditions (although I would not have called it cold civil war then) looked very much like what drove me to “seek a newer world” Bobby Kennedy’s camp.

Naturally, or maybe not so naturally, but out of necessity that means at this time “stooping” (and I used that expression in a jovial way) to get involved in presidential politics, to get “down in the mud,” to join what will be come 2020 an old-fashioned take no prisoners “street fight.” To be part of what was called in the early stages of Senator McCarthy’s seemingly quixotic challenge to a sitting president a “children’s crusade.” To support someone who can speak to the better angels of our natures and WIN. That candidate for many reasons, but mainly because he has been down in the mud many times and can keep pace with the treacherous stuff that will come out of the Trump campaign is Bernie Sanders.       

Bernie is no Bobby from looks to style. Also as far as I know he never had nor now has that ruthlessness Bobby had combined with that that “seek a newer world” drive which I have always loved in a politician (and with Jack and Bobby Irish politicians, those who wrote the book on ruthlessness and vision). But Bernie has the kids eating out of his hand and that is exactly what we need right now. So for better or worse I am with Bernie, willing to work like seven dervishes to get him over the finish line. Channeling Bobby Kennedy every misty-eyed moment.        

*From The Archives- Why I Will Not Be A United States Presidential Candidate In 2012...Or 2016

Click on title to link to Spartacist No. 61 Spring 2009,a publication of the International Communist League, for a very full discussion about the question of running for executive offices in the capitalist state, "Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics", that forms the backdrop to my commentary.

Media Flash: A. F. Markin, long time anti-capitalist, pro-socialist militant and creator of the blog “American Left History”, has announced today that under no conditions will he be a candidate for President of the United States in 2012. Paraphrasing the great 19th century Northern Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman, Markin stated that 'if drafted he will not run and if elected he would not serve' in that post. He, however, did not rule out the possibility of running for some legislative office like the United States Senate or House of Representatives.

Commentary

I know that the long suffering readers of this blog have been waiting breathlessly for me to announce my intentions for the presidential campaign of 2012. Wait a minute! What kind of madness is this on my part to impose on readers who I am sure are still recovering from the shell-shock of that seemingly endless and mendacious 2008 presidential campaign. Well… Okay, as usual I want to, for good or ill, make a little point about running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state now that I have gotten ‘religion’ about the necessary of radicals and revolutionaries NOT to do so. I think this point can really be driven home today now that we have a ‘progressive’ Democratic president, one Barack Obama, as a foil.

I have detailed the controversy and checkered history in the international workers movement, and especially in the Communist International in its heroic days in the early 1920's, surrounding the question of whether radicals and revolutionaries, on principle, should run for these executive offices of the bourgeois state. I need not repeat that argument here. (See June 2008 Archives, "If Drafted I Will Not Run, If Elected I Will Not Serve-Revolutionaries and Running For Executive Offices", dated June 15, 2008). I have also noted there the trajectory of my own conversion to the position of opposition to such runs. Previously I had seen such electoral efforts as good propaganda tools and/or basically harmless attempts to intersect political reality at times when the electorate is tuned in. Always under the assumption made clear during the campaign that, of course, if elected one would not assume the office.

In any case, I admit to a previously rather cavalier attitude toward the whole question, even as I began to see the wisdom of opposition. But having gone through the recent presidential campaign and, more importantly, the inauguration and installation of a ‘progressive’ black man to the highest office attainable under the imperium I have begun to wipe that smirk off my face.

Why? I have hardly been unaware throughout my leftist political career that Social Democratic and Communist (Stalinist/Maoist varieties especially) Party politicians have, individually or in popular front alliances with capitalist parties, wreaked havoc on working people while administrating the bourgeois state. I have, in particular, spent a good part of my political career fighting against the notion of popular front strategies as they have been forged in the past, disastrously in places like Spain during the Civil War in the 1930’s or less disastrously in France in the 1980’s. However, this question of the realities of running the imperial state in America really hit home with the coming into office of Barack Obama.

Certainly, Obama did not have, and in the course of such things could not have any qualms about administering the bourgeois state, even if such toilsome work contradicted his most basic principles. Assuming, for the sake of argument here, that Obama is not the worst bourgeois politician, progressive or not, that has come down the pike. Already, in a few short weeks in office, he has escalated the troop levels in Afghanistan. He is most earnestly committed to bailing out the financial heart of the imperial system, at the long term expense of working people. Where is the room for that vaunted ‘progressive’ designation in all of this? Oh yes he has is against torture and illegal torture centers. That, dear readers might have passed for progressive action- in the 17th century. Jesus, is there no end to this madness in taking grandstanding kudos for stuff that Voltaire would have dismissed out of hand. So the next time someone asks you to run for President of the United States (or governor of a state or mayor of a city)take the Markin pledge - Just say NO!

*Sex And The American Presidential Election Campaign-The View From The Extra-parliamentary Left

Click on title to link the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's 1923 article by Leon Trotsky entitled "From The Old Family To The New" for a communist perspective on the need to transform the constrained modern nuclear family to something much more convivial and social.


COMMENTARY

OBAMA AND MITT DUKE IT OVER SEX EDUCATION

For those who expected some lurid copy about the behind the scenes sex lives of the above-mentioned candidates, forget it. This is much more prosaic. It is hard to believe but in the year 2007 this writer is compelled to make a few comments on the latest 'tempest in a teapot' on the campaign trail over the question of the appropriate age at which public institutions should make children aware of sexual issues. Mitt Romney, staking himself out as the king of ‘family value' issues in order to cozy up to the social conservatives, believes that sex and kindergarten students do not mix. Obama, rightly in this case, believes that age appropriate sex education can be started at that age.

Mainly this is a question of public policy guidelines and, as is the case with most current state-mandated sex education programs aimed at the youth, there are opt out procedures for those adults unconformable with public institutions teaching their children about sex. That, however, is not the real political or cultural question. For those of us who learned about sex the hard way on the streets or have been stuffed with erroneous knowledge about sex or have had to face the sometimes bizarre nature of sexual mores under capitalism without much guidance early sex education would seem to be the beginning of wisdom. Ignorance never did anyone any good. This simply program, moreover, is not something that has to wait until we are in a socialist society. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky reputely once spoke of the three great tragedies of life-hunger, sex and death. He noted that Marxists had staked out the struggle against hunger as the axis on which to fight. But he also noted that these other issues would be addressed most fully under socialism. And they will. But for now- the more real sex education the better.