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
Click on the headline to link to a "The New York Times" obituary for American writer Norman Mailer article, dated November 10, 2007.
Book Review
Barbary Shore, Norman Mailer, Vintage International, New York, 1997
As I recently noted in this space while reviewing Norman Mailer's The Presidential Papers and Miami and the Siege of Chicago at one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that the late author wrote. In his prime Mailer held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might have partially admitted, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon. The early novel Barbary Shore under review here only confirms that estimation of his proper place. This is not a Mailer gem.
This novel was written shortly after Mailer’s huge success with the Naked and the Dead and seemingly shared the fate of many second novels- failure to live up to expectations. Not, however, for the reasons one might think. Yes, the plot is a little contrived in building up the tensions between fellow New York rooming house lodgers, including the narrator, a wounded war veteran trying to scratch out an existence as a writer, who seem to have no existent except to act as foils for each other. Yes, the dialogue is a little forced as each character has to be just a little more arch and a little more tragic that the others. Moreover, the action is virtually nonexistent as the rooming house acts as a metaphor turning on itself here.
However none of these reasons are what causes the novel to fail. The politics, or more properly the confused philosophy, underlying the novel are too big to survive in the space allotted. The characters here, including a repentant Stalinist, a dogged governmental Red hunter and a thwarted socialist idealist are symbols for the very real struggle in Mailer’s head, and in those of other Western intellectuals in the post- World War II period as well, to make sense of the contradiction between the promise of old socialist vision and the way it was being played out under Stalinist tutelage. The historic socialist struggle between Stalin and Trotsky that dominated the first half of the 20th century, American version here, as played by the denizens of a New York rooming house cannot be contained in such a milieu.
Moreover, the existentialist philosophy, with a twist of Kafka, that essentially reduces social action to the unmediated acts of individuals that would dominant much of Mailer’s later writing gets its first tentative workout here as the pressure of the ‘Red Scare’ McCarthy era and the flight from seeking socialist solutions began to have its effect on the New York intelligentsia in the early 1950’s. Nevertheless it is still worthwhile to read something that is thoughtfully, if not successfully, written, as is almost always the case with Mailer. And that is really the place where Mailer finds his comradeship with Hemingway.
The Irish Easter
1916 Uprising- From The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Of All Places
Click on the
link to hear about various aspects, including the key role of women as fighters
and aid workers, of the Easter 1916 Uprising on the 100th Anniversary
of the occasion.
On April
14th, low-wage workers and allies will join together nationwide for a historic
moment to Fight for
$15. You won't want to miss it.
For
every hard working underpaid worker who dreams of a better future for their
family - and for every person who believes that's a dream worth fighting for,
this is it. This is the day to be louder, stronger, and more united than we've
ever been.
Save the date and stand with us for
economic justice! Too many low wage workers are trapped in poverty. We are tired
of being pitted against each other in a race to the bottom. Rain or Shine.
Family friendly.
While
corporate executives, Wall Street investors and other one-percenters bounce back
from the most serious economic recession in 100 years, everyone else continues
to face a punishing, decades-long reality of stagnant wages.
Too
many of us are forced to choose between keeping a roof over our heads, paying
our bills or feeding our kids. But on April 14th, we have a different
choice; we can choose to stand up for what is
right.
A
Thunderclap is a social media tool where hundreds of people can help amplify one
message for a cause. All you have to do is click this link,
choose Support with Facebook or Support with Twitter, and it will connect
your personal social media accounts!
Then, on April 14th at 3:30PM, just as we're advocating
at the State House for $15/hour, all of the messages will be released. All at
once. One unified message in support of the #Fightfor15 will reach tens of
thousands of our friends, family, and community members - but only if you take
two minutes to chip in.
Together we're turning the tide in favor of working
people and our families. And we'll need everyone's help - including yours -
to make this a reality.
We're
fed up with working families being forced to survive on poverty wages, while
being exploited by companies raking in billions of dollars of profit. On
April 14th, 2016, we are taking to the streets.
On
Sunday, May 1st, we'll also be standing up for workers' and immigrant rights for
International Workers' Day, or May Day. More details to follow - save the
date!
The #WageAction Coalition is fighting against wage inequality and is
part of the growing Fight for $15 movement. For more events, please visit our calendar at WageAction.org!
