Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
He, Peter Paul Markin to give
him a name although many of the generation of ‘68 had been on the same quest, for a whole
number of reasons both personal and political, had been on the trail of his
roots, including trips to the old working- class neighborhoods where he came of
political age. Through various methods, including extensive use of the glorious
Internet, he was able to track down a couple of guys from the old neighborhood
whose family story had gripped him in olden times.
As an unintended result of
that research he have also come in contact with some helpful old high school
classmates, North Adamsville High School
(that’s in Massachusetts) Class of 1964 .
One such helpful person, a class officer back in the day, had asked him to
answer some questions that her committee was putting together for his high
school class with an eye to the upcoming 50th anniversary reunion.
You know the “what the hell have you done with your ill-begotten life for the
past half century,” how many kids, grandkids, egad, great-grandkids do you
have; don’t lie about anything in any answer because we have ways of finding
out the truth of your silly life. How do you think we found you after all these
years anyway? (Although, as simple
matter, a glance a local telephone book would have provided the answer.)
Got it. Peter Paul got it
alright. He had answered some of the more pertinent questions, the dream
questions, like how did things actually work out as against one’s totally
inflated and obscenely optimistic teenage dream goals, as truthfully as
possible, or as any of the old gang needed to know and gave forth with the
expected fair percentage of lies, half-lies, and bizarre falsehoods that they
should have expected for him, despite the fore-warnings. And they, in turn
provided their inflated estimates. No foul, no harm. He dutifully posted those on the class
website, although not without noting that this “memoir” excursion was getting
to be a seemingly endless task as the more questions he answered the more they (really she, she
unnamed she, just in case legal action becomes necessary) kept sending him. Such is life. But, through some of the
interchange correspondence he uncovered more information about his roots coming
from an earlier period, the dark “projects” coming of age period. Such is life,
indeed.
He told me, one melancholy
barroom veranda afternoon, some of the details of his “discovery.” How his family
had started life in a housing project in Adamsville with all that implied, then
and now. By the beauties of the Internet social networking he had come in
contact with someone who remembered him (or rather his brother, his older
brother, Prescott- she was sweet on him in elementary school), a woman named
Sherry. She had lived in that housing project during his family’s stay there
and for many, many year after his family had left (to move to the other side of
town in a broken down single, well, shack was the only work he could think of
to describe it) , and saw its transformation from a temporary way station for
returning World War II veterans as had been its original intention to a classic
drug-strewn crime-ridden ‘den of iniquity’ as portrayed in subsequent media
accounts, She agreed to be his ‘hood historian. Moreover she had brothers,
sisters, children and grandchildren who had memories from that place and she
agreed to pump them for their remembrances.
And that is where I came in.
Peter Paul, my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour brother from the
1960s summer of love (summers of love?) generational break-out since we met on
the West Coast one sunny year called on me to work out some of the kinks in the
stories, something he felt was too close to believe that he could do them some
small measure of justice. He presented the concept as something that could very
well be a slice of life series on the trials and tribulations of members of the
marginally working poor, a section of the working class with which I am also very
familiar coming from old time mill town Olde Saco up in Maine. See too from my
vantage point the thing could have produced a study, with all its inherent
limitations, of the decline and disintegration of working class political
consciousness in America since World War II. I had (have) written other stories
from the Olde Saco days that played out one way with a section of the working class
that was slightly above the one that Peter Paul came from, but just above, the
steadily employed working people who dotted the coastal Maine landscape back
then. That saga did not paint a pretty political picture. Nor would this one, I
feared. But, damn, we both agreed, why
shouldn’t these people have their stories told, warts and all.
Again, like that Olde Saco
series (with a ponderous series title of History and Consciousness, H&C, I
have gotten better with my titles since then, thank you), this series would really
narrate a very prosaic working class set of stories. I planned, however, to organize
these stories differently because now I know what I am looking for and each
story will be able to stand on its own. In H&C the stories as they unfolded
piecemeal, frankly, got out of control and I do not believe that when I put all
the parts together at the end that it had the power that I wanted it to have,
and that it did have for me as they unfolded.
That said, if this time last
year somebody asked me, including Peter Paul, if I would be doing another series
like H&C I would have said they were crazy. I then wanted to discuss the
finer theoretical points of organizing to push for the American withdrawal from
Afghanistan Iraq or building a workers’ party in this country. But this series
seemed like finding the philosopher’s stone. This was the “real deal” down at
the base of society; from a time when with a little tweaking things could have
gone in another direction.
I prepared the first story (since
published) that dealt with how this poor woman Sherry, Peter’s ‘hood historian,
was humiliated by other students (girls mainly) at his elementary school for
the mere fact of being from “the projects.” This writer was painfully aware of
that type of humiliation as he faced the same thing up in Olde Saco. I expected
to use that introductory story to draw some political conclusions, if
possible. Again, as I had in H&C, I
asked the question- will there be political lessons to be learned? I did not
believe so, directly. However, real stories about the fate of the working class
down at the base can help explain the very real retardants to working class
political consciousness that we face as we try to organize here in America to
take back the republic. I have spent a lifetime quoting radical socialist
principles, chapter and verse, elsewhere. These stories desperately need to be
told. Sadly, after that first story though Sherry passed away and we, Peter
Paul and I, have been left a little rudderless. Time is not always on our
side. Sherry from the ‘hood, RIP.
No comments:
Post a Comment