| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Warrior Writers-From Those Who Know What The Cost Of War Is All About
From The Archives Of The Maine Peace Walk 2015
Direct link:
http://knox.villagesoup.com/p/maine-walk-for-peace-on-midcoast/1427797?cid=891905
Maine Walk for
Peace on Midcoast
By Dagney C. Ernest
| Oct 14, 2015
For the fourth time in recent years, Maine Veterans for
Peace is walking through the state, passing through the Midcoast Oct. 11, 12, 13
and 14 on the 175-mile trek from Ellsworth to Portsmouth, N.H.
This year’s Maine
Walk for Peace is focused on raising awareness of the Pentagon’s impact on the
world’s oceans, with a special emphasis on the Navy’s use of sonar, offshore
weapons testing and the under- construction base on South Korea’s Jeju Island.
But the walkers have more local sites in mind, as well;; as part of their walk,
they plan to deliver a letter to Frederick Harris, president of Bath Iron Works
and General Dynamics NASSCO.
That task lay ahead of them when they passed through the
Midcoast, spending the night of Oct. 11 in Belfast; Columbus Day in Camden; and
Oct. 13 in Rockland. At each evening stop, the walkers, organized by Maine VFP
Secretary Bruce Gagnon, enjoyed a potluck meal and shared their mission before
heading home with community members or bedding down in a host space: First
Church UCC in Belfast; Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church in Camden; and
First Universalist Church in Rockland.
In the Rockland church’s basement meeting hall, the Oct.
13 program featured opening remarks by Tarak Kauff, up from New York state to be
in the walk; a reading of the BIW letter by Morgana Warner Evans of West Bath,
spending her fall break from her senior year at college to join the Peace Walk
for the third time; a reading by Boston-area poet and Gulf War vet Eric
Wasileski; and a guitar-accompanied performance of Morrissey’s “In Mexico” by
Jason Rawn of Hope, who has been part of the protests at Jeju.
The group stepped out at 9 a.m. sharp Oct. 14, heading
for Damariscotta and a night at the Friends Meeting House. Driving ahead of them
is a van decorated with a colorful “Demilitarize Our Oceans!” banner and topped
with dolphin sculpture with peaceful protest history, having gone cross-country
in a cart with Greenpeace. Both were created by Hancock artist Russell Wray, who
is among the walkers.
The group will be joined in Freeport by a member of the
Nipponzan Myohoji order of Buddhist monks and nuns, who regularly lead the
non-violent action. In addition to local support by hosts such as the Midcoast
Peace and Justice Group, Maine Walk for Peace is sponsored by Maine Veterans for
Peace, PeaceWorks, CodePink Maine, Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats, Peace
Action Maine, the Boston-area Veterans for Peace Smedley Butler Brigade,
Portsmouth’s Seacoast Peace Response and the Global Network Against Weapons
& Nuclear Power in Space.
The peace walk, which began Oct. 9, will conclude
Saturday, Oct. 24, in Portsmouth. It is along Route 1 and the public is invited
and encouraged to join in for any portion. For schedule and more information and
a copy of this story with photos included, visit vfpmaine.org.
The Golden Rule (The Ship That Challenged The Nuclear Testing In The 1950s) Returns to Humboldt Bay
The Golden Rule Returns to Humboldt Bay
October 15, 2015
 The Golden Rule departed from Eureka on July 23rd and sailed to San Diego in time for the Veterans For Peace national convention. Since leaving San Diego, theGolden Rule has been “port-hopping” up the coast, making stops in Long Beach, Marina del Rey / Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Morro Bay / San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Berkeley, Sausalito and Noyo Bay / Fort Bragg. At each stop, the crew was interviewed by local media, feted at public events and potluck dinners, and raised funds to continue the mission of the Golden Rule –Sailing for a Nuclear-Free World. “This was a very successful voyage,” said crew member Helen Jaccard. “Everywhere we went, people were happy and excited to see the Golden Rule. We made many new friends.” In 1958, the Golden Ruleand her intrepid crew of Quaker peace activists brought worldwide attention to U.S. nuclear bomb testing in the South Pacific. Their highly publicized attempt to sail into the nuclear test zone in the Marshall Islands was stopped cold by the U.S. Coast Guard in Honolulu, but they spurred a worldwide movement. In 1959 President Eisenhower stopped the testing and in 1963 President Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty with the UK and the USSR. Five years ago, after the famous 30-foot ketch was pulled from the bottom of Humboldt Bay, members of Veterans For Peace launched a campaign to restore the Golden Rule. Scores of volunteers and hundreds of donors made it possible. The Golden Rule is once again sailing for a nuclear free world. To find more about the Golden Rule peace boat, go to www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org. |
The Promise of a Socialist Society
The Promise of a Socialist Society
Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.
Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.
—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
(Quote of the Week)
Workers Vanguard No. 1025
|
3 1 May 2013
|  |
| ||
TROTSKY
|
LENIN
|
The Promise of a Socialist Society
(Quote of the Week)
In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.
Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.
Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.
—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for.
So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Occasionally Ralph would come to Boston on trips and Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany (or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in the decade, was still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, minus Lena for quite a while now).
The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas to fortify them have been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of the their early radical political work together. The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant international working class anthem, the Internationale for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music. Sam had noted that Ralph with a certain sorrow had stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was despite his and Sam’s continued good old cause left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces had in the end and at great cost had no trouble doing so). People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites if not before and despite the obvious failure of capitalist to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had to agree that they in effect too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making.
Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).
Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s of the war and later a bunch of social issues, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation struggle at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activist no longer spoke in such terms but the more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,” “gender” reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s).
No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a bogger himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change.
Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head, anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with him and his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a false pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic. Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).
See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war
movement for personal reasons at first reasons which had to do a lot with
ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking
world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism
before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul. Ralph’s story is
a little bit amazing, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in
Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s
electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what
was happening to drafted as infantry guy he had enlisted (three years against
the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical
field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed,
desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more
grunts to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central
Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on
just like the General wanted. He had even extended his tour to eighteen months
to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but
because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had
to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the
American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing
more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late
1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main
anti-war veterans group at the time and a real indication even today of how
unpopular that war was when the guys, mostly guys then, rose up against the
slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York
City mainly.
Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had
remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter
button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly,
explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole
support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed
away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s
print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later
open his own shop after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started
heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the
anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not
involved had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been
blown away in the Central Highlands and that made him question what was going on.
Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him in
Vietnam though that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more
than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell
people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few
months to go he was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or
pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been
Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten
Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got
him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some
intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war but because his
friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that
went.
At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist
types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out
more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation
to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft
boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had
been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the
neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters
took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try
to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the
slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings
where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop
the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government
was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile
little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”
1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two
stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at
that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help
out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about
changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had come down to Washington with a
group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the
war. They met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main
holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the
week)
So May Day was a watershed for both men, both sensing that
even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had
previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the
notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to
symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the
government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who
had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the
National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day,
treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968,
treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who
raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.
They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching
for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those
few days of detention in D.C. not only started what would be a lifelong
personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next
several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed
was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that.
Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that
were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions
which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few
years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed.
Such thoughts even
with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back
of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were
not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an
icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes.
Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one
night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s before heading
home.
And the Marxism did
not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had
taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built
from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his
main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old
Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his
campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be
done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more
importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days
to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind
Marxism, that impossible to read Das
Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with
seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976
when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around
with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation
struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist
years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked
like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy
old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.
After that time while
they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody,
some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they
would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered
back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly
a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term
picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an
almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking
their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that
had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red
collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed
just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor
once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam
thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers
will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph
could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good
old cause.”
This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind
This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind
Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best Robert Hall white suit complete with tie or best dress on when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which made the hymns make sense. Like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician named Berry told Mr. Beethoven and his ilk to move on over certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind).
Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and got full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right and for a time on television, long after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment). No, for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.
Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. He spoke of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley in Spain where it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.
The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).
It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.
Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)