From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-The Great Blue-Pink American West Night Ghost Dance

Enough of muddy, rutted, always bum-busting rutted, country back roads, enough of breathless scenic vistas and cows, enough of trees dripping sap, rain, and bugs, strange bugs, not city bugs, that was for sure, but biting frenzy worthy anyway. Enough of all that to last a life-time, thank you. Enough too of Bunsen burners (last seen in some explosive chemical flash-out flame out in high school chemistry class and, maybe, they have rebuilt the damn lab since then, maybe though they have left it “ as is” for an example), Coleman stoves (too small for big pots, stew worthy, simmering pots to feed hungry campers and hard, country hard, to light) wrapped blankets (getting ever mildewed ), second-hand sweated army sleeping bags (in desperate need of washing after a month of night exertions with those ever laughing hands reaching out to his companion Joyell), and minute (small, not speed in throwing up , especially when rains came pouring down and they were caught out without shelter from the storm, a metaphor maybe) pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated eastern mountain stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, and nature in the raw. Cities, please. Large Pacific-splashed roar of ocean cities with life in sheltered caverns and be quick about it.

Quebec City, Montreal, small catholic ile this and sainte that cities, towns really, in between passed in lightning speed, in 1972 lightning speed, deep into westward ho great blue-pink skied American west nights (splashed too). Onward, back to Estados Unidos entrances (studying quick-draw Spanish along the way for the southern Mexican winter and hence use of quick-draw mex words instead of U.S. of A rock landing words). Through fossil-fueled Detroit and radical oasis Ann Arbors of the mind, quickly, and then some Neola cornfields and Aunt Betty breakfasts, non-descript or rather same descript, cornfields that is, breakfasts worthy of the corn-fed. A time to ponder though, cornfield, and more cornfield, and aunt betty wisdom, totally foreign although not alien like they were in some other country, and not estatos unidos (better not say that in corn-fed Neola though you might get an argument, an argument in spades, from the normally give me your hand shake people. Yes, strange people, almost Amish except, of course, the gun-racked pick-up trucks and the odd sign or two about no six-shooters allowed inside breakfast cafes). Then through to white out-eked Denver and Boulder rockymountainhighs and from there down dinosaur roads into the high desert thundering night. And to this dream, this Peter Paul Markin dream:

Damn, already I missed Joyell, road-worthy, road-travel easy, easy on the eyes and easy getting us roadside and campfire friends Joyell as I traveled across Interstate 10 onto the great high desert southwest American hitchhike road after we parted at the Phoenix bus station. She, heading home East, at least New York east, from the road on some pressing family emergency business, some stockholder stuff, and I to the savage search for the blue-pink great American West night. (We are to meet up in some Pacific splash town, probably L.A., and from there head south, tex-mex south.)

I will tell you true, stockbroker yankee father Mafioso don or not I wished to high heaven she had not gone. See she had started to see thing s my way a little about white picket fence commitment once she knew I could be more companionable without such talk, and committed still in my own way. And glad as hell to reach my laughing hands out for her like the first snow-filled New Hampshire high purpose anti-war conference night we met. (And she glad too, the road was our cement and our getting Boston city stinks blown off.) True too I did not relish driving alone, picking up vagrant hitchhikers and other kindred in the hot, arid, high desert sputter.

Right then though I sighted my first connection hitchhike ride heading out of Phoenix and as luck would have it this big bruiser, full tattoo armed with snakes, roses, and lost loves names, ex-truck driver who was obviously benny-ed, benny-ed to perdition and was talking a blue streak was heading to some motorcycle jamboree, heading to Joshua Tree in California, my next destination (although he did not call it a jamboree and I had better not either unless I want to risk offending the entire Hell’s Angels universe at one stroke. Let’s call it a tumble-rumble-stumble and be done with it. They’ll like that.).

All I wanted was company on the ride that day and unfettered thoughts of Joyell but I knew enough of the road, enough of the truck driver come-on part of it anyway, even if ex-trucker, to know that this guy’s blue streak was a small price to pay for such companionship. See, some guys, some trucker guys like Denver Slim, who left me off at some long ago (or it seemed like long ago, really only a couple of years) Steubenville truck stop on my way American south one time wanted to talk man to man. Back and forth like real people, especially as I reminded him of his errant (read: hippie –swaying) son. Other guys are happy for the company so they can, at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour with the engine revved high and where conversation is made almost painful and chock-filled with the “what did you says?”, spout forth on their homespun philosophy and their take on this wicked old world. With these guys an occasional “Ya, that’s right,” or a timely “What did you mean by that?” will stand you in good stead and you can nod out into your own thoughts. Forlorn Joyell thoughts.

And that is exactly where I wanted be, as old Buck (where do they get these names) droned on and on about how the government was doing, or not doing this or that for, or to, the little guy who helped build up, not tear down, the country like him. Me, I was thinking about what Aunt Betty, sweet Neola cornfields grandmotherly Aunt Betty (everybody called her Aunt Betty, even guys who were older than she was, after the name of her sweet Neola diner), said a month or so back when we pitched our tent for a few days in her backyard, we did some chores in kind, and she fed us, royal Midwest fed us, still rung in my ears. I was good for Joyell. Hell, I know I was. Hell, if I had any sense I would admit what I knew inside. Joyell was good for me too.

