This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
National Bird A new documentary film about the secret United States Drone Assassination Program Why is our government killing thousands of people around the globe they can’t even identify? Tuesday, October 10, 2017, 7-9 pm Robbins Library Community Room 700 Mass. Ave., Arlington Center ( on the 77 and 79 bus lines)
People interviewed in this film include drone operators turned whistleblowers suffering PTSD, and people on the ground in Afghanistan whose families and lives have been shattered by ongoing drone attacks. After the film there will be a short discussion with suggestions of things we can do to stop this immoral and indefensible form of warfare.
Many of you are probably watching the PBS documentary on the Vietnam War, which is showing this week. Not surprisingly for a mainstream production, the series begins and continues to propagate the idea that the war – which killed 58,000 Americans and probably more than 2 million Vietnamese – was a “well-meaning mistake.” There is some useful commentary here: America's Amnesiaand here: Ideology as History: a Critical Commentary on Burns and Novick’s “The Vietnam War”In our own neighborhood, the war lives onamong Dorchester’s large Vietnamese community, including many former officers and government officials from South Vietnam; storefronts not infrequently display the flag – yellow with three red stripes – of the defunct US-supported Republic of Vietnam (the actual official Vietnamese flag is a yellow star on a red background).
In case you missed it in The Globe. . .
TRUMP PUSHES US CLOSER TO WAR
Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations on Tuesday moved the world closer to war. The speech was Hitlerian in tone and content, filled with vitriol and grievance. Germany, said Hitler, was stabbed in the back by its own leaders after World War I. The Obama administration, declared Trump, signed an agreement with Iran that was “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” Trump threatened, from the very podium of the UN General Assembly, to “totally destroy” North Korea, a country of 25 million people… In the case of Iran, Trump’s overheated rhetoric is even more bizarre. A nuclear agreement has already been reached and is being fulfilled. Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rohani has won re-election against hardliners. The country is fighting ISIS effectively. The real explanation in the case of Iran lies with the US administration acceding to the reckless lobbying by both Israel and Saudi Arabia to lure us into a war with Iran for the narrow interests of those two countries (at least “interests” as warmongers in the two countries perceive them). Have no complacency. Speak out against war. Demand democratic constraint over the US military and oversight by our hapless, so-far useless Congress. War typically seems impossible until it is too late. Then it is utterly disastrous and ruinous for all. More
"Totally destroy" North Korea? Attack Iran?
IT'S TIME TO STOP THE NEXT WAR!
The build up to a war is happening right now before our eyes. It’s more imperative than ever for those of us who oppose such rampant destruction to build our power to oppose war. The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw from the nuclear agreement are dangerous for the U.S. and the entire world. As a large group of retired Generals and Admirals wrote in a letter to Trump in July, the administration must “recognize the national security benefits of the nuclear agreement and appropriately weigh the risks to our troops of escalating tensions with Iran.”
Amid renewed talk by the Trump administration of a military option against North Korea, one salient fact goes unnoticed. The United States is already at war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK – the formal name for North Korea). It is doing so through non-military means, with the aim of inducing economic collapse… We are told that UN Security Council resolution 2375, passed on September 11, was “watered down” so as to obtain Chinese and Russian agreement. In relative terms, this is true, in that the original draft as submitted by the United States called for extreme measures such as a total oil embargo. However, Western media give the impression that the resolution as passed is mild or mainly symbolic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The resolution, in tandem with previous sanction votes and in particular resolution 2371 from August 5, is aimed squarely at inflicting economic misery. More
North Korea-The Deeper Issues
High level fulminations and fiery rhetoric notwithstanding, if a political solution can be achieved, Washington almost certainly will find it more distasteful than will any other country in the world. A political solution will inevitably end up “permitting” North Korea to maintain an element of nuclear weapons. It will almost surely require an end to US military exercises and presence in South Korea. Yet South Korea itself will almost certainly accede to any genuinely peaceful solution… . That is a net strategic loss to Washington—as long as the US remains determined to maintain a dominant military presence in East Asia. North Korean nationalism runs high— as does their domestic propaganda. Unlike Americans, North Koreans have not forgotten the sweeping devastation inflicted by the US on the North in the Korean War (1950-53) in which more bombs and napalm were dropped on the North by the US than on all other Asian targets in the Pacific during World War II; virtually nothing was left standing and the country was reduced to famine. More
In addition to the annual $3.8 billion in Aid to Israel. . .
