Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment

Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200^th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment 

A link to a 200^th anniversary discussion of Mary Shelley and her “baby” Frankenstein on NPR’s On Point. 

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/02/12/working-in-the-lab-late-one-night

By Lenny Lynch

We all know in the year 2018 that it is impossible to create a human being, maybe any being, out of spare stitched up human parts, and a few jolts of electricity. At least I hope everybody short of say Hannibal Lecter, Lucy Lane or some such holy goof who thought he or she could “do God’s handiwork” on the cheap, out of some “how to manual” knows the ropes enough to have figured that out. You have to go big time MIT scientist and MGH doctor routes running through DNA, RNA, genetic matching and such to do what back in the day only a scary primitive amateur guy working in some foreboding isolated mountain retreat would even dare to contemplate. Back in that 1818 day when Mary Shelley (she of the thoroughbred breeding via Earth Mother feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and French Revolution-saturated  anarcho- philosopher William Godwin and later channeling Romantic era poet husband Percy Shelley who hung around with ill-fated heroic Lord Byron and that crowd ) wrote her iconic classis Frankenstein former idea, the stitch and sew part, seemed pretty far out on the surface and would go on to sell scads of books to titillate and disturb the sleep of fevered.  

I like the Modern Prometheus part of her title better since like I said science was pretty primitive on that count, not much better that the Greeks creation from earth’s laden clay process, about the way our brother was put together in a slapdash manner but provided an impetus to further discovery. Today where through genetic engineering we have a better understanding of science and medicine who knows what the possibilities are for good or evil. Although at times we need to treat science, maybe medicine too, like a thing from which we have to run. (Example, a very current example, running the rack on discovering everything there is to know about the atom and then have such a discovery threatening a hostage world with nuclear weapons once the night-takers latched on to the military possibilities. At that point running away from the results of the creation like cowardly Victor Frankenstein doesn’t mean a thing, not a thing.)      

Still Mary Shelley was onto something, some very worthy thoughts about human beings, about sentient and sapient beings, about where women fit into the whole scheme of things if we can at the flip of a button create life without human intervention which has already accrued to us today in marginal cases and probably would have shocked her 19^th sensibilities. A better result if humankind can make itself out of odd spare parts, a little DNA splicing here and there, that also puts a big crimp in the various ideas about God and his or her tasks once he or she becomes a sullen bystander to human endeavor. Not a bad thing not a bad thing at all. But the most beautiful part of her story is the possibility, once again, that we may get back to the Garden to retrofit that Paradise Lost that the blind revolutionary 17^th poet John Milton lost his eyesight over trying to in verse form how we lost our human grace. Yeah, tell us that we might be able to get back to the Garden. Nice choice Ms. Shelley. 

We know, or at least I know, that Frankenstein aka Modern Prometheus, has gotten a bad rap. Prometheus remember him from subtle Greek mythology and how he was able to create his brethren out of clay. Nice trick. Better, the brother did not leave humankind hanging by offering the gift of fire to move human progress at a faster clip. To keep the race from cold and hunger. Took a beating from psychopath Zeus for his lese majeste by having to roll that rock for eternity. Mister Frankenstein really has been misunderstood especially since the rise of the cinema starting from that first libelous presentation in 1931 which turned him from that misunderstood and challenged youth who was orphaned by a unfit “father” into a scary monster who made kids afraid on nighttime shadows on bedroom walls. There are a million ways that piece of bad celluloid got it wrong but if you will he remember actually learned English, despite being “born” out in the wilds of 19^th century Germany, so movie audiences could understand what he was saying. Does that sound like a monster to you? I thought not.

The bad ass in the whole caper is this dolt Victor Frankenstein, the human so-called scientist who built a thing from which he had to run like some silly schoolgirl. If the guy had the sense that God, yes God, gave geese he would not have abandoned his brethren, his avenging angel. Wouldn’t have started a string of murders for which he not his so-called “monster” was morally responsible for. Instead the dink just let the bodies stack up like a cord of wood as he let his “creation” get out of control.