As The 150th Anniversary
Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–One Last Time-In Honor Of The
Union Side- The Last Hard Year Of War-A
Book Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
I would not expect any average
American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist
intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First
International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American
Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top
of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient
history.I am, however, always amazed
when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals
who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised,
very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham
Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a
number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to
show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some
memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts
with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do
so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm
Sorge.
Since Marx and Engels have always
been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may
seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on
events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist
state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political
and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20th
century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were
however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of
historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context
of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So
while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on
historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified
support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support
was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the
country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the
Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive
capitalist system to thrive.
In the age of advanced imperialist
society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and
villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative
about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the
need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist
reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at
earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then
at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect
everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist
scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that
would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the
historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a
necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our
forebears, and our eyes too.
Furthermore few know about the fact
that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that
Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that were
spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German
revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the
conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an
early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies.
Below is a 1939 book review
highlighting key points of their interest in the evolving situation in the
United States from1861-65.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on
the US Civil War
Author:
George Novack
Engels called the American
Civil War “the first grand war of contemporaneous history”. Marx later hailed
it as “the greatest event of the age”. Today when the nineteenth century has
receded into the distance and the bourgeois power that issued out of the Civil
War bestrides the world, we can realize the colossal magnitude of the conflict
far better than they. The Second American Revolution stands out as the decisive
turning point of Nineteenth century history.
All the more valuable
therefore are the views of these two great working class leaders on the Civil
War in the United States while it was still in progress, now made available as
a whole for the first time in English. These writings consist of seven articles
contributed to the New York Tribune and thirty-five to the Vienna Presse in
1861-1862 together with sixty-one excerpts from the correspondence between Marx
and Engels during 1861-1866. The editor has also appended two addresses written
by Marx for the First International, one to President Lincoln and the other to
President Johnson.
In turning to these writings for the
first time this reader received three immediate impressions. First, the
evergreen quality of these articles written so many years ago. How little faded
they are by the passage of time! Then the astonishingly intimate knowledge of
American history possessed by Marx and Engels, which would go far to dispel the
ignorant prejudice that these Europeans were unfamiliar with the peculiar
conditions of the United States. Finally, the incisiveness of their most casual
comments on personalities and events coupled with the remarkable insight of
their observations. Again we see what inexhaustible vitality and prophetic
power is lodged in the materialist interpretation of history discovered by
these master minds, which enabled them to plumb deep below the billowing
surface of events and fathom the underlying formations and motive forces of
history in the making.
These genial powers shine forth in
the following quotation from the first article, which summarizes the sixty
years of American politics before the Civil War in five succinct sentences.
The progressive abuse of the Union
by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic
Party, is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the
beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the
successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more
transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises
denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the
same time none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a
hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different
party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the
positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South,
the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of
the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat. (Marx, The American
Question in England, New-York Daily Tribune, October 11, 1861.)
The rise and fall of the slave power
is the grandest example of the dialectic in American history. The slaveholders
had to be lifted to the heights before they were dashed to the ground and
annihilated forever in the Civil War, an historical precedent it is good to
keep in mind when the advancing world reaction seems to be carrying everything
before it.
The first two articles of the series
contributed to the Vienna Presse written in refutation of the arguments
disseminated by the Southern sympathizers in England, are the meatiest portions
of this collection. The pro-slavery advocates contended, first that the war
between the North and South was nothing but a tariff war; second, that it was
waged by the North against the South to maintain the Union by force; and,
third, that the slave question had nothing to do with it.
Marx easily explodes the first
argument with five well-placed facts to the contrary. In answer to the second,
he points out that the war emanated, not from the North, but from the South.
The Civil War originated as a rebellion of the slaveholding oligarchy against
the Republican government. Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter started the
war, so Lincoln’s election, gave the signal for secession. Lincoln’s victory
was made possible by the breach between the Northern and Southern wings of the
Democratic Party, and the rise of the Republican Party in the new Northwest.
The key to secession was therefore to be found in the upsurge of the Northwest.
By splitting the Democratic ranks and supporting the Republican candidate, the
Northwestern states upset the balance of power which had enabled the slave
power to rule the Republic for six decades and thereby made secession necessary
and inevitable.
