"a massive escalation of the resistance"
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Friday, March 03, 2017
From Socialist Alternative- "a massive escalation of the resistance"
Nukes, NATO, and Right-Wing Nationalism
Nukes, NATO, and Right-Wing Nationalism
When: Tuesday, March 7, 2017, 7:00 pm
Where: American Friends Service Committee • 2161 Massachusetts Ave • Cambridge
Reiner Braun has been a leading figure in the German and European peace movements since the early 1980s. His connections with movements and political figures from Manila to Moscow and Berlin to Buenos Aries is extraordinary. He is currently Co-president of the International Peace Bureau as was the lead organizer of IPB’s massive Disarm! For a Climate of Peace! Congress in Berlin this past October. He was the founder of the No to NATO/No to War International Network. He has long been associated with International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES), the Max Planck Institute and the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms.
Reiner is currently involved in planning activities for the Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty negotiations at the United Nations in March and June, as well as counter-NATO-summit activities and for the NPT PrepCom in Vienna – both in May.
Reiner Braun is a highly informed, sharp and long-time critic of U.S., European and Russian foreign and military policies. He will be in Boston as part of a national speaking tour organized by the American Friends Service Committee and Peace Action, and United for Peace and Justice.
Co-sponsored by: American Friends Service Committee, Massachusetts Peace Action, and United for Justice with Peace
Upcoming Events:
| Nukes, NATO, and Right-Wing Nationalism | Tuesday, March 7, 2017 - 7:00pm | American Friends Service Committee | Cambridge |  |
| Film and Discussion: The Occupation of the |
In Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take One -In The Time Of His Time
In Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take One -In The Time Of His Time
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Billy Casey woke up in a sweat that early March 1919 night, woke up in a once again sweat that he had earned from his experiences as a doughboy, an American doughboy in France now furloughed home to New York City, awaiting medical discharge from that mustard gas explosion that harried his breathe ever since. Yes, he had had it rough overseas, had seen some stuff and done some stuff he didn’t want to repeat to anybody, stuff that frankly no man should be forced to do making him remain silent when asked, and which he believed, or he came to believe, no man would do even to an animal. He had put some of that behind him but still a little corner would flare up on nights when he was excited and he was excited this night and had been for the past few nights about big doings in Moscow coming up in a few days (or since he wasn’t sure of the dates of the conference, except early March, maybe had already occurred), about creating a new organization, a new international organization that would “speak” Russian to the bosses, all the bosses, everywhere, to working people together right the wrongs of this wicked old world.
See, Bill Casey had gotten “religion,” no not catholicprotestantjewishmuslim religion but the good word-the socialist word , the word that all workingmen, and Bill Casey was nothing if not a working man, were brothers and that the robbers of the world were the only ones who had benefited from the damn war “to end all wars” over in Europe. And Bill had the destroyed lungs to prove it was not him who had benefited. This new language had been taught to him by a fellow soldier, a fellow doughboy, Tim Ryan, who had belonged to the American Socialist Party before the war, before he passed away from failed lungs in that French convalescent home Bill was assigned before coming back to America. So when Bill got back to New York the first thing, well maybe not the first, the first being to roll the pillows with his long-suffering girlfriend, Rosie, also nothing if not a daughter of the working class, he marched down to the American Socialist Party office in Greenwich Village (that is where his deceased comrade told him to go since that is where he had been a member) and joined right up.
Now Bill Casey had never been much for the books, and the materials that he received from the local secretary when he paid his dues and received his membership card seemed a lot more convoluted that the way his hospital pal explained it, but he plugged at it for a while, and that along with the weekly lectures helped him along. And he was going to be in full need of that knowledge because he had landed on his socialist arse (his expression) right at a time when the whole socialist movement was in turmoil. And the big event was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the fall-out from that event. See Bill’s pal had only known the American Socialist Party before that revolution, and since most of the party had been anti-war before his pal joined up to fight he didn’t know the stuff that was going on between the different factions-basically to stick with the Socialist (also known as the the Second) International or go with the new one, the one that said that the old one was done for and a new Communist International had to be formed to fight for revolutions everywhere. Heady stuff. Stuff to make Bill sweat in anticipation.