On this site my fellow writer Danny Moriarty has recently taken it upon himself to smash what he has called the unearned reputation of one Lanny Lamont, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes the so-called deductive logic detective who also let innocent bodies pile up before he got a bright thought in his dope-addled head about how to stop the carnage. That Danny’s take, Danny not his real name by the way but an alias he had been forced to use to protect himself and his family who have been threatened by a bunch of hooligans who are cultist devotees and aficionados of this Lanny Lamont known as the Baker Street Irregulars.

I don’t know enough about the merits of Danny’s crusade to decide whether he too is also an avenging angel, a blessed brethren in the fight for human progress against the night-takers, against the “alternate fact” crowd. But I do know that the idea behind what he is trying to do is solid. In his case the bare knuckle blowing up of an undeserved legend. This bicentennial year of the existence our beautiful Mister Frankenstein, the Old Testament avenging angel, I am proud to defend his honor against all the abuse he has taken for far too long. That may be a tough road but so be it.         

Mary Shelley started something for us to think about on letting things get out of hand though and now we have to try to put the genie back in the bottle. 

No Matter How You Spin It-War Is Hell-In This Year Of The 100th Anniversary Of Armistice Day Just Ask A Veteran-Colin Firth And Nicole Kidman’s “The Railway Man” (2013)-A Film Review

No Matter How You Spin It-War Is Hell-In This Year Of The 100^th Anniversary Of Armistice Day Just Ask A Veteran-Colin Firth And Nicole Kidman’s “The Railway Man” (2013)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sam Lowell

The Railway Man (railway automatically telling you this is a British film), Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, 2013

Sometimes a name of a place, especially a place when war or some other catastrophe passed though will make your gut churn up, make a tear come to your eye when you think about that name. The various Holocaust death camp sites in Europe come to mind as do places like My Lai in Vietnam. In my family the Burma Highway comes to those emotional senses. My grand uncle, Frank, had been one of those who died working, no, no, no, not working slaving to produce what the Japanese in World War II were trying to do in the infested jungles of Southeast Asia to get a railroad track laid as a shortcut to from point A to point B in their determination to subject all of Asia to their will. I never knew that uncle having been born after news that he had died on the highway, news that his body had been recovered from a mass grave along that highway came our family’s way. Would not have had a chance to know him even if he had not died that endless death since he had gone back to Ireland when he could not find work in America during the 1930s and then when Ireland did not prove to be any better than America fatefully migrated to Australia. Migrated just at the wrong time since the Japanese were raising hell in all the British possessions and threatened Australia. He joined one of the regiments that would head to Singapore to support the British defense there just before they surrendered to the Japanese. And from there to the death highway. (Why an Irish nationalist, and he was, wound up defending the Brits is a story I never got from my Grandmother Riley since you could not mention Frank’s name without her crying and so I stopped doing so.)

That brings us to the film adaptation of Eric Lomax’s autobiography The Railway Man. The story of his horrible torturous experiences on that same railway that my grand uncle perished. In this case Lomax, played by stiff upper lip Colin Firth, was an officer in the British Engineers who got caught in the same round-up when the British surrendered in Singapore and wound up transported to the Malay Peninsula. Unlike my grand uncle we know what happened to Lomax in great detail from the film. As an engineer he was forced to work on designing the best route through the dense jungle for the Japanese. Lomax though was an industrious sort, a tinkerer, a harmless tinkerer with radios and a love of railroads. He made the almost fatal mistake of building a radio set which the Japanese found out about and assumed was some sort of communication device to get messages to their enemies. No, all Eric was doing was attempting to keep morale up, his own and that of his comrades, by getting information from the BBC International service. For that, which he took sole responsibility for, he was mercilessly tortured by the Japanese military police, especially one Nagase. Eventually the British prisoners, those who survived physically, were liberated by Allied forces.            

That experience as one could expect was a life-long psychic wound that never was either far from the surface or something that he was able to get over as the film edges forward. Enter some thirty years later Patricia, played by fetching Nicole Kidman, met on a train heading toward Scotland. They got along, got along very well although Patricia was unaware of the effects of that prison camp experience until after they   had been married and he displayed symptoms of the nightmares that haunted his dreams and incapacitate him to the point on physical withdrawal, Through an Eric friend who also went through the Burma railway experience she learned what had happened to her husband. Through that same friend who would eventually commit suicide over his own memories Eric found out that the torturer Nagase was still alive and well and had never been prosecuted for war crimes committed during the prison tortures. After his friend commits suicide and urged on by Patricia, he went to Asia to confront Nagase who had been working as a museum guide at the very place where he had been a torturer.               