With the principle that any further
extension of slave territory was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans
attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. A strict confinement of
slavery within its old terrain was bound according to economic law to lead to
its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that
the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the
slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the
side of the “poor whites”. The Republican election victory was accordingly
bound to lead to the open struggle between North and South.
The assumption of state power placed
a noose in the hands of the Republican bourgeoisie which they could draw as
tight as they pleased around the neck of the slave power until they had
succeeding in strangling it. Having lost control of the government to their
adversary and faced with the prospect of slow death, the slaveholders
determined to fight for their freedom—to enslave others!
The political contest which resulted
in civil war was but the expression of profound economic antagonisms between
the slave and free states. According to Marx, the most important of these was
the struggle over the possession of the territories necessary for the expansion
of their respective systems of production. In a striking phrase Marx states
that “the territorial contest which opened this dire epopee was to decide
whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the
immigrant or prostituted to the tramp of the slavedriver”. The Western lands
were the rock on which the Union was shipwrecked.
To those who represent the
slaveholder’s rebellion as a defensive, and, therefore, a just war, Marx
replied that it was the precise opposite. The dissolution of the Union and the
formation of the Confederacy were only the first steps in the slaveholders’
program. After consolidating their power, the slavocracy must inevitably strive
to conquer the North and to extend its dominion over the tropics where cotton
could be cultivated. “The South was not a country... but a battle cry”; the war
of the Southern Confederacy “a war of conquest for the extension and
perpetuation of slavery”. The slave-owners aimed to reorganize the Union on the
basis of slavery. This would entail the subjugation of North America, the
nullification of the free institutions of the Northern states, the perpetuation
of an obsolete and barbaric method of production at the expense of a higher
economic order. The triumph of the backward South over the progressive North
would deal an irreparable blow to human progress.
To those who argued that slavery had
nothing to do with the Civil War because the Republicans feared to unfurl the
banner of emancipation at the beginning of the conflict, Marx pointed out that
the Confederacy itself proclaimed the foundation of a republic for the first
time in modem history with slavery as its unquestionable principle. Not only
the secession movement but the war itself was, in the last analysis, based upon
the slave question.
Not in the sense of whether the
slaves within the existing slave states would be emancipated or not (although
this matter, too, must sooner or later be settled), but whether twenty million
men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of
three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast territories of the
republic should be planting-places for free states or for slavery; finally,
whether the national policy of the Union should take armed propaganda of
slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.
Thus Marx proceeds from the
political to the economic and finally to the social core of the Civil War. With
surgical skill he probes deeper and deeper until he penetrates to the heart of
the conflict. “The present struggle between the North and South,” he concludes,
“is nothing but a struggle between two social systems; between the system of
slavery and the system of free labor.” The struggle has broken out because the
two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American
continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” If
this conclusion appears elementary to us today, it is only because history has
absolutely confirmed it. But one has only to compare Marx’s words at the opening
of the Civil War with the writings of the other politicians of the period to
appreciate their foresight.
In connection with this admirable
account of the causes of the war, Marx underscores the crucial political,
economic, and military importance of the border states. These states, which
were neither slave nor free, were a thorn in the side of the South on the one
hand, and the weakest part of the North on the other. The Republican government
was inclined toward a weak, cowardly, and conciliatory policy of waging the war
out of regard for the support of these ambiguous allies and did not throw off
their constraining influence until the war was half over.
Marx and Engels followed the
military aspects of the conflict with the closest attention. “The General” in
particular was absorbed by the tactics and strategy of the contending forces.
He was justly impatient with the Fabian policies of McClellan and his “anaconda
plan” for surrounding, constricting, and crushing the South, advocating instead
a bold and sharp stroke launched at the middle of the South. He thus
anticipated in 1862 Sherman’s decisive march through Georgia two years later.
Exasperated by the manifold blunders and half-heartedness of the Union generals
as well as the reluctance of the Republican bourgeoisie to use revolutionary
methods in waging the war, he at one time despaired of a Northern victory. But
Marx, with his eye upon the immensely superior latent powers of the North and
the inherent weaknesses of the South, chided him for being “swayed a little too
much by the military aspect of things”.
