Markin comment:
I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.
**************
PRI Regains Mexican Presidency
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified)
04 Jul 2012
Mexico
PRI Regains Mexican Presidency
by Stephen Lendman
Like its northern neighbor, wealth and power dominate Mexican politics. Elections are notoriously tainted. Populist candidates are excluded. The late John Ross said Mexico perfected the art of electoral theft.
Longstanding problems fester. For millions, they're unbearable. They include extreme poverty, unemployment, underemployment, deep-seated private and public corruption, drug-related crime and violence, and political repression.
Beyond lip service, none of the candidates addressed them. Conditions are worse now than years earlier.
Sunday's election changed nothing. Privately, Nieto assured Washington that business as usual will continue.
On July 2, AP headlined "Mexican elections: PRI, former ruling party, voted back into office," saying:
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Pena Nieto "promis(ed) a government that will be modern, responsible and open to criticism."
A New York Times editorial headlined "Mexico Elects a New President," saying:
"Many voters clearly felt the need for change....Nieto has a chance to restore his party's reputation and do a lot of good for Mexico if he can deliver on his promises to make belated reforms, increase accountability and end the bloodshed."
The Times gave Nieto op-ed space. He headlined "Mexico's Next Chapter," saying:
His campaign "was about....improv(ing) economic conditions for millions of struggling Mexicans" and ending political polarization and paralysis.
He's committed to democracy, he said. Change no longer can be postponed, he claimed.
Mexicans know better. PRI's history reflects a shameful legacy of subordinating populist interests to predatory capitalism, the military, and bourgeoisie privilege.
Established in 1929, it emerged from the 1910 - 1917 Mexican Revolution. During the Great Depression, class harmony and nationalist slogans co-opted workers and campesinos. Class struggles were controlled.
Revolutionary change never came. Post-war strikes were brutally repressed. In the 1980s, greater integration into global markets occurred. A new billionaire class emerged.
Crisis conditions affected ordinary Mexicans. They still do. Farmers and small businesses went bankrupt. NAFTA drove millions north. Drug trafficking spawned violence. Thousands have been killed in recent years.
Elections don't change things. Washington and Mexico partner in criminality, repression, and militarized control.
James Petras calls "narco-finance....the most advanced stage of neo-liberalism. When the respectable become criminal, the criminals become respectable," he explains.
Like America, money power and imperial interests run Mexico. Ordinary people are entirely left out. Each electoral cycle, everything changes but stay the same. Nieto's election assures more of the same.
PRI leaders ran Mexico from 1929 - 2000. National Action Party (PAN) candidate Vincente Fox ended its 70 year rule in 2000. Both parties represent common interests. It hardly matters which one rules.
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ran a populist 2006 campaign. Thereafter, he shifted markedly right. Earlier he promised expanded social benefits. No longer. Mexico's power elite knows he safe.
Mexican-style democracy reflects America's. Wealth and power run both countries. Promised change won't come. Nieto's agenda reflects it. Neoliberalism's death grip assures punishing hard times for ordinary people at a time of protracted economic Depression.
Popular support for Nieto was unimpressive. With most returns counted, Reuters said his margin was 37.6% over PRD's Obrador 32.2% and PAN candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota's 25.4%.
New Alliance Party's (PANAL) Gabriel Quadri got 2.3%. Another 2.4% of ballots were declared invalid. Turnout was about 62%.
From 2005 - 2011, Nieto served as State of Mexico governor. Critics call him a product created by Mexico's TV giants. He's a proxy for the country's biggest businesses and ruling elites.
"He's been imposed on us by powerful interests like the (corporate owned) TV stations and old presidents," said biochemist Javier Aguilar. "How can it be that a country this miserable is home to the world's richest man."
He referred to business tycoon Carlos Slim. Other billionaires, major banks, and corporate giants run Mexico. They replicate business interests in America and other Western countries.
Other critics called PRI's return to power a major setback. University students staged opposition marches in the final weeks of Nieto's campaign. They expressed no faith in his promises.
He's also dogged by accusations that he overspent his $330 million campaign funding limit and got favorable Mexican corporate media coverage.
A London Guardian expose headlined "Spotlight falls on Televisa, Mexico's all-powerful TV station," saying:
Historian Andrew Paxman called Televisa "like Murdoch on steroids in the sense (it) has operated under far fewer constraints...."
"The company's alleged use - abuse, say critics - of programming for political and commercial ends has become an explosive issue in Sunday's election."
"....Nieto, has been thrown on the defensive over evidence uncovered by the Guardian detailing his links to Televisa, whose channels account for about two thirds of free-to-air television. Its rival, Azteca, accounts for most of the other third."
Concentrated television ownership threatens democracy, said former under-secretary of communications Purificacion Carpinteyro. "It gives them enormous power to extort....because nobody wants to be insulted or rubbed out or (negatively) exhibited on TV."
WikiLeaks cables helped expose the corrupt Televisa/Nieto relationship. One explained how the network gave him "extraordinary amounts of airtime and other kinds of (favorable) coverage."
Televisa maintained close ties to PRI for decades. Like US television giants, it supports wealth and power interests.
Voters also elected 300 Mexican lower house Chamber of Deputies members and 168 senators. Governors were chosen in six states, and Mexico City got a new mayor. PRI candidates appear to have won control of the nation's Congress.
PRD candidate Obrador questioned election results. He claimed pollsters manipulated pre-election surveys. His supporters also questioned electoral fairness.
Fraud is endemic in Mexican politics. In 2006, vote totals were falsified for current President Felipe Calderon. Millions of ballots weren't counted. Around 900,000 were declared void, blank, annulled and discarded.
Obrador won. Calderon's brother-in-law, Diego Hildebrando Zavala, designed the vote-counting software.
Mexico City mayor-elect Marcelo Ebrard said, "There is now so much evidence of fraud that the court will have to act." Nothing followed. Calderon took office.
He acknowledged Nieto's victory. He and Obama congratulated him. A White House Office of the Press Secretary release said:
"Today the President called Enrique Peña Nieto, President-elect of Mexico, to congratulate him on his victory based on the initial results issued by Mexico’s electoral authorities."
"The two leaders reaffirmed the close bilateral partnership the United States and Mexico enjoy based on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and the deep connections between our people."
"The President reiterated his commitment to working in partnership with Mexico, and looks forward to advancing common goals, including promoting democracy, economic prosperity, and security in the region and around the globe, in the coming years."
"The President also congratulated the Mexican people who have once again demonstrated their commitment to democratic values through a free, fair, and transparent election process."
Obama acknowledged that Mexico is safe in his hands. Money power keeps control. The worst of what harms ordinary Mexicans will continue. Dire economic conditions assures hard times getting harder.
Mexico's history reflects revolutionary outbursts every 100 years or so. In 1810 and 1910 they erupted. Perhaps another is due any time.
In 1910, Francisco Madero triggered what Emiliano Zapata Salazar led. His supporters were called Zapatistas.
Mexicans wondered if Subcommandante Marcos was his modern incarnation. Their hopes remain unfulfilled. Indigenous struggles continue. Beneficial social change is long overdue.
The only solution is world revolution. The best way to beat organized money is with organized people. Famed Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky (1909 - 1972) explained.
Change depends on taking to the streets, striking, boycotting, challenging authority, disrupting business, and sustaining grassroots efforts for change.
There is no other way. Throwing the bums out for more of the same fails every time.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- James M. Cain’s “Mildred Pierce”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.
DVD Review
Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Jack Caron, Zachary, Scott, based on the novel by James M. Cain, Warner Brothers, 1945
Apparently the urge to overindulge one’s children is not solely a recurring phenomenon of the “baby-boomer” generations. And just as apparently the object of those 1940s indulgences were, as in the film under review Mildred Pierce, just as ungrateful as the children of today’s baby-boomers. At least in fiction just in case one of those current objects stumbles on to this review.
Now the name of high- end steamy pot-boiler novelist James M. Cain is well-known to this writer. His classic Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice (and their film adaptations) have been fulsomely reviewed in this space. But here is the twist in Mildred Pierce. While saucy housewife waiting to break out from stifling suburban existence (1940s California suburban, there is a difference), that self-same Mildred Pierce (played by Joan Crawford) of the title, has her own qualifications for femme fatale-dom in a demure way the real femme here is strictly junior varsity, her daughter, Veda (played kittenishly by Ann Blyth). So it was a little disconcerting, after having seen the likes of Miss Cora (played by Lana Turner) in Postman and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity twist their men around so badly that they could not see straight and came back for more, and gladly, to see this junior varsity edition at work. But not for long.
I better lay out the drift of story and you will see what I mean. California suburban housewife and devoted mother Mildred, up from poverty, or close to it, wanted to give her two daughters (although only Veda counts) what she didn’t have. Fair enough. But apparently something got messed up in the Pierce gene pool or in any social or moral sensibilities as they passed to Veda. Veda, no matter what, wanted more and everything. Well Papa Pierce fell on hard times (and was doing a little two-timing as well) and the Pierces decided to divorce. Mildred decided, very unconventionally for the times, to open a restaurant to keep the wolves from the door (and keep Veda in things, many things, ungratefully accepted). Part of that process was to get backing, and a few breaks. The backing comes from Wally (a money mad real estate deal maker) and the breaks from Monte, scion to a descending family fortune but still capable of putting on the high society faux charm for Mildred (and Veda).
The whole mix, the whole class mix, was wrong though, and because this is a crime film noir something bad had to happen. And the callous and very class-conscious Monte was the fall guy, a very dead fall guy with about six slugs in him. As the film unwinds backwards to find out who did the dastardly deed about five different candidates emerge, including Mildred, ready to fall on their swords to protect someone. That someone of course being Veda who when Monte threw her over got, uh, a little high strung and wasted the poor guy. As always though in crime noir truth and justice will win out and Veda had to take her fall and will have many a lonely night to think over her errors in some dank California women’s prison far from the bright lights of Los Angeles night clubs. Hey, nobody said every femme fatale, junior edition, was going made it to the “bigs.”
P.S. I don’t know about you but after watching some of these Cain film adaptations and a few other crime noir gems like Jane Greer in Out Of The Past and Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai somebody should take these femmes aside and give them a little instruction in shooting with guns. They all seem, and maybe it is because they are a little nervous or agitated, to feel the need to pump about six slugs in every guy that has wronged them. Terrible waste of ammo, terrible, although like I said maybe they were just the slightest bit angry at the time.
DVD Review
Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Jack Caron, Zachary, Scott, based on the novel by James M. Cain, Warner Brothers, 1945
Apparently the urge to overindulge one’s children is not solely a recurring phenomenon of the “baby-boomer” generations. And just as apparently the object of those 1940s indulgences were, as in the film under review Mildred Pierce, just as ungrateful as the children of today’s baby-boomers. At least in fiction just in case one of those current objects stumbles on to this review.
Now the name of high- end steamy pot-boiler novelist James M. Cain is well-known to this writer. His classic Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice (and their film adaptations) have been fulsomely reviewed in this space. But here is the twist in Mildred Pierce. While saucy housewife waiting to break out from stifling suburban existence (1940s California suburban, there is a difference), that self-same Mildred Pierce (played by Joan Crawford) of the title, has her own qualifications for femme fatale-dom in a demure way the real femme here is strictly junior varsity, her daughter, Veda (played kittenishly by Ann Blyth). So it was a little disconcerting, after having seen the likes of Miss Cora (played by Lana Turner) in Postman and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity twist their men around so badly that they could not see straight and came back for more, and gladly, to see this junior varsity edition at work. But not for long.
I better lay out the drift of story and you will see what I mean. California suburban housewife and devoted mother Mildred, up from poverty, or close to it, wanted to give her two daughters (although only Veda counts) what she didn’t have. Fair enough. But apparently something got messed up in the Pierce gene pool or in any social or moral sensibilities as they passed to Veda. Veda, no matter what, wanted more and everything. Well Papa Pierce fell on hard times (and was doing a little two-timing as well) and the Pierces decided to divorce. Mildred decided, very unconventionally for the times, to open a restaurant to keep the wolves from the door (and keep Veda in things, many things, ungratefully accepted). Part of that process was to get backing, and a few breaks. The backing comes from Wally (a money mad real estate deal maker) and the breaks from Monte, scion to a descending family fortune but still capable of putting on the high society faux charm for Mildred (and Veda).
The whole mix, the whole class mix, was wrong though, and because this is a crime film noir something bad had to happen. And the callous and very class-conscious Monte was the fall guy, a very dead fall guy with about six slugs in him. As the film unwinds backwards to find out who did the dastardly deed about five different candidates emerge, including Mildred, ready to fall on their swords to protect someone. That someone of course being Veda who when Monte threw her over got, uh, a little high strung and wasted the poor guy. As always though in crime noir truth and justice will win out and Veda had to take her fall and will have many a lonely night to think over her errors in some dank California women’s prison far from the bright lights of Los Angeles night clubs. Hey, nobody said every femme fatale, junior edition, was going made it to the “bigs.”
P.S. I don’t know about you but after watching some of these Cain film adaptations and a few other crime noir gems like Jane Greer in Out Of The Past and Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai somebody should take these femmes aside and give them a little instruction in shooting with guns. They all seem, and maybe it is because they are a little nervous or agitated, to feel the need to pump about six slugs in every guy that has wronged them. Terrible waste of ammo, terrible, although like I said maybe they were just the slightest bit angry at the time.
HONOR SAMUEL ADAMS AND JAMES OTIS-AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the American revolutionary Samuel Adams
COMMENTARY
ON THE 4TH OF JULY -HONOR SAMUEL ADAMS, JAMES OTIS, THOMAS PAINE, THE SONS OF LIBERTY AND THE WINTER SOLDIERS OF VALLEY FORGE.
REMEMBER THE LESSONS OF THIS EARLY STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION- YOU CANNOT WIN IF YOU DO NOT FIGHT.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
As we approach the 235th Anniversary of the American Revolution militants should honor the valiant fighters for freedom, many not prominently remembered today, such as Samuel Adams, James Otis and Tom Paine who kept the pressure on those other more moderate revolutionary politicians such as Washington and John Adams who at times were willing to compromise with the British Empire short of victory. We should also remember the valiant but mainly nameless Sons of Liberty who lit the spark of rebellion. And the later Winter Soldiers of Valley Forge who held out under extreme duress in order to insure eventual victory. Anyone can be a sunshine patriot; we desperately need militants in the tradition of the winter soldiers. No revolution can succeed without such fighters.
The 4th of July today is covered with so much banal ceremony, flag- waving, unthinking sunshine patriotism and hubris it is hard to see the forest for the trees to the days when, as Lincoln stated, during that other great progressive action of this country’s history- the Great Civil War of 1861-65- that this country was the last, best hope for civilization. Note this well- those men and women who rebelled against the king from Washington on down were big men and women out to do a big job. And they did it. A quick look at the political landscape today makes one thing clear. This country has no such men or women among its leaders today-not even close.
Rereading the Declaration of Independence today, a classic statement of Enlightenment values, and such documents as the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution demonstrates that these men and women were, hesitantly and in a fumbling manner to be sure, taking on some big issues in the scheme of human development. Today what do we see- half-hearted withdrawal programs to end the quagmire borne of hubris in Iraq, amendments against same sex marriage, amendments against flag-burning, the race to the bottom of the international wage scale bringing misery to working people, serious attempts to create a theocracy based on Christian fundamentalism, creation of a fortress against immigration in a nation of immigrants, among other things. In short, the negation of that spirit that Lincoln talked about. Today, the militants who fought the American Revolution would probably be in some Guantanamo-like cages. DEFEND THE ENLIGHTENMENT!
In earlier times this writer had been rather blasé about the American Revolution tending to either ignore its lessons or putting it well below another revolution- The Great French Revolution, also celebrated in July- in the pantheon of revolutionary history. However, this is flat-out wrong. We cannot let those more interested in holiday oratory than drawing the real lessons of the American Revolution appropriate what is the property of every militant today. Make no mistake, however, the energy of that long ago revolution has burned itself out and other forces-militants and their allies- and other political creeds-the fight for a workers party and a workers government leading to socialism- have to take its place as the standard-bearer for human progress. That task has been on the historical agenda for a long time and continues to be our task today. Yes, we love this country. No, we do not love this form of government. Forward.
