From The American Left History Blog Archives (2006) - On American Political Discourse  

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2009 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

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NEWS FLASH: OUT OF THE LOOP MILITANT LEFTIST CALLS THE SITUATION IN IRAQ A FULL-BLOWN CIVIL WAR

COMMENTARY

A BASIC RULE OF POLITICS- DO NOT BE AFRAID TO CALL A THING BY ITS RIGHT NAME

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY

I am privy to no special insider information on the trials and tribulations of the internal situation in Iraq. I get my information from the mass media just like most citizens. However, as a politico I pay very close attention to the writings of political journalists, especially those who have been to Iraq and have eye-witness observations about the situation. What is amazing in the fall of 2006 is their near unanimous agreement, regardless of political persuasion, that Iraq is in the midst of a sectarian civil war. Yet, virtually none will call the situation there by that name. They are in a classic position of hedging their bets. Why? This writer has not and does not support American foreign policy in general and Iraq in particular. On the other hand the political writers I have read have some kind of fundamental belief in the rightness of general American foreign policy. In short, those writers exhibit in a different way that same hubris that animated the Bush Administration to go into Iraq in the first place. That is, it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time and although it did not turn out to be the right thing to do nevertheless we must stay to correct the errors. This the arrogance of power-once removed. Sweet Jesus, under that theory our grandchildren will be fighting in Iraq.

The daily news out of Iraq is uniformly grim. X number of Shia, Sunni or others are daily found handcuffed, shot and dumped on the outskirts of town. Or in a river. The recently augmented American forces sent into Baghdad have seemingly kicked every door in the city down to no real effect, except to recruit for the insurgents or some sectarian militia.  There are not enough morgues in Iraq (and maybe the whole Middle East) to hold the victims. Additionally, this week, the week of October 1, 2006 a whole brigade of American trained and financed Iraqi police had to be disbanded for complicity with militias and general ugliness. Dear readers this is civil war pure and simple. Not the prelude to, not a low-level about to be, but a full blown civil war. A year or so ago the situation was not nearly as clear. However, now why are even thoughtful bourgeois journalists and commentators being so coquettish about calling a thing by its right name? Does it have to look like the first skirmishes of the American Civil War at Bull Run before the situation in Iraq is recognized as such? Well, this out-of-the-loop leftist is not going out on any political limb whatever-Iraq is in a full-blown civil war. End of story.

What to do about it. This writer has long called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. That position is a no-brainer now.  However, for the slow-witted Bush Administration here is a quick and short term solution. And it has the virtue of coming from a late revered member of the Republican Party. Call Iraq a victory and withdraw now. During the Vietnam War Vermont Republican United States Senator George Aikens (I believe) made that comment. For those enthralled by parliamentary solutions this seems reasonable. Let future historians argue and fuss over the truth of that assertion of victory. In the meantime-GET THE HELL OUT OF IRAQ NOW!     

From The American Left History Blog Archives (2006) - On American Political Discourse  

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2009 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

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THESE ARE NOT SALAD DAYS FOR LIBERAL HAWKS

BOOK REVIEW

THE GOOD FIGHT: WHY LIBERALS-AND ONLY LIBERALS-CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, PETER BEINART, HARPERCOLLINS, NEWYORK, 2006

In the normal course of events these days the tasks of working class socialists, particularly during the electoral cycle, are to create and distribute propaganda in favor of socialist solutions to the crisis of humankind and to organize around a socialist program. Since we are not in an immediate struggle for political power that is more than enough work. Thus, usually the goings-on among Democratic propagandists are of no direct concern to working on those tasks. However, every once in a while, as now during a electoral cycle, it is interesting to take note of what is going on in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Why? Make no mistake, while the relation of forces today is totally on their side, in the final analysis we will have to directly fight the liberal wing of that party for the political allegiance of the better elements of that party. Does any militant leftist believe in 2006 that our recruiting grounds are located anywhere in the vicinity of the Republican Party?

With that thought in mind Mr. Beinart’s book, the Good Fight, is an outline of a plan to undercut the so-called liberal-pacifist wing of the Democratic Party in order to draw back the allegiance of what at one time were elements that made the Democratic Party a governing party during much of the 20^th century. In short, he is fighting for what appears to him to be the ‘soul’ of the Democratic Party.  Mr. Beinart’s central argument is that while he and other liberal hawks were wrong, dead wrong, on support to the Bush Administrations war in Iraq those who did at least get that question right are nevertheless wrong on a strategy to either defeat or contain Islamic terrorism. Of course, in the process Mr. Beinart thus retroactively absolves himself of his ‘little error’ on Iraq in the interests of the greater war on terrorism. Nobody ever said democratic ideologues were incapable of the occasional sleight-of-hand.