The majority of these articles deal
with various international aspects of the Civil War, among them the diplomatic
jockeying of the great European powers, so reminiscent of the present Spanish
Civil War, as well as the intrigues of Napoleon the Little in the chancelleries
of Europe and his adventures in Mexico. Marx and Engels were concerned with the
international events as foreign correspondents, as residents of England, but
above all as revolutionary proletarian internationalists. Marx kept close
surveillance over the efforts to embroil England in a war against the Union and
exposed the factors that kept the Palmerston government in check: the
increasing dependence of England on American foodstuffs, the superior
preparedness of the United States for war, the rivalry between the Whigs and
Tories in the coalition cabinet and, last but not least, the fear of the
people. Marx played a leading role in frustrating the plans of the war-hawks by
mobilizing the English workers in huge public meetings of protest against the
Southern sympathizers among the English upper crust.
These miscellaneous writings do not
constitute either a comprehensive or definitive treatment of the Civil War and
the revolution interlaced with it. Marx and Engels would undoubtedly have
revised and elaborated not a few of the judgments they expressed at the moment
in the light of subsequent developments. The last extracts from their
correspondence show them in the act of changing their previous opinion of
Johnson. Here are a few points that call for correction or amplification. In
concentrating upon the more immediate causes of the Civil War, Marx and Engels
do not delve into the general economic background of the conflict. Their survey
needs to be supplemented by an account of the maturing crisis within the slave
system and the impetuous rise of Northern capitalism which provided the
economic premises of the Civil War.
The principal lack in these writings
from our present standpoint is the absence of distinction between the separate
and potentially antagonistic class forces allied on the side of the Union. In
particular, insufficient stress is laid upon the special political position,
program, aims, and interests of the Republican big bourgeoisie who headed the
state and led the army. This was not accidental. Marx and Engels emphasized the
broad outlines and major issues uppermost at the moment and more or less set to
one side for future consideration the forces and problems which lurked in the background
and came to the fore at a later stage of the struggle.
A few words must be said about the
editor’s introduction. It is liberally smeared with Stalinism. This substitute
for Marxism is, like certain substitutes for mayonnaise, concocted by omitting
or adulterating the principal ingredients. Mr. Enmale would have us believe
that out of the Civil War a truly democratic government emerged in the United
States.
“In its Civil War phase, the
revolution abolished chattel slavery, and destroyed the old plantocracy,” he
remarks. “At the same time it insured the continuance of democracy, freedom,
and progress by putting an end to the rule of an oligarchy, by preventing
further suppression of civil liberties in the interests of chattel slavery, and
by paving the way for the forward movement of American labor.”
How Marx in his wrath would have
hurled his Jovian thunderbolts at the head of the vulgar democrat who uttered
such deceitful phrases—and in his name! The Civil War put an end to one
oligarchy and marked the beginning of another, which Marx himself
characterized, in a later letter to Engels, as “the associated oligarchy of
capital”, which in its turn became the bulwark of reaction, suppressed civil
liberties, and exerted every effort to check the advance of American labor. It
is not impossible that Mr. Enmale is unacquainted with this letter, written on
the occasion of the bloody suppression of the great railroad strikes of 1877 by
the Federal troops, since it was omitted from the English edition of the Correspondence
issued by the same house. But Enmale’s ignorance of Marx’s views does not
excuse his crude falsification of American history since the Civil War. In
fairness to the editor, it must be said that his notes and biographical index
are accurate and very helpful.
The Civil War opened the road for
the final triumph of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the United States.
During the fight to the death with the slavocracy, Marx and Engels in their
capacity as revolutionary labor leaders correctly stressed the positive,
democratic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the struggle waged by
the bourgeois republic. They based their practical political policy on the fact
that the struggle of the working class for its own emancipation would be promoted
by the victory of the North and thrown back by the triumph of the Confederacy.
At the same time they never proclaimed their political confidence in the
Republican bourgeoisie, freely criticized their conduct of the war, and
maintained their independence vis-Ã -vis their temporary allies.
In the years that have elapsed since
its conquest of power, the capitalist regime has become the mainstay of
reaction in the United States and throughout the world. While giving full
credit to the achievements of the Second American Revolution, contemporary
Marxists are first of all obliged to expose the negative bourgeois, reactionary
sides of its character which historical development have thrust to the
forefront. In this way they will remain true, not to the dead letter, but to
the living spirit of Marxism embodied in these precious pages.
