As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Musicians’ Corner

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or laying their own heads down for some imperial mission.

They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course. 

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.  

And as the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.          

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….           

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind 

 

 

 

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy who had his own band) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlin on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less so) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller version not the Andrew Sister) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able to unlike my older brother, Prescott, call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You (Elvis version, including the salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck Berry, of course), Let’s Have A Party ( the much underrated  Wanda Jackson), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night but what a hit), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course), Peggy Sue (Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with which I did not connect with until later after getting out of my dinky hometown of Carver and off into the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn  the world upside down). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell (from Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later in some kind of act historical affinity), the blue grass music (which grabbed me by the throat when Everett Lally, a college friend and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band let me in on his treasure trove of music from that genre), and the protest songs, songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crows midnight ways, against the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds called the ticky-tack little box existences we were slated for by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere where I hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

 

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. (Of course being nothing but one of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow sociologists were fretting about like we were what ailed the candid world I would not have characterized that trend that way it would take a few decades to see what was what then the music just gave me a a headache). Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice singing out about how he would rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man, Bukka White (sweating blood and  salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited of course Creole Belle candy man Mississippi John Hurt.

But those guys basically stayed in the South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south looking for, well, looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto  and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they too had made their own pacts with the devil. And made a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.  Praise be.               

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

Tuesday, June 9

Justice Reinvestment Act: Rally and Public Hearing
12:30pm, At the State House in Boston

The Justice Reinvestment Act will improve justice and safety, reduce incarceration and invest millions of $ to create jobs for struggling families. A key component of the Justice Reinvestment Act is to end mandatory minimum sentencing for drugs, the topic of the June 9 hearing. Massachusetts is struggling with two diseases: drug addiction and economic exclusion.  It’s time we stand up for healing!  Download a Justice Reinvestment Fact Sheet Here

For more info please contact: Steve O’Neill of EPOCA
(508) 410-7676 steve@exprisoners.org

 

The State Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on Tuesday, June 9, 1pm, at the State House (Gardner Auditorium) , on two important bills - (1) An Act eliminating mandatory minimum sentences related to drug offenses [H.1620, S.786] and (2) An Act reforming pre-trial Process (Pre-trial and bail reform) [H.1584, S.802].  This is the first step in moving these bills forward to a floor vote.

 

The Fire This Time: Black Youth and the Spectacle of Postracial Violence

As the traditional social welfare state is transformed into the corporate state, those democratic public spheres that support public goods are under attack. As the social contract and the democratic values and ideals that uphold it are replaced by a regime of neoliberalism that celebrates privatization, commodification and self-interest, inequality in wealth and power grows exponentially, destroying the healthy social structures necessary for a democracy and the requisites for embracing citizenship as a matter of political, ethical and social responsibility. Citizenship is now reduced to consumerism and politics is emptied of any wider sense of community and respect for the common good… While the killing of unarmed Black people may represent this violence in one of its most lethal forms, this killing is part of a larger structure of violence aimed at destroying the promise of a democracy in the "postracial" era, which includes a mass incarceration system in which even young children are now arrested for minor infractions.  More

 

Cleveland cops shot at 2 unarmed black people 137 times. No one is going to prison

The high-speed chase at times reached more than 100 miles per hour and spanned 22 miles, more than 100 officers, and more than 60 police vehicles. It ended when the fleeing pair's car rammed into a police vehicle at a middle school parking lot, where police then fired 137 shots into the car, hitting Russell and Williams each more than 20 times. The prosecution in the case argued only 15 shots allegedly fired by Brelo weren't justified, CNN's Jason Hanna, Ralph Ellis and Greg Botelho reported. After Brelo's colleagues stopped firing, he purportedly stood on the hood of the car and fired the last shots downward into the windshield, inflicting fatal wounds, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGlinty said. Brelo said he thought the couple was armed, posing a danger to him and his partner. Judge John O'Donnell ruled that Brelo's actions were justified because it wasn't clear that any perceived threat was over when Brelo fired the final shots.  More