Congress’ Military Spending Bill Forks Over Unprecedented Sums to Israel and Ukraine
Buried deep in the text of the mammoth National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a gargantuan money dump into the Israeli defense industry, with $705 million specifically earmarked for “US-Israel missile defense cooperation.” The funding represents a full 1/100th of the whopping $700 billion military spending package, and a staggering $558 million increase from what President Donald Trump had originally requested. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main arm of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, reacted with elation at news of the funding, hailing it as a powerful shot in the arm for the Israeli arms industry… Alongside funding for Israel, the NDAA budgeted unprecedented funding for supposedly defensive weapons for the Ukrainian military, which has been locked in a destabilizing conflict with Russian-backed separatists since a U.S.-backed coup toppled its democratically elected government in 2014… Raytheon also stands to benefit handsomely from the funding earmarked in the bill for Israeli missile systems. It has partnered with the state-backed Israeli arms firm Rafael, to produce the Iron Dome System, which has been deployed primarily to deter homemade rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave… A week before the NDAA vote, AIPAC announced it had sent 50 members of Congress from both parties on an all-expenses-paid junket to Israel. These lawmakers will soon vote on the House version of the titanic military spending bill.
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, AGAIN!
The 1966 Academy Award-winning film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, directed by Norman Jewison, parodies the Cold War paranoia then pervading the United States… Half a century later, Americans are again being warned daily of the Russian menace, with persistent accusations of Russian aggression, lies, violations of international law, and cyberattacks on U.S. elections, as reported in leading liberal outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post… Russia, not surprisingly, has watched these policies with alarm, itself putting five new strategic nuclear missile regiments into service in 2016, and backing the Assad government in the Syrian civil war. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry is among those who believe that the danger of nuclear catastrophe arising from the renewed arms race is “greater today than during the Cold War.” As in the original Cold War, U.S. arms manufacturers have fueled the escalation by lobbying Washington and NATO to maintain high levels of military spending, aided by hired-gun think tanks and professional “experts.” More
The American Military’s Repetition-Compulsion Complex in Afghanistan
…the Taliban are not some invading army. (That would be us.) They are Afghan citizens, distinguished from their countrymen chiefly by their extreme religious conservatism, misogyny, and punitive approach to governance. Think of them as the Afghan equivalent of our own evangelical right-wing Republicans. You find some in almost every town. And the more you rile them up, the meaner they get and the more followers they gain. But in times of peace -- which Afghanistan has not known for 40 years -- many Taliban most likely would return to being farmers, shopkeepers, villagers, like their fathers before them, perhaps imposing local law and order but unlikely to seek control of Kabul and risk bringing the Americans down on them again. Few Afghans were Taliban sympathizers when the U.S. overthrew the Taliban regime in 2001. Now there are a great many more and they control significant parts of the country, threatening various provincial capitals. They claim to be willing to negotiate with the Afghan government -- but only after all American forces have left the country. For the Trump administration, that’s not an option. More
Linking Domestic and Foreign Policy with Global Inequality
Throughout the winter and spring of 2016, Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, proudly laying out an agenda that pulled together one progressive policy plank after another. But in one important area, there was near deafening silence: foreign policy. Well, today Sanders finally delivered the speech many of us have been hoping to hear, from him or anyone else, for quite some time. In laying out a principled and bold progressive vision for recentering US foreign policy at the core of a progressive platform, Senator Sanders has given voice to those of us who have always believed that our values don’t simply stop at the water’s edge. Taking to the same stage where Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech almost 70 years ago, Sanders’s challenge to the progressive movement, and indeed to all Americans, was to redefine for the 21st century a vision for America’s role in the world. More
You can read the Senator’s speech – which was long on good principles but short on concrete proposals – here; and you can watch the video here (Sanders speaks at 1:24)
Sanders Interview: Saudi Arabia Is “Not an Ally” and the U.S. Should “Rethink” Its Approach to Iran
Sanders issued a scathing denunciation of the Gulf kingdom, which has recently embarked on a new round of domestic repression. “I consider [Saudi Arabia] to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism. … They are not an ally of the United States.” …“They are fomenting a lot of hatred,” he added. In June, Sanders joined 46 other senators in voting to try and block the sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led coalition backed by the U.S. has been bombing Iranian-backed Houthi fighters in Yemen since 2015 and is accused of killing thousands of Yemeni civilians… The senator suggested the United States should consider a pivot toward long-standing adversary Iran and away from traditional ally Saudi Arabia. The latter, he claimed, “has played a very bad role internationally, but we have sided with them time and time and time again, and yet Iran, which just held elections, Iran, whose young people really want to reach out to the West, we are … continuing to put them down.” More
