Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind  

By Seth Garth 

[Bernie, O., we will avoid his last name since he has recently retired from the force and we will let him enjoy his peace, after twenty-five of decent and honorable service. The “force” for those who are clueless any police department but here the Bay City Police Department a comfortable California seaside town as its name would indicate, although not as sleepy a town as the seaside designation would connote, That last phrase about Bernie, we can skip the “O” now that we can without rancor leave him to his peace was at one time up for grabs. Had been challenged back when he had been on the force maybe five years in the days before the war (World War II) when anything went in the fair city from gambling, dope, un-bonded booze and women, women who would take you around the world or around the block where a male confederate with a handy blackjack waited in earnest for any unsuspecting goof, not Kerouac’s unsuspecting holy saintly beaten down by the grind of modern society and left to rust along the empty roadside goof either but just some drunken wayward tourist who thought he still had that old sex appeal that his Martha used to brag to her friends about.

And that anything goes, the dope to girls action, especially that latter category since he had started out as a hustling jack-roller grabbing marks some whore he was working with was steering his way was strictly the bought and paid for territory of one Eddie Miles, Mister Edward Raymond Miles when they let him into the swanky Bay City Golf Club-or else- but plain run of the mill gangster Eddie now. We can use his last name since he is finishing up the last five years of a twenty-five year gaff at the Q for plenty of stuff-extortion, pandering, armed this and that,  everything except the one the jury couldn’t pin on him-murder one, murder for hire if you want the full kick. They had a raw assistant D.A. assigned to the case since everybody had the case down to a shoo-in for sure and the D.A. had his own set of problems having let a few Eddy non-murder crimes go under the sea (and “sponsoring” Eddie in that swanky club where he was ostracized after the rap sheet on Eddie became public- probably would have been worse except it is always good to have a D.A. sweating and forgetting stuff-criminal or country club).   

Bernie, Bernie O. when you think back about those days was the straightest rightest cop that ever put on shoe leather in Bay City. The problem back those twenty some years ago was that every other freaking cop on the force was “on the take” to Eddie, or knew guys on the take to Eddie which was the same thing. Somebody, without a shred of evidence had fingered Bernie as a bad cop in Eddie Miles hip pocket. Bought and paid for- a tough charge to defend against when everybody was on the take and wanted to cover their asses. Of course in those days a cop, a five year cop anyway, couldn’t pursuit a case on his own where he had been accused of corruption. Against Department policy. A great set-up for a set-up. So he clamped Phil Marlin, a guy who had been on the force with him, had gone through the academy with Bernie but had been fired for insubordination, fired good, when he wouldn’t tumble to looking the other way when one of Eddie’s boy took some underage girl into a backseat out on the back roads of the Pacific Coast Highway for a blow job and whatever else she was offering-or he was taking. Phil had turned private investigator, private dick, keyhole peeper to most cops. Took the case strictly as a favor to Bernie, no charge, you see, that was how tight they had been back when they had each other’s back in the days they were flat-footing beat cops down in the tough Five Points neighborhood.

Bernie had been in on the bust of Eddie Miles, after the Staties had taken over based on what Marlin had dug up from the sewer and they insisted that Bernie be in on the nab so he had some satisfaction that he was cleared by his own actions. The problem for Bernie and for Marlin came later when Marlin decided he wanted to tell the story to the general public-maybe as a cautionary tale, maybe to show how fragile a grip every human has on life, or maybe he just wanted his name up in lights in some fake private dick’s hall of fame. What Marlin did was get this writer, kind of well- known for writing racy pulp fiction crime detection novels, a guy named Raymond Chandler, to “ghost” the story for him. Between Marlin’s vivid imagination and Chandler’s excessive literary license they balled the whole story up, balled it up pretty bad. So Bernie with his own leisure time, his peace time, hired me to “ghost” his true version of the case-the Eddie Miles bust. The only thing that Bernie and Marlin, the late Phillip Marlin who had his check cashed down in sunny Mexico one back alley night when he was looking for a fugitive named Terry Manning, agreed on was that Bernie had handed him a private job for General Guy Sternwood. Yeah, Sternwood the guy who turned the La Brea tar pits into gold-for himself and his. He was having trouble with one of his wild daughters and needed a guy who could handle the fix he had been put in by her posing for raw, today they would say kinky, nude photographs and guys were looking for dough, serious dough for the negatives-or else. Here is how it really played out from that agreed point on.             

****

Marlin had shown up at the General’s mansion one sunny summer afternoon up in the hills of Bay City far from the humidity and dust and far from the sight of those still-producing oil pumps that got him the place on the hill. Before he could be invited into the General’s bedroom (the General would enumerate more health issues than seemed possible for a breathing human being and he had been under doctor’s to keep to his bed, his now bed-office) he was confronted by one of the wild daughters, the younger one Carol. She had asked him, once she had looked him up and down in a way usually reserved for guys and figured him for a tumbler, if once he had finished talking to her father he wanted a good time in her room. She also told him that she did not care what her father wanted she wanted those nude photos circulated, wanted to be a Hollywood starlet just like Eddie Miles had promised. Wanted all the boys to get big in the pants when they snuck a peak at her luscious body doing nasty little things (and it was luscious according to Marlin-Bernie rated her as a good afternoon fuck and then get the hell out of town).