 

16 states have more people in prisons and jails than college housing

In 16 states, there are more people in prisons and jails than college housing.  This map by MetricMaps shows which states (blue) have more people in college housing and which states (red) have more people in correctional facilities… . Mass incarceration in the US long ago hit diminishing returns that make it an ineffective crime-fighting tool; an analysis by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project found that the 10 states that shrunk incarceration rates the most over the past five years saw bigger drops in crime than the 10 states where incarceration rates most grew.  More

 

See the map above: not surprisingly, most of the states (in red) are in the South, with the notable exception of California, which has a politically powerful prison-industrial complex

 

How the prison-industrial complex is corrupting American elections

Today, literacy tests and poll taxes are banned (though voter ID laws are often essentially poll taxes), but states can still disenfranchise felons. Because of race and class disparities in the criminal justice system, the impact of disenfranchisement hits communities of color and low-income communities the hardest… Many disenfranchised felons face a second blow: prison-based gerrymandering. In this practice, prisoners (who can’t vote) count toward the population of the area where they are incarcerated which affects how districts are drawn.  More

 

Senate could take up $612 billion defense policy bill in June

The Senate could take up its version of the fiscal defense policy bill as soon as next month. “Schedule permitting, the committee is ready to go to the floor in June,” a Senate Armed Services Committee aide told The Hill on Monday. The panel unveiled its draft of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week. The $612 billion policy blueprint sets spending limits for all Defense Department programs and initiatives.  More

 

All the Mass House members voted against the bill, but pressure is needed for a vote against the final version that comes back from the Senate. Help us put a an end to outrageous Pentagon waste.  Click here to send a note to your congressional representatives today! (Good talking points and background here) Sign a petition here

 

 

 

 

If U.S. Military Spending Returned to 2001 Level

In 2001, U.S. military spending was $397 billion, from which it soared to a peak of $720 billion in 2010, and is now at $610 billion in 2015…  If U.S. military spending were merely returned to 2001 levels, the savings of $213 billion per year could meet the following needs:

End hunger and starvation worldwide — $30 billion per year.
Provide clean drinking water worldwide — $11 billion per year.
Provide free college in the United States — $70 billion per year (according to Senate legislation).
Double U.S. foreign aid — $23 billion per year.
Build and maintain a high-speed rail system in the U.S. — $30 billion per year.
Invest in solar and renewable energy as never before — $20 billion per year.
Fund peace initiatives as never before — $10 billion per year.

That would leave $19 billion left over per year with which to pay down debt.   More

 

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Bomb, Bomb Iran, Ignore, Ignore Israel. . .

GIVE WAR A CHANCE?

 

US rejects nuclear disarmament document over Israel concerns

The United States on Friday blocked a global document aimed at ridding the world of nuclear weapons, saying Egypt and other states tried to “cynically manipulate” the process by setting a deadline for Israel and its neighbors to meet within months on a Middle East zone free of such weapons… Since adopting a final document requires consensus, the rejection by the United States, backed by Britain and Canada, means the entire blueprint for global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation for the next five years has been blocked after four weeks of negotiations. The next treaty review conference is in 2020. That has alarmed countries without nuclear weapons, who are increasingly frustrated by what they see as the slow pace of nuclear-armed countries to disarm.  More

 

Netanyahu thanks US for blocking UN measure

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday for preventing a U.N. measure that could have forced full disclosure of Israel’s nuclear arms capabilities.  Had the treaty passed, according to The Times of Israel, it would have convened a U.N. conference by March and appointed a special emissary for ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.  That official may have forced Israel into revealing its full nuclear abilities.The U.S. rejected the measure late Friday, as did Canada and the U.K.  More

 