SENATE BACKS BILL TO PUMP $700 BILLION INTO MILITARY
The Senate has overwhelmingly approved a sweeping defense policy bill that would pump $700 billion into the military, putting the U.S. armed forces on track for a budget greater than at any time during the decade-plus wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Senators passed the legislation by an 89-8 vote Monday. The measure authorizes $700 billion in military spending for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, expands U.S. missile defenses in response to North Korea's growing hostility and refuses to allow excess military bases to be closed… Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and other national security hawks have insisted the military branches are at risk of losing their edge in combat without a dramatic influx of money to repair shortfalls in training and equipment… The bill allots $10.6 billion for 94 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft, which is two dozen more than Trump requested. The bill also provides $25 billion to pay for 13 ships, which is $5 billion and five ships more than the Trump sought. More
The Senate’s Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free
One of the most controversial proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign was a pledge to make tuition free at public colleges and universities. Critics from both parties howled that the pie-in-the-sky idea would bankrupt the country. Where, after all, would the money come from? Those concerns were brushed aside Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’s campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Donald Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.” The bill would set the U.S.’s annual military budget at around $700 billion, putting it within range of matching the spending level at the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More
Outlets That Scolded Sanders Over Deficits Uniformly Silent on $700B Pentagon Handout
Where did all the concern over deficits go? After two years of the media lamenting, worrying and feigning outrage over the cost of Bernie Sanders’ two big-budget items—free college and single-payer healthcare—the same outlets are uniformly silent, days after the largest military budget increase in history. Monday, the Senate voted to increase military spending by a whopping $81 billion, from $619 billion to $700 billion–an increase of over 13 percent. (The House passed its own $696 billion Pentagon budget in July—Politico, 7/14/17.) The reaction thus far to this unprecedented handout to military contractors and weapons makers has been one big yawn. More
After Failing to Prosecute Bankers, Obama Cashes In With Wall Street Speeches
Less than a year has passed since he departed from the White House, and former President Barack Obama has already joined the "well trod and well paid" Wall Street speaking circuit, a decision many argued will negatively impact the Democratic Party's credibility as it attempts to fashion a message around taking on corporate monopolies, tackling income inequality, and loosening the insurance industry's control over the American healthcare system… Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced a wave of intense criticism following her paid speeches to Wall Street during the 2016 presidential campaign, and later conceded that they weren't politically wise. Obama, however, doesn't appear to harbor any concerns about the political impact his speeches may have—a fact that could be problematic for the Democratic Party, Bloomberg's Max Abelson notes. "While he can't run for president, he continues to be an influential voice in a party torn between celebrating and vilifying corporate power," Abelson writes. "His new work with banks might suggest which side of the debate he'll be on." More
The Sept. 21 standout had almost 30 people participating, including a few children, and a woman who came out of the subway and stopped when she saw us to find out more, and a woman who was driving by and stopped when she saw us, wanting to join in. We got a lot of enthusiastic yells and honks from cars, and at one point a sustained chorus of honks from a lot of cars, so loud that all the pedestrians turned to look, and asked us what was happening. I don't think we got any tart "All lives matter!" this time. (Though we were ready with our answer: "Yes, I completely agree with you!") We got seven new members of DPP signed up, some of whom are planning to come to the Oct. 16 DPP meeting. We do need more people to leaflet pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights, so if people can plan to come on Oct. 19 and Nov. 16 and be ready to do some leafletting, that would be great.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact Kelley, kelready@msn.comor Becky, beckyp44@verizon.net, or call Dorchester People for Peace 617-282-3783
As The Burns-Novick Vietnam War Documentary Airs-Iris Dement's "There Is A Wall In Washington"
Frank Jackman comment: Sometimes, and this is one of those times, a song can say as much about a war as a ten-part eighteen hour series in just a few minutes. Not the only poignant song about the effects of the Vietnam War down at the base, down where people who fought, died, or died a thousand dies live-and still do but a good one, a very good one.