They met and Eric at that point was determined to get his well-deserved revenge that the Allies had not been able to do. But upon meeting and after talking although it was a close thing Eric decided not to do the murder he had in his heart. This an example of so-called reconciliation between the transgressor and his victim. In the end as we find out through the afterword the pair became lifelong friends. What I ask though is where was justice for my grand uncle-and relief for my poor grandmother. 

We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When”-In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of Armistice Day-Teresa Wright, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews and Fredric March’s “The Best Years Of Our Lives” (1946)-A Film Review

We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When”-In Honor Of The 100^th Anniversary Of Armistice Day-Teresa Wright, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews and Fredric March’s “The Best Years Of Our Lives” (1946)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

The Best Years Of Our Lives, starring Teresa Brewer, Dana Andrews, Frederic March, Myrna Loy 1946

I have noted in the headline to this piece that on November 11, 2018 we commemorated the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day which ended the bloody slaughter of World War I, the so-called war to end all wars. And that is a fitting honor although the subject matter of the film under review, The Best Years Of Our Lives, is the ending of a subsequent war, the bloody slaughter of World War II. There was a real scramble among the older writers here to review this Academy Award-winning film since a number of us, including myself, had fathers who served in that war and who are themselves veterans of the bloody slaughter in Vietnam, again including myself and so were, are very familiar with the subject matter of this film, the return to civilian life after the displacement of lives caused by that service. I won the “lottery” site manager Greg Green used to determine who would write the review solely on the basis of having been the only one born that year of the presentation of the film, 1946.        

Despite my “victory,” a number of the other guys, Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, and Lance Lawrence come to mind, could have written this piece with the same starting paragraphs about our own problems with what we Vietnam-era vets call returning to the “real world.” In my own case I drifted for several years around the West Coast searching for some common-sense reasons to even go on. Suicide while not near the surface at the time was not far from being contemplated. One only has to look at the statistics to know that “option” was on the very top of the surface for a number of Vietnam vets and now we see that same thing, maybe worse by percentages, happening to the younger Iraq-Afghanistan War vets. Mainly though I couldn’t adjust to the idea of a nine to five existence that I had frankly dreamed about prior to my military service after having done, having seen being done by others, having been done by the government to the people of Vietnam who I had no quarrel with.   

Let me go by the numbers. I had ill-advisedly gotten married before I left for Vietnam under the then normal idea that I would have somebody to come back to. Bad mistake, very bad in the end since when I did get back I could not get behind the nine to five job, little white house and kids and dogs scenarios that was her dream (and as I have said already said mine previously). Moreover when I got back and was unresponsive to her needs, she took up with another guy, a guy who was smack daub into that dream of hers (and they are still married the last I heard). That marriage, the first of three, over I drifted from the East back out to California where in 1967, during the days of the Summer of Love, our old late comrade and fellow veteran Pete Markin brought us to see what was going on out there. I was thinking that a fresh start would do me good.

A false fresh start since I got heavily involved, along with Markin and Josh Breslin who writes for this publication as well, in drugs and other illegal stuff. After a while unlike Markin who headed to Mexico and a fateful bloody end and Josh who headed back East to school under the GI Bill I drifted to Southern California and the hobo camps along various rivers or under bridges with other veterans mostly, although not all from my generation but some from WWII and Korea as well. After a while though that got stale and I headed back East myself and from that point, more or less, I was in a more positive direction.  Although sometimes when the moon is full I wish I was back there among the righteous hobo veterans, had not taken a turn to the nine to five world.

In a way this film is good piece of what Sam Lowell has called on other occasions “a slice of life” hook that has saved him on more than one review when he was in pitch darkness for what Hollywood thought was going on. Unfortunately after a brief survey of fellow writers who are part of the fading baby-boomer generation that got its start in the immediate post-World War II period we would never had found out from our taciturn fathers what it was like to readjust to civilian life as they were too distance, too sullen, too driven to get ahead in the dog eat dog world to let on what they were feeling. Never spoke of what they went through in their war. Strangely, despite this insight on my part, a survey of my kids from those three failed marriages finds that I too never spoke of what I went through, was distance, sullen and so on. That was tough medicine to swallow after I thought about it some.