Phil had told Bernie, and more importantly had told Chandler who retailed the story, that he never had gone into her room after speaking with the General with whom he had accepted the assignment to act as go-between to Eddie in order to get the freaking photos and negatives back to be burned. According to Norris, the trusty butler, a guy who had no ax to grind then, was the General’s eyes and ears in those days (and was stealing him blind since he had control of household checking accounts-like manna from heaven if a guy knew how to fudge the books just so and old Norris had the game down pat) told him that he had seen Marlin coming out of Carol’s room disheveled and glassy-eyed like she had taken him around the world.

That is the real reason Marlin never got anywhere trying to get those photographs back. He would always argue that the General was maybe hot to trot to get the pictures after all he could hardly face his social equals when his daughter was front and center in some low-rent “girlie” magazine (where in the end they would wind up courtesy of Carol sending an agent to one of those publications begging them to put them in the magazine). But the real reason he hired Marlin was he was looking to find out what had happened to his trusted confidante, Rex Randall, who had apparently run off with Eddie Miles’ girlfriend to parts unknown. (Phil had dismissed the run away and elope story as so much eyewash but Bernie knew, had reason to know that Eddie was carrying a big torch for the broad and who knows what he might have done with Rex). Rex a guy Phil knew from the days when Rex was managing a guy in Half Moon Bay dope operations and grapping all the ass he could from young things who were ready to do anything to get something for the head-anything. Bernie knew of him but even then knowing about Eddie’s big torch figured that Rex was sleeping out in the bay somewhere with a sack of rocks tied to him.                

So Phil went through the paces, went through the motions of trying to earn his big bonus-attached (not for the Rex part-for the fucking nude pics), and had met Laura the older daughter as he was leaving his sister’s room. He always claimed he never met her then but had been in the General’s bed-side office after having swigged a couple of high-shelf brandies to seal the deal and then left to pursue justice some such bullshit. Although she wasn’t as photograph pretty as her younger sister Carol she was just as wild, her lovely vices gambling and cases of scotched devoured. Needless to say the story gets jumbled up again when Marlin later denied that he tumbled to her bedroom eyes proposition but Norris once again put paid to that lie since early the next morning he had seen Marlin, disheveled, glassy-eyed and looking sexually-sated (how Norris knew that was the case in England where he had learned the butler trade he had had his fill of such meanderings from the nobility that he had been in service  to-said they had the morals of a great white shark-none). The worse part of that tryst with Laura was that he had spilled the beans about the General’s desire to see what had happened to Rex to Eddie Miles whom she was in hock to for gambling debts at his off-shore casino (and as it turned out had been trying to get out from under by fucking Eddie and a couple of his boys to death-yeah, the morals of a shark- a resourceful girl no question).

Marlin after having his fill of the Sternwood young women then “got to work,” hit the library to see about old rare books and their provences since he assumed that the photos of Carol would wind up in some high-end antique bookstore used as a front for select clientele to “borrow” such fare (some of them when the lists became public later friends of the General who must have gloated and a veritable who’s who at the Bay City Golf Club-yeah, the morals of a shark all the way around). (It was only later that Carol got that agent to hustle his photo-ass to the “girlies” once they had been used at Eddie’s trial since they “belonged” to her). Phil did a perfunctory search of all the old-timey bookstores in town, got nowhere and laid low for a few days before telling the General he was hot on the case and told him that he needed some walking around money to go to Eddies’ casino off-shore. Norris set him up with a cool thou-not bad for walking around money-then anyway. 

One night, the first night he ran into one Eddie Miles, he also ran into Laura losing a load at the tables but smiling about it as she gave him a come hither look that would snow (later when they were in closer proximity she offered to take him out to her car for a little off-hand tryst-which after he had finished up with Eddie he gladly took her up on funny how that time appeared on his bill when it came time to close up accounts with Norris. Services rendered. So another glassy-eyed night with a Sternwood sister. He had gotten nowhere asking Eddie Miles where his wife was and about the rumor that she had taken a powder with Rex-the General’s confidante.  Getting nowhere fast on this case. Getting nothing on Eddie either. 

Then the great break-through although it was really only Marlin falling into something after another guy, a guy he could have saved by all the evidence but he had gotten “cold feet” when the deal went down. It seems that one of the clerks, Iris, a comely female clerk that he had taken into the stockroom one rainy afternoon, at Ye Olde Bookstore had had a boyfriend who had been acting as an agent for Eddie Miles in trying to unload Carol’s sulky nude photos. Somehow he had had trouble moving the merchandise and Eddie dumped him-dumped him literally in the bay for some purpose-or np purpose. Oh, not Eddie personally-Edward Miles did not do his own dirty work but had his number one boy, The Camino Kid, a bad-ass no question throw a sack over the boyfriend’s head and put a few stones in the mix and let him sink and sleep with the fishes off the bow of  Eddie’s casino liner. Nice boy. The girlfriend after getting friendly with Phil that afternoon loosened up by a few drinks had spilled the beans about the boyfriend number one after she had got herself another beau. To even the score with Eddie though she was ready to tell Marlin where Eddie’s wife was-for a couple of hundred bucks to blow town with. Marlin agreed and was to meet the new beau, a square little guy who probably was too short for that ravishing clerk.        

