This blog came into existence based on a post originally addressed to a fellow younger worker who was clueless about the "beats" of the 1950s and their stepchildren, the "hippies" of the 1960s, two movements that influenced me considerably in those days. Any and all essays, thoughts, or half-thoughts about this period in order to "enlighten" our younger co-workers and to preserve our common cultural history are welcome, very welcome.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin-Trouble Is Still My Business –Preface
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler
I like to think that one Michael Philip Marlin who worked out of Ocean City just south of Los Angeles back in the day now incorporated into the vast city had many of Marlowe’s attributes-and Chandler’s too.
Preface by Peter Paul Markin
If you get one thing right in this wicked old world, or the literary segment of the beast, or better, the crime novel sub-segment(okay, okay genre) you know that one Michael Philip Marlin’s business was trouble, trouble pure and simple. And sisters and brother while you are getting that right you best put it down that trouble, trouble with a capital T added, was this classic hard-boiled private detective Marlin’s business. We have previous followed old school Marlin through thick and thin in the many short sketches that make up this collection.
Our intrepid private eye, private dick, shamus, gumshoe or whatever you call a guy that, privately, and for too little dough scraped off other people’s dirt, and did it not badly at that, in your neighborhood. And kept his code of honor intact, well mostly intact, as he, for example, tried to spare an old man some anguish, some wild daughters anguish, or tried to find gigantic Moose’s Verna, Verna, sweet Verna who did not want to be found, not by Moose anyway, or find some foolish wayward daughter despite his client’s ill-winded manners. And on it went.
Oh yah, about Frank Jackman, about the guy who wrote this selection of short Marlin sketches. Like I said in another review he, following along in the train of Brother Raymond Chandler and Brother Dashiell Hammett has attempted to turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime fighters and high-tech wizards masquerading as detectives that dominate the reading market these days on its head and gives us tough guy blood and guts detectives we can admire, can get behind, warts and all.
[Hammett, the author of The Thin Man, and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade, maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Chandler the prodigious creator of the Philip Marlowe series of novels and short stories. Sam and Marlowe, who come to think of it like Marlin, also had judgment problems when it came to women, women wearing that damn perfume that stops a man, even a hard-boiled detective man cold, in Marlowe’s case an assortment of Hollywood women and Sam’s a frill who was looking for the stuff of dreams up north in Frisco town.]
In Jackman’s case he has drawn strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlin’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlin was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlin’s eyes. Or noticing a frayed collar or a misshapen dress that indicated that a guy or gal was on cheap street and just maybe not on the level, maybe scratching like crazy for his or her coffee and cakes.
At the same time Jackman is a master of setting the barebones detail of the space Marlin had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He had a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses reflecting old wealth California, mostly in the south where he plied his trade. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.
But where Jackman has made his mark is in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Los Angeles Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo- men, the penny- ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Jackman knows the type, has the type down solid.
Nor is Jackman above putting a little social commentary in Marlin’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back east looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlin’s code of honor.
And of course over a series of sketches Jackman has expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he had honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlin the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlin the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some serious Obamacare health insurance- no questions asked . Yah, Marlin.
***The Roots Is The
Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…
…she,
nineteen, never had luck with men until the night of the USO dance down at the
Starlight Ballroom in Olde Saco in October, 1943, now glorious October, 1943.
The idea of the dance at least from the brochure her sister Lorraine had
received from the director of the Portland USO was to bolster the morale of the
soldiers, sailors, and marines in the area returning from action overseas, those
who were on leave, or those who were getting ready to ship out to some hellhole
where the fighting would be heavy and so they, one and all, would have a
pleasant memory to take away with them whatever status they were in. Lorraine,
having gone to the previous Friday night’s gathering and “hit pay-dirt” as she
called it with some jittery-bugging sailor who swept her off her feet and who
would be attending this week’s event, coaxed her sister into attending in hopes
of getting her out of her funk. Getting her out of her no luck with boys, men,
whatever funk.
So
she, now listing herselfamong the
employed womenwho were needed to work
outside of the house to fill jobs vacated by draft number- called men, splurged
on a new dress, not a fancy dress since all the serious fabric production was
needed for the men at the fronts, but serviceable with some accoutrements. And
to die for, nylons, nylons harder to get than gas these days. Lorraine, vain
Lorraine as everybody at Olde Saco High called her, including Sis, admitted
that she looked good, was bound to snatch some young soldier. As they entered
the lobby of the Starlight Ballroom, all a-glitter, the sound of Lester Mann
and the Band in the background, she was secretly thrilled that she had, for
once, given into her sister’s whim. There were more men in uniform than she had
ever seen in her life and she blushed as she sensed that every one of those
uniformed pairs of eyes were checking her out (and truthfully every young woman
who came through that door but she just blushed for herself).
No
sooner had they, she, given her wrap to the coat- room girl than it started.