No question this film is moderately melodramatic and maybe today it would be impossible to find backing for its production for despite the old chestnut about a good film being a good film even fifty or seventy-five years later like this one or Casablanca. Probably impossible to get the “gee whizz” notion of community that glued towns together. But enough of that and let’s get to that summary that old Sam Lowell has always cried to the heavens about that every film reviewer owes his or her reader. Starting with the proposition that good story-lines come in threes.

Three is the number of ex-GIs who had recently been discharged from the military service after various stints in the European or Pacific theaters. We have rather than Tom, Dick and Harry-Al, Fred and Homer. A combination of names befitting the times if rather old-fashioned now. A combination of ranks too somewhat counter-intuitive with the banker and middle-class partisan Al having been an NCO while from the wrong side of the tracks Fred had been an officer and Homer nothing but a swabbie what in the Army would be called a grunt-low on the totem pole. And a combination of conditions from Al’s discontent to Fred’s thwarted ambitions to Homer’s war-related physical condition having lost his hands when his ship was sunk out in the China seas.      

What cinematically brings the threesome together is they are from the same city, Boone City, and don’t bother to try to locate that on any U.S. map and have “hitched an Air Force transport ride home. This homecoming must have been somewhat after the various celebrations commemorating victories in Europe and Asia since they all went to their respective homes without fanfare. I would note that whatever public celebrations of WWII happened none were forthcoming when I, or others from my home town, came home after Vietnam service. A different time and different response to what happened in the latter war.

Okay let’s set the stage. Homer had a longtime sweetheart and next-door neighbor who he did not until the very end of the film realize still loved him and will wind up marrying him despite his physical afflictions. There were probably a number of stories with that kind of ending although I know at least one from my own Vietnam experience, Bob Petty, who lost a leg at Danang and whose high school sweetheart just couldn’t deal with that trauma. I am sure there were more such cases. Al, middle-class banker Al, must have volunteered since he had a grown-up family and had been married for twenty years to a wife played by Myrna Loy who was troubled by Al’s behavior, his sullen discontents, coming back from the war. Al was also somewhat estranged from his two kids, the most important for the film being daughter Peggy, played by classic girl next door is Teresa Wright.

I have saved Fred for the last part since his fate intertwined with Al’s family. He, like me, and many others married on the wartime quick decision run, had known the spirited young women for only a short time before shipping out. He had been nothing but a soda jerk before his military service but he had a skill set for dropping bombs mainly in the right place and so thrived in that environment. Back home though he suffered from two serious problems, again which I have many of examples of, including my own. First, that on- the-fly wife turned out to a party girl, any man’s woman, any man with some dough and good looks, a tramp is what we would have called her back in the old neighborhood hang-outs. She married Fred for those precious allotment checks married men were entitled to. Secondly, after the war, after getting out of soda jerk routines he wanted more than to serve giddy teenagers hot fudge sundaes. But he couldn’t land anything that he could keep, that precision bombing skill set of no use in civilian life. No dough, no serious job tells it all. You know that that tramp was going to be heading to greener passages after, hell, maybe before, she divorced our Fred. Don’t worry though our Fred will have a soft landing since along the way Fred and that daughter of Al’s, Peggy fell in love and that divorce was a rather convenient device to bring them together. Yeah, Sam Lowell, was right this was a “slice of life” classic but also rang a bell for a latter- day veteran too.             