And that is where the martyred James Connolly, Bill’s hero from the Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin and a man who had been executed by the bloody British for his part in it, came into it. Or kind of came into it. See the fight over who were the real revolutionaries, the Europeans or the Russians, basically was hard to figure. That is when he met a guy, an Irish guy, a comrade, from one of the factions, Jim Cannon, who put him straight, who told him that if he wanted to get back for that dirty deal he received in France by his own government he had to go with the Russian Bolsheviks and the new international they were trying to form. And Bill Casey respected Jim Cannon, respected the big heavy-drinking Irishman from out in the sticks of Kansas and so he cast his fate with Jim and his communist brethren. And you know what else Jim said to him- he, Bill Casey, should say at meetings and out on the Union Square and Village soapboxes to one and all what he saw and did in France so people would know, know better the next time the government tried to stuff a war down their throats. Bill Casey didn’t know if he could so that, could avoid some tough night sweats thinking about doing it, but he thought if it stopped some young guy from joining up maybe he would at that…
What Makes An Effective Protest-The Risen People?-May Day 1971-Build The Resistance
What Makes An Effective Protest-The Risen People?-May Day 1971-Build The Resistance
Here is a take from NPR on how earlier protest movements affected policy.
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/02/23/effective-protest-movement
http://libcom.org/library/ending-war-inventing-movement-mayday-1971
Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all we knew, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let her rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some wheat field night fantasy this trip.
And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention then to anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in our presence and we were at every meeting, high or low. Moreover we had our ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. We, rightly or wrongly, silly us thought “cop.”
Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramps acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, we were longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.
Here is a take from NPR on how earlier protest movements affected policy.
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/02/23/effective-protest-movement
Click on the headline to link to an entry for May Day 1971 in Washington, D.C.
http://libcom.org/library/ending-war-inventing-movement-mayday-1971
Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all we knew, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let her rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some wheat field night fantasy this trip.
No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war (World War II so as not to confuse the reader) break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we are, he is, ready. On that dusty road ready.
More. See all roads head south as we and they, his girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and his sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.
Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of them figured would be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and we knew (know) who they were, had their antennae out too, they KNEW those who were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct., nothing except Arizona was). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).
The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, they thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms these jailbirds-in-waiting- were ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.
And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention then to anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in our presence and we were at every meeting, high or low. Moreover we had our ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. We, rightly or wrongly, silly us thought “cop.”
So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (He, we, thought, but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted) to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee-slurping to keep the juices flowing).
Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.
Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big ironic (past ironic) Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.
And, as we were being led away by one of D.C.s finest, we turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and we had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive us. (Not so anonymous actually since we saw her many times later in Boston, and Peter Paul almost would have traded in lust for her but he was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, he, let the moment pass, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. We saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)
Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramps acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, we were longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.
Thursday, March 02, 2017
In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Film “Casablanca”- Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Night- Free, Ya, Free- High Sierra- A Film Review
High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, and, of course, Pard, directed by Raoul Walsh, Warner Brothers, 1941
Funny how a character, or performer, in one film will lead you to remember about or to investigate another. Recently I viewed and reviewed a film in which Ida Lupino starred, a kind of off-beat sweet fluff working-class thing in its way from 1942 entitled, Moontide, where she played alongside French actor, Jean Gabon, as down-at-the-heels hash-slinger seeking a little white house with a picket fence. In that role there was no question of her being a femme fatale-type that guys get all, well, nervous over but just a reliable dame when the deal goes down, good or bad. A rare thing in crime noir world, especially with dames. Here in the noir classic, High Sierra, Ms Lupino picks up some of the down-at-the heels aspects of that role of hash-slinger as she plays along side Humphrey Bogart as that reliable shoe good guys and bad guys both use for their own purposes
Of course at this stage of his career Bogart was the king hell actor getting choice roles as the grizzled whatever from Sam Spade in Maltese Falcon to Captain Morgan in To Have Or Have Not so his presence is the driving force of the film. Ms. Lupino is just along for the ride, and to pick up the pieces when the deal goes south. Here Bogart plays the three-time loser, Roy Earle, just out of prison and heading west to get some fresh air, and maybe a new start. A new start in his old racket, armed robbery, big-time armed robbery. Along the way west he is befriended by an Okie-type family heading to California just like the Joads before them. But Roy gets hung up on the young daughter, some lame Janie, and helps fund her operation to fix her foot. Naturally Janie is nothing but ungrateful and spoils Roy’s rehabilitation program. Needless to say, also along the way, brought along by one of the confederates, Marie, the role Ms. Lupino plays, is the smitten dish- rag gangster’s girl who stands by her man, although why with Roy the way he treats her is not apparent on the face of it.