The predicate for this thesis is that there is vast ‘conspiracy’ underfoot by those, apparently led by the filmmaker Michael Moore and kindred spirits, who want to take over the Democratic Party and emulate Neville Chamberlain at Munch in regard to the war on terror. The result, according to Mr. Beinart, is that the centrist Lieberman wing will have no home and the Democratic Party will not rule again like in the good old days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In answer, this writer makes this observation-what planet does Mr. Beinart live on?  If memory serves Mr. Moore supported one General Wesley Clark, the mad commander of NATO forces in Serbia who attempted to bomb that country back to Stone Age conditions, in the presidential primaries of 2004. Moreover, do any rational liberal politicians or activist take political counsel from Mr. Moore? Certainly he is a political gadfly and provocative filmmaker but, please, go after the big game. Moreover, and I do not need to rely on memory for this one, who in the Democratic Party opposed the now crumbling war in Afghanistan? There were very few of us in those days even those who were allegedly opposed to all wars on pacifist grounds. No, overall, as we are painfully aware every day, the Democratic Party is nothing more than a somewhat loyal parliamentary opposition. They take no more risks than the Republicans. The real problem is that on foreign policy, either in its containment or confrontational stages, the Democratic Party is Republican-lite. That in a nutshell is their political malaise-the Republicans do better at protecting the long term interests of the ruling classes-end of story.

Mr. Beinart’s book does bring up a serious political question about how to fight the war on terror for those who favor a workers government and we duck the issue at our peril. Be forewarned, Islamic fundamentalism is a threat to not only democratic forms of government but ultimately also to socialist forms as well. Without giving an abstract blueprint to a theoretical question- How would a workers government in power respond? Fair enough. The obvious first answer is that a workers government would try to break the stranglehold of Islamic fundamentalism at the base by, yes, throwing lots of money and organizers at the problems which keep the Islamic masses in poverty. Beyond that the breaking up of the Islamic terrorist organizations appears to be much more of police problem than a military one. A workers government, like any responsible government, would mercilessly track down every one of these cells in the appropriate manner. Finally, a workers government under foreseeable conditions would not be a pacifist government, even though the final aim is a peaceful world. There is a long way to go before humankind gets to that stage. It would know who to go after and it would not be against Saddam on this issue although it would be on socialist grounds. However, let me suggest this. The Soviet Union’s intervention into Afghanistan in 1979 drove the West, including the American Democratic Party headed by one President Jimmy Carter, to support the Islamic fundamentalists of that time as a proxy against the Soviets. The Soviet Union, even if eventually half-heartedly, in retrospect was then the vanguard of the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. Does anyone today want to rethink that Western opposition?  One should. A workers government today would follow the Soviet lead demonstrated in Afghanistan and in earlier fights in the 1920’s against counterrevolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia as it attempted to consolidate the Soviet state.  That is a sketch of some aspects of a workers government policy to think about. In the fight against Islamic fundamentalism the real options are fairly narrow.               

FROM THE PEN OF LEON TROTSKY-PRACTICAL PROBLEMS IN BUILDING A SOCIALIST SOCIETY

BOOK REVIEW

PROBLEMS OF EVERYDAY LIFE, LEON TROTSKY, MONAD PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973

Sometimes those of us embattled socialists still trying to propagandize for the socialist worldview get so totally caught up in that fight that we at times neglect the goals of our efforts. No so Leon Trotsky who despite being in a continual fight inside the Russian Communist Party in the 1920’s to save and extend the Russian Revolution from time to time put out essays and gave speeches on behalf of that goal. The book under review contains a wide ranging selection of some of the everyday issues and examples of the aspirational messages given that concerned him at the time. Although some of those issues are particular to the Russian situation due to the underdevelopment of Russian society at that time (and unfortunately now as well) some of the aspirational essays should be taken to heart by socialists working today.

Generally when educated people speak of culture they are referring to “high culture”, the arts and the like. Trotsky was not unaware of that distinction and wrote many enduring essays elsewhere on the subjects of literature and the arts. Here Trotsky looks at the deeper meaning of culture for the mass of society. That is, those characteristics and manners of behavior that would lead to a more educated workforce, a more enlightened population and that would give the fight for a socialist society a gigantic push forward. Thus, he writes about the problems of endemic alcoholism, illiteracy, swearing, the fight against religious superstition, the fight for cleanliness and promptness and the like. Except in a mocking manner most cultural writers do not take such issues seriously except to distance themselves from the habits of the under classes. Yet here was a big time intellectual, revolutionary leader and in this reviewer’s opinion an exemplar of communist man harping on the necessity of acquiring just such virtues.

Part of the compilation in this book is taken up with Trotsky’s daydreaming in print about how a future socialist and then communist classless society might look. He did not neglect the importance of using the preexisting industrial apparatus left from capitalism as the starting point. He also presents many interesting predictions about the use of technology, including nuclear technology, and mass communications to make the transition easier. However, Trotsky’s dreams certainly do not include a theory of “barrack communism”, that is, the equality of all citizens based on scarcity or return to a more primitive form of society. On the contrary, Trotsky’s communist future is explicitly based on abundance so that the question of daily survival is taken off the agenda for the mass of humankind. Then society, will as a matter of course, develop many great political thinkers, literary writer and other types of geniuses and put the geniuses of past societies in the shade. Yes, I can get behind goals like that. Yes, those are what the goals of socialism are all about.

