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
Pictured are two of the three Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers under construction at Bath Iron Works, the DDG 1001, the future USS Michael Monsoor (far left) and the DDG 1000, the USS Zumwalt (far right), along with the Arleigh Burke-class DDG 115, the future USS Rafael Peralta, in between.
Posted Oct. 27, 2015, at 10:56 a.m. Last modified Oct. 27, 2015, at 1:19 p.m.
BATH, Maine — With an estimated 3,000 people expected to gather at Bath Iron Works on Saturday to watch the christening of the 35th Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer built by the shipyard, peace protesters plan to use the event to condemn military spending and send a message to Maine’s political leaders. Members of Midcoast Peace Works, CodePink Maine and other organizations will hold a rally near the shipyard, then send a “peace delegation” to attempt to enter the yard and deliver a letter to Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Angus King, Rep. Chellie Pingree and Rep. Bruce Poliquin, who are expected to attend the ceremony, according to BIW spokesman Matt Wickenheiser. Gen. Robert B. Neller, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley and Vice Adm. Robin Braun, chief of the Navy Reserve and commander of the Navy Reserve Force, are also scheduled to speak Saturday.
The DDG 115 destroyer is named for Sgt. Rafael Peralta, a rifleman in the U.S. Marine Corps who was killed in action on Nov. 15, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq. Beginning at 10 a.m., protesters will rally at the corner of Washington and Hinckley streets, according to a release from Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. At the end of the event, they will send “a delegation” to attempt to enter the shipyard to deliver “An Open Letter to Maine Elected Officials.” In the letter, protesters argue that “very expensive warships are outfitted with offensive cruise missiles and so-called ‘missile defense’ interceptors that in fact are key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning. The Aegis warship program is not about defending our nation, but in fact these ships are being used to provocatively encircle the coasts of China and Russia.” The letter states that while elected officials will likely speak Saturday about the jobs created by building “warships” at BIW, “what they won’t say is that the Navy shipbuilding budget is unsustainable and that very soon the nation will hit the economic wall as aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers are all over budget.” Peace vigils and anti-war demonstrators outside the shipyard during christenings are the norm, but it’s rare for protests to occur inside the yard. In February 1997, excommunicated Catholic priest Philip Berrigan and five other protesters were arrested after they entered the yard and poured blood on the USS Sullivans. The christening is open to the public, but in order to attend the event, civilians must pass through a security check at a shipyard gate. Bath Police Lt. Robert Savary said Tuesday that protesters wouldn’t be allowed through if they are noticed. If they do get into the yard, police will issue a lawful order to leave, and if they don’t, the protesters could be charged with trespassing. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had any major issues,” he said.
He Came Through The
Woods-With The Carter Family In Mind
He wasn’t his father’s
only son, not by a long shot. There was Isiah, Levi, Joshua, Samuel, David and Isaac
but Preston was his favorite, his youngest son that he got around to naming
after him when the smoke blew off of his “burned over” religious experience
when the evangelical movement made it way south as it did periodically through
the mountains by the early 1920s and he had been a previous sinner “reborn” and
stopped naming his sons after some ancient high king in heaven Jehovah and his
progeny. Preston also had a parcel of sisters, his father’s measurement term
for the girls that he had called Missy, Little Peach or “hey you” when they
were younger and almost nothing as they came of age, became womanly with their
womanly needs most pressingly to be separated in sleeping quarters from the
boys meaningthat the old man was
forever building lean-to sheds for each newly minted young woman in the back of
the cabin giving the whole property the look of so manymismatched ticky-tack boxes, which they
were.As the parcel came of age he could
not frankly understand them and their ways any more than he could understand
his late wife, Sarah, bless her soul, when it came right down to it but they
were kin and so the boxes and the not so secret wish that some young bucks
would come and take them off his hands.