Note- To learn more about the history of the American Revolution and the foundation of the Republic any books by Gordon S. Wood on the subject are a good place to start. Garry Wills in his book Inventing America also has some insights worth reading.
COMMENTARY
ON THE 4TH OF JULY -HONOR SAMUEL ADAMS, JAMES OTIS, THOMAS PAINE, THE SONS OF LIBERTY AND THE WINTER SOLDIERS OF VALLEY FORGE.
REMEMBER THE LESSONS OF THIS EARLY STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION- YOU CANNOT WIN IF YOU DO NOT FIGHT.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
As we approach the 235th Anniversary of the American Revolution militants should honor the valiant fighters for freedom, many not prominently remembered today, such as Samuel Adams, James Otis and Tom Paine who kept the pressure on those other more moderate revolutionary politicians such as Washington and John Adams who at times were willing to compromise with the British Empire short of victory. We should also remember the valiant but mainly nameless Sons of Liberty who lit the spark of rebellion. And the later Winter Soldiers of Valley Forge who held out under extreme duress in order to insure eventual victory. Anyone can be a sunshine patriot; we desperately need militants in the tradition of the winter soldiers. No revolution can succeed without such fighters.
The 4th of July today is covered with so much banal ceremony, flag- waving, unthinking sunshine patriotism and hubris it is hard to see the forest for the trees to the days when, as Lincoln stated, during that other great progressive action of this country’s history- the Great Civil War of 1861-65- that this country was the last, best hope for civilization. Note this well- those men and women who rebelled against the king from Washington on down were big men and women out to do a big job. And they did it. A quick look at the political landscape today makes one thing clear. This country has no such men or women among its leaders today-not even close.
Rereading the Declaration of Independence today, a classic statement of Enlightenment values, and such documents as the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution demonstrates that these men and women were, hesitantly and in a fumbling manner to be sure, taking on some big issues in the scheme of human development. Today what do we see- half-hearted withdrawal programs to end the quagmire borne of hubris in Iraq, amendments against same sex marriage, amendments against flag-burning, the race to the bottom of the international wage scale bringing misery to working people, serious attempts to create a theocracy based on Christian fundamentalism, creation of a fortress against immigration in a nation of immigrants, among other things. In short, the negation of that spirit that Lincoln talked about. Today, the militants who fought the American Revolution would probably be in some Guantanamo-like cages. DEFEND THE ENLIGHTENMENT!
In earlier times this writer had been rather blasé about the American Revolution tending to either ignore its lessons or putting it well below another revolution- The Great French Revolution, also celebrated in July- in the pantheon of revolutionary history. However, this is flat-out wrong. We cannot let those more interested in holiday oratory than drawing the real lessons of the American Revolution appropriate what is the property of every militant today. Make no mistake, however, the energy of that long ago revolution has burned itself out and other forces-militants and their allies- and other political creeds-the fight for a workers party and a workers government leading to socialism- have to take its place as the standard-bearer for human progress. That task has been on the historical agenda for a long time and continues to be our task today. Yes, we love this country. No, we do not love this form of government. Forward.
Note- To learn more about the history of the American Revolution and the foundation of the Republic any books by Gordon S. Wood on the subject are a good place to start. Garry Wills in his book Inventing America also has some insights worth reading.
Why Communists Do Not Celebrate July 4th- Another Guest Commentary
Click on the title to link to a Workers Vanguard, Number 942, September 11, 2009 article entitled Slavery and The Origins of American Capitalism, Part 1 which provided added details to the premise of this entry. For Parts Two and Three check today's other entry Why Communists Do Not Celebrate July 4- A Guest Commentary.
Guest Commentary:
"Why We Don't Celebrate July 4-Marxism and the "Spirit Of '76"- Workers Vanguard, Number 116, July 2, 1976
The burned-out tenements of America's decaying slums are plastered with red, white and blue posters celebrating a 200-year-old revolution. From factory bulletin boards and the walls of unemployment offices, patriotic displays urge American working people to join with Gerald Ford and the butchers of Vietnam in commemorating the "Spirit of '76." Class-conscious workers and militant blacks, like the colonial masses ground down under the economic and military heel of arrogant American imperialism, must recoil in revulsion from the U.S. bourgeoisie's hypocritical pieties about "liberty."
The Fourth of July is not our holiday. But the chauvinist ballyhoo of the "People's Bicentennial" does not negate the need for a serious Marxist appreciation of colonial America's war of independence against monarchical/ mercantilist England. Marxists have always stressed the powerful impact of the classic bourgeois-democratic revolutions in breaking feudal-aristocratic barriers to historical progress.
In appealing for support for the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin in his Letter to American Workers (1918) wrote:
"The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those really
great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been
so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present
imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or
capitalists over the division of usurped land or ill-gotten gains. That was the
war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed
America and held her in colonial slavery. "
It is also legitimate for revolutionaries to appeal to the most radical-democratic traditions of the great bourgeois revolutions. Yet the fact remains that the Fourth of July is a fundamentally chauvinist holiday, a celebration of national greatness. In no sense does it commemorate a popular uprising against an oppressive system, or even pay tribute to democratic principles and individual freedom. Attempts to lend the Fourth of July a populist coloration (or the Communist Party's popular-front period slogan that "Communism is 20th century Americanism") only express the capitulation of various fake-socialists to the democratic pretensions of American imperialism.
But neither can the traditions of 1776 justly be claimed by the imperialist bourgeoisie. Compared to the leadership of the colonial independence struggle, the present American capitalist class is absolutely degenerate. One has only to think of Franklin or Jefferson, among the intellectual giants of their time, and then consider Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter. The twentieth-century United States is the gendarme of world reaction, the backer of every torture-chamber regime from Santiago to Tehran.
The "founding fathers" would have been revolted by the men who today represent their class. The degeneration of the American bourgeoisie is appropriate to the passing of its progressive mission. The attitude toward religion is a good indicator. Virtually none of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were orthodox Christians; they held a rationalist attitude toward the concept of god. Jefferson would have walked out in protest at today's prayer-intoning presidential inaugurations.
The America of 1976 is the contemporary analogue of the tsarist Russia which the "founding fathers" held in contempt as the bastion of world reaction—the tsarist Russia against whose tyranny Lenin and the Bolsheviks organized the proletariat. It is to the world working class that the liberating mission now falls.
Was the War of Independence a Social Revolution?
Like the Fourth of July, Bastille Day in France is an official, patriotic holiday, replete with military marches and chauvinist speeches. Yet the events Bastille Day commemorates retain a certain revolutionary significance to this day. The French people's understanding of 1789 is as a violent overthrow by the masses of an oppressive ruling class. The French imperialist bourgeoisie's efforts to purge the French revolution of present-day revolutionary significance have not succeeded. A Charles De Gaulle or a Valery Giscard d'Estaing cannot embrace Robespierre or Marat, for the latter stand too close to the primitive communist Gracchus Babeuf, who considered himself a true Jacobin.
The American war of independence was also a classic bourgeois-democratic revolution, but it was not really a social revolution which overthrew the existing ruling class. The British loyalists were largely concentrated in the propertied classes and governing elite. However pro-independence forces among the planters and merchants were strong enough to prevent any significant class polarization during the war.
The English and French bourgeois-democratic revolutions had to destroy an entrenched aristocratic order. That destruction required a radical, plebeian terrorist phase associated with the figures of Cromwell and Robespierre. For the American colonies, winning independence from England did not require a regime based on plebeian terror. The war of independence did not produce a Cromwell or a Robespierre because it did not need one. Nor did it give rise to radical egalitarian groups like the Levellers and Diggers, or the Enrages and Babouvists. It never remotely threatened the wealthiest, most conservative planters and merchants who supported secession from Britain.
The consolidation of bourgeois rule in the Puritan and French revolutions required a political counterrevolution in which the Cromwellians and Jacobins were overthrown, persecuted and vilified. The radical opposition which sprung up in resistance to this counterrevolution became part—through the Babouvists in France—of the revolutionary tradition which Marx embraced.
Because the American war of independence did not experience a plebeian terrorist phase, neither did it experience a conservative bourgeois counterrevolution. The leaders of the independence struggle went on to found and govern the republic; greatly venerated, they died of old age.
The men who met in Philadelphia's Convention Hall 200 years ago realized their aims more satisfactorily than any other similarly placed, insurrectionary group in history. This achievement does not bespeak their greatness, but the limited, essentially conservative nature of their goals. The legitimization of black chattel slavery in the Constitution, without significant opposition, demonstrates the bourgeois conservatism of the leaders of the American Revolution. The "founding fathers" had no children who could claim that the principles of 1776 had been betrayed in the interests of the rich and powerful. The era of the war of independence did not give rise to a living revolutionary tradition.
John Brown's Body
There is a social revolution in American history which troubles the imperialist bourgeoisie to this day. It did not begin in 1776, but in the anti-slavery confrontations. The issue rose by the civil war and particularly the period of Radical Reconstruction—the intimate relationship between capitalism in America and racial oppression—awaits its fundamental resolution in future revolutionary struggle. The wasn't-it-tragic attitude of the bourgeoisie to the civil war era contrasts sharply with their celebratory attitude toward the war of independence. The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, unlike the Declaration of Independence, will never be a holiday in racist, imperialist America.
It is in the civil war era that there are parallels with the plebeian component of the French Revolution. The contemporary bourgeois treatment of John Brown resembles the French ruling class attitude toward Robespierre. They cannot disown the anti-slavery cause outright, but they condemn John Brown for his fanatical commitment and violent methods. The Reconstruction era of 1867-1877 is the only period in U.S. history which the present ruling class rejects an un-American extremism. Two important films, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the later Gone With the Wind, are outright apologies for white supremacist terror against the only radical-democratic governments this country has ever experienced. The Compromise of 1877, when the black freedmen were abandoned to the merciless regimes of the ex-slaveholders, was the American bourgeois-democratic revolution betrayed. And the reversal of that historic betrayal awaits the victory of American communism.
Because of the American revolution's limited social mobilization, those whose principles ultimately clashed with bourgeois rule—the likes of Tom Paine and Sam Adams—were easily disposed of. The radical abolitionists—John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass— are the only figures in American history before the emergence of the workers movement whose commitment to democratic principles actually threatened bourgeois rule. For the same reason that the present-day bourgeoisie denounces John Brown as a dangerous extremist, we communists can claim the radical abolitionists as ours. Only a victorious American socialist revolution can give to the heroes and martyrs of Harper's Ferry and the "underground railway" the honor that is their historic right.
Guest Commentary:
"Why We Don't Celebrate July 4-Marxism and the "Spirit Of '76"- Workers Vanguard, Number 116, July 2, 1976
The burned-out tenements of America's decaying slums are plastered with red, white and blue posters celebrating a 200-year-old revolution. From factory bulletin boards and the walls of unemployment offices, patriotic displays urge American working people to join with Gerald Ford and the butchers of Vietnam in commemorating the "Spirit of '76." Class-conscious workers and militant blacks, like the colonial masses ground down under the economic and military heel of arrogant American imperialism, must recoil in revulsion from the U.S. bourgeoisie's hypocritical pieties about "liberty."
The Fourth of July is not our holiday. But the chauvinist ballyhoo of the "People's Bicentennial" does not negate the need for a serious Marxist appreciation of colonial America's war of independence against monarchical/ mercantilist England. Marxists have always stressed the powerful impact of the classic bourgeois-democratic revolutions in breaking feudal-aristocratic barriers to historical progress.
In appealing for support for the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin in his Letter to American Workers (1918) wrote:
"The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those really
great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been
so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present
imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or
capitalists over the division of usurped land or ill-gotten gains. That was the
war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed
America and held her in colonial slavery. "
It is also legitimate for revolutionaries to appeal to the most radical-democratic traditions of the great bourgeois revolutions. Yet the fact remains that the Fourth of July is a fundamentally chauvinist holiday, a celebration of national greatness. In no sense does it commemorate a popular uprising against an oppressive system, or even pay tribute to democratic principles and individual freedom. Attempts to lend the Fourth of July a populist coloration (or the Communist Party's popular-front period slogan that "Communism is 20th century Americanism") only express the capitulation of various fake-socialists to the democratic pretensions of American imperialism.
But neither can the traditions of 1776 justly be claimed by the imperialist bourgeoisie. Compared to the leadership of the colonial independence struggle, the present American capitalist class is absolutely degenerate. One has only to think of Franklin or Jefferson, among the intellectual giants of their time, and then consider Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter. The twentieth-century United States is the gendarme of world reaction, the backer of every torture-chamber regime from Santiago to Tehran.
The "founding fathers" would have been revolted by the men who today represent their class. The degeneration of the American bourgeoisie is appropriate to the passing of its progressive mission. The attitude toward religion is a good indicator. Virtually none of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were orthodox Christians; they held a rationalist attitude toward the concept of god. Jefferson would have walked out in protest at today's prayer-intoning presidential inaugurations.
The America of 1976 is the contemporary analogue of the tsarist Russia which the "founding fathers" held in contempt as the bastion of world reaction—the tsarist Russia against whose tyranny Lenin and the Bolsheviks organized the proletariat. It is to the world working class that the liberating mission now falls.
Was the War of Independence a Social Revolution?
Like the Fourth of July, Bastille Day in France is an official, patriotic holiday, replete with military marches and chauvinist speeches. Yet the events Bastille Day commemorates retain a certain revolutionary significance to this day. The French people's understanding of 1789 is as a violent overthrow by the masses of an oppressive ruling class. The French imperialist bourgeoisie's efforts to purge the French revolution of present-day revolutionary significance have not succeeded. A Charles De Gaulle or a Valery Giscard d'Estaing cannot embrace Robespierre or Marat, for the latter stand too close to the primitive communist Gracchus Babeuf, who considered himself a true Jacobin.
The American war of independence was also a classic bourgeois-democratic revolution, but it was not really a social revolution which overthrew the existing ruling class. The British loyalists were largely concentrated in the propertied classes and governing elite. However pro-independence forces among the planters and merchants were strong enough to prevent any significant class polarization during the war.
The English and French bourgeois-democratic revolutions had to destroy an entrenched aristocratic order. That destruction required a radical, plebeian terrorist phase associated with the figures of Cromwell and Robespierre. For the American colonies, winning independence from England did not require a regime based on plebeian terror. The war of independence did not produce a Cromwell or a Robespierre because it did not need one. Nor did it give rise to radical egalitarian groups like the Levellers and Diggers, or the Enrages and Babouvists. It never remotely threatened the wealthiest, most conservative planters and merchants who supported secession from Britain.
The consolidation of bourgeois rule in the Puritan and French revolutions required a political counterrevolution in which the Cromwellians and Jacobins were overthrown, persecuted and vilified. The radical opposition which sprung up in resistance to this counterrevolution became part—through the Babouvists in France—of the revolutionary tradition which Marx embraced.
Because the American war of independence did not experience a plebeian terrorist phase, neither did it experience a conservative bourgeois counterrevolution. The leaders of the independence struggle went on to found and govern the republic; greatly venerated, they died of old age.
The men who met in Philadelphia's Convention Hall 200 years ago realized their aims more satisfactorily than any other similarly placed, insurrectionary group in history. This achievement does not bespeak their greatness, but the limited, essentially conservative nature of their goals. The legitimization of black chattel slavery in the Constitution, without significant opposition, demonstrates the bourgeois conservatism of the leaders of the American Revolution. The "founding fathers" had no children who could claim that the principles of 1776 had been betrayed in the interests of the rich and powerful. The era of the war of independence did not give rise to a living revolutionary tradition.
John Brown's Body
There is a social revolution in American history which troubles the imperialist bourgeoisie to this day. It did not begin in 1776, but in the anti-slavery confrontations. The issue rose by the civil war and particularly the period of Radical Reconstruction—the intimate relationship between capitalism in America and racial oppression—awaits its fundamental resolution in future revolutionary struggle. The wasn't-it-tragic attitude of the bourgeoisie to the civil war era contrasts sharply with their celebratory attitude toward the war of independence. The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, unlike the Declaration of Independence, will never be a holiday in racist, imperialist America.
It is in the civil war era that there are parallels with the plebeian component of the French Revolution. The contemporary bourgeois treatment of John Brown resembles the French ruling class attitude toward Robespierre. They cannot disown the anti-slavery cause outright, but they condemn John Brown for his fanatical commitment and violent methods. The Reconstruction era of 1867-1877 is the only period in U.S. history which the present ruling class rejects an un-American extremism. Two important films, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the later Gone With the Wind, are outright apologies for white supremacist terror against the only radical-democratic governments this country has ever experienced. The Compromise of 1877, when the black freedmen were abandoned to the merciless regimes of the ex-slaveholders, was the American bourgeois-democratic revolution betrayed. And the reversal of that historic betrayal awaits the victory of American communism.