A SLICE OF REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY- THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

 

BOOK REVIEW

THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION: CENTRAL COMMITTEE MINUTES OF THE RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY, AUGUST 1917-FEBRUARY 1918, PLUTO PRESS, LONDON, 1974

Those readers who have understood the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 through the prism of Stalinism will be surprised to find in this book of the minutes of the leading body of the Bolshevik Party not the monolithic party of Western thought but a lively and contentious party even at the height of the struggle for revolutionary power. And if one really thinks about it all the great revolutions of history display that same dynamic. I would argue that revolutions can not succeed otherwise. That said, this is not a book for beginners but for those who know something about the Russian Revolution. For those who do not Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution- Volume Two can help up until the October Revolution itself. For the period from October 1917 to February 1918 E. H. Carr’s three volume set titled The Bolshevik Revolution is invaluable.

As background, the beginning of the period under review is a time when the Bolshevik’s were just coming out of a period, known in history as the “July Days”, when the major leaders, including Lenin, were in hiding, laying low, or in jail and Bolshevik publications had been suppressed. The period continues through the abortive coup attempt by General Kornilov, the various attempts by the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to crib some non-Soviet democratic institutions together in order to put off the convening of a Constituent Assembly, the fight for the Bolshevik seizure of power, and in the aftermath the fight to end Russian participation in World War I and make peace with the Germans.

As is to be expected not one of the above-mentioned events was without its effect on Bolshevik policy and led to the creation of different factions and tendencies reflecting different moods, constituencies and personalities within the party. The most famous, and for today’s militant’s the most important, are the fight within the party over the question of the seizure of power and the more intense fight over how to and on what terms to end Russia’s participation in the war. To a great extend these various tendencies in one form or another existed for the next ten years after the revolution until the final Stalinist clampdown. Of course, many of the leading personalities did not have long-term consistent policies. For example, Bukharin a leader of the self-styled Left- Communists in the fight over capitulation to German peace demands argued for revolutionary war but later proved to be a key ally of Stalin on the question on the rightist policy of  ‘socialism in one country’. If one wants to get a glance at the way revolutionary policy in the heat of revolution is made here’s a good place to start.        

Nikita Khrushchev-SOFT-CORE ANATOMY OF A STALINIST HENCHMAN

 

BOOK REVIEW

KHRUSHCHEV, ROY MEDVEDEV, ANCHOR PRESS, NEW YORK, 1983

At one time in the seemingly distant pass the name Roy Medvedev was associated very closely with the left-wing elements of the  opposition movements into the former Soviet Union at the time of  Khrushchev’s leadership. One would hardly know from reading this biography that the two were, at least formally, political opponents. Mr. Medvedev has produce a biography that beyond acting as a moving travelogue of  Mr. Khrushchev’s and activities as leader of the former Soviet Union is little more than a soft-core sell  of  an old Stalinist henchman.  It may be due to the fact that it was published in 1983 when the Soviet Union was in the early process of going to hell in a hand basket and so the Khrushchev period appeared to be a Golden Age of Stalinism-without Stalin.  Nevertheless if one is looking for a more profound analysis of the immediate post-Stalin period one will have to look elsewhere.

Mr. Medvedev cannot be faulted for the general factual presentation. He dutifully, if superficially goes through Mr. Khrushchev’s rise to the top layer of the Stalin entourage, the struggle for power after Stalin’s death in 1953,  the monumental revelations of the  crimes of Stalin at 20^th and later the 22^nd Russian Communist Party Congresses,  the various domestic crises particularly  the continuing problems in agriculture that years later would contribute to the downfall of the Soviet Union, the international disputes within the world Communist movement and the at times very heated struggle  with the West during various episodes of the Cold War and his eventual downfall from power in 1964. The reviewer grew up in American at the time of the rise and fall of the Khrushchev regime and it was interesting to be reminded of those events, their importance in the history of that period and a refreshing of my reaction to the events at the time. For those who have forgotten or do not know of the key events such as the attempts at nuclear disarmament, the crisis in Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis this book provide a competent review of those events.

The stumbling block to any further credit to Mr. Medvedev’s book is his rather fawning over Mr. Khrushchev’s achievements in the post-Stalin period. Yes, Mr. Khrushchev performed an important if not full service to the international communist movement by his revelation of Stalin’s crimes. But any leftist critic of Stalinism has the right to ask- Mr. Khrushchev what were you doing at the time of all these acknowledged crimes as a henchman of Stalin? It is not enough to argue that there was little one could do. The history and fate of the Left Opposition in the Russian Communists Party and of other oppositionists in the wastes of Russian testify to other routes for those who considered themselves Bolsheviks. No it will not do.  Mr. Khrushchev, Mr. Medvedev and I shared one thing in common. At one time we all stood for the defense of the Soviet Union against attack by world imperialism and internal counterrevolution. Beyond that we part ways. I note that all through this paean to the intrepid Mr. Khrushchev there is very little sense that  in the Khrushchev era despite some obvious thawing of the internal political environment  these is no sense that workers and farmers councils  could have been more e appropriate that just playing musical chairs with the top levels of the Soviet bureaucracy. The gap between that Leninist understanding of the road to socialism and Mr. Khrushchev’ s top-down operation certainly did its part to weaken the Soviet Union and cause its ultimate collapse.    