                 

That boyfriend number two, Harry, wasn’t any luckier than number one since he was acting as go-between for Iris with Marlin (Iris a girl who had her charms apparently but who always left standing unlike her beaus). They were supposed to meet at Harry’s office but the Camino Kid got there first while Phil was hiding in an anteroom. The Kid’s chore that day to get Harry to clam up about Eddie’s wife’s whereabouts. The little guy held out though-Iris must have had something he had not noticed that afternoon in the stockroom. Yeah, paid with his life for protecting his honey while Marlin stood breathless in the next fucking room. Here is where the wheels turned though. The cops, Bernie and his partner, were tailing the Camino Kid since the Iris’ boyfriend number one washed up on shore tied up in a sack just the way the Camino Kid liked to finish up his handiwork. They were able to follow him to the backroads of Ocean City the next town over where he stopped at an old house set back from the road. Waiting at the door was Eddie Miles’ wife. No sign of Rex though.         

Earlier back at Harry’s office Marlin had gotten out of his deep freeze long enough to follow Bernie’s police vehicle to that lonely country road. That is why Marlin claimed he took the Camino Kid out. That the fire -power that did the Kid in when he resisted arrest and started ban-banging had come from his weapon. Claimed he “saved” Bernie’s partner who was a dead man if he hadn’t shot the Kid first. Since he was using a police special (he had never turned in his gun when he was fired from the cops figuring he would need a weapon as a private dick) who the hell would have known. Bernie knew for a fact that he had winged the Kid and then doubled-down on him. He had heard no additional shots. Chalk one bad guy gone up for Bernie if you are keeping score. That action is what got him in on the deal when the Staties went after Eddie Miles and his henchmen.

As for Rex, well, here is where things get weird, where what the rich or do not do gets sealed with seven seals. Carol, and Marlin should have seen this coming given his own experiences with the girls, had killed Rex one afternoon when he would not give her a tumble. Carol did not like not being obeyed when she had her wanting habits on. That is why Marlin got taken around the world that day he went into the General’s hire. Laura had covered up for her sister-also why he gotten taken around the world by her. They had him figured as a sex-addled guy and they knew their mark. Marlin out of respect for the old man and his troubles with those wild sisters let it ride. Let the old man fade into his endless sleep not knowing he had sired two monsters. Before he left that hillside mansion though he made sure he got his full rate and expenses. That’s the real “skinny” forget all that other self-serving stuff.          

*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

One of the worst excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the 1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of those thinkers, cadre and organization who had come before us and whom were disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of organizing the struggle against the American beast.

I can remember more than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and revolutionary youth. Those organizations far too eager to traffic with what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and “old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know, and I know that many others at the time,  had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting loudly and vehemently  from this or that book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)               

Of course not everybody who came through the 1960s passed through any left-wing political school. Despite the nostalgia, despite the now puffed-up claims that we had this or that decisive effect on history, especially these days with the commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the trotting out once again of the overblew claims that the American anti-war movement stopped the Vietnam War rather than the heroic struggles of the people of Vietnam, the number of the young who got catch up more than marginally was significantly smaller that the photographs, videos, and remembrances of the times would suggest. A case in point is my old friend Sam Lowell, from my growing in Carver times whose longtime political trajectory I want to highlight in this sketch.

Highlight to provide something, I am not sure what, perhaps a cautionary tale, to what appears to be the makings of the next “fresh breeze” coming through the land that another Carver corner boy, the late Peter Paul Markin, would harangue us with on lonely Friday nights was coming. The big turn in the environmental movement, the fight for better conditions for young workers (and old) epitomized by the “Fight for $15” movement and above all, the bedrock struggle of the “Black Lives Matter” movement portends some new awakening and we old-timers who have kept the political faith have something about all of that early experience which may push those struggles forward. Here’s Sam’s story and see what you think:   

 

Sam Lowell when he was young, when he was coming of age in the 1960s along with his hang around guys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in Carver, did not give a “tinker’s damn” (Sam’s term which he would endlessly utter especially when the late Peter Paul Markin would start talking about what was going on outside of the Jimmy Jack corner world) about politics, about the fate of the world, about the burning and pressing issues of that day nuclear disarmament, black civil rights down South (he if anything had the Northern white working class prejudices inherited from his parents and relatives using the “n” word to refer to blacks for a very long time), and the exploding war in Vietnam. Sam’s world, like many guys of that time, like now too as far as anybody can see, was about girls or sex or name the gender combinations, above all about the music of the times, about what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (the folk music minute of that period which Bart Webber tried to get him interested in was, is, a book sealed with seven seals and he still grinds his teeth when any of us who hang with him still mention that genre).