Blocking a Nuclear-Free Mideast

The more fundamental roadblock was the same one that has been decisive every time the subject of a MENWFZ has come up. Israel doesn’t like the idea, and the United States, acting as Israel’s lawyer (Israel itself, not being a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, was only an observer and not a full participant in the review conference), blocked approval of the draft statement that was on the table… Israel’s official position regarding a conference is that discussion of nuclear weapons can only take place amid a discussion of “the broad range of security challenges in the region,” and it says it would consider joining the NPT only if Israel were at peace with the Arab states and Iran. That position is, of course, a formula for putting off the subject of a MENWFZ indefinitely, given that the Israeli government has sworn eternal hostility toward Iran and is determined — all the more so in the Israeli government’s latest post-election configuration — not to settle its conflict with the Palestinians and therefore will not be at peace with most Arab states either.   More

 

What Israel's Chief of Staff Is Worried About — No, It's Not Iran

Two members of Congress from New York, a Democrat and a Republican, are calling on President Obama to provide Israel with massive, 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, capable of penetrating Iran’s fortified underground nuclear facilities. They also want to send B-52 long-range bombers that can carry the huge devices… Though the lawmakers seem unaware of it, their proposal comes immediately on the heels of a weeklong media blitz by heads of the Israel Defense Forces, detailing in speeches and interviews the military’s view of the main strategic threats facing Israel in the foreseeable future and its plans to meet them. Oh — in case you’re wondering: No, Iran isn’t on the list.   More

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

Friend of DPP Lou Pierro writes from over the Milton Line:

Dear friends from Milton and surrounding communities.  I hope you will join me at what promises to be a very exciting and interesting forum with top quality speakers about the Guantanamo Detention Center.  And please forward this and the attached flyer along to anyone who might be interested.

 

Milton High School Amnesty International Club together with Milton for Peace will be presenting a forum on Wed evening June 10^th at Keyes Community Room at Milton Public Library entitled “Guantanamo - What is the Truth?  Detention, Interrogation and Judicial Practices of the US Government” with speakers Terry Rockefeller documentary film producer of September 11^th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows; Matthew Allen, Public Advocacy Coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts; Margaret Ashur of International Law Journal at Boston University; and Peace and Justice Activist Susan McLucas.  There will be time for questions and answers after the presentation.  Snacks will be provided by Bent’s Cookie Factory.  The event starts at 6:45.

 

Pentagon Report Predicted West's Support for Islamist Rebels Would Create ISIS

The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies… The revelation from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting 'Islamic State' today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify the expansion of state anti-terror powers… Yet the new Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided policies of secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious geopolitical purposes.  More

 

NYT Trumpets US Restraint against ISIS, Ignores Hundreds of Civilian Deaths

The article claims that “the campaign has killed an estimated 12,500 fighters” and “has achieved several successes in conducting about 4,200 strikes that have dropped about 14,000 bombs and other weapons.” But an anonymous American pilot nonetheless complains that “we have not taken the fight to these guys,” and says he “cannot get authority” to drone-bomb targets without excessive proof that no civilians will be endangered. Despite the criticisms, Schmitt writes, “administration officials stand by their overriding objective to prevent civilian casualties.” But there’s one rather glaring omission in this article: the many hundreds of civilian deaths likely caused by the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.  More

 

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ISRAEL, PALESTINE AND THE US

 

TAKE ACTION:

Urge Congressional Offices to Attend an Important Briefing on Capitol Hill (June 2)

Every year, hundreds of Palestinian children - some as young as 7 years old - are detained and arrested in an Israeli military detention system where ill treatment and abuse is widespread.  Many are taken from their families in night raids, held without charges or due process, and subjected to abuse or poor conditions while in custody.  

The "No Way to Treat a Child" campaign, organized by the Chicago Faith Coalition, is aimed at bringing attention to Israel's routine mistreatment of Palestinian children. Now, the coalition needs your help to make sure these important voices are heard by Members of Congress and their staff. Please click here to read a description of the upcoming briefing.

When we ask Congressional staff why they come to these Congressional briefings, they frequently respond "because constituents asked us to attend." Your calls and emails are critical to ensuring these important voices are heard on Capitol Hill, so please take action today. 