***Tu Do Street, USA

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Tu Do Street (nicknamed by some American G.I., probably some down South black soldier or some kindred brother, black or white, familiar with Chi Town’s Chess Records, familiar with Howlin’ Wolf or just familiar with the blues idiom, in the 1960s as Do The Do Street. And if it was the Wolf that drew his inspiration you knew, knew damn well, what that do the do was about even if you never saw Tu Do Street) , Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City for those who have not been paying attention since about 1975) was the street of dreams, feckless, reckless G.I. dreams.

The street of cheap- jack merchandise, unbelievably cheap- jack merchandise (watches that wilted in the humid night, cameras that jammed in the fetid air, gee-gaws of all descriptions that had no known use, no known soldier use except they were not rifles, bullets or that kind of stuff although you could buy all you wanted of that stuff there as well), of expensive drinks (watered-down scotches, whiskeys and gins, ditto the beer unbelievable as that sounds) in some soldier trap gin mill, and plentiful whores, oops, prostitutes, you know, sex workers sometimes cheaper than the booze they peddled. Some girls, young, straight from the hungry desolate peasant countryside, an extra mouth to feed with not enough food to go around, easily used up and abandoned (abandoned with American babies, black and white, by the ton) sent there by their kin, some just plain camp- followers, camp-followers from every port of call, Russians, Japanese, Americans , all over, who have followed in the train of war since Adams and Eve’s time, maybe before, and some “official” hostesses working the American Red Cross, USO, or other NGO racket before finding out there was much more kale to be made by taking your clothes off for an hour (really a half hour who was kidding who) and giving a hungry and not fussy guy just off the line what he wanted even if you weren’t the beautiful girl of his dreams.

That girl of his dreams, maybe not so beautiful either, was back home somewhere in the real world waiting for his return (although maybe not faithfully by the number of Dear John letters that arrived weekly) keeping herself ready for that return and their little white picket fence house that she had already picked out and furnished in her mind. But he had his needs right then, right there. And so he, Bob Baxter, Bob from Mansfield, Ohio had, being stationed at a base just outside of Saigon, before his tour of duty was up had tasted all three Tu Do Street assortments, tasted them many times, and had had a lingering taste for them (although as far as he knew he did not leave any little ones behind, at least none that anybody claimed were his).

But those day, those twenty years before days of his youth had long passed. Since then, after he got back to the “real world,” made a few minor, and a couple of major ( a small drug and drinking habit twelve-stepped away), adjustments he settled down, married his high school sweetheart (both Mansfield South High Class of 1967), got a decent job selling insurance for a major company, got that white picket fence house, complete with three kids and a dog, and a couple of years ago a divorce when things went south in that “last forever” marriage. It wasn’t anybody’s fault or maybe it was both their faults for having stayed together too long when it was pretty clear early on that whatever high school dreams they had shared had been lost in the rice paddies of Vietnam, or maybe, better, Tu Do Street and the dreams. Bob, although toward the end of the marriage had refused to continue to argue about it, was unhappy in sex, unhappy that Beth, his high school sweetheart, had gotten “religion” about sex and only wanted to do the missionary position when they did it, which as such things inevitably go, was less and less frequently as soon as they decided that three kids were enough. Not an unusual story, almost commonplace in late 20^th century, early 21^st century America (and elsewhere too but let’s stick with America).

Shortly after the divorce was finalized, maybe a couple of months later, Bob was send by his company to an international insurance conference in San Francisco and there he began to get an old time urge, an urge he had not felt since Tu Do Street days to check out the prostitutes, uh, sex workers, and see if they were as inventive in America as they were back then in Saigon. Sure, like a million guys, and keep this under your hat because it might affect the divorce settlement terms, Jesus, he had a couple of very short affairs while he was married (one, a short fling with one of Beth’s friends who knew the Kama Sutra and it love positions backwards and forward and was not afraid to tease him with that fact. And to teach him a few things like those by-gone, long-gone Saigon girls). Who would have thought that about a cloistered Mansfield, Ohio woman, married too.). But that was behind the bushes stuff after a night of hard drinking and soft-core exploration, maybe an off- center motel fifty miles from town stuff with some bar met woman, freebie stuff in any case.

What he wanted, what he was craving was to be with a paid woman. Of course it was easy on Tu Do Street all you had to do was look in some window or across some street see what you liked and made your short, or long, arrangements. And once you were “connected” into the “life” you could specialize, depending on your whim. It was all there for American soldiers with scrip, the real coin of the realm (that connection stuff was real too because that was how he hooked into the white girls, and an occasional black girl too, the ex-USO “hostesses.” Some of them, maybe because they were far from home, or wanted to make a ton of money were ready to do anything, anything on a stray G.I.’s mind. One woman who “entertained” him, and who shall remain nameless, later used her money to start her own company when she got back home and was now well thought of in the CEO world.).