Because of the American revolution's limited social mobilization, those whose principles ultimately clashed with bourgeois rule—the likes of Tom Paine and Sam Adams—were easily disposed of. The radical abolitionists—John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass— are the only figures in American history before the emergence of the workers movement whose commitment to democratic principles actually threatened bourgeois rule. For the same reason that the present-day bourgeoisie denounces John Brown as a dangerous extremist, we communists can claim the radical abolitionists as ours. Only a victorious American socialist revolution can give to the heroes and martyrs of Harper's Ferry and the "underground railway" the honor that is their historic right.
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Yes, I Would Rather Be The Devil To Be That Woman’s Man
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Skip James performing his classic Devil Got My Woman.
Devil Got My Woman
by Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James recording of 19 from probably Complete Early Recordings (Yazoo 2009) & Melodeon 7321, copyright notice
I'd rather be the devil, to be that woman man1
I'd rather be the devil, to be that woman man
Aw, nothin' but the devil, changed my baby's mind
Was nothin' but the devil, changed my baby's mind
I laid down last night, laid down last night
I laid down last night, tried to take my rest
My mind got to ramblin', like a wild geese
From the west, from the west
The woman I love, woman that I loved
Woman I loved, took her from my best friend
But he got lucky, stoled her back again
And he got lucky, stoled her back again
__________
Note: the song was inspired by his broken marriage;
Note 1: James usually completed this line with ""woman's man"
"... The devil was stronger than I was, an' he did have, and is got now, a certain amount of power... And he lives in hell, and that's where he haves his part. And God give him a certain amount of time to be on the earth, in the bowels, persuadin' people... He still has agencies out. Everywhere you've been. And then he's a man don't never sleep. he never get offa his job or duty, That is, you can lay down happy at night, you and your companion... and in harmony. Everything goin' well. Satan'll creep in the house overnight... next mornin' you cannot get a good word out of her. Why?. Because satan has got the bill of sale over her. He done crept in overnight...
**********
“Damn, I can’t get that Selena off my mind no matter how far west I go, I miss her, miss her bad ” thought Be-Bop Benny, real name: Peter Paul Markin and an amigo of mine of long standing back to sunnier summer of love, 1967 version, days when the world was strictly tomorrow ( we always laughed then, and called out in the middle of some drug-induced stupor, “manana mama,” when any decisions beyond the next meal, and sometimes not even that, came due). Yes, Be-Bop had it bad, as bad as a man can have it when the devil gets your woman. So bad he had to get out of town, get out quick, and get out with some fifteen hundred dollars in gringo dinero, that he owed the “boys” for some unfinished drug deal. Yes, that bad.
Of course Be-Bop’s (let’s keep it short like that, like the way we used to call him in those sunnier days) problems had nothing to do with some abstract devil, his own devilish character (well, maybe, just a little), but with one Spanish spitfire named Selena Rios. Let me fill you in a little on the details and see if you don’t agree.
No question this Selena was strictly mex, mestizo, beautiful, not that icy norte beautiful, proper English or Irish, the way I like them (although, truth, if she had passed her eye my way I would have had no second thoughts about giving her a tumble. She was that kind of woman.) with dark mestizo skin , dark hair, dark smoldering dancing eyes, ruby red lips and that sings-song voice that made you think of mists and fogs, if you have time to think, Or wanted to. But mainly it was that scent she gave off, of adventure, of silky sheets, of sweaty nights and cool showers after, frankly, of lust. And if that didn’t lure you in, lure Be-Bop in, then that slight fragrance, some cacti mix from a thousand husks wore just lightly enough to keep you within five feet of her at all times, and glad of it.
How they met? Oh, this one is a beaut, but it will tell you about the times, about summer of love 1960s times, and if I spill it here you won’t have to go ask your fidgety grandparents about it. They met in the middle of the Cambridge Common, when she fresh in town on some student exchange program between Harvard and Sonora University down in Mexico, when she, she remember, asked Be-Bop if he wanted to “split a joint with her.”
I already described, described her one hundred generations (or whatever number of generations have elapsed since the old Spanish conquests down there) scent. And that fragrance. And bug-eyed Be-Bop was a long gone daddy, long gone. Innocent enough though even for today’s prudish ears.
And Be-Bop swore it was that pure for a couple of weeks. Then two things happened. First the money ran out, what little there was of it between them. And they (or rather he) had big dreams of together and California and ocean washes to feed. So to solve the dough problem Selena gave Be-Bop all the details for making some dough by becoming small-time dope dealers through her connections with the righteous (her word, and he didn’t disagree, for the dope she shared was high grade Acapulco Gold, real good stuff compared to the normal Commons oregano mix) down in Sonora. So they went south instead of west and “muled” their first supply without too much difficulty. Coming back , at first, it was selling just to friends, a few joints here and there, just to keep them in coffee and cakes, but then to friends of friends, and their friends, and then to strangers. All this meant a couple more trips south, and a much expanded business. Hell, it was fun for a while, although working weights and packaging and all the rest was boring.
Be-bop said he could have seen it through though because the more dough they made the happier Selena seemed to be, and the better she was under those silky sheets she was addicted to sleeping on. But then, the other shoe dropped. Selena started going over to the Commons and asking other guys if they wanted to “share that dynamite joint” she had, and what went with it.
Now Be-Bop, despite his funny moniker, was no monogamous fool guy, and didn’t want to be, but this Selena thing got to him, got to him bad. Sometimes she would bring a guy right up to the apartment, smoke a joint, all Be-Bop could hear was the sound of silky sheets from the bedroom. Christ how much could a guy take. She called him bourgeois, and an old lady when he objected.
One night a few months later after a few taunts from Selena, and some stuff about going to old Mexico for another shipment by herself (they had always gone together previously) Be-Bop had had enough of this woman, or so he thought. About three in the morning he put some clothes in a ruck- sack, put a couple of sandwiches together, a little dope, and about fifteen hundred dollars in cash from the last drug sales. He hit the road west at the Massachusetts Turnpike entrance in Cambridge, and fled town.
Here is where I really enter the story. A couple of years later I was down in Mexico, down Sonora way for some conference, some journalism thing, and as I signed in at the front desk of the Hotel Sonora I heard a blood-curdling voice scream across the room telling me to tell Be-Bop that she, and her “connections,” had not forgotten about the missing dough. And that honor debt would never be forgotten, even if he wound up face down in some dried bed desert somewhere. No more sing-song voices for far-gone Be-Bop.
I actually had not seen Be-Bop for a couple of years at that point but the whole thing had me interested for his sake, and maybe for a story. In any case it turned out that the so-called Harvard –Sonora University connection was bogus (the school was some local church school for girls and not the kind of place Harvard would have had some educational relationship with), she had been in the United States illegally and had been using a bogus visa,
her brothers were her drug connections (and heard to have done some nasty things to competitors, and those who didn’t come up with their cut of the dough), and she was married to some local drug bigwig while she was silky sheeting it with Be-Bop. The only “truth” about her was that little habit of coming up to guys and asking the “joint” question. A few companeros in the Sonora area that she was seen with came up face down in some deserted culvert as proof of her obsession.
After a while I finally found out where Be-Bop was, or had been, and passed a message on. Mainly about staying very far west, and very far away from sunny Sonora down Mexico way. And stay very, very, very far away from one Selena Rios. And this is the message I got back- “Damn, I can’t get that Selena off my mind no matter how far west I go, maybe I should try to see her.” Well, what is a guy going to do when the devil has got his woman. Adios, amigo.
Devil Got My Woman
by Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James recording of 19 from probably Complete Early Recordings (Yazoo 2009) & Melodeon 7321, copyright notice
I'd rather be the devil, to be that woman man1
I'd rather be the devil, to be that woman man
Aw, nothin' but the devil, changed my baby's mind
Was nothin' but the devil, changed my baby's mind
I laid down last night, laid down last night
I laid down last night, tried to take my rest
My mind got to ramblin', like a wild geese
From the west, from the west
The woman I love, woman that I loved
Woman I loved, took her from my best friend
But he got lucky, stoled her back again
And he got lucky, stoled her back again
__________
Note: the song was inspired by his broken marriage;
Note 1: James usually completed this line with ""woman's man"
"... The devil was stronger than I was, an' he did have, and is got now, a certain amount of power... And he lives in hell, and that's where he haves his part. And God give him a certain amount of time to be on the earth, in the bowels, persuadin' people... He still has agencies out. Everywhere you've been. And then he's a man don't never sleep. he never get offa his job or duty, That is, you can lay down happy at night, you and your companion... and in harmony. Everything goin' well. Satan'll creep in the house overnight... next mornin' you cannot get a good word out of her. Why?. Because satan has got the bill of sale over her. He done crept in overnight...
**********
“Damn, I can’t get that Selena off my mind no matter how far west I go, I miss her, miss her bad ” thought Be-Bop Benny, real name: Peter Paul Markin and an amigo of mine of long standing back to sunnier summer of love, 1967 version, days when the world was strictly tomorrow ( we always laughed then, and called out in the middle of some drug-induced stupor, “manana mama,” when any decisions beyond the next meal, and sometimes not even that, came due). Yes, Be-Bop had it bad, as bad as a man can have it when the devil gets your woman. So bad he had to get out of town, get out quick, and get out with some fifteen hundred dollars in gringo dinero, that he owed the “boys” for some unfinished drug deal. Yes, that bad.
Of course Be-Bop’s (let’s keep it short like that, like the way we used to call him in those sunnier days) problems had nothing to do with some abstract devil, his own devilish character (well, maybe, just a little), but with one Spanish spitfire named Selena Rios. Let me fill you in a little on the details and see if you don’t agree.
No question this Selena was strictly mex, mestizo, beautiful, not that icy norte beautiful, proper English or Irish, the way I like them (although, truth, if she had passed her eye my way I would have had no second thoughts about giving her a tumble. She was that kind of woman.) with dark mestizo skin , dark hair, dark smoldering dancing eyes, ruby red lips and that sings-song voice that made you think of mists and fogs, if you have time to think, Or wanted to. But mainly it was that scent she gave off, of adventure, of silky sheets, of sweaty nights and cool showers after, frankly, of lust. And if that didn’t lure you in, lure Be-Bop in, then that slight fragrance, some cacti mix from a thousand husks wore just lightly enough to keep you within five feet of her at all times, and glad of it.
How they met? Oh, this one is a beaut, but it will tell you about the times, about summer of love 1960s times, and if I spill it here you won’t have to go ask your fidgety grandparents about it. They met in the middle of the Cambridge Common, when she fresh in town on some student exchange program between Harvard and Sonora University down in Mexico, when she, she remember, asked Be-Bop if he wanted to “split a joint with her.”
I already described, described her one hundred generations (or whatever number of generations have elapsed since the old Spanish conquests down there) scent. And that fragrance. And bug-eyed Be-Bop was a long gone daddy, long gone. Innocent enough though even for today’s prudish ears.
And Be-Bop swore it was that pure for a couple of weeks. Then two things happened. First the money ran out, what little there was of it between them. And they (or rather he) had big dreams of together and California and ocean washes to feed. So to solve the dough problem Selena gave Be-Bop all the details for making some dough by becoming small-time dope dealers through her connections with the righteous (her word, and he didn’t disagree, for the dope she shared was high grade Acapulco Gold, real good stuff compared to the normal Commons oregano mix) down in Sonora. So they went south instead of west and “muled” their first supply without too much difficulty. Coming back , at first, it was selling just to friends, a few joints here and there, just to keep them in coffee and cakes, but then to friends of friends, and their friends, and then to strangers. All this meant a couple more trips south, and a much expanded business. Hell, it was fun for a while, although working weights and packaging and all the rest was boring.
Be-bop said he could have seen it through though because the more dough they made the happier Selena seemed to be, and the better she was under those silky sheets she was addicted to sleeping on. But then, the other shoe dropped. Selena started going over to the Commons and asking other guys if they wanted to “share that dynamite joint” she had, and what went with it.
Now Be-Bop, despite his funny moniker, was no monogamous fool guy, and didn’t want to be, but this Selena thing got to him, got to him bad. Sometimes she would bring a guy right up to the apartment, smoke a joint, all Be-Bop could hear was the sound of silky sheets from the bedroom. Christ how much could a guy take. She called him bourgeois, and an old lady when he objected.
One night a few months later after a few taunts from Selena, and some stuff about going to old Mexico for another shipment by herself (they had always gone together previously) Be-Bop had had enough of this woman, or so he thought. About three in the morning he put some clothes in a ruck- sack, put a couple of sandwiches together, a little dope, and about fifteen hundred dollars in cash from the last drug sales. He hit the road west at the Massachusetts Turnpike entrance in Cambridge, and fled town.
Here is where I really enter the story. A couple of years later I was down in Mexico, down Sonora way for some conference, some journalism thing, and as I signed in at the front desk of the Hotel Sonora I heard a blood-curdling voice scream across the room telling me to tell Be-Bop that she, and her “connections,” had not forgotten about the missing dough. And that honor debt would never be forgotten, even if he wound up face down in some dried bed desert somewhere. No more sing-song voices for far-gone Be-Bop.
I actually had not seen Be-Bop for a couple of years at that point but the whole thing had me interested for his sake, and maybe for a story. In any case it turned out that the so-called Harvard –Sonora University connection was bogus (the school was some local church school for girls and not the kind of place Harvard would have had some educational relationship with), she had been in the United States illegally and had been using a bogus visa,
her brothers were her drug connections (and heard to have done some nasty things to competitors, and those who didn’t come up with their cut of the dough), and she was married to some local drug bigwig while she was silky sheeting it with Be-Bop. The only “truth” about her was that little habit of coming up to guys and asking the “joint” question. A few companeros in the Sonora area that she was seen with came up face down in some deserted culvert as proof of her obsession.
After a while I finally found out where Be-Bop was, or had been, and passed a message on. Mainly about staying very far west, and very far away from sunny Sonora down Mexico way. And stay very, very, very far away from one Selena Rios. And this is the message I got back- “Damn, I can’t get that Selena off my mind no matter how far west I go, maybe I should try to see her.” Well, what is a guy going to do when the devil has got his woman. Adios, amigo.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Devil’s Music 101- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Skip James performing his classic Devil Got My Woman.
CD Review
The Blues, various artists, 4 CD set, Smithsonian Recording, 1993
Recently, in reviewing a 2CD compilations of blues honoring the 40th Anniversary of Alligator Records, I noted that the raucous, rock the house of blues house down, blue artists listed there, like Johnny Winters, Albert Collins, Koko Taylor, and Lonnie Brooks, learned their trade from listening to an earlier generation of blues artists. The earlier artists grace this four CD set from the Smithsonian Recording Collection, from old time Charley Patton and Son House to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Basically this one covers virtually every voice and rhythm you would ever need to work your way into blues aficionado-hood.
Of course in that review I also noted that while I “learned “ the artists collected in that Alligator compilation on my own I owed a debt of gratitude to my old friend Be-Bop Benny (real name, Peter Paul Markin)
for “teaching” me the devil’s music. See, when we met in the summer of love, 1967 version, out in the California hills and hollows, I had just graduated from Olde Saco High School up in Maine and while I had the wanderlust to learn more of the world I was clueless about blues, country or electrified. I think the closest that I came to the blues was thinking that some Buddy Holly slow one, or Brenda Lee was what it was all about. Silly me.
So Be-Bop Benny took me in tow and during that summer, and for a few years after too, tuned me into the old time blues from his scratchy collection of off-beat singles (some called “race” records in their day) and LPs on his cranky road-weary record player (look that last term up if you are not familiar with the implement) that he had grabbed from some cheapo record shops in Harvard Square or at Sandy’s down closer to Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So that is how I came to know of the legends like Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Memphis Minnie, Sippy Wallace, Big Joe Williams, Big Bill Bronzy, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and all the rest in this collection. But think about it, wouldn’t it have been less work, much less work, indeed, if he could have “taught” me devil’s music 101 with this compilation? What I learned about what hell to raise with the devil’s music is a separate (and private) question that he can take no credit, or blame, for. But here is your primer on the music.