But see the times were funny is a way. No way in 1962, or ‘64, or ’66, let’s say, that I would have run into a Joyell. I was strung out, strung out hard, on neurotic, long black-haired (although that was optional), kind of skinny (not thin, not slender, skinny, wistfully skinny, I say), bookish, Harvard Square, maybe a poet, kind of girls. If I said beatnik girls, and not free-form, ethereal, butterfly breeze “hippie”girls you’d know what I meant. As a kid I was cranked on pale, hell wan was more like it, dark-haired, hard Irish Catholic girls, and I mean hard Irish Catholic girls with twelve novena books in their hands, and chaste lust in their hearts. So, I swear, when Joyell’s yankee goodheart number turned up, I was clueless how to take just a plain-spoken, says what she means, means what she says young woman who had dreams (unformed, mainly, but dreams nevertheless) that also were plain-spoken. Ah, I can’t explain it now, and I doubt I ever will. Just say I was stunted, stunned, and smitten, okay and let me listen to old Buck’s drone.

****
I have now put many a mile between me and Phoenix and here I am well clear of that prairie fire dream now into sweet winter high desert night California (still hot during the day, jesus, one hundred at Needles, although not humid, thank Christ) not far from some old now run down, crumbling Native American dwellings on Joshua Tree reservation that keep drawing my attention and I still want to utter that oath, that Joyell fealty oath. Buck has gone, and thanks, over to Twenty-nine Palms. (Marines watch out when Buck and his tribe come through.)

Sitting by this Joshua night camp fire casting weird ghost night-like shadows just makes my Joyell hunger worst. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies,” Jack (something out of a Pancho Villa recruitment poster and, in another age, the look of a good man to have beside you in a street fight) and Mattie (some Captain America easy rider poster boy brimming with all that old long gone Buck found ugly in his America although Mattie did two hard tours in ‘Nam), playing their new-found (at least to me) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone.

Hey, I just remembered, sitting here wrapped up in Joyell and ancient primal tribal memories out of the whistling black star-filled night that I haven’t filled you in on where I have been, who I have seen (like John and Mattie), and how I got here after depositing Buck at his stop on this star –crossed night. Jesus, and here we are only a few hundred miles from the ocean. I can almost smell, smell that algae sea churned smell, and almost see the foam-flecked waves turn against the jagged-edged La Jolla rocks and mad, aging surfer boys from another time looking for that perfect wave. Yah, another more innocent time before all hell broke loose on us in America and crushed our innocent youthful dreams in the rice paddies of Asia, our Joyell plain-spoken dreams, but not our capacity to dream. That only makes the Joyell hurt worst as I remember that she had never seen the Pacific Ocean, the jagged edged, foam-flecked ocean that I went on and on about and I was to be her Neptune on that voyage west to the rim of the world. Well, let me get to it, the filling you in part.

After grabbing up and letting off that strange from blue streak talkin’ hard rider old Buck I did tell you about, I got to Joshua Tree in good order. If I didn’t tell you before, and now that I think about it I didn’t, I (we, before Joyell high-tailed it back east), was to hook up with my now traveling companions, Jack and Mattie, here at Joshua for the final trip west to the ocean and serious blue-pink visions. Jack and Mattie are two guys that I picked up on the Massachusetts highways heading south in the days when I had a borrowed car (from sweet pea Joyell) in the early spring. We had some adventures going south, that I will tell you about another time, before I left them off in Washington, D.C. so they could head west from there. We agreed then to meet up in Denver, where they expected to stay for a while, later in the year.

My last contact with them in late summer had them still there but when Joyell and I arrived in late October at the communal farm on the outskirts of Denver where they had been staying we were informed that they had gotten nervous about being stuck in the snow-bound Rockies and wanted to head south as fast as they could. They had left a Joshua Tree (the town) address for us to meet them at. We stayed at the commune for a few days to rest up, doing a little of this and that, mostly that, and then we headed out on what turned to be an uneventful and mercifully short hitchhike road trip to Phoenix on the way to connect with them. And then my Joyell world fell apart, as you know.

And so here we were making that last push to the coast but not before we investigate these Native American lands that, as it turns out, we, Jack Mattie and I (not Joyell though when I asked her about it one hell-bent night much later), all had been interested in ever since our kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-Along Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.

Earlier on this day I am talking about we had been over to Black Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely across the west not all that long ago but who are now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of our own warrior shaman trances are still in our heads this now blazing camp fire night. I was still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive the marauding“white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but we had scored some peyote buttons (strictly for religious purposes, as you will see) and the buttons had started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (strictly for medicinal purposes as well).

Just then in this dark, abyss dark, darker than I have ever seen the night sky in the citified East even though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Joyell I was embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And if my ears didn’t deceive me, and they didn’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle I hear, and hear plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.

And after more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, I swear, I swear on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls I saw the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that I had heard got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, we three, we three television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so we were actually out of synch with the wall action, to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya...until we sped up to catch the real pace. After what seems an eternity we were ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white injustices.