Sam, declared by his local draft board exempt from military service as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after he father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965, had pretty much kept his head in the sand about the war, probably supported the war against demon communism as much as anybody in town who was not directly involved in the escalation of the war. That is until one of his hang around guys, Freddie Callahan, Jack’s younger brother, had lain down his head in some rotted jungle in some unpronounceable hamlet in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in late 1967 and who would later have his name placed on that black granite down in Washington, D.C. which would bring a tear to Sam eye every time he visited it despite his complete change of heart about the war.

The war, the hellish flare-up and destructiveness of the war had not been Freddie’s fault, it had not been Freddie’s war as Sam was at pains to explain when he did get active in the anti-war movement and people around town thought that he was being disrespectful of Freddie’s memory and of the flag, actually probably more the flag until very late, maybe about 1972 when even the American Legion types in town saw the writing on the wall, some of them anyway.

Bart Webber was the first to take his slightly held anti-war feelings to the holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner night but he was facing the draft himself in 1966 so Sam had not taken his plight to heart. It really had been Freddie’s death that got him thinking, Freddie whom he had known since fifth grade when his own family had moved to Carver from North Adamsville when the shipbuilding trade there bottomed out and his father sought work in the new electronics plant just built up the road from Carver. Got him thinking about lots of things that did not add up in the world, the world of people just trying to get by without being shot at, or shot up by friend or foe.

One day, maybe in early spring 1968 in any case sometime before summer of that year, Sam had gone to Boston about thirty miles up the road from Carver on some business when he was walking near the Park Street subway station and a young guy about his age in regulation long hair (Sam’s was short although long for Carver young adults just then and commented on at Jimmy Jack’s by the older crowd going in for the old-timers’ blue plate specials and gung-ho guys who had no truck with “fairies” and “hippies”), unkempt beard, blue jeans and sandals, a picture of heaven’s own high priest hippie who handed him a leaflet for an anti-war rally sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society that was going to take place on the Common later that afternoon. (That was the notorious SDS that every right-thinking American believed, including Sam a little before Freddie’s death, as they could not understand kids who seemed to have everything going for them including draft exemptions were so rebellious unless some unknown source was prodding them, as the agents, paid or unpaid, of Moscow or China or someplace antagonistic to the interests of the United States. Every time an SDS rally was broken up by the cops, or mass arrests occurred, those believers breathed a short sigh of relief).     

The guy in hippie garb pressed the issue, something Sam thought was odd since in his experience these hippie types were too laid back doing dope and sex and listening to acid rock to bother about politics usually saying that to get involved only “encouraged” those politicians who had depended on free-wheeling unpaid volunteer youth to campaign for them. That drug, sex and rock and roll were okay with him although he had not been into the dope scene then but rather the traditional Carver Friday and Saturday night down by the cranberry bogs drinking cheap whiskey scene, a scene that Carver guys had been doing since time immemorial at the bogs from what he had heard.

This dippy hippie started yelling at him that it that it was his “duty” to attend the rally and help “stop the fucking war.”  Something in that common language “speech” made Sam take notice and he asked the hippie where he was from. He answered from Lynn, a very working class town on the North Shore of Boston, and told Sam, who blushed a little at the information, that he had already been in the Army, had served in Vietnam and had had enough of seeing his buddies killed or otherwise “fucked up.” Sam then out of the blue mentioned the death of Freddie Callahan, something he had never talked about except with the guys at Jimmy Jack’s, and the hippie told him that he had better get his ass to the rally before half their generation went up in smoke.

Sam pleaded business but that afternoon and early evening as the sun went down in Boston Sam was no longer “not political.” And Lance Jones, the hippie who had “recruited” him was there that afternoon and many times later to make sure that he did not backslide, and to give him the “skinny” on what was really going on in Vietnam and whose interests that commitment was serving. Sam and Lance (and others) would do many things together, sit-in at draft boards (Sam uneasy about that given his own status as exempt but Lance said everybody counted in the struggle), rallies, blocking highways and every other kind of civil protest against the damn war.

The defining moment, the moment Sam saw that the movement was ebbing, was becoming ineffective as a way to stop the “fucking war” as even he was prone to express his outrage at the constant bombings and constant lies about the situation, was down in Washington D.C. on May Day 1971 where there was a separation in the movement between those who wanted to endlessly built, presumably, larger mass rallies to show the people’s war weariness and those who decided it was time for more militant in-your-face tactics when the proposal was to “stop the government, if the government did not stop the war.” Sam had gone with the militants, a decision he has since never regretted although not for the outcome of the event itself which was an unmitigated failure but because of the enormity of that failure he had to think through things a bit more carefully, think more strategically.

He had been manhandled and arrested by the cops the first day out as the governmental forces far outnumbered and were more effective in containing the mass than that mass of people had been in evading the waiting cops and troops. Sam had spent a week in detention in RFK Stadium, a goddam football field as he would always tell everybody afterward, for his troubles (although he tempered his remarks about the stadium after the coup in Chile in 1973 where those militants were not merely harassed and detained but jailed for long periods or shot death out of hand in many cases). 