New International Feb 1939
The Civil War in the United States, by By KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS
Edited and introduced by Richard
Enmale New York. International Publishers.
“Not Afraid
Of Man Nor Beast”-The Continuing Saga Of Sand-Bagger Johnson-Part Five
“Just like
my people before me I fear neither man nor beast when the deal goes down.
Certainly I fear nobody on any of humankind’s golf courses, even that one we
played yesterday, Tranquillo, or whatever the damn place was called,” blurred
out Sand-Bagger Johnson to the fellow members of his foursome, Earl The Pearl,
Roger The Dodger, and Jerry Jeff, as they say around drinking their drinks
waiting on a table at La Mesa, one of a never-ending chain of steak houses in
the never-ending strip malls that dot the Orlando landscape (some of a more
genteel nature say mar the landscape but those fools adhere to some quaint
Harvard Square, Rockport notion of the world so should be immediately discounted
out of hand).
Sand-Bagger,
maybe into his third, no, fourth glass of chardonnay (the wait at these never-ending
chain of steak houses is also never-ending) was recapping the previous day’s
adventures at the that Tranquillo course when he was challenged by Earl The Pearl
to put up or shut up about his manly virtues in light of what he had just told
the group about what had happened to him on the way to the seventeenth hole, a
hole adjacent to the street and to some swamp refuge land -a hole which they
all found out later was called Alligator Run. Needless to say as an early riser,
a guy who liked to run early before the sun hit the skyline he had decided that
he would take to the streets near and in the golf course they would play later
that day.
As he jogged
his painful miles (jog, not run, for the “purists” who only call somebody running
who is like some Kenyan madman whirling dervish as “running”, you know those guys
who sit around bragging about how they are going to beat up the course like a
gong when they run a sleek half-marathon), flashing his little light before him
to guide the way he finally got in to a pace where he stopped thinking about
his knee, shoulder, ankle, hip and assorted other pains and ailments and got
lost in the beauty of the run (okay, okay jog). When he ran down the dirt road along
the outer edge of the seventeenth hole he noticed a bunch of what looked like logs
near the large pond just after the teeing-out areas and decided to get a closer
look-Jesus Christ the damn logs started to move in his direction as he suddenly
realized that these were the well-known alligators who populate half the golf courses
in the state of Florida. That recognition caused Sand-Bagger to pick up his pace
a bit-he was able to slice a tenth of a second off Michael Boit’s world record for
the 100 meters. And live to tell the tale.
Later in
thinking about the matter, before being rudely challenged by the Pearl, he
attributed his safe passage to the manly virtues inculcated in him since
childhood, maybe some genetic disposition from generations gone by. “Yeah, old
Sand-Bagger could say with no smirk on his face that he feared neither man nor
beast on or off the links.
Oh yeah,
summary for Casey-a sparkling 99 on a tough Tranquillo course and a pair of-two-two-
and two victories against Jerry Jeff and Roger the Dodger. These guys never
heard of five dollar bets like such a sum would only be proposed by some kind of
golf hustler. The Pearl proved to be a bit faint-hearted claiming that he did
not take to the idea of “paying” for his fellows golf excursions. He was taken
for three bucks in the dangerous category of putting. Sand-Bagger did just then
wish for the manly company of Lucky Pierre, Casey and Zow who knew how to put their
monies where their mouths were. Selah.
Reflections In The Aftermath Of The 40th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Last year, 2015, I like a billion other citizen-music critics meaning no more than that I wrote a small sketch about the 40th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s iconic first widely admired album, Born To Run (“iconic” a word now attached to every half-baked event and fully-baked person that has ever come to the surface with the slightest bit of renown but until the fever flavor of the month gets replaced by a more sober assessment like enigmatic I will follow the herd on this one) and placed my assessment in various blogs that I follow and other relevant social media sites but also no less than I had the same right as professional music critics to commemorate a milestone event in my own trek through life.