But then just as quickly the now flickering camp fire flame went out, or went to ember, the shadow ghost dance warriors were gone and we crumble in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance and revenge. We, after regaining some strength, all decided that we had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, will do us in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment we, or at least I knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-On The Road, Circa 1972-A Detour

For Jack Kerouac

Fidgety. No, not some usual since schoolboy preternatural eternal girl swaying in the mind’s eye breeze, next girl glance, next girl trying to tie old Titan down, next-up girl swaying from some old time film noir fidgety. Fidgety, get out of town, get out of the rut, hit the Jack Kerouac asphalt highway curve- kicking Dean Moriarty as Neal Cassidy American hero daredevil driver with a smirk , magic gear-shifting road warrior (pressing on after a mad midnight to dawn fresh air late 1971 re-reading of “On The Road,” the first time was just 1962 kid’s stuff, schoolboy trying to get out of the house kid’s stuff, and just reading what everybody cool was reading to be cool, to be beat, late faux beat as it turned out), farmer brown get the stink blown off fidgety after wasting away so much breeze on this and that, inconsequential this and that.

And just maybe too, get out of town, get out of the hot humid Boston nights that disturbed his sleep, hit the highway, to rekindle a sagging girl sway relationship (real girl, real girl sway not some white blouse, white shorts femme serving them off the arm in some seashore diner thinking of mayhem and waiting for some Frankie to save her film noir swaying) that was heading to the rocky shores (see I told you that swaying madness goes to the grave, eternal, or close). Name your reason, or maybe no reason but get out, and get out fast before the moment crashes down on you. Yes, a Jack moment and for once he could feel what it meant to be beat, beat down, beat around, beat six ways to Sunday and still come up swinging.

It was that kind of time. Rocky shores, by the way, just then meaning aversion to “commitment,”commitment to white picket fence complete with fully mortgaged white picket fence house, running field dogs, mutts maybe, and flowered gardens (left unspoken those two point three kids to clutter up said house, to pet such dogs and to run amok in the petunias but she, Joyell she, to sagging girl sway name her, at least knew how not to sell her case). Jesus, no, jesus one thousand, no, one million times no, not after he had just escaped, and barely, steel-barred rooms, dram shop de-drunks, and erased sweet bobby kennedy-visioned dreams of forty years, a pension, a gold watch and some minor thefts in the service of the people. No, he roared, let’s just shake the dust of this town and see what happens kind of gentle like. Okay. Ah, okay. Joyell finally seeing the light okay, he thought.

So off into the chili night (no sic, chili, the final southern destination was winter Mexico before the drug cartels blew into mountain breeze Cuernavaca, shooting up red bishops, Mex federales, lefty, the shades of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and whoever else go in the way. Remind me to tell you sometime about a busted deal back before the serious drug madness when sweet boy Billie Bradley wound up face down in some dusty Mex street just for being, well, greedy) they roamed, or rather prepared to roam. Prepared with Salvation Army’s, Joe’s Army-Navy, Harry’s Cheapo Depot cheap, serviceable camping gear, or rather the bare minimum they could squeeze in that broken down box of a car (a Datsun, a gone automobile name yellow, and far from his (and mine too) boyhood dream ’57 Chevy cherry reds or sweet flame red Camaros or green Mustangs) that he had managed to cadge off some guy, a friend of a friend guy, who had no cash, needed to get west fast (or at least out of town and west was the only way unless he figured on swimming).West fast meaning either girl trouble or some imminent drug crash out, busted no question, knowing whose friend of a friend he was. They, smart they, smart Joyell they, had set aside plenty of funds just in case this rag-a-muffin of a car decided to join its Zen spirit master on some by-road west when they headed north. North, then west, then south in that innocent chili night.

Working funds to see them through thick and thin? Well said white picket fence (complete with house, dog, flowers and creeping one child) dreaming yankee lady had some dough, some father Manhattan NYSE stockbroker (or some such profession he never really did get all the details of his occupation although he acted like a damned proper don in some Mafioso dream sequel and so just in case he or his capo progeny are around let’s stick with stockbroker), which then meant dough, daughter dough. But said princess daughter (WASP daughter, alright) found herself slumming (if dream slumming really, and talking about it too with all her waspish girlfriends like some red badge of courage, but you probably figured that out already) with some half-heathen, half-broken, faux Irishman and while she was not above white picket dreams she still insisted that on this trip they would do frugal, thrifty yankee “dutch treat.” And this fidgety dog-fearing, white paint-hating, and weed-loving (the lawn destroying kind, okay) half-heathen wanted to have his own dough just in case he decided that he had to go to Butte instead of Beverly Hills in a fit of hubris. Oh, freedom, dough freedom.

So our brother, our story brother, Peter Paul just in case you had forgotten his name, worked at this and that and if you asked him (or her, but with scowls) what he did you would receive the usual hobo tramp bum – “a little of this and that.” A little this and that really meaning “the best he could,” just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. And “the best he could” got him that yellow box car, a couple of army sleeping bags(vintage World War II, of course, no Korean War/Vietnam War stuff to revile his dreams, or her dreams of him when she played him a hero, their love was fresh, and they fell fitfully down in first days 1971 New Hampshire snows and kissed gentle kisses just to see what it was like to kiss a hero she later told him and he laughed, and she reddened, and he reached out his laughing hands to her, and, and, but on with our travel story, you can figure out what those laughing hands did, can’t you), a small two-man army surplus tent (excuse me, two person, both to reflect the “new age” of person-hood and that that two part was all that could possibly fit into the damn thing, not even a stray dog could nuzzle his or her nose in), and a “house” worth of utensils. Canteens, Coleman stoves, mess kits, all very travel-worthy stuff as he knew from his minute now expired field army experience. Cheapsville, very cheapsville stuff, got it.