CD Review
The Blues, various artists, 4 CD set, Smithsonian Recording, 1993
Recently, in reviewing a 2CD compilations of blues honoring the 40th Anniversary of Alligator Records, I noted that the raucous, rock the house of blues house down, blue artists listed there, like Johnny Winters, Albert Collins, Koko Taylor, and Lonnie Brooks, learned their trade from listening to an earlier generation of blues artists. The earlier artists grace this four CD set from the Smithsonian Recording Collection, from old time Charley Patton and Son House to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Basically this one covers virtually every voice and rhythm you would ever need to work your way into blues aficionado-hood.
Of course in that review I also noted that while I “learned “ the artists collected in that Alligator compilation on my own I owed a debt of gratitude to my old friend Be-Bop Benny (real name, Peter Paul Markin)
for “teaching” me the devil’s music. See, when we met in the summer of love, 1967 version, out in the California hills and hollows, I had just graduated from Olde Saco High School up in Maine and while I had the wanderlust to learn more of the world I was clueless about blues, country or electrified. I think the closest that I came to the blues was thinking that some Buddy Holly slow one, or Brenda Lee was what it was all about. Silly me.
So Be-Bop Benny took me in tow and during that summer, and for a few years after too, tuned me into the old time blues from his scratchy collection of off-beat singles (some called “race” records in their day) and LPs on his cranky road-weary record player (look that last term up if you are not familiar with the implement) that he had grabbed from some cheapo record shops in Harvard Square or at Sandy’s down closer to Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So that is how I came to know of the legends like Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Memphis Minnie, Sippy Wallace, Big Joe Williams, Big Bill Bronzy, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and all the rest in this collection. But think about it, wouldn’t it have been less work, much less work, indeed, if he could have “taught” me devil’s music 101 with this compilation? What I learned about what hell to raise with the devil’s music is a separate (and private) question that he can take no credit, or blame, for. But here is your primer on the music.
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Biography-Louis-Auguste Blanqui
Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*************
Biography-Louis-Auguste Blanqui
BLANQUI, LOUIS AUGUSTE (1805-1881), French publicist, was born on the 8th of February 1805 at Puget-Théniers, where his father, Jean Dominique Blanqui, was at that time subprefect.
He studied both law and medicine, but found his real vocation in politics, and at once constituted himself a champion of the most advanced opinions. He took an active part in the revolution of July 1830, and continuing to maintain the doctrine of republicanism during the reign of Louis Philippe, was condemned to repeated terms of imprisonment.
Implicated in the armed outbreak of the Société des Saisons, of which he was a leading spirit, he was in the following year, 1840, condemned to death, a sentence that was afterwards commuted to imprisonment for life. He was released by the revolution of 1848, only to resume his attacks on existing institutions. The revolution, he declared, was a mere change of name. The violence of the Société républicaine centrale, which was founded by Blanqui to demand a modification of the government, brought him into conifict with the more moderate Republicans, and in 1849 he was condemned to ten years’ imprisonment.
In 1865, while serving a further term of imprisonment under the Empire, he contrived to escape, and henceforth continued his propaganda against the government from abroad, until the general amnesty of 1869 enabled him to return to France. Blanqui’s leaning towards violent measures was illustrated in 1870 by two unsuccessful armed demonstrations: one on the 12th of January at the funeral of Victor Noir, the journalist shot by Pierre Bonaparte; the other on the 14th of August, when he led an attempt to seize some guns at a barrack. Upon the fall of the Empire, through the revolution of the 4th of September, Blanqui established the club and journal La patrie en danger. He was one of the band that for a moment seized the reins of power on the 31st of October, and for his share in that outbreak he was again condemned to death on the 17th of March of the following year. A few days afterwards the insurrection which established the Commune broke out, and Blanqui was elected a member of the insurgent government, but his detention in prison prevented him from taking an active part.
Nevertheless he was in 1872 condemned along with the other members of the Commune to transportation; but on account of his broken health this sentence was commuted to one of imprisonment. In 1879 he was elected a deputy for Bordeaux; although the election was pronounced invalid, Blanqui was set at liberty, and at once resumed his work of agitation. At the end of 1880, after a speech at a revolutionary meeting in Paris, he was struck down by apoplexy, and expired on the uncompromising communism, and his determination to enforce it by violence, necessarily brought him into conflict with every French government, and half his life was spent in prison. Besides his innumerable contributions to journalism, he published an astronomical work entitled L’Eternité par les astres (1872), and after his death his writings on economic and social questions were collected under the title of Critique sociale (1885).
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*************
Biography-Louis-Auguste Blanqui
BLANQUI, LOUIS AUGUSTE (1805-1881), French publicist, was born on the 8th of February 1805 at Puget-Théniers, where his father, Jean Dominique Blanqui, was at that time subprefect.
He studied both law and medicine, but found his real vocation in politics, and at once constituted himself a champion of the most advanced opinions. He took an active part in the revolution of July 1830, and continuing to maintain the doctrine of republicanism during the reign of Louis Philippe, was condemned to repeated terms of imprisonment.
Implicated in the armed outbreak of the Société des Saisons, of which he was a leading spirit, he was in the following year, 1840, condemned to death, a sentence that was afterwards commuted to imprisonment for life. He was released by the revolution of 1848, only to resume his attacks on existing institutions. The revolution, he declared, was a mere change of name. The violence of the Société républicaine centrale, which was founded by Blanqui to demand a modification of the government, brought him into conifict with the more moderate Republicans, and in 1849 he was condemned to ten years’ imprisonment.
In 1865, while serving a further term of imprisonment under the Empire, he contrived to escape, and henceforth continued his propaganda against the government from abroad, until the general amnesty of 1869 enabled him to return to France. Blanqui’s leaning towards violent measures was illustrated in 1870 by two unsuccessful armed demonstrations: one on the 12th of January at the funeral of Victor Noir, the journalist shot by Pierre Bonaparte; the other on the 14th of August, when he led an attempt to seize some guns at a barrack. Upon the fall of the Empire, through the revolution of the 4th of September, Blanqui established the club and journal La patrie en danger. He was one of the band that for a moment seized the reins of power on the 31st of October, and for his share in that outbreak he was again condemned to death on the 17th of March of the following year. A few days afterwards the insurrection which established the Commune broke out, and Blanqui was elected a member of the insurgent government, but his detention in prison prevented him from taking an active part.
Nevertheless he was in 1872 condemned along with the other members of the Commune to transportation; but on account of his broken health this sentence was commuted to one of imprisonment. In 1879 he was elected a deputy for Bordeaux; although the election was pronounced invalid, Blanqui was set at liberty, and at once resumed his work of agitation. At the end of 1880, after a speech at a revolutionary meeting in Paris, he was struck down by apoplexy, and expired on the uncompromising communism, and his determination to enforce it by violence, necessarily brought him into conflict with every French government, and half his life was spent in prison. Besides his innumerable contributions to journalism, he published an astronomical work entitled L’Eternité par les astres (1872), and after his death his writings on economic and social questions were collected under the title of Critique sociale (1885).
Monday, July 02, 2012
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long- time supporter of class-war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long- time supporter of class-war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
The Latest From The "National Jericho Movement"- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners
Click on the headline to link to the National Jericho Movement website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long-time supporter of class- war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long-time supporter of class- war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
http://www.leonardpeltier.net/
Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
http://www.leonardpeltier.net/
Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- “Who Will The Next Fool Be”- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the late Koko Taylor holding forth righteously on I ‘m A Woman.
CD Review
Alligator Records : 40th Anniversary Collection, 2 CD set, various artists, Alligator Records, 2011
My old friend from the 1960s great American hitchhike highway, Peter Paul Markin (then consciously carrying the moniker of Be-Bop Benny), really was the first person who tuned me into the world of blues, old time country blues (driven by the Saturday juke joints), and the later post-World War II electrification of the blues as blacks headed north to the cities- and electricity. He got me, a small city Maine boy, hip to the likes of Son House, Skip James, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. All unabashedly raw talent, and all out front down deep blues, country or city.
Of course that was over forty years ago and almost all of those who he hipped me too have now passed on, although not their musical influence and that is what brings me to this review, Alligator Records: 40th Anniversary Collection 2 CD set. Since the blues are still very much with us, although that genre, like rock and roll, has it up and down periods of popularity it is necessary to take a peek at who has carried on the traditions that Be-Bop Benny started me out on when we travelled those West Coast highways seeking the great American West night.
And that is where the Alligator Record label comes in. In earlier times certain record companies were known, and well-known, for certain kinds of music. Chess Record sin Chicago comes readily to for electric blues. As does Sun Records for early rock (and rockabilly). And Vanguard Records for folk stuff. Well Alligator has filled a certain niche for those who wished to carry on the electric blues tradition and this 38 performance collection set is testimony to those efforts for the last forty –something years.
While they may have recoded for other recoding companies or had other label arrangements (not uncommon in the helter-skelter world of record production) the artists list here constitute something of “who’s who” of post-1960s electric blues. A small roll call of names like Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Guitar Shorty, Marcia Ball, Son Seal, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Brooks, Hound Dog Taylor, James Cotton and the rest make my case. The only question that I have is who will produce the next generation of blues material? Alligator Records efforts here are the new benchmark.
CD Review
Alligator Records : 40th Anniversary Collection, 2 CD set, various artists, Alligator Records, 2011
My old friend from the 1960s great American hitchhike highway, Peter Paul Markin (then consciously carrying the moniker of Be-Bop Benny), really was the first person who tuned me into the world of blues, old time country blues (driven by the Saturday juke joints), and the later post-World War II electrification of the blues as blacks headed north to the cities- and electricity. He got me, a small city Maine boy, hip to the likes of Son House, Skip James, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. All unabashedly raw talent, and all out front down deep blues, country or city.
Of course that was over forty years ago and almost all of those who he hipped me too have now passed on, although not their musical influence and that is what brings me to this review, Alligator Records: 40th Anniversary Collection 2 CD set. Since the blues are still very much with us, although that genre, like rock and roll, has it up and down periods of popularity it is necessary to take a peek at who has carried on the traditions that Be-Bop Benny started me out on when we travelled those West Coast highways seeking the great American West night.
And that is where the Alligator Record label comes in. In earlier times certain record companies were known, and well-known, for certain kinds of music. Chess Record sin Chicago comes readily to for electric blues. As does Sun Records for early rock (and rockabilly). And Vanguard Records for folk stuff. Well Alligator has filled a certain niche for those who wished to carry on the electric blues tradition and this 38 performance collection set is testimony to those efforts for the last forty –something years.
While they may have recoded for other recoding companies or had other label arrangements (not uncommon in the helter-skelter world of record production) the artists list here constitute something of “who’s who” of post-1960s electric blues. A small roll call of names like Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Guitar Shorty, Marcia Ball, Son Seal, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Brooks, Hound Dog Taylor, James Cotton and the rest make my case. The only question that I have is who will produce the next generation of blues material? Alligator Records efforts here are the new benchmark.
Out In The Be-Bop Night- Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Sweet, Moonless Ohio Dreams-1969
The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.
Scene Four: Sweet, Moonless Ohio Dreams In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night
The 1960s asphalt-driven, white-lined, hitchhike road, the quest for the blue-pink great American West night, the eternal midnight creep of over-weight trucks with their company-seeking, benny-high, overwrought teamster drivers, and the steam-driven, onion-filled meatloaf-milk-heavy mashed potatoes-and limpid carrots daily special diner truck stop are all meshed together. You could say that there was no hitchhike road, and no blue-pink dreams, if the old-fashioned caboose (sometimes literally) diner was not part of the mix that glued things together out on that lonely highway.
No, I do not speak of the then creeping family-friendly one-size-fits-all but still steamed meats-milky starches-sogged vegetable franchise interstate restaurants that now dot the roads from here to ‘Frisco but back road, back hitchhike road if you were smart, back old time route one, or sixty-six or twenty road where you had a chance for pushing distance and for feeling America in the raw. Hey, I have a million diner stories, diners with and without truck stops, diners famous and obscure, diners of every shape and composition to tell about. Or rather I have about three basic diner stories with a million steamed meat loaf-mashed taters-carrots (okay, maybe string beans, steamed, for a change-up)-bread pudding for dessert variations. I want to tell you one, one involving a young woman, and involving the great American night that drives these scenes. The other variations can wait their turns for some other time.
Car-less, and with no hope for any car any time soon, but with enough pent-up energy and anger to build a skyscraper single-handedly, I set out on the early May open roads, thumb in good working order, bedroll on one shoulder, life’s worldly goods in a knapsack on the other. It was that simple in those days. Today, sadly, it would take my rental of a major U-Haul truck, for starters. As always in those days as well, and some of you may know the spot if you have ever been in Boston (or, better, Cambridge) there was (and is) an old abandoned railroad yard that was turned into a truck depot near the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike where most of the truckers, the big diesel-fuelled ones, the doubled-wheeled, eight and sixteen-wheeled ones, picked up or unloaded their goods for further transport. That was the place to check first if you were heading west on the off chance that some mad man trucker was looking for company on that white-lined, hard-scrabble road, and did not mind bedraggled, bearded, long-haired, hippie boy company, at that. As luck would have it I caught a guy who was heading out to Chicago with a load of widgets (or whatever, even these guys didn’t know, or want to know, what was on the manifest half the time, especially if they were running “heavy”).
And why, by the way, although it is not germane to the story, was I heading out on that old California road? Why all that pent-up energy and skyscraper-building anger. Well, the cover story was so that I could get my head straight but you know the real reason, and this is for your eyes only, I had just broken up, for the umpteenth time, with a woman who drove me to distraction, sometimes pleasantly but on that occasion fitfully, who I could not, and did not, so I thought, want to get out of my system, but had to put myself a little distance away from. You know that story, boys and girls, in your own lives so I do not have to spend much time on the details here. Besides, if you really want to read that kind of story the romance novel section of any library or the DVD film section, for that matter, can tell the story with more heart-throbbing panache that you could find here.
Now there were a million and one reasons that long-haul drivers back then would take hitchhikers on board, even hippies who represented most of what they hated about what was happening in, and to, their America in those days (in the days before the trucking companies, and the insurance companies, squashed that traveler pick-up idea and left the truckers to their own solitary devises). Some reasons maybe were perverse but usually it was just for sheer, human companionship, another voice, or more usually someone to vent to at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour, especially at night when those straight white lines started to get raggedy looking.
This guy, this big-chested, brawny, beef-eating teamster guy, Denver Slim by name (really, I heard other truckers call him that at truck stops when they gave each other the nod, although, as described, he was neither slim nor, as he told me, from Denver), was no different except the reason, at least the reason that he gave me, was that I reminded him of his goddam son (I am being polite here) whom he loved/hated. Loved, because that is what a father was expected to feel toward kin, son kin especially and hated because he was showing signs or rebellion (read: becoming a hippie). I, needless to say, was a little queasy and sat close to the door handle for a while until I realized that it was more about love than hate. Old Denver Slim just didn’t get what was happening to his world, especially the part, the huge part, that he had no control over.
Hey, I had countless hitchhike rides in all kinds of vehicles, from the Denver Slim big wheels to Volkswagen bugs (look that up) but the common thread was that there were some interesting (if disturbing and hopeless) stories out there. Let me fill you in on Denver Slim’s story both because it helps explain what is coming up in my own quest and the hard, hard fact that there was a malaise, a palpable malaise, in the land and his story was prima facie evidence for that notion. Denver Slim had gone, like a million other members of my parent’s generation, through his childhood in the Great Depression (Chicago) and did his military in the throes of World War II (Corporal, U.S. Army, European Theater, and proud of it). After the war he started driving trucks, finally landing unionized teamster jobs as an over-the-road long haul driver based in Chicago. As was not unusual then, and maybe not now either, he married a local woman he knew from the old neighborhood, had several children, moved out of Chicago proper to a suburban plot house (“little boxes,” from the description he gave) and bought into the mortgaged, green-grassed lawn, weekly mowed (when he was not on the road), television-watching, neighbor-averting (except for the kids when young) routine that was a blueprint for America 1950s life in the lower-middle classes.