Since then I have been thinking about what I said back then and I have some additional things that might be of interest to “Bruce Springsteen nation” even though we will presumably not be commemorating the anniversary of the first distribution of that album for about another ten years. Part of the impetus for reflecting on the album was that one night my old Carver High School friends Bart Webber, Sam Eaton and Jack Callahan were discussing my sketch at one of our periodic get-togethers at the Rusty Nail, a bar we hang out in of late near Kenmore Square in Boston, now that we are all retired or semi-retired and have time to philosophize over some high-shelf scotches and whiskeys. (For those who do not frequent bars, are tee-totallers, or are just curious that “high-shelf” designation is important especially to four guys who grew up “from hunger” down in Carver, then the cranberry capital of the world or close to it who when young and thirsty drank Southern Comfort, low-shelf whiskeys like Johnny Walker Black, no scotches high-shelf or low, and if pressed hard drunk Thunderbird or Ripple wines.)
That night we got, as we have been doing since those high school days when we hung out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys pining away, into a dispute, although we always called it a beef back then about the virtues of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics on stuff like Thunder Road and Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. Their collective wisdom was that Bruce “spoke” to that Saturday night “chicken run” everything is all right down at the far end of the beach as long as you have your honey on board, take your baby for a ride, see the sights but get the hell out of Carver at all costs unless we wanted to wind up like our parents tied by a million cords to the freaking bogs. Me, well me, I thought they all had had too much to drink that night, maybe too much to dream too since while I am willing to give Bruce plenty of simpatico for merely having survived his youth in Jersey a few years after us that we were driven much more by guys like the literary on the road Jack Kerouac, the poetic mad monk Moloch-hunter Allen Ginsburg, and muse musically by Bob Dylan. They raised a collective sigh and then made the inevitable comment that covers all our disputes these days that I had probably done too much grass/ cousin/speed/hash or any combination thereof and the chickens have finally come home to roost. Here in my updated version of that sketch from last year reflecting that conversation with my friends. I hope it will hold everybody’s tongues until mid-2025 when we have to think through the damn thing again:
“I got my ‘religion’ on Bruce Springsteen ass-backward (something unkind souls of my acquaintance, that trio of corner boys who still think I am addled by the acid trips of my youth and therefore feel free to discount everything I have said for the past forty years, would say was a more generalized condition), meaning, my meaning anyway, was that I was not an E Street Irregular back in the day, the day we are commemorating with this little sketch, the day when Bruce Springsteen busy in the subterranean world around New York City trying to catch on well after the folk minute and acid rock moments had played out sprung his sweet baby everything is all right Saturday night Jersey boy of a different kind magic on the rock and roll scene with the album Born To Run on a candid world. You see I was in a monastery then, or might as well have been, and did not get the news of the new dispensation, that a small stab was being attempted to create a “new breeze” after the previous breeze had played out a few years before, that there was a new “max daddy” rock and roll star out in the firmament and so I let that past. (As will be explained presently there were reasons for that, reasons that the in-tune Bart, Sam and Jack did not have to deal and they could track the rise of Springsteen in the normal progressive of their rock musical interests.)
“Here comes reason for that ass-backward part though. See I really was ‘unavailable’ in that 1975 year since I was one among some guys, really a lot of guys although that was something I didn’t know until many years later, some Vietnam veterans who were living under bridges, along the riverbanks, along the railroad tracks of the East Coast from about Boston in summer (the area which I had come from since Carver is about thirty miles south of Boston) to D.C. maybe a little further south as the weather got colder trying to cope as best we could with the ‘real’ world when we got home. The post ‘Nam ‘real’ world that just wasn’t the same as before we left from home and our standard dreams of marriage, white picket fence houses, kids and dogs after whatever we left of ourselves in burning, shooting, napalming, molesting a whole race of very busy people with whom we had not quarrel, no quarrel at all. Plenty of guys, most probably if anybody took a survey on the subject of post-war adjustment, got back and just went to their standard dream lives. Others of us, me and my brothers under the bridge, took a detour, a wrong detour but a detour and so the old hangout with the buddies world of high school chatting about girls with didn’t have or if we did have didn’t have dough to take out properly, about cars we didn’t have either and mostly just hung out talking about music, about what we talk about since we always had a spare quarter to play the latest tunes on Jack Slack’s jukebox, or our leader madman Frankie Riley did, seemed very far away. The fight to keep warm, to keep doped up, to keep from jail except when we wanted to be “vagged” to get indoors and some food and a shower, and most of all to keep moving, something that I still feel even today at times, is what drove our sullen dreams.