It had not been that
young Preston (that is how we will call it here since you know who old Preston
is) was so like his father in his old-fashioned ideas about women, about
religion (although the old man had calmed down a bit about the matter after
Sarah died but he still read his good book every evening and while he was
lenient about many things he still would not abide [his term] swearing in his house
and put one than one boy out for a time to prove his point) but that he had an
independent streak that he had sensed that he had gotten from the old man. Like
the time that young Preston at age twelve had run off with a couple of boys from
up the road, Hobart Smith’s boys, going up to the Ohio River from their home in
Hazard, Kentucky to see if they could hear John Newbury and his Appalachian
Mountain Boys play on a riverboat sited at Paducah.
See young Preston had
the music bug just like his father had before he was married and before he came
to believe against all good reason that music was the devil’s work (although
here too the old man had backed down a bit only refusing to personally be the
devil’s servant, again his term), had been working on his guitar for since he
was eleven singing old Jimmy Rodgers tunes, you know the Texas yodeler although
he was actually born in Mississippi for some reason, and a few from A.P.
Carter’s vast collection of simple songs guaranteed to get the girls to pay
attention. (Carter would go around the countryside into the hillbilly hills and
hallows, into the Nigger-towns and grab up every song he could, rework them a
little, although keeping some monotonous same melody and then copyright them as
his own like a few other guys would do later like Bob Dylan with traditional
songs that were in the public domain.
He needn’t have
worried about the girls since from early on the girls around Hazard,
Prestonsburg, hell, even down to Haran County come Saturday night barn dance at
Red Miller’s old homestead the girls had eyes for him, and not just the younger
ones either. (It was a sixteen year old girl from over in Lewisburg who took
away his virginity and hers at the same time when he was fourteen so yes he did
not need to worry on the young girl front). But the way he figured the
situation the guitar was his way out, his way out of the coal mines that dotted
the countryside that turned everything within a few miles into black, and
moreblack on top of that until one
sickened of the color ruining the natural beauty of the valley. So young
Preston would practice constantly, got pretty good at it until it was his time
at fourteen to go into the mines to help the family, and go like his older
brothers down to the pits along with half the men in the town (the other half
not working, nor not wanting to work, just sitting on their front porch tar
paper shacks drinking homemade whiskey or just hanging out looking to be
hanging out. The classic Tobacco Road white trash situation that more than one
author has milked for all it was worth, not too much worth in the end but
enough to hang that name on them). So he went, went to do coal separation work
like all the boys did on day one in the mines, and then to the mines themselves
when he grew too big for the separation work.
But he always thought
about that guitar, about that possible way out of his freaking existence (my
term). Then one night when he was sixteen he and a couple of boys stepped away from
the pits, went to find out if they could get away first and then when they did
they went their separate ways and good luck. Preston to Louisville and then
over to try his luck in Nashville in the Tennessee night. Got himself into a
small school that taught him how to really play the guitar, got him to be able
to carry a tune with some precision. Got him noticed too when he entered a
couple of talent search competitions one which had been judged by the most famous
one of the famous Lally brothers, Shiloh, the master fiddler who kept the group
lively, and although he did not win that competition he made an impression on Shiloh
by doing a deep version of Anchored in
Love, the old Carter Family standard. Preston got offered a job travelling
with the Lally Brothers as second guitar and maybe some vocals (although Shiloh
preferred to sing solo most of the time).
That went along for a
couple of good years with Preston playing back-up guitar but occasionally lead
on some bass-ful songs. Got him plenty of come hither looks from the girls too,
one of the things that Shiloh had noticed about Preston in that competition he
had judged when the girls all crowded around close. Then December 7, 1941 came
and blew a hole in a lot of dreams, a lot of expectations. Preston, as
patriotic as the next man, and a couple of the younger Lally brothers went up
to Louisville to enlist in the Marine, Semper Fi guys no question. When the
Marine sergeant recruiter noticed that Preston had worked in the mines he told
him that guys with mine experience could be exempted from military duty since
many, many tons of coal would now be needed for all the ships and other vessels
that would go against the Axis powers. Preston laughed, told that recruiter
that between digging god awful coal and facing the “Nips” (a common term referring
to the Japanese) he would take his chances against the latter.