Presidio 27 "Mutiny" 50 years later
Podcast with Keith Mather

Presidio 27 Mutiny Podcast and Events

Courage to Resist<refuse@couragetoresist.org>

9/2/2018 4:54 PM

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Presidio 27 "Mutiny" 50 years later Podcast with Keith Mather During the Vietnam War era, the Presidio Stockade was a military prison notorious for its poor conditions and overcrowding with many troops imprisoned for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. When Richard Bunch, a mentally disturbed prisoner, was shot and killed on October 11th, 1968, Presidio inmates began organizing. Three days later, 27 Stockade prisoners broke formation and walked over to a corner of the lawn, where they read a list of grievances about their prison conditions and the larger war effort and sang “We Shall Overcome.” The prisoners were charged and tried for “mutiny,” and several got 14 to 16 years of confinement. Meanwhile, disillusionment about the Vietnam War continued to grow inside and outside of the military. “This was for real. We laid it down, and the response by the commanding general changed our lives,” recalls Keith Mather, Presidio “mutineer” who escaped to Canada before his trial came up and lived there for 11 years, only to be arrested upon his return to the United States. Mather is currently a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Veterans for Peace. Listen to the Courage to Resist podcast with Keith. D O N A T E towards a world without war 50th anniversary events at the former Presidio Army Base October 13th & 14th, 2018 PANEL DISCUSSION Saturday, October 13, 7 to 9 pm Presidio Officers’ Club 50 Moraga Ave, San Francisco Featuring panelists: David Cortright (peace scholar), Brendan Sullivan (attorney for mutineers), Randy Rowland (mutiny participant), Keith Mather (mutiny participant), and Jeff Paterson (Courage to Resist). Free ticket registration Facebook event information Courage to Resist podcast with Keith Mather ON SITE COMMEMORATION Sunday, October 14, 1 to 3 pm Fort Scott Stockade 1213 Ralston (near Storey), San Francisco The events are sponsored by the Presidio Land Trust in collaboration with Veterans For Peace Chapter 69-San Francisco with support from Courage to Resist. More information D O N A T E to support resistance

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

In Cambridge- WEDNESDAY 11/14: Emergency Rally to end U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia

WEDNESDAY 11/14: Emergency Rally to end U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Cole Harrison<cole@masspeaceaction.org>

8:09 AM

Via  Act-MA <act-ma-bounces@act-ma.org>

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Emergency Rally to end U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia
Wednesday, November 14 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm ~ Harvard Square T station
[image: Trump boasts of arms sales to Saudis - with crown prince Mohammed
bin Salman]

*The past weeks have seen a dramatic shift in mainstream attitudes toward
our relationship with Saudi Arabia. The grisly killing of Jamal Khashoggi
is reverberating throughout power circles in the U.S. and has shaken the
very basis of a consensus around the U.S.-Saudi alliance*.

For the first time U.S. weapons sales, particularly by Raytheon, are being
seriously questioned as the rage around Khashoggi has opened the door to
unprecedented questioning of the U.S.-Saudi war in Yemen. Now is the time
for us to seize the moment and turn the present tumult against U.S.-Saudi
collaboration in attacking Yemen, in tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and
in promoting devastating sanctions and even war with Iran. In short, we
need take advantage of this opening — as long as it exists — to breakup
Trump’s love affair with the Saudis and with Raytheon and the other
companies that thrive on war. Who knows, we may even be able to do
something that helps the people of Yemen!

*For information call 617-354-2169 <(617)%20354-2169>*
--
*Not one step back*

Cole Harrison
Executive Director
Massachusetts Peace Action - the Commonwealth's largest grassroots peace
organization
11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-354-2169 w
617-466-9274 m
www.masspeaceaction.org
Facebook: facebook.com/masspeaceaction
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Twitter: masspeaceaction <https://twitter.com/masspeaceaction>
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On The 50th Anniversary of the May Days in France in 1968

On The 50^th Anniversary of the May Days in France in 1968

By Frank Jackman

Allan Jackson labeled the post-World War II generation that came of age in the 1960s the “Generation of ’68.” A lot of things happened that year, including our respective draft call notices for induction in those days when a whole generation of young men, pro or anti-war had decisions to make not always easy or right). We both in retrospect should have refused to do so but you learn a few things in this wicked old world and that is worth something. This publication in any case has publicized a fair part of the world-historic occasions from Tet 1968 in January on through to the seminal 1968 elections.