Sam, Lance, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, me, maybe a couple of other guys did other things too, things like taking those continent-wide hitchhikes to the West Coast, the rock concerts, all of the stuff that those who had broken from the old expected cookie-cutter, if in Sam’s case only partially and slowly since he was not sure that the whole thing had not been a dream, and he had those family responsibilities although they lessened as his sisters came of age and left the house and his mother re-married to a good guy who ran a tool and die shop in town and had government contracts for high precision machine work. But it was funny thing about Sam, a thing that was not apparent when he hung around Carver in high school but once he was convinced that he needed to do something he stuck with it (he would later tell anybody who would listen that “sticking with it” included his two drawn out failed marriages beyond repair).

Sam, after that debacle in Washington, had settled in for the long haul, had listened to what Lance had to say about needing to organize better, get more substantial allies. Gave a glance at Marx and some other thinkers who knew what they were talking about if you wanted to  effect real change and not just play at the thing for kicks, or for something to do while you are in school or on the loose, had read some and while for a long time he had his misgivings about taking his political cues from around the edges of rational politics, politics that he and his family, his neighbors, his corner boys had dismissed or worse stigmatized as “commie” talk which still hovered over his thinking. But Sam had been the first in the group to sense in the mid-1970s, particularly after the fall of Saigon and the close of the Vietnam era which had almost split the country in two, that the Garden of Eden was going to be postponed for a long time, that the tide had ebbed just as Bart Webber had sensed the rising tide in the mid-1960s.

But Sam stayed with the commitment to serious political change, to right some wrongs, to be a stand-up guy when some egregious governmental decision reared its ugly head. Stayed with it far longer that Lance who wound up going to school and becoming a CPA, longer than Bart who decided writing law briefs was easier than sitting around with about twelve people dedicated to changing the world and projecting when the next great mass upsurge would occur. Stayed with longer than Frankie Riley who also was drawn to writing legal briefs although he made a comeback in the lead-up to the first Iraq war in 1991. Longer than even the late Peter Paul Markin who had totally lost his moorings, let that “wanting habits” hunger that all the Jimmy Jack’s hang out guys had near the surface of their lives get the best of him and got caught up in the down side of the dope trade and wound up in a back alley face down under mysterious conditions in Sonora down in Mexico after a dope deal went bad. Yeah, those were not good years

So Sam faced the next few decades doing his best to keep up the good fight, working mainly with ad hoc committees that would rise and fall over specific issues like the effects of the “Reagan revolution” in this country, the struggles in Central America throughout the 1980s, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that first Iraq war in 1991, and a laundry list of other causes great and small which filled his political life in hard times. But always kept his eyes open and ears to the ground to see if some new version of that 1960s experience would get some wind in its sails as new generations got caught up in the whirlwind of trying to right the world’s wrongs. He knew that the 1960s experience could never be exactly replicated, that each new generation would come to understandings in its own ways and forms, did not believe that a lot of 1960s stuff should be replicated but he did believe that another wave would come, believed in that vision for a long time. But when, damn it.

One of Sam’s worries as he got older and got more concerned about the future, especially in the post 9/11 world of the early 2000s, got much more concerned about the possibilities of a socialist future if not for him then for later generations as the American body politic took one of its prolonged turning in and against itself was that there would be no one to pass on whatever accumulated political wisdom he and his dwindling band of aging 1960s sisters and brothers had been through. No one to make sense of the political battles won and lost, no one to pick up the skills necessary to organize any effective opposition to the fierce predatory appetites of the American imperium, or maybe better said, any opposition at all as the post-2003 anti-war landscape demonstrated. Most importantly no one to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, mistakes made, unlike the American government, mostly out of willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris but certainly avoidable. Avoidable since a great if fairly obvious lesson from his own experiences had been that uprisings against the government, against the social norms of the day are short and precious opportunities not to be squandered by willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris.       

Sam’s youthfully derived certitudes had taken a hammering in the process of the reactionary counter-offensive that erupting in the mid-1970s as the spirit of the 1960s rapidly dissipated, and took a decisive turn right under the auspices of the Reagan Revolution. The self-serving, self-promoting, social Darwinist view of society systematically laid out in that period has held a full head of steam since then as everyone almost daily has his or her nose rubbed in the hard fact that most people are not getting ahead while the bourgeoisie, the economic royalists, what did one wag call them, oh yeah, “the one-percent” with all the guns, prosper with no sweat.  That ethos had never really abated despite a couple of promising uprising blips around opposition to the second Iraq war in 2003 which evaporated after the hellish bombs began to fall in earnest in Baghdad and after the world financial meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent short-lived and anarchistic Occupy movement of late 2011.

So Sam had more recently begun to feel that feeling in the extreme,   the fear that there would be nobody to pass the torch to, nobody in the American body politic to learn a couple of things about past left-wing struggles and organizational efforts to attempt to “tame the monster.” Began to wonder if what he believed had not been an idle thought or some kind of self-induced paranoia.