“So we, me, were not doing a very good job of getting along with our lives, mostly. Not succeeding against the drugs (my personal problem from cocaine to meth and back depending on when you ran into me, if you dared), the liquors (my boy Seaside Sean from up in Hampton Falls in New Hampshire who gathered a fistful of medals in Vietnam and who tossed them over the fence at the United States Supreme Court building in that famous VVAW demonstration earlier in the decade unlike me who only survived because a couple of black kids from Harlem saved my ass a couple of times although later not their own, whom I couldn’t save one night when the DTs got to him so bad he went down into the Hudson River from the nearest bridge he was so lost), the petty robberies (Jesus, holding up White Hen convenient stores with my hands so shaky I could barely keep the gun from jumping out of them and if the young girl behind the register had decided to take a stand I probably would not be writing this, at least not as a free man), and the fight to stay away from the labor market. Work which seemed so irrelevant then, work for what purpose if your dreams were not of white picket fences, the curse of the ‘lost boys of the bridges,’ the boys who wanted no connection with Social Security numbers, VA forms, forwarding addresses, hell even General Post Office boxes just in case some dunning repo man, or some angry wife was looking for support, support none of us could give for crying out loud why do you think we worked the stinking garbage strewn rivers, rode the dreamless smoke streams trains, faced the rats mano y mano under the bridges. Work if pressed up against the wall only at some day labor joint giving false social security numbers, pearl-diving where no question were asked as long as the dishes and pans didn’t pile up, or in-kinf for a few nights reprieve from the bridges at some Sally (Salvation Army) harbor lights mission. Not the time to be worrying about grabbing that girl heading to Thunder Road.
“Yeah, tough times, tough times indeed, and a lot of guys had a close call, a very close call, including me, and a lot of guys like now with our brethren Afghan and Iraq soldier brothers and sisters didn’t make it, guys like Sean who if you looked at him you could not believe how gone he really was with that baby-face of his I still see now, still see as he trogged his way to that night bridge and just let himself free fall I hope somebody up in Hampton Falls claimed him for we, I, couldn’t do so since I was on the run myself, didn’t make it but are not on the walls in black granite down in D.C.-although maybe they should be.
“Of course Brother Springsteen immortalized the Brothers Under The Bridge living out in Southern California along the arroyos, riverbanks, and railroad tracks of the West in a song which I heard some guys playing one night when I was at a VA hospital in the early 1980s trying to get well for about the fifteenth time (meth again, damn I can still feel the rushes, still want my sweet jesus high, when I say the word) and that was that. I cried that night for my lost youth, for Sean, for the guys who played the song over and over again, Saigon, long gone… no way long gone. The next step, after a few more months of recovery, was easy because ever since I was kid once I grabbed onto something that moved me some song, some novel, some film I checked out everything by the songwriter, author, director I could get my hands on.
“Once I did grab a serious chunk of
Springsteen’s work, grabbed some things from the local library since my ready
cash supply was low I admit I got a bit embarrassed. Admitted to myself that I
sure was a long gone daddy back in 1975 and for few years thereafter. How could
I not have gravitated earlier to a guy who was singing the high hymnal songs
about the antics of the holy goof corner boys who I grew up with, the guys out
in the streets making all that noise, trying to do the best they could in the
hard working class neighborhood night around Harry’s Drug Store on windless
Friday nights without resources after all the grifter, sifter, and
especially midnight shifter stuff was said and done (and where are they now,
Frankie, Markin, Jack, Jimmy, Tiny, Dread, and a few other who faded in and out
over the high school years, I know where Jimmy Johnson and Kenny Bow are, down
on a black granite stone in D.C. still mourned, mourned since they never got to
graduate from the corner boy night like the rest of us one way or another).