As always in these crime noir adventures, in the end, crime doesn’t pay. In this case the big-time resort heist is fouled up by the inside man and Roy his confederates have to go on the run. Moreover Roy and Marie are forced to split up. Law enforcement keeps crowding Roy. One thing a three-time loser knows, knows deep in his bones, if he goes back to prison he ain’t coming out. That knowledge drives the suspense of the last part of the film as Earle’s world becomes smaller and smaller. And, as they say, it’s a dog’s world that does him in at the end. Ya, but he was free, free like the starry nights that he had time to dream about in his prison nights. And Marie? Who knows but that some other heel may need a reliable shoe.
In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Film “Casablanca”- Out In The Be-Bop 1930s Night-When Primitive Man “Wins”- “Petrified Forest”-A Film Review
Okay here is the genesis of this review. Recently, being on a something of a film noir tear, especially a crime noir tear, I reviewed a little light puff of a noir film, Moontide, where well-known 1940s French film star Jean Gabon tried to break into the Hollywood film racket with a role as a tough hombre, seen-it-all dockworker who is really, just ready, to settle down after all the wine, women and song escapades have worn thin. And settle down in 1940s movie parlance (and maybe life too) was with a good woman and a white picket fenced house (or in this film a barge, it’s near the sea, see). The good woman, a kind of eternal working-class version of everywoman also happened to be down on her luck, and in that film was played by Ida Lupino.
Well, seeing Ms. Lupino in that role got me to think about a similar role that she played trying to be a good “wifie,” (and “mother” to the dog Pard) to Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra. In that film the grizzled Bogart played a serious desperado, a three-time loser desperado, Roy Earle, looking to “retire” to that picket-fenced house except the cops would not let him. Let him, especially after a certain messed-up resort hold-up caper went awry. And when Mr. Earle bought it, as it had to be since crime does not pay, grizzled wised-up gangster or not, Ms. Lupino was left to keep his memory fresh and keep moving on.
Of course all of that high Bogartism got me to thinking about other grizzled gangster roles (and grizzled detectives too) that the bad boy actor Humphrey Bogart played, and that led naturally to the film under review, Petrified Forest, where as Duke Mantee Bogart put in his bid for king of the gangster hill. In fact this film (he had also played the role on Broadway, I believe) first established him for that challenge. The story line here has him on the run from, what else, a busted bank robbery, and every cop in the Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dellinger, Bonnie and Clyde American untamed West was looking for him and his confederates. He winds up in a flea-bitten café located, where else, next to the Petrified Forest, a great symbol of humankind’s age old struggle to deal with nature, and to break with the primitive past.
And that isolated, flea-bitten café setting is important because there is a young serving- them-off-the-arm waitress, Gaby, played by a very young Bette Davis, as the owner’s daughter, trapped there, full of dreams, literary dreams, and a very, very strong to desire to put those silly tree rocks behind her. And, as the film opens, a very well-turned out gentleman/intellectual/ hobo/alcoholic, Alan, played by Leslie Howard, on his uppers trying to get off that dusty road. And that little tension, a tension that was palpable to audiences in the 1930s, between Bogart’s gangster take-everything-you-can-grab-and-grab-it-quick and Howard’s ordered intellectual world gone awry with the times, the 1930s despair times what they were, is what drives the theme of this one. Alan, knowing his time has passed, in any case, makes a pact with the devil to insure Gaby’s future hold on her dreams. And while Bogart, perhaps, played more memorable roles later he certainly was believable as the primitive man gangster trying to claim his rightful place in the modern world. Naturally, in movie life he must pay, pay big-time, with his life because we all know, or should know, that crime does not pay.