Here is where Slim’s story gets tricky though, and interesting. Of course being on the road, being mortgaged up to the neck on the road, he was never home enough to make the word family stick. He, as he admitted, when talking about his son Jamie, the rebellious son (read: becoming a hippie son), didn’t really know the kids (the other three were daughters whom he , as he said, wouldn’t have known anyway past the age of ten or so the way things work in girl world). But here is the kicker, the kicker for me back then although I get it better now, much better. The wife, Ruth, the ever-loving wife, had along the way taken a boyfriend and, off and on, lived with that boyfriend. Slim went crazy at first about it but somehow got through it and accepted that situation. Oh, you thought that was the kicker. No, that was just the prelude to the kicker. Here it is. Denver Slim, old proud soldier-warrior, old mortgaged to the neck teamster, old work and slave on the road for the kids that he doesn’t know had a girlfriend, and had said girlfriend way before his wife took her lover. A beautiful family values story out of the age of Ozzie and Harriet, right?
But this is the real kicker for your harried hippie listener, old salt of the earth Denver Slim in relating his life story got a little bit lovesick for his honey (no, not the wife, the girlfriend, come on now, listen up) who lived in Steubenville, Ohio. And that, my friends, was where we were heading as we made tracks to Youngstown on Interstate 70 and so instead of getting a ride through to Chicago (a place where I knew how to catch a ride west, no problem, almost like out of Boston) I was to be left off, and good luck, at the diner truck stop just off Route 7 outside of Steubenville, Ohio. Right near the Ohio River, at the eastern end that I was not familiar with. Christ, I never even heard of the place before, never mind trying to get a ride out of there, getting out of there at night as it looked like was going to happen by the time we got to the stop. Well, such is the road, the hitchhike road, and I hope old Slim had a good time with his honey, maybe, maybe I hope he did that is.
Slim must have had it bad, love bug-bitten bad, because he no sooner left me off at the diner than he then barrel-assed (nice term, right?) that big rig back, that big sixteen wheeler, onto the lovesick -night road and to his own dream sleep. So there I was doing graduate-level diner study by my lonesome. Look, I was no stranger, by this time in my wanderings, to the diners, trucks stops, cafes, and hash houses of this continent. From the look of this one (and one judged these things by the number of big rigs idling nearby) it was something of a Buckeye institution, maybe not like the football team or various legendary football coaches but busy (see, I know a little about Ohio, although not much outside the bigger cities and campus towns).
As I went inside through the glass-plated double doors I could practically inhale the steam from the vegetables, the dank, faded glory of the taters, and the inevitable onion smell than can only mean meat loaf. Hey, this is what passes for home-cooking on the road. And be glad of it, friend. As a single I would not be so uncool as to take a booth, although at that time of day there were some empties, but rather hopped right up on that old stool at the Formica-top red counter replete with individual paper mat and dinner setting, spoons, folks, knives, various condiments and plastic-entombed menu that every self-respecting diner has for those caught by their lonesome. Their sincere, if futile, attempt at home-away from homey-ness. It was not like this was a date-taking place (or at least I hope nobody thinks along those lines, but you never know, maybe people celebrate their anniversaries in the place) but it is okay out here abandoned in the neon-lighted wilderness of a back road truck stop.
Okay, at long last here is the part that you have been waiting for, the girl in the story part. Well, wait a minute, let me hold forth on waitresses because that is important to the girl part (and it was almost always waitresses in those days, or in a pinch, the owner/short order cook) who served them off the arm. In college towns and big cities, waitresses were (and are) just doing that job to mark time while going to college or some other thing but in the hash houses, the roadside diners, the hole-in-the-wall faded restaurants of this continent it was (is) almost universally true that in this type of establishment this was an upwardly-mobile career move (or, maybe, just a lateral move). You have all seen and heard about the typical career waitress- surly, short-tempered, steam-pressed uniform, steamed by the proximity to the food trays that is, hardly has time to take your order because that party of six in the booths is waiting on dessert (and her big tip for this evening, she hopes, although if she thought about it the hard facts should have told her that old lonesome single male trucker was the best tipper). There is a smidgen of truth in those old hoary stories about waitresses but there is also some very hard-pressed, ill-fated bad luck thrown in as well. They all had stories to tell, at least the ones who didn’t scurry away like rats from “hippies.”
Okay, okay I can now tell you about angelic Angelica. That name, the smell of that name, the swirl around the tongue speaking that name, the touch of that name, still evokes strong memories even after all this time. But enough of nostalgia. Let’s get down to cases. First of all she was young, very young for a truck stop diner waitress so at first I thought that she was a career waitress-in-training or that there was a college nearby that I might not have heard of. I will describe her virtues in a second but let me tell you right off that the minute I sat down, and although there were several others at the counter who had come in before me, she came right over to my stool and asked if I wanted coffee. Well, kind of sleepy that I was at the time, I said yes and she went right off, got it, and came right back. And then, while the others at the counter were cooling their heels, she took my order, and as she moved away to put that order in (No, I do not remember what it was but, probably, since I was counting pennies, a burger and fries, meat loaf and other such high-end cuisine was saved for serious hungers) she slightly turned to give me another look and a sly smile.
In those days I was susceptible, very susceptible, to that winsome sly smile that some women know exactly how to throw (hell, I am still a sucker for that one, and don’t tell me you aren’t, or couldn’t be, too, male or female, it works both ways on this one). That sly smile and her, well, looks. Forget that endless physical description stuff about soft auburn hair, full ruby-red lips, bright, fresh, naïve blue eyes, nicely-shaped hips and well-formed legs. Very good legs. Okay, forget all that. I will describe her looks in “on the road” terms because when you were on the road and trying to get across the country the rules, the rules of the road, were a little different. Your take on life and your usually transient relationships with passing strangers, male or female, got a little twisted. Not necessarily in a bad way, but twisted.
There were different protocols for different situations when you were hitchhiking. A lone male hitching was usually not a bad proposition, especially if you stayed close to the highways and knew the truck stops, and appeared to be drug free, or at least that you were not in the throes of a terminal drug experience while trying to hitch a ride. This Hunter Thompson Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas drug stuff is good road fiction, but fiction nevertheless, if you were trying to get from point A to point B before your old age set in. The same with goofy Dennis Hooper Easy Rider stuff. Good cinema, bad, real bad road stuff. The main problem then, and probably would be today as well, is single middle-age guys, maybe desperate for a little company, picking you up with the idea of making advances. I don’t know about anybody else, as least I never heard anybody talk much about it then, but a simple "no" usually was enough to stop that(and not infrequently got you dumped in some odd spot between exits to thumb down some flying-by traffic). It’s only later, in the early 1970s when I wasn’t on the road so much that things started to get hairy, and the talk turned to weirdness, serious weirdness, out on the white-lined lanes.
In the late 1960s a pair of males was not a bad combination either. Not so much for getting rides from truckers who usually did not have room for two (or, if so, it was uncomfortable as hell) but for the plethora of Volkswagen vans, converted school buses, campers, and pick-up trucks that were out there on the blue-pink seeking road. There were times on the Pacific Coast Highway out in California that you barely got your thumb out and some vehicle stopped, especially if you looked like you were part of “youth nation.” Two more guys in back, sure thing, no problem. Those were good days to travel the roads, and another time I will tell you about some of those experiences but right now I have to get back to describe Angelica, or her road-worthy attributes anyway.
The optimal road set-up though, the one that got you rides the fastest, usually was to be paired up with a woman, truth be told, preferable a good-looking young woman. Ya, it’s not good form today, it’s certainly not politically correct or socially useful today to work from this premise, but back then the idea was that a guy and girl were safe from the driver’s perspective. And it was almost always guys, truckers or loners, or an occasional man and woman, who picked you up. Not single women drivers, young or old. For my perspective, the hitcher’s perspective, a good-looking woman, with good legs, made the road easier. And other delights, of course.
And it did no harm to have the woman act as an upfront side-of-the-road decoy for that same reason. Maybe not in the desert tumbleweed badlands of Arizona or Nevada where the hot sun, or dust, got you a ride from people who knew that area and knew they had to stop as a matter of your survival, and who knows their own sense of survival as well, but between exits on Interstate 80, let’s say, it helped, hell it helped a lot. Maybe not old Denver Slim, high on benny and moaning and groaning for his honey (the girlfriend not the wife remember) in dark night, white-lined blur but a guy like me would have made those lonesome highway brakes squeal to high heaven, and gladly. Angelica, at first glance, would certainly make the road easier, although this little detour is strictly for descriptive purposes in this part of the story. Put a simpler way, she was fetching.
But all of that is music for the future. Needless to say making any kind of move toward continuing the conversation with Angelica required a certain diligence and patience in the middle of diner traffic. As it turned out the diligence was only partially necessary because she was more than willing to talk to me while taking orders all around us. Her story was that she had been enrolled in some local Podunk (her term) business school (Muncie Business College for Women, or something like that) in her hometown of Muncie, Indiana but now wanted to be a medical technician of some sort (radiologist is what it was, I think). But most of all she wanted to get away from home (be still my heart) and had wound up in Steubenville as some kind of way station between dreams. Yes, I can hear the snickers now about some small-town girl seeing the bright lights of Steubenville and going all a-flutter. Stop it. Stop it right now.
In the dark of that night I was obviously not in any particular rush to leave, and as the dinner crowd thinned out we talked some more, as she filled my coffee cup repeatedly so that I could look like I was a "real" paying customer. To say this gal was innocent in some ways would be an understatement, and on the face of it a Midwest naïve and an East Coast hippie just would not make sense, no sense at all. But so would the fact, the hard fact that I would be in Steubenville, Ohio as part of a search for the great American night. Let’s just call it the times, and leave it at that.
And the times here included a very convenient fact. Angelica, as occurred more often than one would have thought out in those highway stops, as part of her job resided in one of the diner owner's motel cabins that dotted the outside ring of the truck stop. These single units provided cheap lodging for someone new, or transient, in town and were basically provided to the help so the newer help could be readily available on call when the inevitable call came in from the drunken cook, the moving-on dishwasher, or when one of the love-smitten senior career waitresses called in “sick.” Mainly though these cabins were for over-weary transcontinental truckers to grab a little sleep before pushing on. Thus they weren’t, at least these weren’t, your basic family-friendly digs that made you feel that you were in some room at home but rather that you were on that hell-bent, weary road, and this is the best you could do to rest those weary bones.
Well, yes we got around to leaving after her shift was over about 11:00 PM and did the ceremonial dancing around that generations, no, generations of generations, have pursued in the “courting ritual” on that initial question of whether, and when, a smitten pair get together for the night. But this time there is no story if they don’t, right?
Well, to spare any more suspense dear Angelica asked me into her digs. Just to talk, okay, and frankly I was so tired from my long day’s journey that just talk seemed about right then. I will describe that talk in a minute but let me describe this cabin homestead as we approached it on our one hundred, or one hundred and fifty, yard walk from the diner. Now that I think about it though I really shouldn’t have to describe it to you because you have all seen them, that is if you have been on the back roads of America a little, especially out on those one-lane country roads where working- class people who don’t have much money go out to the country to get away from the city and this is what they can afford. There are about fifteen or twenty barely whitewashed cabins in a semi-circle, or maybe a few degrees over. If they were not numbered or if you came to them unknowingly on a dark, moonless night like that night I guarantee that you would be hard-pressed to tell your new-found home away from home from any other in that arc.
The telltale old-fashioned, green oil-based painted screened door told you immediately that you were not at the Ritz, or even its fifth cousin. As we entered amid the inevitable light-drawn flies, or moths, or whatever those insects are that you need to swat away to get in the door, or else you have to deal with them inside all night. Like I say these places are built for the moment and so the amenities are on the Spartan side.
As we walked inside, if I were to hazard a guess, and I was a professor in some upscale home interior design school, if someone presented this layout in a portfolio I would sent them, and sent them quickly, to remedial work. Or to a job at Sears& Roebuck. But we were here and here the basic bed, bureau, kitchenette with a small table and a couple of wooden chairs, small sleeper sofa, and tiny shower ¾ bathroom filled the room. The only things personal about this place were Angelica’s alternate uniform that matches the one that she has on hanging to one side, drying out for her next bout with the ham-fisted crowd at the diner, and a small open suitcase that had her clothes neatly packed in it. On the bureau her “making my face” fixings and a few gee gads that everyone throws on the bureau when they want to unload their pockets. Hey, I have placed my head down to sleep on paper-strewn park benches and under paperless bridges and on up to downy-pillowed, vast, roomy, and leafy suburban estates so a highway motel cabin is hardly down at the low end of my sleeping quarters resume. This, my friends, will be just fine for the night.
So we start the "just talk" that Angelica promised. I don’t and, frankly, no one should expect me to, remember most of what we talked about but here is my lingering impression. Turnabout is fair play. I thought that I was going to get an in-depth view of what “square” small-town Midwest girls dreamed of, or what drove them from the Lynds’ Middletown (that’s Muncie, okay, the subject of a famous study in sociology), to the wilds of Ohio. Instead I was the interrogated. It seems that Angelica had been so “brain-washed” (her term) about “hippies” or what the old town folks thought was hippie-dom (basically a variant of their mid-country fears of the “Bolsheviks” under every bed) that she was crazy to “capture” (my term) one. And, as it turned out, in the course of events, I was the one. And on top of that and here is a direct quote from her, “You seemed nice, right from the time you sat down.” (Well, of course, without question, without a doubt, it’s a given, and so on).
But here is the unexpected part, or at least the somewhat unexpected part. Off the top of my head I would not then, in the 1960s, bet my last dollar that a young woman from Muncie (town used here for convenience only) would be coy (nice word, right?) on her first “date.” Coyness here signifying her willingness to gather me to her bed at about 3:00 AM as we both were trying to fight off the sleep that was descending on us. But get this, and I will sign any notarized document necessary in support of this, she asked, yes, asked me into her bed. Well, as I mentioned above, she said I seemed nice, and there you have it. Of course, being “nice” I couldn’t say no. Yes, the gentleman “hippie”, that was me.
You know the boy meets girl plot lines of most movies have it all messed up. Either they meet, give each other lecherous stares (hell, not even winsome smiles), and proceed to tear each other clothes off in an act of sexual frenzy then spent the rest of the movie justifying their eternal love by that first edenic act. Or, and this is truer of older films (and prudish modern comic book-based superhero flicks), the “foreplay” lasts so long that by the time that they hit the downy billows you go ho-hum and are more interested in the unfolding plot. Novels follow a lot of the same paths except, mostly the sexual scenes are about a paragraph or so and reflect the wisdom of the parties involved more than raw sexual energy. Romance novels, a category that would seem to be made for sexual exploits, using don’t get around to hitting the pillows until about page 323 and by then all you care about is whether the sheets are pastel or designer prints.
Real life, real life first encounter romances (read: sexual encounters) are more halting and, frankly, timid. Except, of course, those phantom Herculean and nubile sex-crazed teeny-boppers of urban legend that we have heard about. Ya, I have heard about them too. But that’s about it, heard about them. Think about the awkwardness of that first touch reflecting those ancient memories of being kissed back in about sixth grade, or about those gone wrong affairs that have piled up in your life’s memory bank, or that intense moment when both parties look downward in trepidation at what may come ahead. Or, and here is where memory plays no trick, that woman back home, that woman of one thousand frustrations that you needed to get some distance from, and that set you on this blue-pink road, but whose 999 delights have now surfaced and clouded all thinking. I nevertheless plunged recklessly onward.
For those pruriently-inclined readers who now expect a touch by touch, feel by feel, clothes taking-off by clothes taking-off, flesh against flesh description of our precious, sweet, private, very private love-making look elsewhere. Wait a minute. Look elsewhere, unless you have a written book (and/or movie rights) contract in hand. In that case I will be more than happy to fill in the sweaty, steamy, lurid, blood-pressure-rising details. I will make the earth under that old cabin shake, and the rafters too. I will give details that would make the Marquis de Sade blush, blush profusely. If you have no contract then let’s leave it at this; something deep in that moonless Ohio night, that times out of joint, moonless Ohio night, created a passion, or better, a moment of passion that we both could have bet our last dollars on. Something that, it seemed, we had both been waiting all our lives for, although we didn’t use those words. Just a couple of sly, knowing smiles, and then sleep.
Suddenly, we were awakened with a start. A still dark of night start and a hard rapping on the door, that damn, fly-flecked, oil-based painted green door. And a voice, a female voice. “Angelica, one of Penny’s kids is sick you’ll have to take her shift.” Even a night of passion, a moonless Ohio sly-smiled night of passion, cannot fend off the day’s realities, Angelica’s day realities. She says: “Yes, I’ll be there in a little while,” almost automatically. But just as automatically she says to me: “Don’t go out on the highway yet.”