Over the previous several years he had given the immediate reasons some thought as he began to realize that the generation after his which was the logical place to have passed that information onto never in the aggregate cared much about his kind of politics, had turn tail and gotten caught up in the “Reagan revolution” or after witnessing what happened to the ‘60s crowd ducked their heads, seriously ducked their heads when the deal went down. He had also become pretty sanguine about prospects for the generation after that, the grandkids, who seemed preoccupied with “Me” and with looking down toward the ground with their technological gadgetry and their ethereal “social networking” tweeter. But of late he was not so sure he should have been ready to throw in the towel but a new gathering storm, or what old Bart Webber, who he had run into recently in town for the funeral of a brother, had called “the fresh breeze” was still in its embryonic stage.

Sam had had to laugh at one point after a small demonstration of few hundred in Boston’s Park Street on the Common, the historic spot for such activities, against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama administration  (one of the “surges” that was supposed to secure “victory” and which in the final analysis led to more doors in more villages being kicked in and the United States’ action acting, once again,  as a “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS-type organizations). That demonstration drew a cohort young people, people who had not previously been out in the public square but who were bewildered by a “peace” American President, a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, sending more boots on the ground after he had told the nation that the best American course was to withdraw from that benighted country. Of course the usual dwindling crew of AARP-worthy older types, the ones that his old friend Pete Markin had called when they were young the “little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers up-tights, and assorted harmless do-gooders” back in the Carver days when he didn’t give a damn about politics and now here he was a “little old man in tennis sneakers” carrying on their seemingly utopian struggle.

An unusual combination indeed. The sly laugh part though was his realization that if there was any new action, any seeking of the “newer world” as that same Markin liked to called it comparable to the 1960s, that it would be the grandpas and grandmas and the grandkids linked up against the world. He was okay with that if that ever happened but after that initial burst of young energy faded he got increasingly more morose about that prospect, and the handing of that goddam torch.

Like with a lot of things in the world of politics, particularly left-wing politics where due to the smallness and isolation of those forces there is tendency to have to react to events not of your own making, the reaction by governments, particularly the United States, following 9/11 with its attempt to institutionalize the national security state and to seek vengeance at any target foreign or domestic that it considered dangerous. No question the scariest time of his political life, the only time he felt the full heat of physical threat from the average citizen whom he assumed usually view people demonstrating about anything as mere cranks and weirdoes was in the aftermath of the frenzied American bombing campaign and troop occupation in Afghanistan in 2001 right after 9/11 when he had with very few others had organized a small, a very small demonstration in opposition to the bombing campaign at Park Street and took more menacing guff from passers-by than he had ever encountered before. Those were dark days when some locally well-known committed peaceniks dependable in fair weather favored folding up the tent rather than face the hostile streets, and no question they were hostile, were suddenly not available to rally.

Like Sam said he hoped the later Occupy movement which arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of the world financial crisis but that fizzled fairly quickly and that sent Sam into another bout with what the hell, no who the hell was going to lead the struggle, who among the young who of necessity with their energy and sense of wonder drive all the great movements, was going to step forward. He felt at that time that he would have no problem taking a back sit in the struggle if the new blood came along.   

Here is a funny thing, a quirk of politics. Everybody Sam talked to, young and old, understood that the social tinder underlying American society only needed a little push to go wild. Knew that as a result of the vast increase in income inequality, knew the weight of the endless wars on the budget and human resources   was at a breaking point, knew that people, a lot of people, did not feel they were getting ahead in life always something that will steadily enflame people. So Sam, and they, the ones he talked to and talked to him knew something had to flare up. But didn’t, for a long time didn’t. Then in a rather quick succession the environment, the fight for a living wage and the fight against police brutality and the fight against the hard racism against black people were taken up by the young, or rather sections of the young from say late 2013 to now.

Not everything that has been proposed, not every action has made political sense but there is some motion toward upping the struggle, getting back into the street politics that Sam had been pushing for some time in various committee meetings since the portals of government seemed to be tone-deaf to what was going on down at the base of society. Here is the kicker though. The kicker for now as things are still in flux, still have a way to go before they are sifted out. Things may be in flux and need sifting out but Sam is starting to get and uneasy feeling already. Sam went to a meeting of those who wanted to respond to the various egregious police shootings of the past years around the country and tried to make some points, give some perspectives. He was rather unceremoniously dismissed by the young leaders there, both the young black and white leaders, as an old-timey too talkative guy.

The young, like in his generation, appear ready to seek to reinvent the wheel. Appear too as well to be as naïve about the enemies they are facing as they were in his generation. But what bothered Sam most of late has been that the young in their identity political way are “ageist” if such a term makes sense, are disrespectful of his right to have his say since when the deal goes down he will be on the barricades right beside them. Sam thought that even with the slights he could still say-“Ah, to young was very heaven” though as old Wordsworth had said in his sunnier days.    