“Strobe Light’s Beams Creates Dreams”-The Summer Of Love, 1967-The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts Take
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
Early this year driven by my old corner boys, Alex James and Sam Lowell, I had begun to write some pieces in this space about things that happened in a key 1960s year, 1967. The genesis of this work is based on of all things a business trip that Alex took to San Francisco earlier this spring. While there he noted on one of the ubiquitous mass transit buses that crisscross the city an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young Art Museum located in Golden Gate Park. That exhibition The Summer of Love, 1967 had him cutting short a meeting one afternoon in order to see what it was all about. What it was all about aside the nostalgia effect for members of the now ragtag Generation of ‘68 was an entire floor’s worth of concert poster art, hippy fashion, music and photographs of that noteworthy year in the lives of some of those who came of age in the turbulent 1960s. The reason for Alex playing hooky was that he had actually been out there that year and had imbibed deeply of the counter-culture for a couple of years out there after that.
Alex had not been the only one who had been smitten by the Summer of Love bug because when he returned to Riverdale outside of Boston where he now lives he gathered up all of the corner boys from growing up North Adamsville still standing to talk about, and do something about, commemorating the event. His first contact was with Sam Lowell the old film critic who also happened to have gone out there and spent I think about a year there, maybe a little more. As had most of the old corner boys for various lengths of time usually a few months. Except me. Alex’s idea when he gathered all of us together was to put together a small commemoration book in honor of the late Peter Paul Markin. See Markin, always known as “Scribe” after he was dubbed that by our leader Frankie Riley, was the first guy to go out there when he sensed that the winds of change he kept yakking about around the corner on desolate Friday and Saturday nights when we had no dough, no girls, no cars and no chance of getting any of those quickly were coming west to east.
Once everybody agreed to do the book Alex contacted his youngest brother Zack, the fairly well known writer, to edit and organize the project. I had agreed to help as well. The reason I had refused to go to San Francisco had been that I was in the throes of trying to put together a career as a political operative by attempting to get Robert Kennedy to run against that naked sneak thief of a sitting President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had us neck deep in the big muddy of Vietnam and had no truck with hippies, druggies or “music is the revolution” types like those who filled the desperate streets around Haight-Ashbury. Then. Zack did a very good job and we are proud of tribute to the not forgotten still lamented late Scribe who really was a mad man character and maybe if he had not got caught up in the Army, in being drafted, in being sent to Vietnam which threw him off kilter when he got back he might still be around to tell us what the next big trend will be.
The corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville are, as the article below demonstrates, not the only ones who are thinking about the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Not only did the de Young cash in on the celebration which is to be expected since it is right in San Francisco and right in Golden Gate Park where the Be-Ins, and many concerts by Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Doors, etc. played (many times for free if you can believe that in the now age of high priced tickets for the Stones, etc.) but the Museum of Fine Arts in staid old Boston has tipped its hat as well. The exhibit in Boston unlike San Francisco is small and concentrates on the graphic poster art and photographs but is similar in intent to the larger exhibits (also one at the Berkeley Art Museum around the same time as the de Young). Boston had its own smaller Summer of Love experience as well in 1967 but it was a pale refection of the big deal in Frisco town
Still no question as I have mentioned before around this celebration year 50 years later looking at the art, the posters, photographs and listening to the music makes me once again realize that in that time “to be young was very heaven.”
Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review
Book Review
By Zack James
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, New York, 1920
Josh Breslin, the old time cultural critic, mostly in the music and film milieu but occasionally with an adventurous foray into the printed word which had caused him more anguish from angry authors, had to laugh a couple of years back when approaching retirement after many years of free-lance journalism for publishing houses, small presses and an occasional off-beat journal he decided that he would review a wide selection of books by authors long dead. As one might expect he would therefore not have to deal with those troublesome and irate authors since they would have been long in the grave and beyond care for what some early 21st century adventurer might have to say, or not say, about some literary gem. Or so he thought when he attempted to do a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early coming of age novel, This Side Of Paradise.