But here in America, even in Barbary Coast history Frisco town, it wasn’t like a man, at least a man who had a certain position to protect (and that damn alimony to pay); it wasn’t like you could go onto Bay Street or Mission maybe and snap your fingers like in old Saigon, not if you weren’t connected. So he checked out a newspaper, what they called in the old 1960s days an alternative newspaper, The San Francisco Bay Other, which had long since turned into a front for sex ads, for “personals.” You know, “sexy busty teenager seeks, desperately seeks, a momentary sugar daddy for a mature relationship beneficial to both parties.” Stuff like that, usually “trade puffing” since what you got may, or may not be, sexy, busty, or a teenager. So he searched, called a couple of numbers, and finally reached a valid working number with a woman’s voice behind it. Her ad had been straight forward enough as such things go and so he made arrangements for a meet at her “place” (he wasn’t taking chances on having her come to the hotel not with many, too many, known associates around), a place on Geary over by the beach, by the old Sutro Baths. The instructions were to call that number again when he got to Geary and she would give him further directions. He did so, called, and went as directed to an older Spanish adobe dwelling (plentiful in Frisco town, some old some young, depending on which earthquake they did, or didn’t, survive).

An oriental girl, Chinese, although Frisco is filled to the brim with every Asian nationality, petite, young, and kind of shy answered the door for Doug (the name Bob gave over the phone) and he thought for just a minute that he was back on Tu Do Street except the money was dollars, the place was fifty times cleaner than any place he had flopped in Saigon, and she was less, far less experienced that those Tu Do Street girls. Even the fresh dew country peasant girls once they had a taste of the city, and of the life. Still she knew enough, enough to do what he asked, nothing kinky but also nothing his ex-wife would have done to make  him a little happy by doing, did it well, if not expertly and smiled as he left. As he walked down the street to his car, and back to his hotel he thought, he might give her another call tomorrow if he had time. He thought too maybe he would score some dope, some grass or coke, if he could make that “connection” and maybe she could bring back some Tu Do Street dreams …

***In Honor Of Miss (Ms.) Lenora Sonos, Clintondale High School English Department, Circa 1961

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

"The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, Upon the place beneath" lines from Portia's speech to the court in William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice

As Jimmy came across these above-quoted lines in the epilogue of a book that he was innocently, very innocently, reading about the sources of old time English playwright William Shakespeare’s for his various works he suddenly developed a 50th anniversary case of the nerves. He had learned to love Shakespeare, and his sense of language, so one could not blame the playwright (the messenger) for the sudden case of nerves. Nor could one blame his peers who kidded him about his bookish ways, about his still reading such things way after he needed to read stuff, serious stuff, about old times like that, the time of King James I in England and of other places in 17^thcentury Europe. And it certainly was not due to his ever-loving wife, Cindy, who had a terrible case of the yawns when Jimmy started mentioning anything before about 1950. So the source of those nerves was really easily traceable, very easily traceable, once he settled down to time spent in Miss Lenora Sonos’classroom memorizing those very lines of the Bard back in 1961.

Miss Lenora Sonos, Jimmy’s senior year English teacher made many people nervous. Who was he kidding, she made one James Cullen, Jimmy, Class of 1961, and king hell king of the school’s intramural bowling league (boys’ division) at old Clintondale High, nervous. Others can, on their own hook, come forth with their own benighted and heart-rendering testimony but she made him nervous before her class, nervous while in her class, nervous after leaving her class, and nervous in that occasional dark hour just before the dawn when he woke up, woke up with the sweats, became that book report due Monday morning bright and early was not coming together the way he wanted. Come on, again, who was Jimmy kidding, waking up with the sweats kidding, the way that she wanted it. Wanted the no rush, no night before it was due , well-thought out and drafted, concise, with some kind of original twist to it paper, and written like some come down from the mountain patriarchal tablet screed, or really an endlessly re-written version of that self-same screed.

And worse, worse than not being concise, worse than not having an original twist idea, was that you had to publicly defend your ideas in front of the whole class. But, once again who was Jimmy kidding, the class was child’s play, putty in his hands once he started throwing his obscure, arcane, in-your-face two thousand facts at them, and they retreated, or better, surrendered, white flags in hand. No, it was her, Miss Sonos, that he had to impress with his obscure, arcane, in-your-face knowledge but here was the rub, she had no surrender, or white flag, in her because she was privy to those two thousand facts, had in fact taught him a bunch of them, and had a few thousand additional ones in her own storehouse just waiting for Jimmy to make that one wrong move, the one wrong move that was inevitably to come from a young, still unformed, mind.