And off, hot August dog days off, heading north to catch a breeze and a dream before it got too cold, or the funds ran out after those first days of spending more than was budgeted because this or that cost more than expected. Backup though- some yankee stockbroker would come through, or some half-heathen would take another stab at “doing this and that.” First stop old time yankee gangway to fresh seas hideout from the Irish and other assorted trash Kennebunkport. (Not Kennebunk, that was for the heathens, she told him without qualification or guile, personal knowledge told him, and he was proud that day she told him, proud of his little smitten waspy conquest and gave just a peep of a thought that maybe a white picket fence might not be so bad with such a find.)

First night sleep out in some yankee farmer’s blueberry late season black fly-bitten field and first crack of setting up camp. Long hours to set “pup” tent (with no room for pup, no way, save that for dream white picket fences and petunias), fix hungry dinner on the big pot averse Coleman stove and wait for eternal, infernal water to boil for fresh day coffees and giggles. They are off, they are finally off, they are free, and they are one day into hard adventure and still in one piece- the morning would tell that same tale. Hey, this is easy, he said, easy before the fidgets could speak.

Heading north bright next morning to yankee Bar Harbors, maybe deeper yankee than Kennebunkport (with no Kennebunk for the heathen refuge, just Ellsworth) and more tents, and more eternal, infernal waits for precious coffees. North more, Campobello, north Calais (callus; don’t call it some French thing though if you don’t want to get into an argument). Then more slowly, more north to New Brunswick, sweet Moncktons and switch off youth hostel indoor one night living (nobody probably every called that dorm hostel sweet before, no reason to, but I will remain discrete and let you just think of laughing hands), north more to Nova Scotia (New Scotland, no question) Neil’s Harbor tents and Peggy’s Cove bed and breakfast inn (figured in the funding, so don’t get nervous). Push until no more norths (or easts) can be seen short of flight or boats and then west, the great blue pink America west night adventure waits and they are both like two intrepid pioneer kids (although now, after a few weeks, old camping hands) hard –faced to the wind.

Still more Canadian lands but island Prince Edward Island lands, sweet Charlottetown, rocked inlet boats, and another bed and breakfast, this time with ocean view and white picket fences but both of them are too rough-hewn now, just now anyway after several weeks on the roads, to care a fig for white picket fences. Or rustic scenes and rolling farm lands, and endless sea-side fishing villages just starting to fog up and rust up with lack of shoals work. Time for the cities, time for Quebec City and Montreal down the mighty Saint Lawrence and ooh, la, la French delights. And lights other than stars, sounds other than night cicadas, and talk other than get firewood, get tent pegs set and hammered, sleeping bags morning dew aired out, and fresh coffee boiling waits, infinity waits. Edge city waits.

Out Of The Be-Bop Film Noir Night- The Crime Noir “Kansas City Confidential”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime film noir, Kansas City Confidential.

DVD Review

Kansas City Confidential, John Payne, Preston Foster, Coleen Gray, Jack Elam, directed by Phillip Karlson, United Artists, 1952

I have said this many times. Sure I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background, and shadowy moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh yah, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good, some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, the film under review, Kansas City Confidential, is in the former category.

And why shouldn’t it be. One fall guy Joe (fall guys seem always to be named Joe, regular Joes I guess to make the cut in regular guy America aborning in the late 1940s), played here in a understated way by John Payne, a little the worst for wear in post-World War II America, having had a few legal problems of his own, gets caught up in the dragnet after a major heist (over a million dollars, a lot of money then but just pocket change today) of a bank, in of all places Kansas City (Missouri, of course, not the staid, square Kansas one). Now all of this fall guy action, aside from the criminal intent and cash reward, has been set-up by a disgruntled, vengeful ex-cop (played by Preston Foster) who masterminds the whole thing.

Of course such a major heist then (as now) requires several, um, “associates,” to pull the damn thing off in this case masked associates (for their own and Foster's self-protection against the dreaded “stoolie’ syndrome. That old chestnut about honor among thieves being honored, if honored at all, more in the breach than the observance. Just ask about ten thousand guys serving time, hard time if you get a chance) Said associates are not anyone you or I would want to hang around with, even if you were strictly a hang around corner boy because you would have to watch your wallet, to speak nothing of your back from minute one. These guys are strictly losers, especially one grafter extraordinaire, Pete Harris, played to manic perfection by Jack Elam. (The others are perennial bad guys Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand).

Now Joe, as one might expect, takes umbrage, yes, umbrage at having taken a beating from the cops, and also for being set up as the fall guy. So, naturally, as any crime noir hero worth his salt would do, he in good private citizen outraged fashion is going to get to the bottom of this thing come hell or high water. And the rest of the plot line centers of following the clues, and following the sun to sunny Mexico (low film budget fauxMexico in some Hollywood back lot, to be sure) to undo the bad guys, and maybe catch a reward. Or at least a stray gringa or senorita. Naturally he does, the gringa part anyway, although she turns out to be mastermind ex-cop’s daughter (a law student daughter, not exactly a femme fatale hiding out in sunny Mexico until some guy who knows how to do some heavy lifting comes along and falls for her like Jane Greer did to Robert Mitchum in the classic “Out Of The Past,”played by Coleen Gray).