A Day Without A Woman Rally - International Women's Day- Downtown Boston
A Day Without A Woman Rally - International Women's Day- Downtown Boston
A Day Without A Woman Rally - Downtown Boston
Date:
Wed, 03/08/2017 - 4:00pm
Location Name: The Staircase at Downtown Crossing
Address:
On Washington Street between TJ Maxx and Millennium Tower
Description:
Women make 82 cents on the dollar for every dollar a man makes and women of color make even less. On International Women's Day, organizers are asking you to work 82% of the day and join in collective action supporting the values and impact of the working women we have in our communities and society. Gather at Downtown Crossing and take a stand in support of working women.
Sponsored by: Chinese Progressive Association, Community Labor United, Matahari Women Workers' Center, SEIU 32BJ District , Right to the City Boston, New England United for Justice, Alternatives for Community and Environment, City Life/Vida Urbana
Feel free to share the flyer attached below.
For more info:
For more information, contact Lindsay McCluskey at lindsay@massclu.org
Sponsored by: Chinese Progressive Association, Community Labor United, Matahari Women Workers' Center, SEIU 32BJ District , Right to the City Boston, New England United for Justice, Alternatives for Community and Environment, City Life/Vida Urbana
Feel free to share the flyer attached below.
For more info:
For more information, contact Lindsay McCluskey at lindsay@massclu.org
Attachment Size
day_without_women_flyer_3.
day_without_women_flyer_3.
An Encore -Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits
An Encore -Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits
From the pen of the late Peter Paul Markin who fell by the wayside, fell to his notoriously monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places down among the weeds in Mexico, looking for train smoke and dreams if you really thought about the matter, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother,RIP.
******
If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, bourgeois a better term than capitalist or imperialist if you are in America since it gives a better view of the unhindered social norms, the ethos rather than the sheer grab for filthy lucre; you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address, the address of Mister Tom Waits if you missed the headline or missed who is writing this thing. (Or better "wrote" since this piece is being edited posthumously by Zack James who found this and three companion pieces in the attic of Josh Breslin's Olde Saco family house in Olde Saco, Maine when they were looking to dispose of whatever could be disposed of in preparation for selling the place so Josh and Lana could move into smaller quarters and Josh told him the long and at the end the sad story about Josh's and Markin's meeting out in San Francisco in the summer of love 1960s times and about Markin's awful fate down in Mexico. That story drove Zack to the editing job in order that a genuine mad monk writer could some forty years after his death receive a small recognition of his ambitious talent.)
Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay once he saw how those coupon-clippers devoured all good sense and sober ethos, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors, some hungry Dutch sailors who took what they wanted back the homeland and made a grave attempt to fatten their own chests. Just check out any Dutch master painting to see what I mean.
Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys were no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for "you at the expense of me" system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.
If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap, with blinkers on before you got stuck in the human sink that you have still not been able to get out of) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering, have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half-forgotten, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups complete with spoons to measure that coffee out as the very modernist poet once said making his modern statement about the world created since the turn of the 19th century that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes Spanish is the loving tongue, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, plucked out early by a professor over on Brattle Street back when the Brahmins very publicly ruled the roost, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter [oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay-Zack James] and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.
If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs, brother even I Iearned early that it was a dangerous world, yeah, learned very early in the Adamsville projects where you got a very real taste of danger before you got too much older than five or six), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark-skinned like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land and that city on a hill that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half-forgotten remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.
If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that sagging bed to perdition and worse losing that thing she had for sex once she started selling it by the hour. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.
So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who had gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.
If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.
Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record [CD or download okay-Zack] and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.
See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten.
Tom Waits once you get the habit gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.
If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.
From the pen of the late Peter Paul Markin who fell by the wayside, fell to his notoriously monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places down among the weeds in Mexico, looking for train smoke and dreams if you really thought about the matter, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother,RIP.
If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, bourgeois a better term than capitalist or imperialist if you are in America since it gives a better view of the unhindered social norms, the ethos rather than the sheer grab for filthy lucre; you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address, the address of Mister Tom Waits if you missed the headline or missed who is writing this thing. (Or better "wrote" since this piece is being edited posthumously by Zack James who found this and three companion pieces in the attic of Josh Breslin's Olde Saco family house in Olde Saco, Maine when they were looking to dispose of whatever could be disposed of in preparation for selling the place so Josh and Lana could move into smaller quarters and Josh told him the long and at the end the sad story about Josh's and Markin's meeting out in San Francisco in the summer of love 1960s times and about Markin's awful fate down in Mexico. That story drove Zack to the editing job in order that a genuine mad monk writer could some forty years after his death receive a small recognition of his ambitious talent.)
Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay once he saw how those coupon-clippers devoured all good sense and sober ethos, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors, some hungry Dutch sailors who took what they wanted back the homeland and made a grave attempt to fatten their own chests. Just check out any Dutch master painting to see what I mean.
Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys were no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for "you at the expense of me" system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.
If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap, with blinkers on before you got stuck in the human sink that you have still not been able to get out of) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering, have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half-forgotten, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups complete with spoons to measure that coffee out as the very modernist poet once said making his modern statement about the world created since the turn of the 19th century that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes Spanish is the loving tongue, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, plucked out early by a professor over on Brattle Street back when the Brahmins very publicly ruled the roost, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter [oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay-Zack James] and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.
If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs, brother even I Iearned early that it was a dangerous world, yeah, learned very early in the Adamsville projects where you got a very real taste of danger before you got too much older than five or six), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark-skinned like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land and that city on a hill that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half-forgotten remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.
If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that sagging bed to perdition and worse losing that thing she had for sex once she started selling it by the hour. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.
So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who had gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.
If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.
Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record [CD or download okay-Zack] and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.
See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten.
Tom Waits once you get the habit gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.
If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919)-Lenin's Speech at the Opening Session of the Congress
Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The Anniversary Of The Historic First World Congress Of The CI
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
********
Speech at the Opening Session of the Congress
March 2
On behalf of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party I declare the First Congress of the Communist International open. First I would ask all present to rise in tribute to the finest representatives of the Third International: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg . ( All rise .)
Comrades, our gathering has great historic significance. It testifies to the collapse of all the illusions cherished by bourgeois democrats. Not only in Russia, but in the most developed capitalist countries of Europe, in Germany for example, civil war is a fact.
The bourgeois are terror-stricken at the growing workers’ revolutionary movement. This is understandable if we take into account that the development of events since the imperialist war inevitably favors the workers’ revolutionary movement, and that the world revolution is beginning and growing in intensity everywhere.
The people are aware of the greatness and significance of the struggle now going on. All that is needed is to find the practical form to enable the proletariat to establish its rule. Such a form is the Soviet system with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat—until now these words were Latin to the masses. Thanks to the spread of the Soviets throughout the world this Latin has been translated into all modern languages; a practical form of dictatorship has been found by the working people. The mass of workers now understand it thanks to Soviet power in Russia, thanks to the Spartacus League in Germany and to similar organizations in other countries, such as, for example, the Shop Stewards Committees in Britain . All this shows that a revolutionary form of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been found, that the proletariat is now able to exercise its rule.
Comrades, I think that after the events in Russia and the January struggle in Germany, it is especially important to note that in other countries, too, the latest form of the workers’ movement is asserting itself and getting the upper hand. Today, for example, I read in an anti-socialist newspaper a report to the effect that the British government had received a dedication from the Birmingham Workers’ Counsel and had expressed its readiness to recognize the Councils as economic bodies. [A] The Soviet system has triumphed not only in backward Russia, but also in the most developed country of Europe—in Germany, and in Britain, the oldest capitalist country.
Even though the bourgeoisie are still raging, even though they may kill thousands more workers, victory will be ours, the victory of the worldwide Communist revolution is assured.
Comrades, I extend hearty greetings to you on behalf of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. I move that we elect a presidium. Let us have nominations. [B]
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
********
Speech at the Opening Session of the Congress
March 2
On behalf of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party I declare the First Congress of the Communist International open. First I would ask all present to rise in tribute to the finest representatives of the Third International: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg . ( All rise .)
Comrades, our gathering has great historic significance. It testifies to the collapse of all the illusions cherished by bourgeois democrats. Not only in Russia, but in the most developed capitalist countries of Europe, in Germany for example, civil war is a fact.
The bourgeois are terror-stricken at the growing workers’ revolutionary movement. This is understandable if we take into account that the development of events since the imperialist war inevitably favors the workers’ revolutionary movement, and that the world revolution is beginning and growing in intensity everywhere.