And worse, worse than public Sonos humiliation, worse than being at a lost for that original idea was to not be with her, to be with her one hundred percent, when she spoke, almost in a hushed whisper, of some piece of literature the virtues of which she endlessly drilled into the class, but really had her eyes set on him when doing so, or so he thought. (He found out later that that feeling was shared by every at least half-awake student in the class, the others were just ducking behind some book hoping not to be noticed.) As he thought of those books just now, he remembered the time, trying to be one hundred with her, when he blurred out that Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye “spoke” to him, spoke to him about his own teen alienation, spoke about what can a kid do when the cards are stacked against him in this cruel old world, a world he didn’t put together, spoke of teen angst in trying to find his place in the sun when everybody was pushing him in about six different ways and he was pushing himself in about seven.

And there Jimmy was, proud as a peacock, feeling like a junior-sized literary critic and then she, Miss Sonos in high dudgeon, lowered the hammer and dismissed the book, and the author, as so much hot air and New Yorker-style cheapjack kid’s short story, barely pabulum. And that was the end of it, for once Miss Sonos pronounced someone a mere kid’s stuff short- story writer, oblivion beckoned. She much preferred that her Jimmys tackle James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, and Edith Wharton who although they too wrote short stories wrote novels, great novels, and therefore were not assigned to hellish depths. And you know in a funny way Jimmy had to admit that she was right, right in the sense that these other guys had a lot to say and that one should no put all their “literary light” eggs in one basket, although she was still wrong, wrong big time, about J.D. Salinger. Wrong that is if she is not now nearby and ready to pounce, nearby this side of the grave that is.

But the worst time, the worst time of all, for Jimmy who was trying to hold his head up in that dark early 1960s red scare Cold War working poor teen angst night was when she made him write a paper as a proponent of the then front line, flame-burning civil rights movement down South after he had written a short piece, a short diary-like piece, for her eyes only, one time. Not only that but he was going to be forced to argue his case against the editor of the school newspaper, a hot shot who had real literary ambitions and had a father who was a professor, or something, over at the university. Now Jimmy, as he noted in his short piece, was in sympathy, secret sympathy, with the struggle of black people down South, and had linked that struggle with his own sense of what white working poor people needed too. They needed desperately to do in order to get out from under their own tobacco road Clintondale existences. Not all that deeply thought out then, but that was the gist of it. But see, the secret part was necessary because the best word, the absolutely best word that he had ever heard anybody in Clintondale, young or old, call black people was “nigra,” like the neighborhood, the predominantly Irish and Italian Catholic neighborhood that he lived in, and breathed in, was down in the Mister James Crow South itself.

And the most vitriolic voice around the neighborhood was that of his father, and his kindred, who resided nightly at the Old Gaelic Pub, egging on vicariously, while watching the barroom television news, the red-neck sheriffs and guys in white sheets of the world. Jimmy tried, tried hard, to explain this all to Miss Sonos but she, unlike in some other things, dismissed his pleas out of hand. Well, he gave that presentation, and if he didn’t win the debate points, the precious debate points, that he thought he was fighting for he made it clear that the he was on the other side of the road in the battle between the those who lived, thought and acted out “nigra”,or worse “nigger” white dreams and those who said 1960s “negro.” So there she was right again, although many friendship bridges were burned that day.

As Jimmy nervously finished up musing over the exploits, the maybe un-heroic exploits, of Miss Lenora Sonos, he thought about those lines from Portia’s speech to the court in Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice, lines that she made the class memorize, although that memorizing business was not her style in general. And Jimmy chuckled to himself that did not, after all, have to look those sentences in that speech up, although if he was in a courtroom under oath he would have to confess that he did look them up in order to see if there was one or two p's in droppeth. He knew those lines and more from the master by heart. And that fact, that fact of remembrance, served to bring up something, something heroic about Miss Sonos. About what she said, said endlessly. Literature matters. Words matter. Jimmy had, on more occasions than he cared to remember, honored those ideas more in the breech than the observance but he tried to be guided by them. But they, no question, were planted there by Miss Sonos.

Thinking on it all now Jimmy realized that he was not close to Ms. Sonos, certainly not her "pet". Perhaps she did not even really know who he was, although that bout over the civil rights paper may have turned the tables a little away from the truth of that notion. He did not know about today but back then the classes were very large and there were many minds to feed. So it was possible. Perhaps she did not even “like” him. That too was possible. Jimmy did not display his better side, the "better angel of his nature", in those days, on most days. However, Jimmy did know two things about her-literature matters, words matter. That wisdom more than balanced things out. And then he said in whisper, “Miss (Ms.) Lenora Sonos, wherever you are-thanks.”

Which Way Forward For The Labor Movement

SPEAKERS: Seamus Whelan: Registered nurse for 15 years and active union member in the Massachusetts Nurses Association. Genevieve Morse: Shop Steward in the Classified Staff Union at UMass-Boston Geoff Carens: Union Rep, Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers/HUCTW and the Industrial Workers of the World/IWW.