Other than the inevitable tacky ending ( I won’t spoil your fun by telling what it is) this one moves along nicely, is filled with some nice twists, and is, as usual with black and white noir films great on those shadowy takes which reveal evil in the making. Especially those loser, grifter, chain-smoking Jack Elam takes. Some noirs you watch for the magic camera work, some for the femme fatales that drive the story line, some for the tough guys and their gaff. This one you get for the plot line.

Flyer For The Smedley Butler Brigade- Veterans For Peace 2012 Veterans Day/Armistice Day Commemoration –Sunday November 11 in Boston Common At Noon

President Obama Pardon Private Bradley Manning Now!

Free The Alleged Wikileak Whistleblower Now!

 

Bradley Manning in his own words:

"God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms...

 

I want people to see the truth... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

*************

The Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private Bradley Manning and his fight for freedom from his jailers, the American military.

 

Private Manning is facing a February 2013 court-martial for allegedly simply blowing the whistle on something that is a hard fact of war- war crimes by American soldiers through release of the “Collateral Murder” tape and what have become known as the Iraq and Afghan War logs.

 

Private Manning has paid the price for his alleged acts with almost 900 days of pre-trial confinement, including allegations of torture during this period, and is now facing life imprisonment for simple acts of humanity. For letting the American people know what they perhaps did not want to know but must know- when soldiers, American soldiers, go to war some awful things can and do happen.

 

For more information about the Private Manning case and what you can do to help or to sign the online petition to the Secretary of the Army for his release contact:

 

Bradley Manning Support Network: http://www.bradleymanning.org/ or the Courage To Resist Website:http://www.couragetoresist.org/

 

Smedley Butler Brigade- Veterans for Peace Website: http://smedleyvfp.org/  - on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/smedleyvfp -on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SmedleyVFP#

 

Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us In Davis Square, Somerville –The Stand-Out Is Every Wednesday From 4:00-5:00 PM

Click on the headline to link to the  "Private Bradley Manning Petition" website page. 

Markin comment:

The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward a mid- winter trial. Those of us who support his cause should redouble our efforts to secure his freedom. For the past several months there has been a weekly stand-out in Greater Boston across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Bradley Manning Square for the stand-out’s duration) in Somerville on Friday afternoons but we have since July 4, 2012 changed the time and day to 4:00-5:00 PM on Wednesdays. This stand-out has, to say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with more supporters present. Please join us when you can. Or better yet if you can’t join us start a Support Bradley Manning weekly stand-out in some location in your town whether it is in the Boston area, Berkeley or Berlin. And please sign the petition for his release either in person or through the "Bradley Manning Support Network". We have placed links to the "Manning Network"and "Pardon Private Manning Square" website below.

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Bradley Manning Support Network-http://www.bradleymanning.org/

Manning Square website-http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/

Remarks Made By A Speaker At The Pardon Bradley Manning Rally At Downtown Boston Obama Headquarters-September 6, 2012

Welcome one and all and I am glad you could be here for this important struggle.

The Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private Bradley Manning and his fight for freedom from his jailers, the American military.

Now usually when I get before a mic or am on a march I am shouting to high heaven about some injustice. Recently I was called strident by someone and when it comes to the struggle against this country’s wars, the struggle for social and economic equality, and for freedom for our political prisoners I am indeed strident.

But I am looking for something today something personally important to me and so I will try to lower my temperature a bit- I want, like you, for President Obama to pardon Bradley Manning so I will be nice, or try to be.    

Bradley Manning is in a sense the poster person for all of us who have struggled against the wars of the last decade. He stands charged with allegedly leaking information about American war crimes and other matters of public concern to Wikileaks. We, and we are not alone on this, do not see whistleblowing on such activities as a crime but as an elemental humanitarian act and public service. 

Private Manning has paid the price for his alleged acts with over 800 days of pre-trial confinement and is now facing life imprisonment for simple acts of humanity. For letting the American people know what they perhaps did not want to know but must know- when soldiers, American soldiers, go to war some awful things can happen and do. He has also suffered torture at the hands of the American government for his brave stand. We have become somewhat inured to foreign national being tortured by the American government at places like Guantanamo and other black hole locales. We have even become somewhat inured to American citizens being tortured and killed by the American government by drones and other methods. But we know, or should know, that when the American government stands accused of torturing an American soldier for not toeing the war line then we private citizens are in serious trouble.     

Why does Private Manning need a pardon? Did he give away the order of battle or the table of organization for American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? No. Did he give away the design for drones and such weapons? No. He allegedly simply blew the whistle on something that is a hard fact of war- war crimes by American soldiers through release of the Collateral Murder tape and what have become known as the Iraq and Afghan War logs. This is what the American government had tried with might and main to cover up. And what needed to be exposed. All talk of bringing democracy, or national building, or having a war to end all wars, and the million other lame excuses for war pale before the hard fact that in the heat of war the real strategy is to kill and burn and  let god sort out the innocent from the guilty.

That is what Private Manning exposed.  I, and I am sure many other veterans from previous wars who saw or knew of such things and did nothing about it, are glad that such things were exposed. If for no other reason Private First Class Bradley Manning deserves presidential pardon for his service. To insure that event we urge everybody to ramp up their efforts in behalf of Bradley by signing here or online at the Bradley Manning Support Network site the petition to the Secretary of the Army for his release and to call the White House, the telephone number is listed on the flyer we are handing out, and demand that President Obama pardon Private Manning.