 

Israel asking US for 50% increase in next defense package

Israel reportedly wants the US to increase its annual defense assistance package by half, to an average $4.5 billion. Defense News reported this weekend that Israel and US officials have in recent months begun negotiations on the next 10-year aid package…  Defense News quoted “US and Israeli experts” as saying that the amount would be separate from any package the United States offered Israel as compensation for the Iran nuclear deal now being negotiated between Iran and the major powers.Like the defense assistance package currently in place, it is also separate from the $1.2 billion in materiel the United States stores in Israel and which under certain conditions is available for Israeli use, and from the approximately $500 million in US funds provided to Israeli anti-missile development each year.  More

 

 

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OTHER EVENTS

 

Thursday, May 28: Harvard Graduation Day Demo for Palestine,  4:00 – 6:00 pm, (Holyoke Center/Harvard Square)
JOIN US!  People from all around the US and world attend the graduation.   We will ask them to oppose Israel’s accelerated settlement drive and demand freedom for Palestinians. Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights

 

Tuesday, June 2: The Olympics: More Than a Game -- with Dave Zirin and Kade Crockford, 7:00pm, Hope Central in JP in Jamaica Plain. Surveillance, Displacement, and the Other Olympic 'Legacies' That Boston 2024 Won't Tell You About.  Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation Magazine and author of "Brazil's Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Struggle for Democracy," and Kade Crockford, Director for the Technology for Liberty Project at the ACLU Massachusetts, will discuss the Olympic legacies of displacement, surveillance, militarization, and more.

 

Tuesday, June 2: CHRIS HEDGES:  The Moral Imperative of Revolt, 7-8:30pm, First Church JP. The Jamaica Plain Forum <http://www.jamaicaplainforum.org> welcomes back Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, as he discusses what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization. From South African activists who dedicated their lives to ending apartheid, to contemporary anti-fracking protests in Alberta, Canada, to whistleblowers in pursuit of transparency, Wages of Rebellion shows the cost of a life committed to speaking the truth and demanding justice. <https://www.facebook.com/events/799158853526466/>

 

Wednesday, June 3: Benefit for Palestinian House of Friendship, 6:30-8:30pm, First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist 3 Church Street, Harvard Square.  Mohammed Sawalha, Director of the Palestinian House of Friendship, is persistent in his creative resistance to the occupation and in finding ways to bring learning and joy to the lives of young people.  He has a visa this year and will be with us along with his son, Majed, a college student and rapper.  Come and hear about the new playground in Asira al Shamaliya and the development of distance learning programs.  Find details on Facebook. Directions.  Please RSVP by May 29th (see poster).  Co-sponsored by the Middle East Eduction Group at First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, the Palestine Israel Task Team of First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC

 

Thursday, June 4: What Next for the Nuclear Abolition Movement?  7:30 pm

First Church in Cambridge, 11 Garden St - Hastings Room.  Report from the NPT Review Conference and Discussion on the Way Forward with Joseph Gerson, Peace & Disarmament Coordinator, American Friends Service Committee

John Loretz, Program Director, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

Moderator: Elaine Scarry, Professor, Harvard University

 

Wednesday June 10: Guantanamo - What Is the Truth? Detention, Interrogation and Judicial Practices of the US Government, 6:45-8:30 PM, Milton Public Library, 476 Canton Ave. ( Keyes Community Room). A forum presented by Milton High School Amnesty International Club and Milton for Peace about Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility and the Detention and Interrogation Practices of the US Government - with speakers  •  Terry Rockefeller – September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and documentary film producer;   Matthew Allen - Public Advocacy Coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts;   Margaret Ashur - International Law Journal at Boston University;  Susan McLucas - Peace and Justice Activist

 

Monday, June 15: Risky Business or Economic Boost?: The Real Cost of the Boston Olympics, 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm, First Church JP, 6 Eliot St, Jamaica Plain. Papercuts JP and the Jamaica Plain Forum welcome Andrew Zimbalist, author of Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. Zimbalist will discuss his new book in relation to Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games.  Andrew Zimbalist is an international expert on the financing of big-league and global sports events. His latest book explores the economic impact of hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. 

