And You Don’t Believe We Are On The Eve Of Destruction-With “The Bomb” In
Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Sometimes it takes a “nut case” or something that reads like a far-out
off-the-wall statement like the one up above under the headline to provoke some
real thought about the nightmares that haunted our youthful dreams but which
since the demise of the Soviet Union and the serious lessening of the nuclear
threat of war have fallen into the background. (Of course the Doctor
Strangeloves of the planet have kept themselves in high dudgeon seeing and seeking
imminent nuclear war behind every action of every untoward event by some “enemy”
that occurs. And of course this optical illusion of power is spoon-fed by the
very real danger that the number one nuclear threat to the peoples of the war,
the United States, poses.) So one can discount the doomsday message presented
above as just another false alarm raised to spur the beguiled troops who follow
the messenger on. Especially once one sees the name Lyndon LaRouche who must be
truly ancient by now and perhaps not even alive but who name only need be merely
evoked to spur his supporters on. That man has been associated with more whacky
doomsday political operations, left and right, than one could shake a stick at.
A true menace when he was a man of the left and who knows what once he flipped
out on whatever medication he was presumably taking at the time and became a
right-wing fool.
But one should not combine the LaRouche screwball politics and doomsday
predictions with the very real threat of nuclear war posed by the increasingly
bellicose actions of the American government as we have just recently been
painfully reminded by in the 70th anniversary commemorations of the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And that is exactly the way that Frankie Riley thought about the question after
perusing the leaflet that had been passed on to him by a guy standing in
Harvard Square one recent Saturday afternoon. The gist of the leaflet made him
think about the days back in the early 1960s and about how his old time corner
boy friend, the late Pete Markin, used to harangue the crowd in front of Jack
Slack’s bowling alleys sophomore year in high school when he was all hot to
trot to save the world from the nuclear threat. Markin, also dubbed “The
Scribe” by Frankie after he spent what appeared to be half his youth paying
homage to Frankie’s corner boy leadership at Jack Slack’s and the other half
giving out his own doomsday warnings about the perils of nuclear war, was a
funny dude that way.
Get this example to show his serious contradictions (and give a flavor for
why when things went sour in his life he came to a bad end). One week you could
see Markin passing out “missile gap” Jack Kennedy literature in front of the little
shack that was Kennedy headquarters on Main Street in North Adamsville in order
to help insure his election in 1960. Of course that “missile gap” point made by
Kennedy was that in the very real Cold War dark night the Soviets had somehow
nefariously gotten a jump on the old USA in the number of nuclear-armed
missiles which could blow the world up a million times over. The implication
being that doddering Grandfather Ike and his hatchet man Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent,
had left the door open. But see the next week, and Frankie had to hold back a
laugh and a tear on this one you could find Markin walking with a bunch of
little old ladies in tennis shoes for a world without nuclear weapons.
Frankie had had to laugh when he thought about that “little old ladies in
tennis sneakers” Markin was always yakking about when he was in high pacifist
mode. Those little old ladies (and guys too but Markin didn’t mention their footwear)
were the do-gooders of the world, you know, the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Universalist
(before those two organizations patched up whatever doctrinal differences they had
and merged a while back), the wooly-headed college professors with their corduroy
jackets with elbow-saving patches and stinking pipes jutting out of their mouths
who thought spending a Saturday afternoon spreading the good word of peace to a
pagan red-scare crowd would turn the swords into plowshares. At least that was
Frankie’s take on the matter. Yeah, Markin was something back in the day when he
got on his high horse.
All of a sudden Frankie said, “damn it” when he realized that Markin had
costed him five dollars over his foolishness with the do-gooders. Back in
October 1960 just before the elections, scheduled maybe to embarrass blessed Jack
Kennedy, blessed one of our own sweet boy Irish brethren even if he was “chandelier”
Irish as Frankie liked to think about the matter, Doctor Spock who every other
mother in the post-World War II era sought for advise on child-rearing except maybe
his and Markin’s and a bunch of other do-gooders and commies in an organization
called SANE had called for nation-wide rallies to stop the nuclear proliferation
of the times-by both sides. Markin had found out about the demonstration scheduled
for Boston on a Saturday afternoon at Park Street Station on the Boston Common,
the historic site for various protests in the downtown area, from a copy of The Catholic Worker that his sainted
Irish grandmother subscribed to and had around the house.
Markin was on fire to go attend the event but expressed fears to Frankie and
the other corner boys that he would be arrested by the cops as a disorderly
person, be beaten up by anti-communist thugs, or would be laughed at by the
little old ladies for being a wet-behind-the-ears kid of fourteen in an adult
world. Frankie who loved to bait Markin (and the others) about their manhood
told Markin that he would bet him five dollars that he would not go to that
rally downtown, especially since North Adamsville was playing a big football game
against Carver High that day and all the corner boys were expected to be there
to root on the home team. Now when one guy proposed a bet the usual course was
to take the bet, or be considered chicken. Markin said “bet” but Frankie knew
he was in a quandary about it. Frankie figured when the deal went down Markin
would cry uncle and that five bucks would be like finding money on the ground.
Well as you know since Frankie fifty some years later said “damn it” that
he lost the bet but it was a close thing. This is the way Markin told the story
after the event as he met up with Frankie to collect his filthy lucre. First
Markin was fearful that he would be waylaid when he went through Old Harbor, a
rough section of another town which you had to pass through to get to the Yellow
Line of the subway that would take you to the Park Street Station. Markin had
been menaced there before but that day the gods were with him and he got
downtown alright. Once he got there he saw about twenty or so people, mostly those
little old ladies in tennis sneakers that he would later call them, walking in
a circle carrying signs like “Ban The Bomb,” “Stop The Madness,” and “Nuclear Disarmament
Now” and being menaced by a bunch of pug-uglies who looked like they might be
from Southie a place where they hated anybody who protested anything anytime that
threatened their views of king-pin America. He almost decided to turn around and
go home but something about the way those people were holding their ground, were
handling themselves with some dignity while the coppers turned a blind eye made him turn
back to the small demonstration and begin to walk in the circle. Somebody
passed him a “Ban The Bomb” sign and he accepted it. As the afternoon wore on Markin
began to feel better because the participants now grown to about fifty in
number had begun to treat him, by far the youngest marcher, as their “mascot,”
as a sign that the future was not altogether hopeless. Yeah, a good day for Markin
and five dollars richer in this wicked old world.
Frankie had to laugh again although at the time he was really pissed off about
it but Markin took that five dollars and sent it to the Catholic Worker as a donation to be used for nuclear disarmament. Yeah,
Frankie thought with a sigh over his lost brother, pure Markin.