Now everybody, everybody that counted for Josh anyway, mostly other reviewers and their hangers-on knew that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s masterwork, knew that it was one of the great classics of the old-time “dead white men” pantheon. He would not when reviewing Paradise try to take that masterpiece away from its proper place in the literary pantheon but instead to tweak a few laconic noses he decided to argue that Paradise was on a level with Gatsby, that it should book-end the classic. Published such deliberate effrontery in several small literary journals and more importantly the literary blog, American Musings, a blog which several well-paid professional book reviewers, college professors, semi-literate high school English teachers, a smattering of graduate students in American Literature and most importantly a cohort of doctoral and post-doctoral literary lights out to make a reputation as gunslingers in the mad dash of that lightless world read and wrote for. Naturally the damn thing caused something of a fire storm as a result. Maybe you did not hear about it if you are not a devotee of such endeavors and just went about your life in ignorance of such earth-shattering blazes. But in that good night circle guns were drawn and ready, acid was added to the pen of many who saw that they could take down a two-bit has-been reviewer who obviously had not read anything since about age twelve-except maybe comic books.
That was the exact reaction that Josh had expected, had savored the prospect of igniting on fire. Had worried, worried to perdition that when he wrote the review nobody, no sensible person could, give a rat’s ass (his corner boy expression never entirely dismissed from his adult vocabulary) a couple of books almost one hundred years old from a guy who was on that “dead white men” extinction list mentioned above. He smiled with secret glee when the first review by a lonely undergraduate student who was trying to muscle herself up the food-chain by condemning Josh to East of Eden took him to task for even mentioning both books in the same universe much less in the same small breathe. Dared Josh to come up with one paragraph, one which she put in bold-face for emphasis as if Josh was some errant schoolboy that came up to that last couple of paragraph when voice Nick talks after Gatsby’s bloody demise about the feeling of those long ago Dutch sailors who came upon the “fresh, green breast of land” that would later become Long Island and had upon viewing had enflamed their sense of wonder. A paragraph she had written her freshman term paper on for American Literature which the professor had given her an A on-so there.
Josh, again acting as the provocateur, in return cited the dance scene in the club in Minneapolis with Amory and his prey, Isabelle, as he attempted against all convention to grab a small kiss from her sweet lips. Argued that after all Paradise was about the roamings and doings a young adult trying to figure out his place in the world and who was finding it not easy to find his niche. Josh contrasted that with the too uppity habits of a small-time hood from nowhere USA hustling whatever there was to hustle trying to step up in class out with the big boys and got pushed back down the heap once he got in over his head with Daisy and what she stood for-wealth, conformity and letting the servants clean up the mess.
That comment seemed to have put that earnest undergraduate in her place since she went mute before Josh’s logic but no sooner had that dust-up settled down that Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary efforts of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances. So the battle raged.
Josh laughed as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison. Let the sparks fly.
The Sunmer of Love, 1967 Exhibition At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston
Alex James comment: although Boston's version of the Summer of Love at the time was a pale reflection of the scene in Frisco everybody of certain age in this country, the world can appreciate the artistic efforts being highlighted this year in many place-"ah, to be young in that time was very heaven"-Worthsworth had the right expression no question and I am happy to "steal" it from him in this context.
You are here
The Summer of Love Photography and Graphic Design
July 6, 2017 – October 22, 2017 Edward and Nancy Roberts Family Gallery (Gallery LG26)
In celebration of the Summer of Love’s 50th anniversary, this exhibition explodes with a profusion of more than 120 posters, album covers and photographs from the transformative years around 1967. That summer, fueled by sensational stories in the national media, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a mecca for thousands seeking an alternative to the constrictions of postwar American society. A new graphic vocabulary emerged in posters commissioned to advertise weekly rock concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom, with bands such as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Janis Joplin-led Big Brother & The Holding Company. A group of more than 50 concert posters highlights experiments with psychedelic graphic design and meandering typography—often verging on the illegible. These include works by Wes Wilson, who took inspiration from earlier art movements such as the Vienna Secession, and Victor Moscoso, whose studies of color theory with Josef Albers at Yale University translated into striking use of bright, saturated colors in his own designs. A grid of 25 album covers traces the influence of the famously amorphous lettering in the Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul on countless covers and posters from later in the decade. At the heart of the exhibition is a group of 32 photographs by Herb Greene, a pioneering member of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture and now a resident of Massachusetts. Many of his iconic images document the city’s burgeoning music scene, while a selection from a newly published portfolio offers a glimpse at everyday life in the Haight during the fabled summer of 1967.