Humble, barely whitewashed cabin or exotic, leafy country estate if a woman jumps out of bed and orders me to stay put who was I to disobey, at least until I see what my next move was. I agreed and turn over. A few hours later she returns and we mess up her bed sheets again, and again. Then, after some Angelica sleep, and some kitchenette supper she says to me, just as boldly as when she invited me to her bed, that she wanted to go “on the road” with me.
My heart was racing for a thousand reasons, one of them included the thought that our little romance would lead to this although I didn't put it that way in my answer. More like: “Ya, I guess I was kinda thinking, maybe, a little about that idea.” A couple of days later, after she had worked some double-shifts and I did my bit doing some off-hand dish- washing for meals and wages we gathered up her stuff off the bureau, place it in that orderly small suitcase, shut that damn, moth-crusted oil-based painted green door and head for the trucks a couple of hundred yards away and our ride out. Our ride out in search of the blue-pink great American West night that I have not told her about, at least not in those exact words, but that that she will find out about in her own good time and in her own way.
Scene Four: Sweet, Moonless Ohio Dreams In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night
The 1960s asphalt-driven, white-lined, hitchhike road, the quest for the blue-pink great American West night, the eternal midnight creep of over-weight trucks with their company-seeking, benny-high, overwrought teamster drivers, and the steam-driven, onion-filled meatloaf-milk-heavy mashed potatoes-and limpid carrots daily special diner truck stop are all meshed together. You could say that there was no hitchhike road, and no blue-pink dreams, if the old-fashioned caboose (sometimes literally) diner was not part of the mix that glued things together out on that lonely highway.
No, I do not speak of the then creeping family-friendly one-size-fits-all but still steamed meats-milky starches-sogged vegetable franchise interstate restaurants that now dot the roads from here to ‘Frisco but back road, back hitchhike road if you were smart, back old time route one, or sixty-six or twenty road where you had a chance for pushing distance and for feeling America in the raw. Hey, I have a million diner stories, diners with and without truck stops, diners famous and obscure, diners of every shape and composition to tell about. Or rather I have about three basic diner stories with a million steamed meat loaf-mashed taters-carrots (okay, maybe string beans, steamed, for a change-up)-bread pudding for dessert variations. I want to tell you one, one involving a young woman, and involving the great American night that drives these scenes. The other variations can wait their turns for some other time.
Car-less, and with no hope for any car any time soon, but with enough pent-up energy and anger to build a skyscraper single-handedly, I set out on the early May open roads, thumb in good working order, bedroll on one shoulder, life’s worldly goods in a knapsack on the other. It was that simple in those days. Today, sadly, it would take my rental of a major U-Haul truck, for starters. As always in those days as well, and some of you may know the spot if you have ever been in Boston (or, better, Cambridge) there was (and is) an old abandoned railroad yard that was turned into a truck depot near the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike where most of the truckers, the big diesel-fuelled ones, the doubled-wheeled, eight and sixteen-wheeled ones, picked up or unloaded their goods for further transport. That was the place to check first if you were heading west on the off chance that some mad man trucker was looking for company on that white-lined, hard-scrabble road, and did not mind bedraggled, bearded, long-haired, hippie boy company, at that. As luck would have it I caught a guy who was heading out to Chicago with a load of widgets (or whatever, even these guys didn’t know, or want to know, what was on the manifest half the time, especially if they were running “heavy”).
And why, by the way, although it is not germane to the story, was I heading out on that old California road? Why all that pent-up energy and skyscraper-building anger. Well, the cover story was so that I could get my head straight but you know the real reason, and this is for your eyes only, I had just broken up, for the umpteenth time, with a woman who drove me to distraction, sometimes pleasantly but on that occasion fitfully, who I could not, and did not, so I thought, want to get out of my system, but had to put myself a little distance away from. You know that story, boys and girls, in your own lives so I do not have to spend much time on the details here. Besides, if you really want to read that kind of story the romance novel section of any library or the DVD film section, for that matter, can tell the story with more heart-throbbing panache that you could find here.
Now there were a million and one reasons that long-haul drivers back then would take hitchhikers on board, even hippies who represented most of what they hated about what was happening in, and to, their America in those days (in the days before the trucking companies, and the insurance companies, squashed that traveler pick-up idea and left the truckers to their own solitary devises). Some reasons maybe were perverse but usually it was just for sheer, human companionship, another voice, or more usually someone to vent to at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour, especially at night when those straight white lines started to get raggedy looking.
This guy, this big-chested, brawny, beef-eating teamster guy, Denver Slim by name (really, I heard other truckers call him that at truck stops when they gave each other the nod, although, as described, he was neither slim nor, as he told me, from Denver), was no different except the reason, at least the reason that he gave me, was that I reminded him of his goddam son (I am being polite here) whom he loved/hated. Loved, because that is what a father was expected to feel toward kin, son kin especially and hated because he was showing signs or rebellion (read: becoming a hippie). I, needless to say, was a little queasy and sat close to the door handle for a while until I realized that it was more about love than hate. Old Denver Slim just didn’t get what was happening to his world, especially the part, the huge part, that he had no control over.
Hey, I had countless hitchhike rides in all kinds of vehicles, from the Denver Slim big wheels to Volkswagen bugs (look that up) but the common thread was that there were some interesting (if disturbing and hopeless) stories out there. Let me fill you in on Denver Slim’s story both because it helps explain what is coming up in my own quest and the hard, hard fact that there was a malaise, a palpable malaise, in the land and his story was prima facie evidence for that notion. Denver Slim had gone, like a million other members of my parent’s generation, through his childhood in the Great Depression (Chicago) and did his military in the throes of World War II (Corporal, U.S. Army, European Theater, and proud of it). After the war he started driving trucks, finally landing unionized teamster jobs as an over-the-road long haul driver based in Chicago. As was not unusual then, and maybe not now either, he married a local woman he knew from the old neighborhood, had several children, moved out of Chicago proper to a suburban plot house (“little boxes,” from the description he gave) and bought into the mortgaged, green-grassed lawn, weekly mowed (when he was not on the road), television-watching, neighbor-averting (except for the kids when young) routine that was a blueprint for America 1950s life in the lower-middle classes.
Here is where Slim’s story gets tricky though, and interesting. Of course being on the road, being mortgaged up to the neck on the road, he was never home enough to make the word family stick. He, as he admitted, when talking about his son Jamie, the rebellious son (read: becoming a hippie son), didn’t really know the kids (the other three were daughters whom he , as he said, wouldn’t have known anyway past the age of ten or so the way things work in girl world). But here is the kicker, the kicker for me back then although I get it better now, much better. The wife, Ruth, the ever-loving wife, had along the way taken a boyfriend and, off and on, lived with that boyfriend. Slim went crazy at first about it but somehow got through it and accepted that situation. Oh, you thought that was the kicker. No, that was just the prelude to the kicker. Here it is. Denver Slim, old proud soldier-warrior, old mortgaged to the neck teamster, old work and slave on the road for the kids that he doesn’t know had a girlfriend, and had said girlfriend way before his wife took her lover. A beautiful family values story out of the age of Ozzie and Harriet, right?
But this is the real kicker for your harried hippie listener, old salt of the earth Denver Slim in relating his life story got a little bit lovesick for his honey (no, not the wife, the girlfriend, come on now, listen up) who lived in Steubenville, Ohio. And that, my friends, was where we were heading as we made tracks to Youngstown on Interstate 70 and so instead of getting a ride through to Chicago (a place where I knew how to catch a ride west, no problem, almost like out of Boston) I was to be left off, and good luck, at the diner truck stop just off Route 7 outside of Steubenville, Ohio. Right near the Ohio River, at the eastern end that I was not familiar with. Christ, I never even heard of the place before, never mind trying to get a ride out of there, getting out of there at night as it looked like was going to happen by the time we got to the stop. Well, such is the road, the hitchhike road, and I hope old Slim had a good time with his honey, maybe, maybe I hope he did that is.
Slim must have had it bad, love bug-bitten bad, because he no sooner left me off at the diner than he then barrel-assed (nice term, right?) that big rig back, that big sixteen wheeler, onto the lovesick -night road and to his own dream sleep. So there I was doing graduate-level diner study by my lonesome. Look, I was no stranger, by this time in my wanderings, to the diners, trucks stops, cafes, and hash houses of this continent. From the look of this one (and one judged these things by the number of big rigs idling nearby) it was something of a Buckeye institution, maybe not like the football team or various legendary football coaches but busy (see, I know a little about Ohio, although not much outside the bigger cities and campus towns).
As I went inside through the glass-plated double doors I could practically inhale the steam from the vegetables, the dank, faded glory of the taters, and the inevitable onion smell than can only mean meat loaf. Hey, this is what passes for home-cooking on the road. And be glad of it, friend. As a single I would not be so uncool as to take a booth, although at that time of day there were some empties, but rather hopped right up on that old stool at the Formica-top red counter replete with individual paper mat and dinner setting, spoons, folks, knives, various condiments and plastic-entombed menu that every self-respecting diner has for those caught by their lonesome. Their sincere, if futile, attempt at home-away from homey-ness. It was not like this was a date-taking place (or at least I hope nobody thinks along those lines, but you never know, maybe people celebrate their anniversaries in the place) but it is okay out here abandoned in the neon-lighted wilderness of a back road truck stop.
Okay, at long last here is the part that you have been waiting for, the girl in the story part. Well, wait a minute, let me hold forth on waitresses because that is important to the girl part (and it was almost always waitresses in those days, or in a pinch, the owner/short order cook) who served them off the arm. In college towns and big cities, waitresses were (and are) just doing that job to mark time while going to college or some other thing but in the hash houses, the roadside diners, the hole-in-the-wall faded restaurants of this continent it was (is) almost universally true that in this type of establishment this was an upwardly-mobile career move (or, maybe, just a lateral move). You have all seen and heard about the typical career waitress- surly, short-tempered, steam-pressed uniform, steamed by the proximity to the food trays that is, hardly has time to take your order because that party of six in the booths is waiting on dessert (and her big tip for this evening, she hopes, although if she thought about it the hard facts should have told her that old lonesome single male trucker was the best tipper). There is a smidgen of truth in those old hoary stories about waitresses but there is also some very hard-pressed, ill-fated bad luck thrown in as well. They all had stories to tell, at least the ones who didn’t scurry away like rats from “hippies.”
Okay, okay I can now tell you about angelic Angelica. That name, the smell of that name, the swirl around the tongue speaking that name, the touch of that name, still evokes strong memories even after all this time. But enough of nostalgia. Let’s get down to cases. First of all she was young, very young for a truck stop diner waitress so at first I thought that she was a career waitress-in-training or that there was a college nearby that I might not have heard of. I will describe her virtues in a second but let me tell you right off that the minute I sat down, and although there were several others at the counter who had come in before me, she came right over to my stool and asked if I wanted coffee. Well, kind of sleepy that I was at the time, I said yes and she went right off, got it, and came right back. And then, while the others at the counter were cooling their heels, she took my order, and as she moved away to put that order in (No, I do not remember what it was but, probably, since I was counting pennies, a burger and fries, meat loaf and other such high-end cuisine was saved for serious hungers) she slightly turned to give me another look and a sly smile.
In those days I was susceptible, very susceptible, to that winsome sly smile that some women know exactly how to throw (hell, I am still a sucker for that one, and don’t tell me you aren’t, or couldn’t be, too, male or female, it works both ways on this one). That sly smile and her, well, looks. Forget that endless physical description stuff about soft auburn hair, full ruby-red lips, bright, fresh, naïve blue eyes, nicely-shaped hips and well-formed legs. Very good legs. Okay, forget all that. I will describe her looks in “on the road” terms because when you were on the road and trying to get across the country the rules, the rules of the road, were a little different. Your take on life and your usually transient relationships with passing strangers, male or female, got a little twisted. Not necessarily in a bad way, but twisted.
There were different protocols for different situations when you were hitchhiking. A lone male hitching was usually not a bad proposition, especially if you stayed close to the highways and knew the truck stops, and appeared to be drug free, or at least that you were not in the throes of a terminal drug experience while trying to hitch a ride. This Hunter Thompson Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas drug stuff is good road fiction, but fiction nevertheless, if you were trying to get from point A to point B before your old age set in. The same with goofy Dennis Hooper Easy Rider stuff. Good cinema, bad, real bad road stuff. The main problem then, and probably would be today as well, is single middle-age guys, maybe desperate for a little company, picking you up with the idea of making advances. I don’t know about anybody else, as least I never heard anybody talk much about it then, but a simple "no" usually was enough to stop that(and not infrequently got you dumped in some odd spot between exits to thumb down some flying-by traffic). It’s only later, in the early 1970s when I wasn’t on the road so much that things started to get hairy, and the talk turned to weirdness, serious weirdness, out on the white-lined lanes.
In the late 1960s a pair of males was not a bad combination either. Not so much for getting rides from truckers who usually did not have room for two (or, if so, it was uncomfortable as hell) but for the plethora of Volkswagen vans, converted school buses, campers, and pick-up trucks that were out there on the blue-pink seeking road. There were times on the Pacific Coast Highway out in California that you barely got your thumb out and some vehicle stopped, especially if you looked like you were part of “youth nation.” Two more guys in back, sure thing, no problem. Those were good days to travel the roads, and another time I will tell you about some of those experiences but right now I have to get back to describe Angelica, or her road-worthy attributes anyway.
The optimal road set-up though, the one that got you rides the fastest, usually was to be paired up with a woman, truth be told, preferable a good-looking young woman. Ya, it’s not good form today, it’s certainly not politically correct or socially useful today to work from this premise, but back then the idea was that a guy and girl were safe from the driver’s perspective. And it was almost always guys, truckers or loners, or an occasional man and woman, who picked you up. Not single women drivers, young or old. For my perspective, the hitcher’s perspective, a good-looking woman, with good legs, made the road easier. And other delights, of course.
And it did no harm to have the woman act as an upfront side-of-the-road decoy for that same reason. Maybe not in the desert tumbleweed badlands of Arizona or Nevada where the hot sun, or dust, got you a ride from people who knew that area and knew they had to stop as a matter of your survival, and who knows their own sense of survival as well, but between exits on Interstate 80, let’s say, it helped, hell it helped a lot. Maybe not old Denver Slim, high on benny and moaning and groaning for his honey (the girlfriend not the wife remember) in dark night, white-lined blur but a guy like me would have made those lonesome highway brakes squeal to high heaven, and gladly. Angelica, at first glance, would certainly make the road easier, although this little detour is strictly for descriptive purposes in this part of the story. Put a simpler way, she was fetching.
But all of that is music for the future. Needless to say making any kind of move toward continuing the conversation with Angelica required a certain diligence and patience in the middle of diner traffic. As it turned out the diligence was only partially necessary because she was more than willing to talk to me while taking orders all around us. Her story was that she had been enrolled in some local Podunk (her term) business school (Muncie Business College for Women, or something like that) in her hometown of Muncie, Indiana but now wanted to be a medical technician of some sort (radiologist is what it was, I think). But most of all she wanted to get away from home (be still my heart) and had wound up in Steubenville as some kind of way station between dreams. Yes, I can hear the snickers now about some small-town girl seeing the bright lights of Steubenville and going all a-flutter. Stop it. Stop it right now.
In the dark of that night I was obviously not in any particular rush to leave, and as the dinner crowd thinned out we talked some more, as she filled my coffee cup repeatedly so that I could look like I was a "real" paying customer. To say this gal was innocent in some ways would be an understatement, and on the face of it a Midwest naïve and an East Coast hippie just would not make sense, no sense at all. But so would the fact, the hard fact that I would be in Steubenville, Ohio as part of a search for the great American night. Let’s just call it the times, and leave it at that.
And the times here included a very convenient fact. Angelica, as occurred more often than one would have thought out in those highway stops, as part of her job resided in one of the diner owner's motel cabins that dotted the outside ring of the truck stop. These single units provided cheap lodging for someone new, or transient, in town and were basically provided to the help so the newer help could be readily available on call when the inevitable call came in from the drunken cook, the moving-on dishwasher, or when one of the love-smitten senior career waitresses called in “sick.” Mainly though these cabins were for over-weary transcontinental truckers to grab a little sleep before pushing on. Thus they weren’t, at least these weren’t, your basic family-friendly digs that made you feel that you were in some room at home but rather that you were on that hell-bent, weary road, and this is the best you could do to rest those weary bones.