And he did facing off
against the hated enemy on all of the big Marine Pacific Island operations that
his division was called to perform. Before being discharged he was assigned to
the Naval Depot in Hingham in Massachusetts where he met his future wife,
stayed there and didn’t prosper but didn’t complain when in his turn he had
five sons who were raised somehow. He would sing old Hank Williams songs when
his oldest son, Preston III asked him to do so taking out that old woe begotten
guitar that he salvaged from a trip back home. But he never got up on that big
high stage again.
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Fighters Of The International Working Class Today-The International Working Class Anthem The Internationale
A YouTube film clip of a performance of the classic international working class song of struggle, The Internationale.
Ralph Morris comment:
“Never in a million years” if you had asked me the question of whether I knew the words, melody or history of The Internationale before I linked up in 1971 with my old friend and comrade, Sam Eaton, asked me whether I had known how important such a song and protest music in general was to left-wing movements as a motivating force for struggle against whatever the American government is down on in the war or social front to squeeze the life out of average Joes and Joanne. To the contrary I would have looked at you with ice picks in my eyes wondering where you fit into the international communist conspiracy if you has asked me that question say in 1964, 1965 maybe later, as late as 1967. Then living in Troy, New York I imbibed all the working class prejudices against reds (you know communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy), against blacks (stood there right next to my father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with me and my corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces), against gays and lesbians (you know fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and I went to Saratoga Springs where they spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other), against uppity woman (servile, domestic women like my good old mother and wanna-bes were okay). Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar. But mainly I was a red, white and blue American patriotic guy who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around our way).
But things sometimes change in this wicked old world, change when some big events force everybody, or almost everybody since some people will go on about their business as if nothing had happened even come judgment day. That event for me was the Vietnam War, the war that tore this nation, my generation and a whole lot more asunder and has not really been put back together even now. And that Vietnam War was not an abstract thing like it was for a lot of guys who opposed it on principle, or were against the draft at least for themselves since once I got my draft notice in early 1967 I decided to enlist to avoid being cannon fodder for what looked to me a bloodbath going on over there. But I did that enlistment out of patriotic reasons since my idea also was to use some skills I had in the electrical field to aid the cause. When I got my draft notice I was working in my father’s high skill electrical shop where he did precision work for the big outfit in the area, General Electric (which was swamped with defense contract work at the time) and figured that is what I could do best. My recruiting sergeant in Albany led me to believe that as well. Silly boy (silly boy now but then he promised the stars and I taken in by his swagger bought the whole deal).
Pay attention to that year I got my draft notice, 1967. What Uncle was looking for that year (and in 1968 as well) were guys to go out in the bush in some desolate place and kill every commie they could find (and as I know from later experience if you didn’t have a commie to count just throw a red star on some poor son of a peasant who had just been mowed down in the crossfire and claim him, hell, claim her as an enemy kill, Jesus). So I wound up humping the hills of the Central Highlands of Vietnam not just for a year like most guys but I extended for six month to get out a little earlier when I got back to the “real” world. This is not the place to tell what I did, what my buddies did, and what the American government made us do, made us in nothing but animals but whatever you might have heard about atrocities and screw ups is close enough to the truth for now.
All of that made me a very angry young man when I got out of the Army in late 1969. I tried to talk to my father about it but he was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (my father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All he really wanted me to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And I did it, for a while.
One day in1970 though I was taking a high compression motor to Albany and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave I thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose I found out later) military uniforms carrying signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars and who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to me shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all I needed, all I needed to join my “band of brothers.”
I still worked in my father’s shop for a while but our relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when he retired I took over the business) and I would take part in whatever actions I could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash). Then in the spring of 1971, the year that I met Sam Eaton, I joined with a group of VVAWers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C.
The idea, which will sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows you how desperate we were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Our task, as part of the bigger scheme, since we were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and we figured (we meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly us.