Remembering the Christmas Truce

 

7:02 AM

Veterans For Peace

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We follow the example set by the Christmas Truce soldiers who rejected militarism and the glorification of war. We call on the nation to honor veterans and all those who have died in war by working for peace and the prevention of war. As Veterans For Peace, we know that peace is possible. During the Christmas of 1914, soldiers on multiple fronts of the First World War put their weapons down and made an unofficial and illegal truce. When the celebrations ended, many would not go back to war with each other. The popular story has been re-told many times as a Christmas miracle.  It serves as heartening proof that beneath the brutal clash of weapons, the soldiers' essential humanity endured. A few days ago, we sent out an action alert for veteran members to send a letter to President Obama before his visit to Pearl Harbor, urging him to officially apologize for the nuclear attacks on Japanese civilians in WWII. We are putting out one final call for veterans to take action around nuclear disarmament and reconciliation before this historic visit. In the spirit of the Christmas Truce and the day when ordinary soldiers from opposing armies laid down their weapons and stopped fighting, we are calling on all veteran members to pressure President Obama to continue taking steps towards diplomacy. As military veterans who have come to see the tragic futility of war, we know that the path to peace begins with accountability and reconciliation. Make sure to check out all the "Christmas Truce" resources on our website!

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Where The Money Is-Martin Scorsese’ “Casino” (1995)-A Film Review

Where The Money Is-Martin Scorsese’ “Casino” (1995)-A Film Review  

DVD Review 

Sam Lowell

Casino, starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, directed by Martin Scorsese, 1995

The old-time bank robber extraordinaire, Willy Sutton, was once quoted as saying when asked by the authorities why he robbed banks his reply was that is where the money is. Sound enough at the time. But as the film under review, Martin Scorsese’ Casino makes at times painfully clear the banks are not the only place where there is plenty of dough-the gambling rooms in Las Vegas have plenty although despite Danny Ocean and his crew in the Ocean trilogy you probably would be better off, much better off, taking your chances against the bank vaults. Particularly during the time frame of this film in the 1970s when the Mob, the wise guys, ran the place, ran the cash cow casinos as a skimming operation. Since this film is loosely based on a true story a word to the wise should be sufficient.     

   

Here is the way the wheel spun on this one. Sam Rothstein, played by long time Martin Scorsese favored actor Robert De Niro, an accomplished gambler is hired by the guys with snub noses, the Mob, to run their pot of gold casino, the Tangiers. The idea apparently was that a guy who knew all the gambling angles would keep some order in a place that where there is so much money around it would be very tempting to grab a little something for yourself. And he did a good job for a long time by being a hard-case. But here is the funny thing-the Mob, the Italian mob, was happy to hire the Jewish Rothstein but he was not one of the own, neither in the mob nor Italian so they added a layer of security by sending Nicky the enforcer, played by Joe Pesci, to keep an eye on things. (And they would throw another layer to watch the wild man Nicky go through his paces once he got too crazy.       

For a long while with Sam getting rid of the card-counters and other cheaters unceremoniously and Nicky taking care of any other business that required his specialized and brutal skills everything was fine. The mob was getting their “skim” and that was in the end what counted. During this time though Sam got all hot and bothered by a, well, let’s call her a party girl, Ginger played by Sharon Stone whom, he eventually married and had a child with. He was willing to give her the world but was still hung up on a youthful love who was a loser. The tensions between them drives a great deal of the film.    

Sam’s control over Ginger got her going on alcohol and dope scenes which created nothing but havoc in their household. In casino world things were also taking a turn for the worst. The FBI started an investigation which ultimately led to the arrests of a number of Midwest crime bosses. Eventually Ginger split and wound up very dead of a drug overdose in L.A. As for Nicky, the wild man, he not only had an affair with Ginger before she split but ran his operation in Vegas like it was back in the old neighborhoods. He had to go-and died a gruesome death. As for Sam he said it himself he wound up where he started- handicapping for the mob boys. See why I say take Willie’s advice.          

Demand clemency for Leonard Peltier

 

Dear friends We invite you to sign this petition in support of Leonard Peltier, wrongly jailed for 40 years. Please circulate to your networks. Many thanks PAYDAY "It should be remembered that Standing Rock was the site of the 1974 conference of the International Indigenous Movement that spread throughout the Americas and beyond, the starting point for the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [UNDRIP]... I call on all my supporters and allies to join the struggle at Standing Rock in the spirit of peaceful spiritual resistance and to work together to protect Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth. I also call upon my supporters and all people who share this Earth to join together to insist that the US  complies with and honors the provisions of international law, as expressed in the UNDRIP, International Human Rights Treaties and the long-neglected Treaties and trust agreements with the Sioux Nation."  Leonard Peltier, from a solidarity statementwith the Standing Rock resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline. For more info, contact the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee:http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/