Well, yes we got around to leaving after her shift was over about 11:00 PM and did the ceremonial dancing around that generations, no, generations of generations, have pursued in the “courting ritual” on that initial question of whether, and when, a smitten pair get together for the night. But this time there is no story if they don’t, right?
Well, to spare any more suspense dear Angelica asked me into her digs. Just to talk, okay, and frankly I was so tired from my long day’s journey that just talk seemed about right then. I will describe that talk in a minute but let me describe this cabin homestead as we approached it on our one hundred, or one hundred and fifty, yard walk from the diner. Now that I think about it though I really shouldn’t have to describe it to you because you have all seen them, that is if you have been on the back roads of America a little, especially out on those one-lane country roads where working- class people who don’t have much money go out to the country to get away from the city and this is what they can afford. There are about fifteen or twenty barely whitewashed cabins in a semi-circle, or maybe a few degrees over. If they were not numbered or if you came to them unknowingly on a dark, moonless night like that night I guarantee that you would be hard-pressed to tell your new-found home away from home from any other in that arc.
The telltale old-fashioned, green oil-based painted screened door told you immediately that you were not at the Ritz, or even its fifth cousin. As we entered amid the inevitable light-drawn flies, or moths, or whatever those insects are that you need to swat away to get in the door, or else you have to deal with them inside all night. Like I say these places are built for the moment and so the amenities are on the Spartan side.
As we walked inside, if I were to hazard a guess, and I was a professor in some upscale home interior design school, if someone presented this layout in a portfolio I would sent them, and sent them quickly, to remedial work. Or to a job at Sears& Roebuck. But we were here and here the basic bed, bureau, kitchenette with a small table and a couple of wooden chairs, small sleeper sofa, and tiny shower ¾ bathroom filled the room. The only things personal about this place were Angelica’s alternate uniform that matches the one that she has on hanging to one side, drying out for her next bout with the ham-fisted crowd at the diner, and a small open suitcase that had her clothes neatly packed in it. On the bureau her “making my face” fixings and a few gee gads that everyone throws on the bureau when they want to unload their pockets. Hey, I have placed my head down to sleep on paper-strewn park benches and under paperless bridges and on up to downy-pillowed, vast, roomy, and leafy suburban estates so a highway motel cabin is hardly down at the low end of my sleeping quarters resume. This, my friends, will be just fine for the night.
So we start the "just talk" that Angelica promised. I don’t and, frankly, no one should expect me to, remember most of what we talked about but here is my lingering impression. Turnabout is fair play. I thought that I was going to get an in-depth view of what “square” small-town Midwest girls dreamed of, or what drove them from the Lynds’ Middletown (that’s Muncie, okay, the subject of a famous study in sociology), to the wilds of Ohio. Instead I was the interrogated. It seems that Angelica had been so “brain-washed” (her term) about “hippies” or what the old town folks thought was hippie-dom (basically a variant of their mid-country fears of the “Bolsheviks” under every bed) that she was crazy to “capture” (my term) one. And, as it turned out, in the course of events, I was the one. And on top of that and here is a direct quote from her, “You seemed nice, right from the time you sat down.” (Well, of course, without question, without a doubt, it’s a given, and so on).
But here is the unexpected part, or at least the somewhat unexpected part. Off the top of my head I would not then, in the 1960s, bet my last dollar that a young woman from Muncie (town used here for convenience only) would be coy (nice word, right?) on her first “date.” Coyness here signifying her willingness to gather me to her bed at about 3:00 AM as we both were trying to fight off the sleep that was descending on us. But get this, and I will sign any notarized document necessary in support of this, she asked, yes, asked me into her bed. Well, as I mentioned above, she said I seemed nice, and there you have it. Of course, being “nice” I couldn’t say no. Yes, the gentleman “hippie”, that was me.
You know the boy meets girl plot lines of most movies have it all messed up. Either they meet, give each other lecherous stares (hell, not even winsome smiles), and proceed to tear each other clothes off in an act of sexual frenzy then spent the rest of the movie justifying their eternal love by that first edenic act. Or, and this is truer of older films (and prudish modern comic book-based superhero flicks), the “foreplay” lasts so long that by the time that they hit the downy billows you go ho-hum and are more interested in the unfolding plot. Novels follow a lot of the same paths except, mostly the sexual scenes are about a paragraph or so and reflect the wisdom of the parties involved more than raw sexual energy. Romance novels, a category that would seem to be made for sexual exploits, using don’t get around to hitting the pillows until about page 323 and by then all you care about is whether the sheets are pastel or designer prints.
Real life, real life first encounter romances (read: sexual encounters) are more halting and, frankly, timid. Except, of course, those phantom Herculean and nubile sex-crazed teeny-boppers of urban legend that we have heard about. Ya, I have heard about them too. But that’s about it, heard about them. Think about the awkwardness of that first touch reflecting those ancient memories of being kissed back in about sixth grade, or about those gone wrong affairs that have piled up in your life’s memory bank, or that intense moment when both parties look downward in trepidation at what may come ahead. Or, and here is where memory plays no trick, that woman back home, that woman of one thousand frustrations that you needed to get some distance from, and that set you on this blue-pink road, but whose 999 delights have now surfaced and clouded all thinking. I nevertheless plunged recklessly onward.
For those pruriently-inclined readers who now expect a touch by touch, feel by feel, clothes taking-off by clothes taking-off, flesh against flesh description of our precious, sweet, private, very private love-making look elsewhere. Wait a minute. Look elsewhere, unless you have a written book (and/or movie rights) contract in hand. In that case I will be more than happy to fill in the sweaty, steamy, lurid, blood-pressure-rising details. I will make the earth under that old cabin shake, and the rafters too. I will give details that would make the Marquis de Sade blush, blush profusely. If you have no contract then let’s leave it at this; something deep in that moonless Ohio night, that times out of joint, moonless Ohio night, created a passion, or better, a moment of passion that we both could have bet our last dollars on. Something that, it seemed, we had both been waiting all our lives for, although we didn’t use those words. Just a couple of sly, knowing smiles, and then sleep.
Suddenly, we were awakened with a start. A still dark of night start and a hard rapping on the door, that damn, fly-flecked, oil-based painted green door. And a voice, a female voice. “Angelica, one of Penny’s kids is sick you’ll have to take her shift.” Even a night of passion, a moonless Ohio sly-smiled night of passion, cannot fend off the day’s realities, Angelica’s day realities. She says: “Yes, I’ll be there in a little while,” almost automatically. But just as automatically she says to me: “Don’t go out on the highway yet.”
Humble, barely whitewashed cabin or exotic, leafy country estate if a woman jumps out of bed and orders me to stay put who was I to disobey, at least until I see what my next move was. I agreed and turn over. A few hours later she returns and we mess up her bed sheets again, and again. Then, after some Angelica sleep, and some kitchenette supper she says to me, just as boldly as when she invited me to her bed, that she wanted to go “on the road” with me.
My heart was racing for a thousand reasons, one of them included the thought that our little romance would lead to this although I didn't put it that way in my answer. More like: “Ya, I guess I was kinda thinking, maybe, a little about that idea.” A couple of days later, after she had worked some double-shifts and I did my bit doing some off-hand dish- washing for meals and wages we gathered up her stuff off the bureau, place it in that orderly small suitcase, shut that damn, moth-crusted oil-based painted green door and head for the trucks a couple of hundred yards away and our ride out. Our ride out in search of the blue-pink great American West night that I have not told her about, at least not in those exact words, but that that she will find out about in her own good time and in her own way.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Life Is Cheap South Of The Border, Real Cheap
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Orson Welles' Touch of Evil.
“Get that stinking bracero out of my sight before I kill him with my own two hands,” barked El Paso County Sheriff Harry White. Although barked did not, did not by a long shot, convey the menace in the good sheriff’s voice but after this length of time, almost thirty years, I think that barked will suffice for today’s more tender ears. And with that barked venomous sentence I was introduced to Harry White, El Paso Anglo justice, south Texas Mex sensibilities and small town Anglo justice along the tenuous border between Estados Unidos and Mexico. Let me tell those who though that I only breathed the rarified airs of the big questions-war, more war, and more war, saving green mother earth, trying to shine a little light on the rotten deal most of the little guys (and gals) have been dealt in this wicked old world you don’t know nothing about my rocky road start in the public prints.
After doing a hard two year stretch on the city desk as a glorified gopher for every rotten police blotter detail that the drunken copy editor could foist on me (else he would have to go and “miss” his date with Mr. Johnny Walker Red) at the Portland Daily Gazette (that is in Maine, I don’t think they have crime in the Oregon one) I had had it. Especially after spending a tough few months covering the Lady In Shay’s Pond case from the first day when some hikers found the first body until the Greer sisters drew life, no parole, for their little escapades. So I gave my notice, asked for a little recommendation (granted since I was given some half-ass award for my Lady coverage), and decided to head back west.
Oh, did I mention that that reignited desire to head west again (I had spent a few years out their cadging this and that, under my New Age a-borning name of the Prince of Love, as part of being “on” Captain Crunch’s yellow bus magical mystery tour and drug coma) did not seep into my crime frazzled head but was put there is one Lucy Defarge whom I met as part of that wild wind Lady story. She covered it for the Kittery Times and so we spent a fair amount of time on that, and kind of half- circling each other in the process. Then one night we just kind of united, and decided to live together on the road west. It was that kind of times for those who did not live through it. The idea was to pull up stakes in the East and see what happened picking up free-lance newspaper jobs (or “think” pieces for exotic New Age journals who had the “trust fund baby” financed wherewithal to pay for articles on whether solar or wind was better as an energy source for mother earth and stuff along that line. Don’t laugh. In a forty year career such “manna from heaven” got me, and mine, through some cold Maine winters.)
So Lucy and I headed out in a used Volkswagen bus (of course) in early 1976 and had an uneventful, and mainly interesting time, making some money here for a few weeks writing about the corn harvest for the Omaha Times, and there about some local celebrity in Winnemucca (that is in Nevada and there is definitely crime there, a money pit draws it like flies to honey) who donated his winnings at five card stud to help some orphanage. Strictly for cash stuff, and no apologies or dreams of high art reportage about it. Along the West Coast we mainly “lived off the land” as only the creative (and white) can do in those sunny climes. Then we started heading southwest rounding our way back East and south was best to avoid crazy rocky mountain white out squalls and other crazy western plains weather disasters.
So that was how I (we) came to be in El Paso, a little broke, a little road tired, and, frankly a little in need of some action right around the time Harry White blew his top. This is how I came to see this scene. My recommendation from the Gazette t(and my having been on a big town, I think the editor though it was that other Portland , although he never said as much), and my portfolio articles got me, well, got me right at the top of the pecking order on the city desk at the El Paso Chronicle. And, naturally, having been an “ace” crime reporter before I was a no on- the-job-training necessary top candidate when the Larkin story broke out over our heads.
Joe Bob (real names, not nicknames) Larkin was the biggest rancher/grower in southwest Texas, with tens of thousands of prime ranching and growing (cotton, mainly) acres right along the border. So, of course, he needed thousands of people willing to work that hot, dusty south Texas sun getting in the crops). And very conveniently he had some neighbors south of the border who would be more than happy to come and pick, hell, pick anything for fifty cents a bushel, a tin roof shack, and some gringo food. As now, braceros, wet-backs, mexs, tio tacos (y tias tambien) whatever mal nombre you wanted to call them this work required massive numbers of illegal workers to cross the lines, do the work, and then suffer whatever fate was in store for them after they were all used up. And Joe Bob Larkin was just the good old boy (from all accounts) to grease the hand of the devil himself to get his workers. And the king hell king of proving such services for his top constituent was one Sheriff Harry White.
So when one Joe Bob Larkin wound up (along with his bleach blonde, ah, personal secretary, although her employment status was a little fuzzy, especially to his wife back on the ranch) very dead in a flea-bag hotel room in Cuidad Juarez after some arsonist, some professional arsonist from the way the job was done, including jamming all the doors, torched the place big Harry White was across the border in a flash. No niceties of international diplomacy for Harry, big, no obese, gruff, cigar-chomping with a sweat-stained shirt and hat to match. Something out of an Orson Welles idea of what a borderland red neck sheriff, full of anglo hates, and anglo would look like.
But Harry had missed out on that community/international relations class that cops, gruff cops or meek, were supposed to take in order to smooth the tensions in some high risk situations. Old Harry just hated braceros, stinking braceros, from some tio taco on up. But this is where Harry really blundered. He didn’t realize that 1970 something was not 1940 something when he could have covered this whole thing up with no questions asked on either side of the border, and no reason to. The money exchanged was too good. And that too is where Harry underestimated Mexican National Police cop, Johnny Rivers, specially assigned to the case by the Mexican government because of his previous work with these illegal obreros.
Johnny Rivers (born Juan Rios down Sonora way) was a good cop, a cop not on the take, if you can believe that. Funny, he hated, hated maybe worse than Harry White the braceros, the stinking braceros, with their ten children and their manana ways always ready to eat crow when a gringo came around, or some batos locos looking for easy dough. See he was from them, his father and mother were from them, hell, probably back to the conquest he was from them. So his hate was driven differently from Harry’s, but still hate. And hate that some gabacho Anglo sheriff was coming into Mexico, taking his case, and beating down “his” braceros.
Harry just looked at good cop Johnny Rivers, noted the anglo-ized names, noted the gringa wife (probably some tramp from some Tijuana joy house from the look of her, but she was definitely gringa and knew how to stir a man, even an old sweat-stained leather cigar man), and noted those Pancho Villa charcoal eyes and that Zapata burning sense of national pride and knew he had to take this Juan Rios down a peg, maybe two.
But here is where it all got crazy, crazy for Harry, trying to cover up everything and no questions asked like always. Harry was the guy who set old Joe Bob up. He knew when Joe Bob would be in Juarez with his blond honey, knew that Joe Bob was trying to bring in his own bands of braceros, and paid, paid big money to that arsonist to “scare.” Joe Bob. The pro was just too good for his job (and was found face down later in some outback arroyo, food for the coyotes, after everything came out). Harry, instead of leaving well enough alone, decided that he would “solve” this one by bringing down everyone in the operation who could connect him with those thousands of border crossings. So he brought each and every one he could find in turn to the American side and “put the frame” on them. And that is where I came in, during one of his “hearings,” nightstick in hand.
And that is where Harry went over the edge, where his old ways did him dirt. Harry figured that Johnny was closing in on him, or would figure things out pretty soon and not give up until some bracero justice was done. So Harry just did what he thought was called for, he had that pretty gringa wife of Johnny’s kidnapped, held in a tough spot, and laid the bait for Johnny to come looking for her on the Mexican side of the border. Then he would have them both killed and set face down in some Mexican side arroyo, everybody figuring that some “coyote” rogue elements got to them. What Harry didn’t figure was that Johnny wasn’t one of those old time bracero take it and like it guys. Through about sixteen different connections he had with some mex drug lords he found her, offed her captors and headed straight back over the border.
Needless to say Harry got his just deserts, a couple of slugs in the right place from the gun of one Juan Rios, and he lying face down in a pool of oil at the oil well field where he finally hunted Harry down. And I, well, I got to write it all up for that old El Paso Chronicle. See, in the old days, Captain Crunch and his merry pranksters used to “winter” in LaJolla just above San Diego and the place we wintered at was a big old mansion which belonged to some heavy-duty drug dealers who let us stay there as caretakers. We did that for a couple of years, maybe three. So how do you thing a guy like Juan Rios, a good cop, got the sixteen different connections with those Mexican drug lords. Ya, life is cheap, and not just south of the border.
“Get that stinking bracero out of my sight before I kill him with my own two hands,” barked El Paso County Sheriff Harry White. Although barked did not, did not by a long shot, convey the menace in the good sheriff’s voice but after this length of time, almost thirty years, I think that barked will suffice for today’s more tender ears. And with that barked venomous sentence I was introduced to Harry White, El Paso Anglo justice, south Texas Mex sensibilities and small town Anglo justice along the tenuous border between Estados Unidos and Mexico. Let me tell those who though that I only breathed the rarified airs of the big questions-war, more war, and more war, saving green mother earth, trying to shine a little light on the rotten deal most of the little guys (and gals) have been dealt in this wicked old world you don’t know nothing about my rocky road start in the public prints.