The people are aware of the greatness and significance of the struggle now going on. All that is needed is to find the practical form to enable the proletariat to establish its rule. Such a form is the Soviet system with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat—until now these words were Latin to the masses. Thanks to the spread of the Soviets throughout the world this Latin has been translated into all modern languages; a practical form of dictatorship has been found by the working people. The mass of workers now understand it thanks to Soviet power in Russia, thanks to the Spartacus League in Germany and to similar organizations in other countries, such as, for example, the Shop Stewards Committees in Britain . All this shows that a revolutionary form of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been found, that the proletariat is now able to exercise its rule.
Comrades, I think that after the events in Russia and the January struggle in Germany, it is especially important to note that in other countries, too, the latest form of the workers’ movement is asserting itself and getting the upper hand. Today, for example, I read in an anti-socialist newspaper a report to the effect that the British government had received a dedication from the Birmingham Workers’ Counsel and had expressed its readiness to recognize the Councils as economic bodies. [A] The Soviet system has triumphed not only in backward Russia, but also in the most developed country of Europe—in Germany, and in Britain, the oldest capitalist country.
Even though the bourgeoisie are still raging, even though they may kill thousands more workers, victory will be ours, the victory of the worldwide Communist revolution is assured.
Comrades, I extend hearty greetings to you on behalf of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. I move that we elect a presidium. Let us have nominations. [B]
Send A Donation To Veterans For Peace-Exposing The Cost Of War Since 1985-Now Is The Time To Join The Resistance
Send A Donation To Veterans For Peace-Exposing The Cost Of War Since 1985-Now Is The Time To Join The Resistance
Poets’ Corner- Claude McKay-If We Must Die-In Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Communist International- Take Five
Poets’ Corner- Claude McKay-If We Must Die-In Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Communist International- Take Five
…they had heard that a group of White Guards, a first detachment on horse, maybe from the dreaded mercenary Czech Legion that were running amok from Siberia to the Urals, paid for by who knows who, some said the English some said the French, or worst maybe the dreaded Cossacks, who needed no outside pay but only their Ataman’s word to bend contemptible peasant heads to size, and who took no prisoners, none, were heading their way, heading right for their line of defense in the city ready to take back Kazan for the asking, so those Whites thought. Kazan fallen then the road to Moscow lay wide open and perhaps the end of the Soviet experiment in that dragged on second year of hellish civil war. But Commissar Vladimir ( assigned that title because he, a little more literate, a little cooler under pressure, than the vast bulk of lumpish peasants, mostly from Monsieur Orlov’s land around Omsk, who had signed up to fight and to die for the land, their land from what they had heard, was listened to by that mass unlike the city boy reds) and his band of comrade brothers, five in all, (and one sixteen year old sister, one stray Red Emma, they called her who learned of revolution and sex, young love smitten sex even in war-torn Kazan with young Zanoff, in that exact order while in their company and proved as fierce a fighter both ways, according to that same Zanoff, as any man), the last remnant from the old Orlov estate who survived the bloody endless Czar war swore, swore a blood oath on their tattered red flag, the previous day that they would retreat no further, that here was their stand, their last stand if necessary, but no more moves away from Moscow.
It had not always been that way with them, not even with Vladimir, not by a long shot. They had all farmed, like their fathers going back eons before them, the same fruitless task (for them) land for Orlov, the richest landowner in Omsk, and never lifted their heads when the Social Revolutionaries had come before the war and during that last revolution, the one back in 1905, with glad tidings (and before them other city radicals, narodniks or something like that, had spoken to their fathers and grandfathers). They just shoveled the dirt, kept shoveling, and kept their heads down.
Then the war came, the bloody world war as it turned out, and the Czar’s police (Orlov’s really but in the name of the Czar so the same thing) came and “drafted” them into some vast ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-armed peasant force which proved no match for the methodical Germans as they were slaughtered by the millions in and around those foul trenches. And still they kept their heads bent, Vladimir and his four Orlov surviving farm brothers the only healthy alive ones left from the twenty-two that had started out from Omsk in the summer of 1915. Kept them bent until the February revolution stirred things up although they held to the front line trenches even then since no one told them not to leave and in the fall of 1917 they had just followed their fellows out of the trenches and went home. Not the first ones out, nor the last but just out. Went home to farm Orlov’s land again they figured with bent heads again. Even when the Bolsheviks took power in November and decreed the land of Orlov’s theirs they kept their heads bent. It was not until Orlov, his agents, and his White Guard friends came back and took the land, their now precious land, theirs, that they roared back. And they had joined one of Trotsky’s red brigades passing through on a recruiting drive. They had moved here and there as the lines of battle shifted but mainly back, mainly retreats or break-ups since then and hence the blood oath, and no more retreats. The peasant slows in them had been busted, busted good.