In Boston- Save the Date!

Sunday, June 7

DORCHESTER DAY PARADE!

Please join us for the parade. . . and the cookout after

 

Dorchester People for Peace will be marching again this year in the Dorchester Day Parade on June 7 -- along with our friends and allied organizations.  Together we bring our vision and our values to thousands of people along the four-mile route. Join us this year!

 

Our message will focus on building a neighborhood-based movement to resist wars and military interventions abroad – while opposing racism, dispossession and budget cuts at home; reducing excessive military spending; and funding urgent needs in our communities.  Thousands of marchers and parade watchers will see our banners and get our anti-war flyers.  Marchers will gather around Noon in Dorchester Lower Mills (Richmond St.) with the parade kick-off about 1pm. 

 

We’ll have our after-Parade barbeque and celebration at Jeff Klein’s house, 123 Cushing Ave. from about 3:30pm. Please come to that, even if you can’t march in the parade.  More details as we get them.

 

Jefferson Airplane - The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil

Jefferson Airplane - Wooden Ships

From The Pages Of The Communist International- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919) -Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then

Click below to link to the Communist International Internet Archives"

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/index.htm

Markin comment from the American Left History blog (2007):

BOOK REVIEW

‘LEFT-WING’ COMMUNISM-AN INFANTILE DISORDER, V.I. LENIN, UNIVERSITY PRESS OF THE PACIFIC, CALIFORNIA, 2001

An underlying premise of the Lenin-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 was that success there would be the first episode in a world-wide socialist revolution. While a specific timetable was not placed on the order of the day the early Bolshevik leaders, principally Lenin and Trotsky, both assumed that those events would occur in the immediate post-World War I period, or shortly thereafter. Alas, such was not the case, although not from lack of trying on the part of an internationalist-minded section of the Bolshevik leadership.

Another underlying premise, developed by the Leninists as part of their opposition to the imperialist First World War, was the need for a new revolutionary labor international to replace the compromised and moribund Socialist International (also known as the Second International) which had turned out to be useless as an instrument for revolution or even of opposition to the European war. The Bolsheviks took that step after seizing power and established the Communist International (also known as the Comintern or Third International) in 1919. As part of the process of arming that international with a revolutionary strategy (and practice) Lenin produced this polemic to address certain confusions, some willful, that had arisen in the European left and also attempted to instill some of the hard-learned lessons of the Russian revolutionary experience in them.

The Russian Revolution, and after it the Comintern in the early heroic days, for the most part, drew the best and most militant layers of the working-class and radical intellectuals to their defense. However, that is not the same as drawing experienced Bolsheviks to that defense. Many militants were anti-parliamentarian or anti-electoral in principle after the sorry experiences with the European social democracy. Others wanted to emulate the old heroic days of the Bolshevik underground party or create a minority, exclusive conspiratorial party.

Still others wanted to abandon the reformist bureaucratically-led trade unions to their then current leaderships, and so on. Lenin’s polemic, and it nothing but a flat-out polemic against all kinds of misconceptions of the Bolshevik experience, cut across these erroneous ideas like a knife. His literary style may not appeal to today’s audience but the political message still has considerable application today. At the time that it was written no less a figure than James P. Cannon, a central leader of the American Communist Party, credited the pamphlet with straightening out that badly confused movement (Indeed, it seems every possible political problem Lenin argued against in that pamphlet had some following in the American Party-in triplicate!). That alone makes it worth a look at.

I would like to highlight one point made by Lenin that has currency for leftists today, particularly American leftists. At the time it was written many (most) of the communist organizations adhering to the Comintern were little more than propaganda groups (including the American party). Lenin suggested one of the ways to break out of that isolation was a tactic of critical support to the still large and influential social-democratic organizations at election time. In his apt expression- to support those organizations "like a rope supports a hanging man".