The rush, guys coming right up and asking her to dance, the jitter-buggers
first and foremost, before she had even caught her breathe, and if not this one
then how about the next, or the next. Quite a whirlwind all the way until the
band took an intermission. At that intermission, that maybe fateful
intermission, while she was at the punch bowl re-hydrating herself after the non-stop
action, Dick Sams, Dick from her class when they were in high school, came up
to her in civilian clothes. She asked him what he was doing there since this
was strictly a military affair. He answered that Lester Mann had asked him to
step in front of the microphone during the second set and warble a few tunes, Tangerine, I’ll Never Smile Again, Perfidia,
the current rages. She then remembered that Dick had been a top singer at
school and had wished to pursue a musical career. She asked whether he had gone
on to music school after high school. Dick answered that yes he had for a while
but just the week before his number had come up so the following week he was to
be inducted into the Army.
After
they had talked for a while Dick, Dick Sams the best voice in the high school,
maybe in the town, kind of sheepishly blurted out that he had often wondered
why he had never spoken to her much at school since he had a little crush on
her then. She blushed, blushed some more when he asked her if she would wait
for him after the show, and blushed even more when she said yes. But all that
blushing was nothing, nothing at all to what happened when Dick got up on the
bandstand. He took dead aim at her, dead aim like she was the only one in the
room, and sang I’ll Never Smile Again
to put old Frank Sinatra in the shade. Sang it so tenderly that she blushed yet
again, blushed and wondered if he really would not smile again unless she was
his girl ….
Monday, December 30, 2013
***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…
…he wished he had never been born, never, not after that stunt that he pulled that last leave he had before he shipped out, shipped out East on this damn floating bucket of a troop transport that was heading, heading to who knows where, and who cares, except it has hard fighting, slopping through some muddy roads, and hard death written all over wherever that it was. But what lied ahead was nothing compared to that foolish stunt. He didn’t have to even say that it involved a her, her his sweet Maggie, Maggie O’Leary to be exact because there are a lot of Maggies in the world, although now he knew, knew maybe too late that there was only one for him.
He could not believe that he left her that night, that last gorgeous night telling her that given what was ahead for him he would rather she not wait for him. She cried, cried hard at that. But that was not the stunt, not by a long shot, since those kind of partings with this damn war on were a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper.
What he did after he left her though, figuring he was a free man, was call up Daisy McNamara and spent the night at her place, spent it you know how so nobody has to go into details. And that next morning who sees him catting out of her place but Liam O’Leary, Maggie’s older brother. He tried to call her, no answer, he wrote, wrote about six times, trying to explain what a cad he had been and just this minute he was waiting as he had for the past several days for mail call. Yeah, he wished he had never been born…
***Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky Meets Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
As is my wont when I get bullish on an author I have been on a Raymond Chandler tear, or rather one of my periodic Chandler tears. Most recently I read and reviewed some of the detective novelist’s late work (1958), Playback, the last in his series of Philip Marlowe stories. In that review I mentioned (as I have in several previous reviews of other books in Chandler’s Marlowe series) a number of positive attributes about Marlowe that I found appealing. And also mentioned in addition that I thought one of my political heroes, 20th century Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, would have felt a similar sentiment. I then went on to list some of those attributes. For starters: Marlowe’s sense of personal honor in a modern world (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) that was increasingly discounting that virtue as the reign of the night-takers, the reign of the long knives cast it shadow over the world, a shadow still with us, and that laughed at such old-fashioned notions; his gritty intrepidness in search of ‘rough’ justice in a messy world, the arduous task of sorting out the good guys from the bad guys (and gals, the femmes fatales in particular that he was always a little ready to give a pass to); his amazing, almost superhuman, ability to take a punch or seven for the good of the cause, a stray bullet or two, nothing fatal in a pinch (yah, yah I know that in the world of pulp fiction, the Black Mask world, that it was de riguer for the lead character to show his metal continuously in that department); and, his at least minimally class- conscious and sometimes barely hidden contempt for the traditional social hierarchy and its corrupt police authority, an insider’s contempt since he had started out as a public cop.
Not a proto-type for the “new socialist man” but not a bad start for the transition period, no bad at all. In response, I received an e-mail from a reader, an ardent young socialist-feminist fellow admirer of Leon Trotsky, who took me to task for my characterizations and argued that I had it all wrong both as to Marlowe’s virtues and to his so-called (her description) anti-authoritarian posture.
In passing, the reader deeply discounted those attributes where I put a plus, placed a sense of honor, really a code of honor, very low on the totem pole of virtues for the 21st century, saw Marlowe’s rough sense of justice, getting the bad guys,as some kind of vigilantism or just part of his job, went apoplectic that willingness to take punches or bullets for a righteous cause was even worthy of mention (apparently “forgetting” along way that the struggle ahead, our struggle, is apt to be filled with punches, bullets. or worse), took his bleeding two-bit (her term) partisanship for the little guy mainly done over whisky shots at some gin mill (my term) as so much eye-wash, and deplored the very idea of the possibility that a future socialist society would have room for such attributes as I had mentioned above. And to top it all off that Marlowe’s attitude toward women was ‘primitive’ (her description was rather more graphic call me old-fashioned but this is the public prints).