Just then a messenger came to their line, a messenger from the river in front of Kazan, from the wind- swept Volga. The message said that Trotsky himself , Trotsky of the phantom armored train rushing to this and that front, seemingly everywhere at the same time, that put fear in the hearts of whites and reds alike, had decided to fight and die before Kazan if necessary to save the revolution, to save their precious land. Vladimir and his comrades, including Red Emma, Red Emma who if the truth be told despite her tender years of sweet sixteen was the best soldier of the lot, and should have been the commissar except those lumpish peasants would not have listened to her, reaffirmed their blood oath. They were not sure of Lenin, thinking him a little too smart, and maybe he had something up his sleeve, maybe he was just another Jew, he looked the part with that bald head of his, but stout-hearted Trotsky, if he was willing to die then what else could they do. If they must die they would die in defense of Kazan, and maybe just maybe somebody would hear of their story, the story of five peasant boys and a pretty red-hearted city girl as brave as they, and lift their heads and roar back too….
[Vladimir, Vladimir Suslov (whose grandson, Misha, would become a high Soviet dignitary in the 1980s) also deserves some additional mention so one does not get the impression that they had dug deep into the bottom of the barrel and he was all they could come up with from the loutish lumpish peasant mass that decided, decided almost just yesterday, that they should first raise their heads and then actually go out and fight for their land, come hell or high water. No Vladimir, even as a child was a leader of the boys, the peasant boys who spent more time avoiding work and hiding in the woods than bending to the plow. And contrary to his stolid appearance (added to, and aided by, those miserable years in the trenches) which endeared him to his fellows, made him appear older than his thirty years, he was a good reader, and could write some, including fancying himself a minor peasant poet. Like he told the political commissar of his unit one night when things had dusted up it paid to NOT appear too much brighter than the fellows or else you would be treated like poor Red Emma, Nana, who actually had the heart, the heart of a red warrior princess. And so Vladimir led, led by just being a little ahead, being a little bit better able to read maps, and people and get his fellows out of more than a few scrapes. Of such men revolutions flourish, for a time. Then the grandsons, the Mishas, come along and think they have done it all themselves. ]
[Red Emma, real name Nana Kamkov, deserves a better fate that to written off as some play thing for some loutish peasant boy, Grisha Zanoff by full name, no matter how Red Army brave he was just that moment and no matter how peasant handsome he was, and he was, to Nana’s eyes. Nana had come off the land as a child, as fate would have it Orlov’s land, when after the last revolution, the one in 1905, the government encouraged capitalist exploitation of the land in order to break down the backward-looking peasant communes. Her parents had abandoned the land had travelled to live in Kazan and her father had set up shop as a locksmith, a good one. Nana had gone school and had been an outstanding student if somewhat socially backward (she had not been like the other girls boy-crazy) and desperately wanted to become an engineer although the family resources precluded such a fate.
One day in the summer of 1917 at the height of the revolutionary fervor she ran across a Bolshevik agitator in Kazan (later killed in Kiev fighting off some White Guards in that location) who told her, young impressionable her, aged fourteen, no more, that if the Soviets survived she would be able to pursue her engineering career, hell, the Bolsheviks would encourage it. From that time she had been a single-minded Red Guard soldier performing many dangerous tasks until the Whites threatened Kazan and she was trapped in the city and had joined Vladimir’s remnants as a result. And there she spied Grisha among his soldiers, loutish, foolish Grisha, although handsome she admitted. Perhaps it was the time of her time, perhaps she still had a little foolish schoolgirl notion to be with a man just in case things didn’t work out and she was killed, or worse, executed but one cold night she snuggled up to the sleeping Grisha and that was that. She was teaching him to read better and to think about things just in case they weren’t killed, or worse executed. Practical young woman, very practical. And so young Nana enters the red pantheon, and maybe she will drag Grisha along too.]
If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
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