Today’s event is the start of our fall campaign of behalf of Private Manning who at this time is expected to go to trial next February. We want to build toward that trial, assuming President Obama (or President Romney) has not pardoned him by then. We have been holding weekly stand-outs in Davis Square in Somerville outside the MBTA Red Line stop Wednesdays from 4:00to 5:00 PM and urge you to join us. Or better yet start a Free Bradley Manning stand-out in your own town square. Thank you

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-The Struggle For The Communist League-Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith (1847)

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 Occupy Boston 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.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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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!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches- Sweet, Moonless Ohio Dreams-1969

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

In the last sketch which detailed Peter Paul (and my) experience travelling, hitch-hike travelling as was our wont (and mainly our necessity if we wanted to get places with low or no dough) down to Washington D. C. for the ill-fated May Day 1971 action against the Vietnam War mention was made of later addressing the whole ethos of hitch-hiking. In short, a suitable homage to the long haul truckers who, for whatever reason, were the best guys to ride the road with. Here is a good place to put one such experience although it, strictly speaking, breaks the chronology since it takes place in 1969.

And strictly speaking it goes well beyond the romance of the road to another one of Peter Paul’s moon-begotten romances but on reflection the two really do seem to mesh together in that anything is possible time. Thus it is a good representation of the highs and lows of one experience. I have, by the way, a basketful of my own hitch-hike road stories that I could tell, including that fateful trip cross-country from Olde Saco to San Francisco in the summer of love, 1967, where I met Peter Paul but that for another book of sketches.

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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 obscene, 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 for 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 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 can 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 women 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 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 has 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 gets a little bit lovesick for his honey (no, not the wife, the girlfriend, silly) who lived in Steubenville, Ohio. And that, my friends, is where we are heading as we are making 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 am 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 love-night road and to his own dream sleep. So here I am doing graduate-level diner study by my lonesome. Look, I am 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 (yah, see I know a little about Ohio, although not much outside the bigger cities and campus towns).

As I go inside through the glass-plated double doors I can 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 this time of day there are some empties here, but rather hop 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 hominess. It’s not like this is a date-taking place (or at least I hope nobody thinks along those lines, but you never know, maybe people celebrate their anniversaries here) 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 road side 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 Vegasdrug 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. If they do. But this time there is no story if they don’t, right?

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 tonight 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 tells you immediately that you are not at the Ritz, or even its fifth cousin. As we enter 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 walk 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 are 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 fill the room. The only things personal about this place are 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 has 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 hippiedom (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’s 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. Yah, 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 plunge 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 are awaken 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 am I to disobey, at least until I see what my next move is. I agree 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 is 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 kind of 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-…The Circus Is In Town- “Water For Elephants” A Film Review

 

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Water For Elephants.

DVD Review

Water For Elephants, starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinsen, Christopher Waltz, Fox 2000, 2011

Everybody, well, almost everybody had been to the circus as a kid, or later maybe. Many probably had their first exposure to the circus when some small side-show ramble wreak operation showed up made up of a three truck gypsy caravan came to you not big city town and put on a show or two and then headed out, laughing at the rubes as they left. Or maybe your first look was even less than a circus, a two bit neon-flamed carnival with every drifter, grafter and midnight sifter trying (and mostly succeeding) to get you to part with your hard-earned dough (back in the day maybe you had a kid job, mowing lawns or a paper route and so those were really hard-earned dollars that were soon departed). But mainly, if you didn’t look too closely, at the ragged costumes, the ancient girlies, the broken-down animals, and the broken-down performers you bought into the grand circus illusion, the spectacle. What you bought into as well was the cotton candy, the kewpie dolls, and the other gee-gads. Just don’t deny it okay

And that illusion, or the creation of that illusion, for a couple of hours while rube or sophisticate was in the audience is what the film under review, Water For Elephants, is all about. Also about that seamy back story that any form of entertainment from kid street shows to Super Bowl extravaganza tries to keep away from. And, naturally since this is a cinematic effort based on a historical romance novel, there has to be a little off-hand love interest to keep the“rubes” in the theater audience (or at DVD home) interested. And just as naturally if Reese Witherspoon is in the house (last seen by this reviewer Oscar-winning for her performance as June Carter Cash in Walk The Line) that love interest must be both torrid and meaningful. And it is.

The gist of the story (as told by ancient Hal Holbrook looking back to his youth) is the trials and tribulations of a veterinary doctor (almost) who by some personal misfortune winds up hopping a circus train during the Great Depression (the 1930s one not the current one) and who uses his skill to both help the animals and to become a key aide to the mad man circus owner (and ring master) who also happens to be a very jealous and evil husband of one Reese Witherspoon. The circus, as lots of things in those days, was ready to go belly up if there was not star attraction to pull the rubes in (basically get them under the tent and they are yours, the trick is to get them in). Presto, Ruby the elephant, not without some serious Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-type trauma brought on by the evil ring master, saves the day for a while. In the meantime that handsome young vet falls for one very married ring master’s wife. And she for him. Something has to give, and it does. But next time the circus is in town think twice, no think three times, before starry-eyed thinking about heading out of town on that road.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-The Road Forward, Damn