Naturally we were arrested well before we even got close to the place and got a first-hand lesson in what the government was willing to do to maintain itself at all costs. And in the RFK Stadium that day where we had been herded little cattle by the forces of order since we had thousands of people being arrested is where I met Sam who, for his own reasons which he has, I think, described elsewhere on his own hook, had come down from Boston with a group of radicals and reds whose target was to “capture” the White House. And so we met on that forlorn summertime football and formed our lifelong friendship. Sam, I know, if I know anything has already told you about all of that so I will skip past the events of those few days to what we figured out to do afterwards.
No question we had been spinning our wheels for a long time in trying to oppose the war (and change other things as well as we were coming to realize needed changing as well) and May Day made that very clear. So for a time, for a couple of years after that say until about 1974, 1975 when we knew the high tide of the 1960s was seriously ebbing,we joined study groups and associated with “red collectives” in Cambridge where Sam lived in a commune at the time. The most serious group “The Red October Collective,”a group that was studying Marxism in general and “Che” Guevara and Leon Trotsky in particular, is where we learned the most in the summer of 1972 when Sam asked me to join him (my father was pissed off, went a little crazy but I wanted to do it and so I did). The thing was that at the end of each class, each action, each meeting the Internationale, or some version of it would be sung in unison to close the event and express solidarity with all the oppressed.
At the beginning some of my old habits kind of held me back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first I had trouble despite all I knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country we called Charlie in derision although in Tet 1968 with much more respect when he came at us and kept coming despite high losses). But I got over it, got in the swing. Funny not long after that time and certainly since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites when socialism took a big hit out of favor to solve world’s pressing problems I very seldom sing it anymore, in public anyway.
Sam, who likes to write up stuff about the old days more than I do, writes for different blogs and websites on the Internet and he asked me to do this remembrance about my experience learning the Internationale as part of a protest music series that a guy he knows named Fritz Jasper has put together. So I have done my bit and here is what Sam and Fritz want to convey to you:
Fritz Jasper comment:
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow. ****** Fritz Jasper comment on this issue: Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.
This issue does pose the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialists are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, union caucus organizing. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. Once again this says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
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.
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 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 militantinternational 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 these days from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying to 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 no trouble in doing so).
People, radical intellectuals and thoughtful working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist 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 society 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 war, or do anything else of human good.
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 and Cuba 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 struggles 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 theblack, gay, women 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 now, since the ebb flow of the 1960s and which partially caused that ebbing).
No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world (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 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 women, 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 those wives 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 guys 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 had 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 at 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.”
Out In The Corner Boy Night- With S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders In Mind
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
The Outsiders, starring Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise and a billion brat pack guys, from the novel of the same by S.E. Hinton, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1983
Jack Callahan was not much into films, never had been, had always done the movie bit when he was dating Chrissie McNamara in high school because she had insisted before he had gotten his driver’s license that they could not always go to the seawall at the far end of Adamsville Beach to “make out” and needed the “privacy” of the balcony at the Strand Theater up on Beale Street once in a while (that Chrissie initial match-up whom he eventually married and is still married to is a story in its own right but for another time). Had insisted as well that they occasionally go to the drive-in theater, usually as a double date, to save her, their, reputations by not always being seen at that far end of Adamsville Beach, the local lovers’ lane with the fogged up car windshields and the discarded condoms on the ground, every freaking night. So he might have seen a bunch of films but he really did not pay attention all that much to plot or nuance. So it was odd that recently when Chrissie ordered the DVD of Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s classic tale of teen alienation and angst, corner boy version, The Outsiders, through Netflix for them to watch one Saturday night when they were not minding the grandkids after she had read the blurb of what the film was about that he was totally mesmerized by what he saw from frame number one.