Don�t let my father die in prison Take Action � � SHARE THIS ACTION My name is Kathy Peltier and I am the daughter of imprisoned Native American rights activist Leonard Peltier. In 1975, during a confrontation with members of the American Indian Movement, two FBI agents were shot dead. My father was convicted of their murders, but has always denied killing the agents. Judges and legal experts agree that his trial was unfair. He's been in prison over 40 years - my entire life. Now his health is failing. My worst fear is that my father will die in prison and I won't have any real time with him. Help bring my father home: Tell President Obama to grant Leonard Peltier clemency. Even behind bars, my father is an inspiration. His name is synonymous with the struggle for Native rights, and he recently issued a statement in solidarity with everyone standing together at the Camp of the Sacred Stones at Standing Rock: "It is an honor to have been alive to see this happen with you young people. You are nothing but awesome in my eyes."  Many people have called for him to be granted leniency and freedom, but he remains in prison. That's why Amnesty International USA has included his case in its Write for Rights letter-writing marathon. Join Write for Rights and add your name to this urgent petition: Free Leonard Peltier. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says it won't take care of my father until his condition - he has an abdominal aortic aneurysm - gets even worse. But I'm afraid it will be too late. It would mean everything to me if my father could spend a little of his life with me. Urge President Obama to grant clemency to my father, Leonard Peltier, so that he can live out the rest of his days with his family. On behalf of my father and my brother, and for all the people you help through your kindness and your activism, thank you. In solidarity, Kathy Peltier  2016 Amnesty International USA | 5 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10001 | 212.807

The Brothers’ War-Stanley Tucci’s “Big Night” (1996)-A Film Review

The Brothers’ War-Stanley Tucci’s “Big Night” (1996)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Big Night, Stanley Tucci, Minnie Diver, Isabella Rossellini, Tony Shalhoub (1996) 

Everybody knows, everybody who frequents restaurants on a regular basis in any case knows that keeping them afloat for a long time is a tough dollar. The profit margins are low, aide only by the bailout liquor part of the bill, culinary trends change or service declines. All those conditions lead to a high turnover rate even among the better eateries. That hard fact is what sets the stage the film under review, The Big Night, in which all the problems of the industry are laid out and exacerbated by the temperamental perfection chef - owner and his manager-owner brother in the brothers’ war of the headline.   

Here is how the Italian food wars played out. A pair of Italian immigrant brothers, Primo, a perfectionist old school chef played by Tony Shalhoub, and Secondo, the manager of the restaurant find themselves in paradise on the Jersey shores. (Oops the restaurant was named Paradise there is no paradise in Jersey they have outlawed it there) They slave and strive to make a go of the place except perfectionist Promo will only plate A-1 food in a world that is on the go and happy with microwave whatever. Secondo tries to reason with him to give the people what they want to eat. But the entreaties fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile the very average joint up the street is serving “Amercianized” Italian food and succeeding. Perfection costs though and no customers as well and in the end the banks won’t lend any more money and are ready to foreclose. End of dream and maybe back to the back streets of Italy for the boys.

Secondo tries to hustle a loan from the owner of the successful restaurant up the street but no soap. What the owner does propose is to get his friend, Louis Prima, the big name bandleader who lit up the skies in the 1950s musical night (the non-rock and roll musical night which I was enmeshed in and did not come to appreciate Prima until much later) to patronize the brothers’ place one night for a food extravaganza experience. That imprimatur would insure the success of the operation in the future. What is good enough for Prima is good enough for everybody else was the hook. The brothers bought into the plan and made provision to have an all-out foodies’ paradise that night.       

The night of the big event an assortment of neighborhood people were invited as well. While they are waiting and drinking the brothers are putting on the after-burners to impress Mister Prima. As the night goes on and Prima does not show the brothers finally ladle out the food. By the end of dinner still no Prima. Then the wife of the owner who proposed the plan, Gabriella, played by the comely Isabella Rossellini, lets the cat out of the bag-her husband did not phone Prima to come. Wanted for his own reason to let the brothers go under and work for him. When the hard reality of their going under finally hits them the brothers let loose their accumulated frustrations and fight each other only in the last scene to reconcile and accept their fates.     

Oh yeah, although the pretty food was center stage here there was some romantic interest as well otherwise why have Isabella and Phyllis, played Minnie Diver, around to pretty up the human end of the scene. Get this though Secondo was having an affair with Gabriella while holding Phyllis at arm’s length on the marriage question with his girlfriend. Now despite what the trickster owner said you have a very good reason why he told his revenge the way he did. Phyllis just walked away. Good flick.      

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

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

You wouldn’t know it from reading our mainstream media, but many Syrians, despite the suffering in this awful war, are celebrating Christmas and the recent end of fighting in Aleppo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seO5-x_ue_g&feature=youtu.be

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ISRAEL, PALESTINE, GAZA. . . and the US

Bethlehem: Living Between Tear Gas and Christmas Ornaments (from last year)

Bethlehem is a besieged city surrounded by a 26-foot-high wall erected on much of its perimeter. This imposing edifice prevents many farmers from getting to their land and restricts residents from performing everyday actions, like going to school or work. By the time it is completed, 56 kilometers of this barrier—which many call the apartheid wall—will leave 12 communities physically separated from the rest of Bethlehem. Fully 85 percent of the Governorate of Bethlehem is classified as part of Area C—under complete Israeli control in all security and civil matters. In addition, there are 19 settlements—illegal according to international law and officially opposed by the U.S. government—surrounding the governorate which house over 100,000 Israeli settlers… This Christmas season, as Christians the world over sing of Baby Jesus’s little town of Bethlehem, they must also remember that this city remains under a crippling Israeli occupation. There will be no meaningful peace in Bethlehem as long as the Palestinians there have to live with the wall, settlements, and an unrelenting military chokehold.    More