PUBLIC MEETING WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24 – 7:00 PM @ THOMAS CRANE LIBRARY Main Meeting Room 40 Washington St. – Quincy Center 400 ft from Quincy Center T

Today in America, 50% of us are either in or near poverty while 19% of us are underemployed (we are either unemployed, only finding part-time work, and older workers who have been dropped from unemployment).

Candidate Obama in 2003 promised to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to end the mandatory practice of 90 days of forced anti-union meetings and intimidation by managers when we would try to form a union for better wages, working conditions, and benefits. But once he was elected he and his party never passed it.

Some of us who are in unions are dealing with union leaders who have lost touch with the members they’re supposed to represent.

How do we organize ourselves and co-workers to fight for a better standard of living? How do we reform our current union to make them more democratic to win better contracts? How do we stop the attacks on our public sector unions from Democratic and Republican governors like Scott Walker and Deval Patrick?

Please join us for this discussion.

For more information: 774-454-9060 Boston@SocialistAlternative.org- “Boston Socialist Alternative” on Facebook

***From The May Day 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

Boston's International Workers Day 2013


BMDC International Workers Day Rally
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at Boston City Hall
Gather at 2PM - Rally at 2:30PM
(Court St. & Cambridge St.)
T stops Government Center (Blue line, Green line)

To download flyer click here. (Please print double-sided)

Other May Day events:

Revere - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pmbegin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Everett - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pm begin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Chelsea - @ City Hall - rally a 3:pm (wait for above feeder marches to arrive) will begin marching at 4:30 (to East Boston)
East Boston - @ Central Square - (welcome marchers) Rally at 5:pm

BMDC will join the rally in East Boston immediately following Boston City Hall rally

Supporters: ANSWER Coalition, Boston Anti Authoritarian Movement, Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, Harvard No-Layoffs Campaign, Industrial Workers of the World, Latinos for Social Change, Mass Global Action, Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party of Boston, Socialist Workers Party, Student Labor Action Movement, USW Local 8751 - Boston School Bus Drivers Union, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, National Immigrant Solidarity Network, Democracy Center - Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington United for Justice with Peace, International Socialist Organization, Community Church of Boston

*******

The Latest From The “Occupy May Day Facebook Page”Website- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike

January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •

Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:

Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.

*******
Markin comment:

Wage cuts, long hours, steep price rises, unemployment, no pensions, no vacations, cold-water flats, homelessness, wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines. Well, yes. But these were also the conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the “one percent”were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half, so they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed. What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive, revive big time, that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the one percent.

No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people, the so-called middle class for those who frown upon that previous more truthful designation, has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin big time. What with job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bank bail-outs, home foreclosures, effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in harsh light of the American Dream. Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that the working class and its allies have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch, great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons against the imperial capitalist monster that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the one- per centers of that day) to shut the capitalist down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch the two “p’s.” Moreover a new inspired fight like the action proposed for this May Day 2012 can help inspire new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, to get out from under. Specific conditions may be different just now from what they were in the 1930s but there is something very, very current about what our forebears faced down there and then.

We ask working people to join us this day in solidarity by stopping work for the day, and if you cannot do that reasonably for the day then for some period. Students-out of the class rooms and into the streets. The unemployed, homeless and others who have been chewed up by this system come join us on the Boston Common. Watch this site for further specific details of events and actions.

All out on May Day 2012.

***From The May Day 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

Boston's International Workers Day 2013


BMDC International Workers Day Rally
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at Boston City Hall
Gather at 2PM - Rally at 2:30PM
(Court St. & Cambridge St.)
T stops Government Center (Blue line, Green line)

To download flyer click here. (Please print double-sided)

Other May Day events:

Revere - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pmbegin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Everett - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pm begin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Chelsea - @ City Hall - rally a 3:pm (wait for above feeder marches to arrive) will begin marching at 4:30 (to East Boston)
East Boston - @ Central Square - (welcome marchers) Rally at 5:pm

BMDC will join the rally in East Boston immediately following Boston City Hall rally

Supporters: ANSWER Coalition, Boston Anti Authoritarian Movement, Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, Harvard No-Layoffs Campaign, Industrial Workers of the World, Latinos for Social Change, Mass Global Action, Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party of Boston, Socialist Workers Party, Student Labor Action Movement, USW Local 8751 - Boston School Bus Drivers Union, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, National Immigrant Solidarity Network, Democracy Center - Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington United for Justice with Peace, International Socialist Organization, Community Church of Boston
*******
Why You Need To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the “one percent” were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive, revive big time, that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1% percent.

No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. What with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail –out of banks and other financial institutions “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,”effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in harsh light of the “American Dream.”

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch, great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch profits and property. Moreover a new inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.

Show Power

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1st, 2012 we will be organizing

a wide-ranging series of mass participatory collective actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where

there is no union - a one-day general strike.

*Where a strike is not possible we will be organizing people to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”

*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.

*In our communities we will be holding a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.

All out on May Day 2012.

Update about 'Petition to Free Lynne Stewart: Save Her Life - Release Her Now!' on Change.org

Over 9,000 and counting!