However, as part of my political experiences in America around election time I have run into any number of ‘socialists’ and ‘communists’ who have turned Lenin’s concept on its head. How? By arguing that militants needed to ‘critically support’ the Democratic Party (who else, right?) as an application of the Leninist criterion for critical support. No, a thousand times no. Lenin’s specific example was the reformist British Labor Party, a party at that time (and to a lesser extent today) solidly based on the trade unions- organizations of the working class and no other. The Democratic Party in America was then, is now, and will always be a capitalist party. Yes, the labor bureaucrats and ordinary workers support it, finance it, drool over it but in no way is it a labor party. That is the class difference which even sincere militants have broken their teeth on for at least the last seventy years. And that, dear reader, is another reason why it worthwhile to take a peek at this book.

Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then

Commentary

No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon the founder of The Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined.

The conclusion that I drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spend a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. That position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.


It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question, religion, special racial and gender oppressions) and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the ‘new’ working class or a ‘new’ vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an ideas that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on , frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray ( in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960’s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

 In Boston Support The School Bus Drivers

Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Night-I’ll Get By As Long As I Have You-For Prescott And Delores Breslin

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell


Probably anytime was, is, a tough time for a kid, an American kid, to grow in what with his or her outlandish share of expectations about what the world had, or had not, to offer but Josh Breslin, Joshua Lawrence Breslin to give his full moniker although Josh sufficed among his friends seemed to have had more his share growing up in the hardscrabble Olde Saco, Maine 1950s while all around him others were partaking of the “Golden Age” of the American good time night. It wasn’t that others, other kids, and that was all that counted in Josh’s world then (or any kid’s when the deal went down) at least in Olde Saco, had more of the world’s goods that he did, although some did like his cousins, his mother’s sister’s children, whose father, Rene Dubois, an engineer who had taken serious advantage of the GI Bill that gave a leg up to many returning veterans in order to piggyback on the engineering skills he had first picked up in the Army’s 18^th Engineers in the European Theater, had gotten in early on the big electronics boom in the post-World War II period had shaken the dust of the old town off and lived like Mayfair swells in Kennebunk with the old Yankees, swamp Yankees  who controlled the power structure of the state. That status meaning the Dubois family had arrived complete with small but homey house, the latest automobile from out of Detroit traded in every three years to show that the owners had the wherewithal to do so, and a television all paid for or close to it.

 

No, at least among his friends, at least among those who resided in the streets of Frenchtown, almost all who could trace their roots back to the old country, Quebec, who were various generations of French-Canadians, bound together by religion, Roman Catholic (although as filtered through the Gallic sauce of that religion which could be more conservative that other national churches and strangely by turn more heretical and socially progressive than Rome itself in those days), by the small villages and rural agricultural values along the blessed Saint Lawrence River from which they fled to hug the factories of upper New England where they could make a living, a decent living, and the French which united them with Mother France and all the history, arrogance and hubris that entailed, that sense that they should be showered with the plenty of the Golden Age seemed to have passed them by. A lot of it had to do with a studied indifference to getting              

too far ahead in the American lot they thrived in, a lot had to do with a studied indifference to seeing their children get ahead like their Yankee neighbors who seemed hell-bent on their kids getting more than they who grew up in the benighted Great Depression of the 1930s where their work ethos had been first fired-up and later survived the hell-fires of wanting and waiting in the rationed wartime 1940s and a studied indifference to their fate once the great textile mills that had provided much work for many during the war began their ugly trek south and out of country in search of cheaper labor. Not every French-Canadian family had succumbed to such downward mobility but enough had to have affected Josh and plenty of other Joshes growing up in the Olde Sacos of that time.