A lot of the reason that Allan tagged us as the Generation of ’68 though was not for the jangle of events in general but in homage to the events in France in May and June of 1968 which kind of got everything shifted to the left-for a while. There, in Paris first as usual and then the outlying areas, the radicalized students first and then the students and workers came within a hair’s breathe of turning the world upside down, of making the newer world we were all looking for and which the many times mentioned Markin, the Scribe, whose name Allan had used as a moniker on this site in honor of his fallen friend mentioned many times not always to good effect. You cannot look at the period without seeing the treacherous role of the Communist Party, the organization which was supposed to represent the workers, in the stillborn nature of what happened. Unfortunately “almost” is usually not good enough when you are trying to overthrow the “king” and the moment which might have shifted Western history a little bit differently on its axis passed. That notion is history in the conditional of course but a definite possibility. Certainly in the objective sense if nothing else revolution was in the air-if you could keep it. We now know two things about that Paris and French uprising. Revolutionary moments are few and far between and, at least in the United States where nothing even close to a revolutionary period was in play whatever a small chunk of the radicalized young thought, defeat has put us in a forty plus year cultural war against the accumulated night-takers which we have not won and are still fighting almost daily.

The Paris days though have a more personal frame of reference since at the time, in 1968, neither Allan nor I were anything but maybe left liberals and not much interested in revolutions and the like. We come by our “Generation of ’68” credentials by a more roundabout way although the events in Paris, the visual example possibilities of revolution play a role later. As mentioned above both Allan and I accepted induction into the Army at different points in 1969 after receiving our draft notices in 1968 (which puts us in a different class of ’69 connected with Vietnam which I won’t go into now). We both came out of the Vietnam War experience very changed in many ways but most directly by a shift in our political perspectives. Neither of us whatever our feelings about the war in Vietnam while students were active in the anti-war movement. Mostly after the Summer of Love experiences out in California in 1967 we were what might be called life-style hippies or some such. Like I said the Army experience changed that. Mainly before that we cared about girls, having sex with girls, and getting an occasional drug connection.     

When we got our respective discharges we were all over the place both as to life style and political seriousness. That is where the Paris days in 1968 came into play. It was obvious by 1971 that massive, mostly student-led, peace marches were not going to end the war. What to do next preoccupied the minds of many of the better elements of that movement. That is where 1968 came in. A cohort of radicals and others started thinking about something like a united front between students and workers strange as that sounded then, and now come to think of it, like what almost brought the French government down.

Maybe because we were from the working class, really a notch below, the working poor, this idea sounded good to us although knowing what working class life was really like unlike many of the middle class students we had our doubts about the viability of the strategy. As it turned out not only are revolutionary moments fleeting but mass action moments short of that are as well and so nothing really ever came of that idea. Still if you think about it today if you could get the kids who are in political motion these days not matter how inchoate to join up with some radical workers (leftist workers not though who gave their endorsements by voting against their immediate and long term interests to one Donald J. Trump, POTUS in tweet speak) we could shake things up. History doesn’t really repeat itself but if something rises up out of all of this current movement by the young which is where you have to look for starters looking back at the Paris days, looking back to those barricades in 1968 would not be a bad idea.   

The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left

The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left   

Click below to link to The Rag Blog  

http://www.theragblog.com/

Frank Jackman comment:

When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists, mainly the shattered remnants of the government- hounded spy-infested Moscow-loyal American Communist Party still enthrall to Stalin and his progeny and still hoping that a few liberal friends would raise cash for defense funds and Democratic Party hacks, the Socialist Workers Party long associated with the name of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky but just then driving us crazy with a uni-linear strategy of building bigger and better mass peaceful anti-war rallies that even New Jersey housewives could join, and the moribund remnant of Social Democracy forever warning against the perfidious Communists and leading all down the garden path of the big tent  Democratic Party, tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics.  (That “generation of ’68 being no arbitrary designation with 1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the American bourgeois political upheavals that led to Chicago hell in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits of a student-based vision without other socially more weighty allies of the "newer world" we sought.)

Those scorned old leftists, mainly like I said old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on who survived the 1950s red scare or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare and the Stalinists had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us. Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face- rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and had no say in making needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the hard-edged Prometheus-tangled rock up the hill of human progress.

Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going, had anything to teach us outside of relating their personal experiences and maybe keeping away from what were clearly ultra-leftist weird ideas about strategy but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.

Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels out in the means streets to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.          

So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that  would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the  last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.

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A Frank Jackman comment (2014):

Recently I wrote a short piece in a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back, the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various Occupy campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.

I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still holds true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days, now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s,  made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against it should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.   

A Jackman disclaimer:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out, more times than I care to mention including my own behavior, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.