“I shall refuse all solid food,” Dick Gregory declared on April 4, the date of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., “until Lynne Stewart is freed and receives medical treatment in the care of her family and with physicians of her choice without which she will die.”
Gregory, known for his social activism as much as his for comedic wit and political commentary, took this step to reinforce the worldwide petition in support of Stewart’s application for compassionate release.

Ed Asner, as committed to the struggle for social justice as he is to his acting career, issued a call to action on April 13, days before the April 19 anniversary of the 1776 battles of Concord and Lexington: “The fight to free Lynne Stewart is a front-line battle for basic rights secured through the American Revolution and is a measure of our will to reclaim a land of the free in the home of the brave.”

We can see the difference that your efforts make: as the Center for Constitutional Rights features the petition on its Facebook page, as individuals contact people they know, as journalists publish articles and conduct radio interviews, as organizations sponsor and reach out to their members. Now, let us ramp up our efforts – contact five more people this week and ask them to contact another five. The Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice are on notice: people of conscience worldwide are concerned and will continue to press on until Lynne Stewart is freed.

Visit the Justice for Lynne Stewart website www.lynnestewart.org for the full text of the declarations from Ed Asner and Dick Gregory and for the list of signers up to April 10.

***Out In The 1950s Crime Noir Night-When Alan Ladd Held Forth-“Appointment With Danger”- A Film Review

DVD Review

Appointment with Danger, starring Alan Ladd, Jack Webb, Jan Sterling, Paramount Picture, 1951

No question I am a film noiraficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various film noirefforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy; films like Out Of the Past, Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and The Big Sleep need no additional comment from me as they stand on their own merits. I would add here a couple of earlier Alan Ladd vehicles, the film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and This Gun For Hire both also starring classic femme fatale Veronica Lake (be still my heart, sorry Rita Hayworth). Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass, or as in Gilda a double nod for the plot and for the femme fatale, Rita Hayworth. Be still my heart, am I forgiven, Rita Hayworth? I have even tried to salvage some by touting their plot lines, and others by their use of shadowy black and white cinematography to overcome plot problems like The Third Man (and, in that case, the edgy musical score, with all the zither music you could want or need, as well). And that brings us to those, like this film under review, 1951's Appointment With Danger, starring the above-mentioned Alan Ladd that have no redeeming film noir qualities.

Now as I mentioned in a recent review of another lesser crime noir, William Holden in Union Station, it is not like Alan Ladd did not know how to play hard-boiled crime noiron either side of the crime line as he did in The Glass Key and This Gun For Hire (as well as the Raymond Chandler-scripted The Blue Dahlia) so it is not the acting capabilities, although Brother Ladd may have been a little tired from holding Veronica Lake's hand (or playing playfully with that big wavy hair falling over her right eye). What is missing here in the film under review, Appointment With Danger, is any spark to get interested in actors or plot.

The plot line in any case is rather conventional. Ladd plays a hard-nosed postal inspector (what? yes a postal inspector, and hard-nosed to boot) who is sent out to crime-ridden Indiana to seek the killer, or killers, of a fellow postal inspector (what?, again a postal inspector-who would have known it was such a dangerous life) and the only clue that he has to go on is via a sister, no not a dame, a nun who can identify (and be identified by) one of the men last seen with said postal inspector. Between the pair hard-boiled, obviously Protestant, postal inspector with a narrow sense of his job, and narrower regard for the human species and Catholic nun good who sees only good, Ladd tumbles into a big time heist, a million dollar heist (that was big dough then, if only pocket change now) involving the postal service. Is nothing sacred?

Part of the tumbling by Ladd is that he gets inside the job through wit, wiliness, and an occasional drawing of the gun, although this is the weakest part of a weak plot. If one assumes a certain amount of finesse by Earl, a hotel owner looking for, well, looking for “easy street” and an end to changing towels for the masses, then Ladd’s working his way into the scheme should have put out signals big time. Moreover some of Earl’s confederates have more than a few problems, especially the combination that later in the decade would do yeomen’s service as detectives in Dragnet (Jack Webb and Harry Morgan). Of course in this one the message was telegraphed from the very beginning, crime doesn’t pay, especially if you go after the big boys, the postal service. Or people who walk around with guardian angels to protect them.

Note: As is usual with crime-addled guys they need their molls, sometimes gun molls, but sometimes just for company in the sometimes long wait between jobs. Here the moll, a blonde one as well, although blondeness is not required for the job, just the craven desire for a share of the ”easy street” dough is played by the same moll from Union Station, Jan Sterling. Ms. Sterling actually “steals” the show here as the hard-boiled but smart “be-bop” moll with the quick answer who also has enough sense to come in out of the rain. In short, to know when the deal goes down that her man, Earl, ain’t going nowhere fast and so she blows town, just in time. Nice work. But this is where my interest was perked; she also was into the 1950s be-bop jazz night and brought tin-eared Ladd up to her digs to listen to some platters. If Brother Ladd had had any sense he would have followed her out of town. Willingly.