 

Josh who would later claim, not without some truth, that the 1960s counter-cultural “revolution” (we will not quibble over what that social explosion’s effect was but putting the term revolution in quotation marks accurately reflects the ambiguity of what happened, what lasted, and what the people involved in that brief movement’s moment thought happened) was the only thing that had saved him from winding up like Jean, Sean, Jacques, Lenny, Pierre La Rue, Pierre D’Amboise, and Henri LaCroix, guys who he knew in the 1950s who went off to war, to the factories in town and later down south and to the jails had been a restless feeling, something he could not put his finger on but which gnawed at him to shake the dust from his own shoes and get out of town. That has happened one day in the summer after high school when Josh decided he would head west before he went up to State U, the first in his whole frisking family going back generations who would go as far as Freshman year in college, in the fall and met up with the late Peter Paul Markin out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 and never looked back (went west and in the process driving his father, Prescott, to one of his few rages, public rages anyway, since he had procured a job for him not without calling in a few favors in the MacAdams Textile Mills where he worked).

 

That fateful trip which actually lasted two or three years provided much literary fodder for the aspiring writer in Josh, although it alienated him from parents for about a decade until he won his first journalism award (the coveted Globe for outstanding social commentary in 1979). He would go on to write in many of the small alterative journal and magazines of the time, mostly free-lancing, before settling in to the East Bay Gazette from which he had recently retired after some thirty years on the editorial staff including several years as chief editor. That retirement had allowed him to reflect on what had happened to his crowd, his family, back in the 1950s, allowed him time to reflect on how important his late parents were in making a decent human being out of him, and of how their own dreams had been severely thwarted trying to raise five children on air. The direct catalyst for those reflections had been a trip up into his attic in his house in Cambridge where he was searching for old photographs of him and his friend Markin for a sketch he was doing on that mad man saint bastard when he found a photograph of his late mother Delores and late father Prescott at some dance they attended at the Stardust Ballroom in Old Orchard Beach during World War II, the time of their time, the sunny times before the whole world fell in on them.                   

 

That photograph brought back to mind how much his older brother Prescott, Junior, had hated to have to listen to their music as a youngster, almost like he had to hate it to create his own space, his own way in the world. That stubborn thought brought back to Josh the one day when the whole musical conflict reached a fever pitch when Prescott had exploded. Prescott not around to now to tell his part in the story having gone off the deep end and committed himself to a life on the wild side as a career criminal, armed robbery division, serving a nickel to a dime up in Shawshank just now. Josh blushed as he thought about those other recent reflections which outweighed a confused soul’s nervousness about his place, his or his damn brother’s, in the world. Oddly he could remember the episode almost word for word in his memory’s eye:    

 

 “Prescott James Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute, yelled Delores Breslin (nee Leclerc), Mother Breslin to some, including the yelled at Prescott, honey, to Prescott Breslin, Senior, Father Breslin to the junior one being yelled at just this minute. Just as Mother Breslin, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Prescott, Junior’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WJDA air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his, Far Away Places. Their song. Their Delores and Prescott, Senior forever memory song.

Delores in a quick turn began to talk almost trance-like as she flashed back to the night in 1943 over at the Stardust Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach that she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right there in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl, never a high maintenance girl, women, mother, grandmother, not in hard-nosed working class make your own way or else Olde Saco’s French Town) and Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while the boys were off fighting. They hit it off right away, made Far Away Places their song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and they could get their dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although they never specified a number. The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a breathe drawn without fear of the jack boots of the world knocking at the doors once the dirty bastards had been vanquished, a not from hunger breathe too if anybody was asking.

 

Just then Delores snapped back into the reality, the two by four reality, of their made due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house the housing-hungry returning vets and give them a leg up. Add on the further reality that Prescott’s job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure now that rumors were circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Prescott, Junior, Kendrick, Lawrence, Jean Paul and lastly Joshua. And five is enough, more than enough thank you (that sentiment directed toward Prescott although not picked up by the boys at the time only later when they too saw that seven could not live as cheaply as two, that modern society’s hand dealt to the Breslin could not sustain such weight. But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes singing Little White Lies was making its way into her air space she fell back to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few kids (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around next corner. And just as she was winding up to blast young Prescott, his dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended before, her thoughts returned to her Prince Charming, Starlight Ballroom1943, and their song. Their forever memory song. Yes, she would get by.