He (and his buddy, Friedrich, but let’s just keep it as he and save the parsing out of credits to literary agents, skeptics, revisionists, and sworn enemies, left and right, or to some Freudian psychoanalyst who will put some sexual shape on the thing and will get it all balled up anyway) said struggle. He, when asked by some wooden-headed journalist big city newspaper, maybe the London Times but don’t hold me to the exact paper but do hold me to the accuracy of the quote, looking for some fashionable and titillating quote, “What is?” answered struggle, class struggle (although on the news- printed titillating page it came out as mere struggle to avoid upsetting the Mayfair swells and their hangers-on who were a little skittish about threats to their empire in the making). The town was abuzz, no aflame, over that one, worse than when he connected the dots with those wobbly old greying Chartist boys who had raised holy hell a few decades back and kept king cotton from union with their beloved lion.

So struggle, class struggle it was (and is). He said, from his 19^th century lonely graveside a head sculpture emblazoned hair flowing stern visage above his lot, and a head above his generation’s candor, push back, push back hard against, part one, Vietnam, and those who vouched for that war in somebody’s name, not mine or his. He said part two, the Vietnam push back part connects with that seemingly long time ago push back struggle to break out of “project boy” shames, and stark inequalities of not keeping up with the Joneses, or not fast enough anyway, and father hurts, and mother rages against unfortunate fates, food for tables and clothes for backs worries, and endless mother father hurts. He said, part three, mix the Vietnam push back, the empire push back learned later, painfully learned, the father hurt push backs and the tribune of the people push back (the hard part in no push back America, at least not too much push back) and maybe just maybe history will take a left turn, a sharp left turn. Parting, ghost shades parting, he whispered do not get mixed-message tied up with their politics, that McGovern do-good juggernaut but organize from the base and then strike the match, when it is time for such matters.

He said some other stuff too, stuff said fast, faster than the part one, two, three stuff. He said stay with your people, the wretched of the earth, whom you have abandoned (hell, he didn’t know it was really run away from, run hard away from with Jack Kennedy/Bobby Kennedy, hell, Hubert dreams of forty years, a pension, a gold watch and whatever could be stolen along the way in the “service” of the people). He said it would not be easy. Hell, he didn’t know the half of it. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people, with those gold-flecked dreams of yours. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. Damn, he was right.

He said look for a sign. He said, although he did not put it this way exactly, the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy, again. He said it again and again and would not let it, or me, rest. He said what is struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1871, he said it in 1917, and he was ghost dream saying it in 1972. What a cranky, crazy old guy to disturb Peter Paul’s sleep, huh.

*****
Struggle. But where to start as Peter Paul sat, book in hand, Leon Trotsky’s “History Of The Russian Revolution,” down on a yogurt-spooned 1972 green painted bench on the Charles River near Harvard Square. Having devoured the “Communist Manifesto,” “Class Struggle In France,” “Critique Of The Gotha Programme,” “What Is To Be Done?”,and a few off-hand commentaries on them he was pushing for some sense of how to beat the monster. Beat the monster straight up. For just that Charles River bench seat minute he knew that he had to get beyond books but that books and struggle would be the combination to the golden age. Damn that old guy and his progeny too. Damn them for the heavy task they bequeathed to us ill-prepared descendants.

And for leaving us bends in the road, serious bends, fatal bends. Peter Paul told me how he have done his fair share of kicking one Professor Irving Howe, the late social -democratic editor of the intellectual quarterly magazine "Dissent", around back then and a guy who was supposed to know some stuff about Marxism or socialism when he was trying to figure the road to follow out. [I, on the other hand always appreciated Howe’s literary criticism and thought he had some things to say about politics too before he got indistinguishable from, say right-wing “National Review’s” William Buckley-JLB] But as this is, as is oft-quoted, a confessional age, Peter Paul had a confession, or rather two confessions, to make about his connections to Irving Howe. So for the time that it took to write the comments up he said he would call an armed truce with the shades of the professor. Here is what he had to say:

Confession #1- in the mist of time of my youth I actually used to like to read "Dissent." The articles were interesting, and as we were too poor for the family to afford a subscription, I spent many an hour reading through back issues at the local public library. I make no pretense that I understood all that was in each article and some that I re-read later left me cold but there you have it.

Probably the most impressive article I read was Norman Mailer’s "White Negro." I could relate to the violence and sense of 'hipness' that was hidden just under the surface of the article, especially the violence as it was not that far removed from that in my own poor white working class neighborhood, although I probably would not have articulated it that way at the time. Interestingly, Professor Sorin in his definitive Howe biography noted that Howe thought the article was a mistake for "Dissent" to publish for that very homage to violence implicit in the article. That now says it all.

The funny thing about reading "Dissent," at the time, thinking about it now, was that I was personally nothing more than a Kennedy liberal and thought that the magazine reflected that New Frontier liberalism. I was somewhat shocked when I found out later that it was supposed to be an independent 'socialist' magazine.

Most of my political positions at the time were far to the left of what was being presented there editorially, especially on international issues. I might add that I also had an odd political dichotomy in those days toward those to the left of my own liberalism. I was, not exactly aware then of the basis of the divide between them, very indulgent toward communists but really hated socialists, really social democrats. Go figure. Must have been something in the water, or rather some that said one was closer to solving those project and father hurts than the other.