“Yeah, singing out loud about the death
trap small town that kills the spirit of the young (mine spent up in Carver
down Massachusetts way), especially in the close quarters of the working class
neighborhoods like the small shack of a house I grew up in(along with four
brothers if you can believe that looking at the house today which is owned by a
new ramshackle generation caught on the low-down) along with all the other
stuff that went with it about keeping your head down, about not making waves,
about not bringing public shame, about going along to get along. Yeah, the
whole nine yards. The worse part though was to do your duty, do the right thing
when your freaking country called, called for any reason. You know what I
say-fuck that, get the hell out of Dover, Auburn, Saratoga, Naples, Oceanside,
Fayetteville, Steubenville and a million other Carver-like towns before the
bastards eat you alive. That was the message, or one of the messages, Brother
Bruce laid down.
“Here is another part to consider too,
the constant hanging around with nothing to do looking for the heart of
Saturday night and maybe a date with Lorraine who had been promising to take me
“around the world,” (I’ll let you smart people figure out what that meant on
your own) when we got married and settled down after I got out of the Army
(which was in our stink-hole of a town considered automatic, double automatic
as the war clouds heated up in Vietnam as we were getting ready to graduate).
Lorraine, if you can believe this and you should, lived in an even more
ramshackled shack of house than I did, even more run down because her old man
was a drunk and her mother had some kind of mental problems that nobody could
ever figure out (she would years later be “put away” as the saying went so
there was truth to her problems, maybe that old man drinking and belting her
around added to the pain in her head and she just nodded out into her own
world, I guess). Lorraine maybe dirt poor, maybe not the best dresser since her
clothes came out of the local Bargain Center that she was afraid to admit to me
until I told her my stuff was strictly hand-me downs from my older brothers and
my mother made her purchases for us at that same store, was the smartest girl
in her class (she was a year behind me), was in the College Prep classes while
I was in some dink General Ed track. But here is where having too much time on
your hands, and too much “from hunger” too got in the way.
“Not so sweet Lorraine was two-timing
me, she was two-timing me with a guy from Hingham in the back of his Chevy half
bare-assed, taking him “around the world,” which I figure that you have figured
out by now what it means, as my friend Jack found out from his sister who was
dating the guy’s younger brother and passed on to me, the bitch. Yeah, I took
it hard, took it harder when she lied to me that they were “just friends,” that
our thing was real. I dropped her like a hot potato, gone (although not
forgotten obviously since I still have a slow burn about that situation, hell,
she was my first love). I heard later when I was in ‘Nam from that same Jack
that she went with this Hingham guy out to California for a while, that the guy
had treated her right, that they had been on the same wavelength about getting
out of Podunk, getting out of that public shame stuff too. Jack said he heard
she had become a “flower child” or something but then his sister stopped dating
the guy’s younger brother and she kind of just faded from the
earth.
“The guys were right, my corner boys were
right, right as hell, live fast, live very fast and don’t look back because
there ain’t nothing to look back to. Just keep looking for some new Lorraine to
break your heart, you know you will so you don’t have to take it from me, to
take you “around the world” if she decides not to two-time you for some new
Jimmy. Just keep looking and moving, that’s the ticket. Yeah, it’s a sad, cold
world so damn you had better run, run as hard and fast as you can. That’s the
score, Jack, that’s the score.
“ So Bruce singing about getting out on that Jack Keroauc-drenched hitchhike highway that I dreamed of from my youth, of hitting the open road and searching for the great American West blue-pink night that before ‘Nam every one of my corner boys dreamed of and Sam, Sam Lowell even did, did hit that road, of hitting the thunder road in some crash out Chevy looking for Mary or whatever that dish’s name was, looking for that desperate girl beside him when he took that big shift down in the midnight “chicken run,” in taking that girl down to the Jersey shore everything is alright going hard into the sweated carnival night. Later getting all retro-folkie, paying his Woody and Pete dues looking for the wide Missouri, looking for the heart of Saturday night with some Rosalita too (and me with three busted marriages to show for those dreams), and looking, I swear that he must have known my story for my own ghost of Tom Joad coming home bleeding, bleeding a little banged up, out of the John Steinbeck Okie night, coming home from Thunder Road maybe dancing in the streets if the mood took him to that place that you could see in his eyes when he got going, coming home from down in Jungle-land the place of crashed dreams out along the Southern Pacific road around Gallup, New Mexico dreaming of his own Phoebe Snow. Yeah, thanks Bruce, thanks from a brother under the bridge.”