The reason Jack was fascinated was obvious, obvious if you knew Jack, or rather knew Jack back in his coming of age days in the early 1960s when despite his hard-fought status as a wild man running back for the championship Red Raiders high school football team and thus a hero on those lovely granite grey autumn Saturday afternoons at Veterans’ Stadium he was nothing but an in-your-face corner boy under the command of corner boy leader Frankie Riley, a true wild boy in his own right. While today Jack Callahan is Mister Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts (and Chrissie Mrs. Toyota) with his busy car dealership down in Hingham and a respectable and doting grandfather (don’t use that word with his children though they would laugh in your face) back then he was as likely to be doing a midnight creep to burgle some Mayfair swell home as to be running over awestruck on the field football defenders. After they had watched the film Jack, a drink of white wine in his hand (in the old days nothing by low-rent rotgut whiskies when he was poor and high-end Chivas when he started making money), he surprised Chrissie by wanting to unburden himself of what he saw. Chrissie, knowing this was important to Jack as she always did when on those rare occasions he felt like expanding on some subject sat there in smiling silence (and also was ready in listen in silence already knowing of Jack’s corner boy exploits with that damn Frankie Riley whom she never told Jack had made a million passes at her, a couple of those times when she almost took the ride, took Frankie’s ride, before she reined him in Senior year when that State U football scholarship was on the line).
Jack started off waxing philosophical something he was organically incapable of in the old days by saying, “Hey, even corner boys need their fun, need an outlet for all that fury that they have inside them since they came into a world that they had no say in creating. Of course we all come into the world that way with no say but the difference is these guys, my guys if you want to know, came in with the short end of the stick, came in with small voices getting dimmer like that guy you made me read one time because you thought I would like what he had to say, Algren right [Chrissie: right], and that made all the difference. Take Pony Boy, a good looking kid, young, too young to be a corner boy just like I was at twelve when Frankie Riley first took me under his wing but what are you going to do when the deck is stacked against you and everything around you is divided into corner boys and the others. Pony Boy was trying to break out and the only way he had to do that was to write his brains out, putting it down on paper. You know me I could never do that writing stuff so before as you always say “took me in hand” I was putty in Frankie’s hands. No, I really wanted to do what I did because my wanting habits would have filled a stadium, maybe more.”
“Karl Marx was nothing but a creep and a damn red like that mad man Lenin and crazy Trotsky back then now too if anybody still pays the slightest attention to what those guys had to say and I hope they don’tbut he was a great guy for throwing class-based terms around when you think about it called Pony’s people, my people, my poor father going from pillar to post taking any job he could find to keep me and my four younger sisters from the poor house and my mother filling donuts, Jesus, filling donuts at Java Joe’s Coffee Shop to help out, the workers and the others, the capitalists, or their legion of hangers-on like your damn father, the damn bank executive, who hated me from day one because he felt I didn’t have any “prospects” before I rolled over opposing football teams, really the proletariat and the bourgeoisie if you wanted to get pretty about it.”
“This S.E. Hinton who wrote the book and I think I will go to the library and take it out when I take little Johnny and Jasmine there next week or whoever wrote the screenplay really cut it another way, the “greasers” coming hard out of hot rod cars and oil- stained gas stations all slicked up just like we were although they really did wear their hair way too long out in the sticks so maybe they didn’t have barber shops there where they lived and the “socs,” your people really you know from Beech Street like you.The guys with the expensive sweaters and slacks not from Robert Hall or Walmart and the gals with their cashmere sweaters, starched white collar shirts, you know what I mean, and flouncy skirts just like you [Chrissie laughed.], oh yeah, and their no touch church books in hand just when thing got interesting on Friday night. [Chrissie laughs again then silently blushed thinking about that first time she let Jack “do the do,” have sex with her, as they used to call it in North Adamsville under the influence of a Howlin’ Wolf song when it was not clear who was jumping who or whom.] Call it greaser and soc but it was all the same as Marx called it just a younger version waiting to take over. And there the lines still stand whether in our growing up hometown of North Adamsville, down in Carver with Sam Eaton, New York City, Chicago, Baton Rouge or Podunk, Oklahoma where Pony Boy and crowd were trying to breathe.”