Confession#2- Irving Howe actually acted, unintentionally, as my recruiting sergeant to the works of Leon Trotsky that eventually led to my embrace of a Marxist world view. But after some 150 plus years of Marxism claiming to be a Marxist is only the beginning of wisdom. One has to find the modern thread that continues in the spirit of the founders. Back in 1972, as part of trying to find a political path to modern Marxism I picked up a collection of socialist works edited by Professor Howe. In that compilation was an excerpt from Trotsky’s "History of the Russian Revolution," a section called "On Dual Power.” I read it, and then re-read it. Next day I went out to scrounge up a copy of the whole work. And the rest is history. So, thanks, Professor Howe- now back to the polemical wars against social-democratic accommodation - the truce is over.

 

From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Break from the Two Parties of Wall Street! Vote Jill Stein for President

Click on the headline to link to the"Socialist Alternative (CWI)" website.

Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.

*************

Published by SocialistAlternative.org Read online at: www.SocialistAlternative.org/news/article10.php?id=1959
Break from the Two Parties of Wall Street! Vote Jill Stein for President
Oct 13, 2012 SocialistAlternative.org
Over a billion dollars will be spent on the 2012 Presidential election, smashing all previous records. This mountain of corporate cash ensures that whoever is elected, Obama or Romney, the interests of the super-rich and Wall Street will be represented. That's why Socialist Alternative is calling for a break from two parties of the 1% and for the creation of new, broad party to provide a fighting voice for working people. In this election, we are urging a vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party for president, in order to register the strongest possible protest vote against the two-party system. We don't agree with those who preach patience, who tell us every election that “now is not the time” and that we must support the “lesser evil.” In fact, it is during elections, when the attention of the entire nation is focused on politics, that serious fighters for the 99% must raise their voices the loudest against the lies and manipulations of the corporate politicians. We cannot stand aside and allow the debate to be dominated by Obama and Romney. That means putting up the strongest possible challenge to Wall Street's political monopoly in this election, both on the streets and at the ballot box. Overcoming restrictive, anti-democratic ballot access laws, Jill Stein will appear on the ballots of at least 85% of voters this November. While not a socialist, Stein stands clearly on the side of working people on every key issue facing our country. She refuses corporate donations and has used her campaign to support the struggles of ordinary people fighting injustice. Despite a near complete black-out in the corporate media and the undemocratic refusal to allow her in the debates, a recent CNN poll already showed Stein with 2% support. This makes her the highest-profile left candidate this election, with the potential to attract over a million voters disgusted with the two parties. Her campaign provides a glimpse of what would be possible if our social movements, especially the unions, broke from the Democrats and united into a broad left political challenge. Obama's Betrayals After all the “hope” and “change” of Obama’s campaign in 2008, he has given literally trillions of dollars in bailouts to the same big banks that helped trigger this economic crisis in the first place. Meanwhile, those same banks kick millions of Americans out of their homes. Obama continues the “war on terrorism” and is expanding the assault on civil liberties. Union rights have been dismantled and social services have been cut by both Democrats and Republicans. Young people face mass unemployment, low wage jobs, rising tuition and debt. While Romney and Ryan’s extreme rhetoric is understandably scary for working people and the oppressed, the sick logic of lesser-evilism, of support for Obama and the Democrats, only hamstrings social movements from effectively fighting back. Neither party represents the interests of workers or the oppressed. Neither party will reject the profit-maximizing logic of the capitalist system or the interests of Wall Street. While the Democrats give lip service the interests of workers and oppressed communities, once in power they carry out the agenda of big business. Every serious struggle reveals the Democrats' corporate character. From the Chicago teachers strike to the growing fight against foreclosures, when ordinary people stand up they find both parties united against them. When movement leaders preach support for the very same politicians who are attacking our communities, it only serves to confuse, demoralize, and demobilize our struggles. Yet history shows that only mass struggle wins real change. Students in Quebec have the lowest tuition in North America. Why? Because they organize mass strike movements and street protests when faced with tuition increases. Everything regular people have won in this country, has been fought for with strikes, direct action, and mass protests, from women’s right to vote to the end of segregation to the weekend and 8-hour workday. When movements get caught up in the illusion that allying themselves with the Democrats is the most “realistic” route to success, they end up lowering their demands to what is acceptable to big business. But especially in this era of capitalist crisis, there is no room for even these band-aid reforms. To succeed, our struggles need to challenge the capitalist system, the root cause of the problems we face. Capitalism is a system of exploitation that concentrates resources and influences in the hands of the wealthy elite at the expense of the vast majority of the public and the environment. In order to guarantee jobs, a good standard of living, environmental cleanup and an end to discrimination, we need a different system. Democratic socialism, including public ownership of the top 500 corporations, could ensure a better future. Achieving a new system will require a mass movement. To challenge this system and win real improvements we to need a new political party for working people. A party with democratic decision-making that is involved in movements, that doesn’t take corporate donations, and has support from fighting unions and community groups. More and more people are disgusted with corporate domination. The Occupy movement clearly revealed the political vacuum on the left. While this huge potential has mostly been squandered, small examples show what is possible. In Seattle the dynamic campaign of Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative's candidate running for State Representative against the Democratic Speaker of the House, Frank Chopp, is shaking up Seattle politics and shifting the debate to the left. J