After doing a hard two year stretch on the city desk as a glorified gopher for every rotten police blotter detail that the drunken copy editor could foist on me (else he would have to go and “miss” his date with Mr. Johnny Walker Red) at the Portland Daily Gazette (that is in Maine, I don’t think they have crime in the Oregon one) I had had it. Especially after spending a tough few months covering the Lady In Shay’s Pond case from the first day when some hikers found the first body until the Greer sisters drew life, no parole, for their little escapades. So I gave my notice, asked for a little recommendation (granted since I was given some half-ass award for my Lady coverage), and decided to head back west.
Oh, did I mention that that reignited desire to head west again (I had spent a few years out their cadging this and that, under my New Age a-borning name of the Prince of Love, as part of being “on” Captain Crunch’s yellow bus magical mystery tour and drug coma) did not seep into my crime frazzled head but was put there is one Lucy Defarge whom I met as part of that wild wind Lady story. She covered it for the Kittery Times and so we spent a fair amount of time on that, and kind of half- circling each other in the process. Then one night we just kind of united, and decided to live together on the road west. It was that kind of times for those who did not live through it. The idea was to pull up stakes in the East and see what happened picking up free-lance newspaper jobs (or “think” pieces for exotic New Age journals who had the “trust fund baby” financed wherewithal to pay for articles on whether solar or wind was better as an energy source for mother earth and stuff along that line. Don’t laugh. In a forty year career such “manna from heaven” got me, and mine, through some cold Maine winters.)
So Lucy and I headed out in a used Volkswagen bus (of course) in early 1976 and had an uneventful, and mainly interesting time, making some money here for a few weeks writing about the corn harvest for the Omaha Times, and there about some local celebrity in Winnemucca (that is in Nevada and there is definitely crime there, a money pit draws it like flies to honey) who donated his winnings at five card stud to help some orphanage. Strictly for cash stuff, and no apologies or dreams of high art reportage about it. Along the West Coast we mainly “lived off the land” as only the creative (and white) can do in those sunny climes. Then we started heading southwest rounding our way back East and south was best to avoid crazy rocky mountain white out squalls and other crazy western plains weather disasters.
So that was how I (we) came to be in El Paso, a little broke, a little road tired, and, frankly a little in need of some action right around the time Harry White blew his top. This is how I came to see this scene. My recommendation from the Gazette t(and my having been on a big town, I think the editor though it was that other Portland , although he never said as much), and my portfolio articles got me, well, got me right at the top of the pecking order on the city desk at the El Paso Chronicle. And, naturally, having been an “ace” crime reporter before I was a no on- the-job-training necessary top candidate when the Larkin story broke out over our heads.
Joe Bob (real names, not nicknames) Larkin was the biggest rancher/grower in southwest Texas, with tens of thousands of prime ranching and growing (cotton, mainly) acres right along the border. So, of course, he needed thousands of people willing to work that hot, dusty south Texas sun getting in the crops). And very conveniently he had some neighbors south of the border who would be more than happy to come and pick, hell, pick anything for fifty cents a bushel, a tin roof shack, and some gringo food. As now, braceros, wet-backs, mexs, tio tacos (y tias tambien) whatever mal nombre you wanted to call them this work required massive numbers of illegal workers to cross the lines, do the work, and then suffer whatever fate was in store for them after they were all used up. And Joe Bob Larkin was just the good old boy (from all accounts) to grease the hand of the devil himself to get his workers. And the king hell king of proving such services for his top constituent was one Sheriff Harry White.
So when one Joe Bob Larkin wound up (along with his bleach blonde, ah, personal secretary, although her employment status was a little fuzzy, especially to his wife back on the ranch) very dead in a flea-bag hotel room in Cuidad Juarez after some arsonist, some professional arsonist from the way the job was done, including jamming all the doors, torched the place big Harry White was across the border in a flash. No niceties of international diplomacy for Harry, big, no obese, gruff, cigar-chomping with a sweat-stained shirt and hat to match. Something out of an Orson Welles idea of what a borderland red neck sheriff, full of anglo hates, and anglo would look like.
But Harry had missed out on that community/international relations class that cops, gruff cops or meek, were supposed to take in order to smooth the tensions in some high risk situations. Old Harry just hated braceros, stinking braceros, from some tio taco on up. But this is where Harry really blundered. He didn’t realize that 1970 something was not 1940 something when he could have covered this whole thing up with no questions asked on either side of the border, and no reason to. The money exchanged was too good. And that too is where Harry underestimated Mexican National Police cop, Johnny Rivers, specially assigned to the case by the Mexican government because of his previous work with these illegal obreros.
Johnny Rivers (born Juan Rios down Sonora way) was a good cop, a cop not on the take, if you can believe that. Funny, he hated, hated maybe worse than Harry White the braceros, the stinking braceros, with their ten children and their manana ways always ready to eat crow when a gringo came around, or some batos locos looking for easy dough. See he was from them, his father and mother were from them, hell, probably back to the conquest he was from them. So his hate was driven differently from Harry’s, but still hate. And hate that some gabacho Anglo sheriff was coming into Mexico, taking his case, and beating down “his” braceros.
Harry just looked at good cop Johnny Rivers, noted the anglo-ized names, noted the gringa wife (probably some tramp from some Tijuana joy house from the look of her, but she was definitely gringa and knew how to stir a man, even an old sweat-stained leather cigar man), and noted those Pancho Villa charcoal eyes and that Zapata burning sense of national pride and knew he had to take this Juan Rios down a peg, maybe two.
But here is where it all got crazy, crazy for Harry, trying to cover up everything and no questions asked like always. Harry was the guy who set old Joe Bob up. He knew when Joe Bob would be in Juarez with his blond honey, knew that Joe Bob was trying to bring in his own bands of braceros, and paid, paid big money to that arsonist to “scare.” Joe Bob. The pro was just too good for his job (and was found face down later in some outback arroyo, food for the coyotes, after everything came out). Harry, instead of leaving well enough alone, decided that he would “solve” this one by bringing down everyone in the operation who could connect him with those thousands of border crossings. So he brought each and every one he could find in turn to the American side and “put the frame” on them. And that is where I came in, during one of his “hearings,” nightstick in hand.
And that is where Harry went over the edge, where his old ways did him dirt. Harry figured that Johnny was closing in on him, or would figure things out pretty soon and not give up until some bracero justice was done. So Harry just did what he thought was called for, he had that pretty gringa wife of Johnny’s kidnapped, held in a tough spot, and laid the bait for Johnny to come looking for her on the Mexican side of the border. Then he would have them both killed and set face down in some Mexican side arroyo, everybody figuring that some “coyote” rogue elements got to them. What Harry didn’t figure was that Johnny wasn’t one of those old time bracero take it and like it guys. Through about sixteen different connections he had with some mex drug lords he found her, offed her captors and headed straight back over the border.
Needless to say Harry got his just deserts, a couple of slugs in the right place from the gun of one Juan Rios, and he lying face down in a pool of oil at the oil well field where he finally hunted Harry down. And I, well, I got to write it all up for that old El Paso Chronicle. See, in the old days, Captain Crunch and his merry pranksters used to “winter” in LaJolla just above San Diego and the place we wintered at was a big old mansion which belonged to some heavy-duty drug dealers who let us stay there as caretakers. We did that for a couple of years, maybe three. So how do you thing a guy like Juan Rios, a good cop, got the sixteen different connections with those Mexican drug lords. Ya, life is cheap, and not just south of the border.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Romance Down Sonora Way
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing his early To Ramona.
To Ramona by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
Ramona
Come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise
The flowers of the city
Though breathlike
Get deathlike at times
And there’s no use in tryin’
T’ deal with the dyin’
Though I cannot explain that in lines
Your cracked country lips
I still wish to kiss
As to be under the strength of your skin
Your magnetic movements
Still capture the minutes I’m in
But it grieves my heart, love
To see you tryin’ to be a part of
A world that just don’t exist
It’s all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feelin’ like this
I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
By worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin’ and returnin’
On back to the South
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand
Yet there’s no one to beat you
No one t’ defeat you
’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad
I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better ’n no one
And no one is better ’n you
If you really believe that
You know you got
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you must be exactly like them
I’d forever talk to you
But soon my words
They would turn into a meaningless ring
For deep in my heart
I know there is no help I can bring
Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I’ll come and be cryin’ to you
Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music
“If you see that bastard Be-Bop Benny tell him, and tell him straight, that he still owes me fifteen hundred dollars for that last shipment I delivered up norte. And tell him he better come across quick because my guys don’t wait for late payments. Don’t wait at all,” yelled Selena, with no guile in her voice and no concern that anyone or everyone within earshot might hear her, across the Hotel Sonora lobby as I checked in at the main desk for a conference that I was attending. And, as if to emphasis that last point, she said the whole thing over again in Spanish for the locals, and me.
I am sure more than one companero was taken aback by the dead death-rattle tone in her voice coming from a senorita whose looks epitomized any virtue that came out of the old time Spanish conquest. Dark black hair, dark skin but mixed just right by generations of mestizo blending, big ruby-red lips and a toothy smile to set them off, all topped by those dancing black Spanish eyes that tore the heart (and soul) of more than one man, companero or gringo. Hell they almost had me just then and I was nothing but a convenient whipping boy caught up in some ill-fated (or apparently ill-fated) international drug deal that had some loose ends sticking out. Yes, Be-Bop Benny was in serious trouble if he ever showed his face south of the border, and maybe any place until this issue was resolved.
It was not always that way though, not by a long shot. It all started out as innocence and wildflowers when Selena, fresh in town, stepped up to Be-Bop Benny a few years back in the middle of Cambridge Common and asked him point blank if he wanted to “share a joint” with her. Said not in that death voice that just strung me out across this lobby floor but in that sing-song voice of hers then that spoke of transport and swirls. As well as along with those eyes, that skin and those ruby-red lips. He did, and they did. That was the start of it, simple. A good start for the times, and the times were full of little innocent starts like this, some still burning in the trying 1970s night others, well, others, wound up like this bummer of a scene that I have found myself in the middle of. And no way to fix it, to fix Be-Bop Benny’s problem.
See I don’t have clue one where one Peter Paul Markin, moniker Be-Bop Benny, is in this year of our lord 1976. The last I had seen, or heard of him, was in late 1974 when he was just getting in a little over his head and was making mutterings to me about splitting for the coast (West Coast, of course) and getting clean, ocean clean. But mainly to get Selena off his Selena-obsessed mind, and get out from under his “product” problem. I also knew that he had “borrowed” fifteen hundred dollars that he was supposed to pay to Selena for her to give to her distributor, and so on up the chain.
Damn, it all started out so innocently. A couple of joint “joints,” some wild Spanish perfume and a couple of tumbles in some silken sheets and Be-Bop Benny was Selena’s slave. And then his money ran out, and hers too. That was when she brought up the matter of employment, lucrative employment to keep those sheets swishing and the wolves from the door. The idea at first was for her to head home, Sonora, down in sunny Mexico, pick up some dope (weed, mary jane, herb, whatever you call it in your neighborhood) bring it back and sell to a few friends. And then back to the swishing silky sheets. Then those friends brought their friends around, and those friends their friends until they were selling, selling hot and heavy (for the Mex dope was primo, Acapulco Gold), to strangers and their friends. So the business got out of hand after a while. And Be-Bop Benny got tired of his mule work, got tired of the trips to Sonora, and got tired of Selena sharing her joint come-on and have some fun with every guy who walked in the middle of Cambridge Common. Hell he was crazy for her, and she was just crazy. She tried her routine on me just to spite Be-Bop one time after some fight over dough just to do it.
So if you see Be-Bop Benny tell him for me to keep moving, moving fast, and keep the hell away from Sonora, down in sunny Mexico. Okay, amigo.
To Ramona by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
Ramona
Come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise
The flowers of the city
Though breathlike
Get deathlike at times
And there’s no use in tryin’
T’ deal with the dyin’
Though I cannot explain that in lines
Your cracked country lips
I still wish to kiss
As to be under the strength of your skin
Your magnetic movements
Still capture the minutes I’m in
But it grieves my heart, love
To see you tryin’ to be a part of
A world that just don’t exist
It’s all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feelin’ like this
I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
By worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin’ and returnin’
On back to the South
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand
Yet there’s no one to beat you
No one t’ defeat you
’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad
I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better ’n no one
And no one is better ’n you
If you really believe that
You know you got
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you must be exactly like them
I’d forever talk to you
But soon my words
They would turn into a meaningless ring
For deep in my heart
I know there is no help I can bring
Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I’ll come and be cryin’ to you
Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music
“If you see that bastard Be-Bop Benny tell him, and tell him straight, that he still owes me fifteen hundred dollars for that last shipment I delivered up norte. And tell him he better come across quick because my guys don’t wait for late payments. Don’t wait at all,” yelled Selena, with no guile in her voice and no concern that anyone or everyone within earshot might hear her, across the Hotel Sonora lobby as I checked in at the main desk for a conference that I was attending. And, as if to emphasis that last point, she said the whole thing over again in Spanish for the locals, and me.
I am sure more than one companero was taken aback by the dead death-rattle tone in her voice coming from a senorita whose looks epitomized any virtue that came out of the old time Spanish conquest. Dark black hair, dark skin but mixed just right by generations of mestizo blending, big ruby-red lips and a toothy smile to set them off, all topped by those dancing black Spanish eyes that tore the heart (and soul) of more than one man, companero or gringo. Hell they almost had me just then and I was nothing but a convenient whipping boy caught up in some ill-fated (or apparently ill-fated) international drug deal that had some loose ends sticking out. Yes, Be-Bop Benny was in serious trouble if he ever showed his face south of the border, and maybe any place until this issue was resolved.
It was not always that way though, not by a long shot. It all started out as innocence and wildflowers when Selena, fresh in town, stepped up to Be-Bop Benny a few years back in the middle of Cambridge Common and asked him point blank if he wanted to “share a joint” with her. Said not in that death voice that just strung me out across this lobby floor but in that sing-song voice of hers then that spoke of transport and swirls. As well as along with those eyes, that skin and those ruby-red lips. He did, and they did. That was the start of it, simple. A good start for the times, and the times were full of little innocent starts like this, some still burning in the trying 1970s night others, well, others, wound up like this bummer of a scene that I have found myself in the middle of. And no way to fix it, to fix Be-Bop Benny’s problem.
See I don’t have clue one where one Peter Paul Markin, moniker Be-Bop Benny, is in this year of our lord 1976. The last I had seen, or heard of him, was in late 1974 when he was just getting in a little over his head and was making mutterings to me about splitting for the coast (West Coast, of course) and getting clean, ocean clean. But mainly to get Selena off his Selena-obsessed mind, and get out from under his “product” problem. I also knew that he had “borrowed” fifteen hundred dollars that he was supposed to pay to Selena for her to give to her distributor, and so on up the chain.
Damn, it all started out so innocently. A couple of joint “joints,” some wild Spanish perfume and a couple of tumbles in some silken sheets and Be-Bop Benny was Selena’s slave. And then his money ran out, and hers too. That was when she brought up the matter of employment, lucrative employment to keep those sheets swishing and the wolves from the door. The idea at first was for her to head home, Sonora, down in sunny Mexico, pick up some dope (weed, mary jane, herb, whatever you call it in your neighborhood) bring it back and sell to a few friends. And then back to the swishing silky sheets. Then those friends brought their friends around, and those friends their friends until they were selling, selling hot and heavy (for the Mex dope was primo, Acapulco Gold), to strangers and their friends. So the business got out of hand after a while. And Be-Bop Benny got tired of his mule work, got tired of the trips to Sonora, and got tired of Selena sharing her joint come-on and have some fun with every guy who walked in the middle of Cambridge Common. Hell he was crazy for her, and she was just crazy. She tried her routine on me just to spite Be-Bop one time after some fight over dough just to do it.
So if you see Be-Bop Benny tell him for me to keep moving, moving fast, and keep the hell away from Sonora, down in sunny Mexico. Okay, amigo.
Sunday, July 01, 2012
The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers Now!-“Court Confirms Ten-Year Sentence for Lynne Stewart” by Jeff Mackler
Click on the headline to link to the Justice For Lynn Stewart Defense Committee for the latest in her case.
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
*******
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
*******
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
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