“You saw how it played out in Oklahoma but you know as well as I do it really could have been all of the other places mentioned in the hard-ass young and lost early 1960s when the whole world, or at least the whole American world, make that the whole American up-ward mobile middle class world was worried that their sons would wind up as corner boys and, more importantly that their virtuous daughters, you, would wind up in some back seat or down at some forlorn lovers’ lane with one of the refugees.” [Chrissie silently blushed again remembering that scene in Salducci’s Pizza Parlor where Frankie, Jack and the boys hung out on dough-less, girl-less Friday nights when she came clamoring in “no holds barred” and plopped herself on Jack’s lap daring him to kick her off after she got tired of him not responding to her come hither pleas.]
“Yeah, it played out every which way but here is where the whole thing tumbles. Do you remember the first scenes that take place in that nicely democratic Drive-In movie theater? [Chrissie nods.] They aren’t around much anymore except out in Podunk places like Olde Saco, Maine where my old friend Josh Breslin, an old corner boy himself hanging around with working class French-Canadian mill guys where he grew up recently checked out the remnants of that scene in that still operating venue up there although he said a lot like who was there, mostly families with kids, and the fact you had to tune into a radio station to hear the sound rather than the loudspeaker that you put on the side window of your car half the time especially if you were drunk or sleepy you would rip out when you went to drive off had changed, but back in the early 1960s as you know they along with drive-in restaurants were magnets for teens, all teens, earlier really but that was toddler time and I only want to talk about teenage coming of age time now since I am talking about corner boys.”
“Jesus, whoever figured it out either knew the scene personally or had it checked out pretty nicely, had the whole scene pegged, pegged right. Pony Boy, hey we all had monikers, all the guys, back then right, mine if you remember for a while was Running Bear after the song not because of my football prowess, Buzz, the Frankie Riley of the gang, and the ill-fated runt of the litter Johnny snuck under the fence in the back of the drive-in. Automatically that tells you if the “greaser” hair-dos and cut-off tee-shirts don’t that these guys are “from hunger” even if they had the dough for admission. One of the “perks” of being poor is that you don’t worry about the niceties of paying except when John Law is on your back because you figure the world owes you. I know I did when I first started doing the “clip” and later when we were hitting those Mayfair swell houses.
“So they walk in like they own the place, smoking cigarettes anxiously a mile a minute like we used to do. I remember that first time you smoked that Camel I offered you and you choked and almost turned blue. Although that didn’t stop us from lighting up a blade for years after and it took a civil war practically to get you, then me, to quit, quit for good. They go sit in the public seats that every drive-in had back then when the cars got too hot or your date wasn’t. [Chrissie smiles no blush this time.]Along the way a classic drive-in scene developed remember when a bunch of kids popped out of the trunk of a big ass old car like they made back then. Some Ford or Chevy. Every group of kids pulled that trick at least once. You never let me do it when we double-dated though. Remember we used to pay separate admissions until the management got wise so everybody would pile kids in trunks and back seat wells and pay maybe two admissions then split everything later. Frankie Riley one time, this is before you landed on my lap in Salducci’s, drove into the freaking drive-in like he was by himself one time, the drive-in alone if you can believe that. The guy had balls, no question. [Chrissie: severe look.] Paid one admission and the taker didn’t blink. We had five guys and two girls in back that night. Beautiful. [Chrissie puts on her classic scorn look which after forty some years told Jack to move on quickly from that subject.] That was great until the balloon burst and you paid by the carload.”
“So naturally Buzz the leader of the pack just like Frankie started hitting on a couple of “soc” girls, you know the ones with the starched shirts like you then and not the ones with the form-fitting cashmere sweaters who are helping fog up some back seat windows far away from the open air seat crowd. [Chrissie silently blushed again thinking about that night when Jack was away at a college tour and she took up Frankie’s good friend offer to go to the Drive-In, the back end fogged up area, and after a couple of drinks she almost let him have his way with her but jumped out just like Scarlett or whatever her name was in the movie. Frankie could be very smooth when he wanted to be, when he wanted something especially when he knew she and Jack had already been “doing the do.”]
“No go, no go between greaser and soc even in the democratic Drive-In. Why? Because the social order in school would not permit such an outlandish arrangement. Even when Pony Boy, who played it cool, took that good-looking redheaded soc to the inevitable intermission stand with its stale popcorn, fizz-less sodas, cardboard hamburgers and sullen hot dogs [Chrissie laughed a knowing laugh.] he felt uncomfortable staying too long because people might talk, meaning the inevitable teenage “grapevine” would be hot off the wire. You know from just that scene they there are two different worlds working to a bad end.” [Chrissie knew because she had had to endure not only the “no prospects” noise from her parents which was bad enough but also from her soc girlfriends for a while, especially sophomore year when all social relationships are cemented for the life of the class until graduation. Only when Jack started ripping defenses apart on Saturday afternoons and a couple of those girlfriends wondered out loud what he would be like in bed did that noise die down, did Jack get some acceptance from her crowd but she always had to watch her step, watch out that they did not find out about the midnight creeps and the other stuff that let Jack have dough to take her out without snide comment.]
“After that scene you can tell no matter what somebody, some greaser is going to take a fall.That is the screen-writer part to make the story interesting so they build up the tensions between the soc and greaser guys, build it up into a war practically. Along the way ill-fated Johnny trying to save Pony Boy does in a soc, kills him and that part leads away from my experiences but back on the corner we heard about one gang doing in another, having rumbles and stuff but it was corner against corner, greaser against greaser okay, not one class against the other, it just didn’t happen. You know the soc guys at school were creampuffs, were afraid of their own shadows, would walk, hell, run across the street if they saw two corner boys walking their way. I had to laugh at that part. If you hadn’t landed on my lap that night I probably would have found some sexy cashmere sweater greaser girl famous for blowjobs and bitchiness, and that would have been that. I wasn’t looking for soc girls although you know I was looking for you all the times we talked in class and everything.” [Chrissie thought just then or Ellen or Marie, a couple of her more adventurous soc girlfriends, the wonderers, would have jumped on his lap no question.]
“You know though despite the differences in the story line from what you know was happening to me before you stepped in that lead character, that Buzz, really reminded me of Frankie Riley, reminded me of how that bloody son of bitch Irishman’s son tempted the fates, tempted his fates. [Chrissie turned pale. This is the moment she has dreaded all evening since very early on she could tell Jack was working in his mind the very real similarities between Buzz, played by Matt Dillon who looked very much like Frankie, too much.] Frankie early on, hell, in junior high started out to be the king hell corner boy, was the guy who started half the guys in school smoking because it was “cool,” started the “clip,” and was the mastermind behind the Mayfair swells midnight creeps although Peter Markin was the guy who carried the plans out because Frankie was usually too drunk to lead the expeditions.”
“You know how persuasive Frankie could be, how much of a cutting edge charmer he could be if he put his mind to it and it was in his interest. I know he was after you, or thought about it, thought about it for a second until I told him I would cut his heart out and hand it to him on a platter if he did so after that night you landed on my lap.” [Chrissie blushed her seventh blush thinking again about that Drive-In episode senior year when Frankie had half her clothes off and his hand moving up her thigh toward her vagina and if he had made it before she bailed out who knows what would have happened for she believed Jack really would have done murder and mayhem to Frankie no matter what binds tied them together.]
“Yeah, the Buzzes and Frankies of the world always try to go way outside their comfort zones, try to go outside the small pond they rule. Buzz pulled some hare-brained half thought out robbery and wound up very dead in the sullen stinking oil-soaked streets of Podunk, Oklahoma. Frankie, rest his soul, wound up face down in North Carolina, Ashville, after getting a serious cocaine habit a few years out of high school and after pulling a couple of small armed robberies when he “high as a kite” tried to rob a White Hen convenience store unarmed. [Chrissie sighed, yes, rest in peace, Frankie, rest in peace.]
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