While one would be hard pressed, very hard-pressed, to include Marlowe, with his very quaint but decidedly macho protective attitude toward women (except those oddball femmes who fired first and asked questions later like Carmen in The Big Sleep or Velma more insidiously in Farewell, My Lovely) reflecting the mores of an earlier age, as a champion of women’s emancipation. And maybe over time, as noted in the 1950s Playback review, his sense of honor, his code, became frayed around the edges, his youthful no-nonsense common sense failed him at times, his ability to take a punch lessened and he had a hard timelaying off the low-shelf booze but the reader missed the point of my critique. Or rather she is much too dogmatic in her sense of “political correctness” as it applies to the literary front. Thus this little commentary is intended not so much to clear the air about the “future socialist person,” or in defense of what is after all a literary invention on Chandler’s part as to posit several ideas for future discussion.
I hate to invoke the name of Leon Trotsky, the intrepid Russian revolutionary, hard-working Soviet official, well-regarded political pamphleteer (George Bernard Shaw called him the “prince of pamphleteers” no small praise coming from those quarters), and astute literary critic into this discussion but in that last role I think he had some useful things to say whether he would, as I believe, have admired Marlowe.
Without a doubt Trotsky could have made his mark solely on the basis of his literary criticism, witness his Marxist masterpieces Literature and Revolution and Literature and Art. What made Trotsky’s literary analysis so compelling was not whether he was right or wrong about the merits of any particular writer. In fact, many times, as in the case of the French writer Celine and some of the Russian poets like Blok, he was, I think, wrong. But rather, that he approached literary criticism from a materialist basis rooted in what history, and that essentially meant capitalist history, gave us when he analyzed literary characters, the plausibility of various plots and the lessons to be drawn about “human nature” put forth by any given writer.
This is no mere genuflection on my part to a revolutionary leader whose work I hold in high regard (and as that e-mail writer indicated she did as well) but a recognition that capitalism has given us some much distorted concepts of what human nature is, or can be, all about. That is the core of the genius of Trotsky’s sharp pen and wit. That is why he is still very readable, for the most part, today. Moreover he made a very useful point in Chapter 8 of Literature and Revolution (available on-line at the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives website) that unless it was question of political import, active counter-revolutionary work for the class enemy, the world of culture should be left to something like a real “let one hundred schools of thought contend” by a healthy socialist society.
That thought was no mere abstraction on Trotsky’s part but came out a polemic in the struggle inside Russia in the early 1920’s over the preferential establishment of a school of “proletarian culture” supported by the Soviet state that was then being bandied about by likes of fellow Bolsheviks Bukharin and Zinoviev. Trotsky, in any case, did not spend much time diagramming any but the most general outline of the contours of what the future socialist society, its habits, manners and morals would look like. He did, and this is central in this discussion, spend a great deal of time on what capitalism had and would bequeath a socialist state. Including both vices and virtues.
Not to belabor a point this is the link between Leon Trotsky and one fictional Philip Marlowe. Trotsky, a man of his times as well as forward thinker, accepted that personal honor had a place as a societal goal and as a matter of social hygiene. The parameters of that sense of honor naturally would be different under a socialist regime that was based on use value rather than the struggle for profit margins. Certainly Trotsky’s biography, particularly that last period in the 1930’s when he appeared to be steadfastly tilting at windmills, demonstrates that he had a high moral code that drove him to fight what was increasing a dangerous but necessary rearguard action against the Stalinist- driven Soviet variety of the night of the long knives.
Do I draw the links between the two here too closely? Perhaps. Although Marlowe has his own version of ‘tilling at windmills’ in search of some kind of rough justice and vindication for all those knocks on the head one cannot deny that he does not challenge bourgeois society except in the most oblique way. He will not rail against General Sternwood’s oil derricks. He will not lead a crusade against the old order in his search for the elusive Velma. He is if anything very Victorian in his attitude toward women, good or bad. (Chandler’s Marlowe and Trotsky are both men of another era in their personal attitudes toward women, although Trotsky was light-years ahead on the political front). Nor is Marlowe the prototype for the ‘new socialist man’. But he remains a very appealing fictional character nevertheless. Let, as it should, the discussion continue.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
***The
Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – Don’t
Call It Murder
As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the
son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip
Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private
eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua
Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one
such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest
detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a
habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and
picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin
let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler
Tough hard guys, and once in a while
a wayward gal, have been trying to commit the perfect murder since they
invented murder with Cain slaying Abel, and maybe before. And some guys, some
hard guys, have actually gotten away with it for one reason or another mainly
by disposing of the body in some way so the damn thing would never be found and
the cops would tire of the case and throw it in the cold files to lie there
forever. But the average citizen, and I should know since it is my business,
the private snoop business to know, trying to commit the perfect crime leaves
too many moving parts and so winds up facing the hangman, facing those
high-hung gallows and judgment day. The only way it happens, clean get-away
happens and don’t take this as the norm, okay is if the thing is set up that
way. Here’s what I mean.
The organization I work for, the
International Operations Organization, got a call from a loner private eye, Michael
Philip Marlin, down in Los Angeles saying he needed some help on a political
case, political in that some reform politician he had known in the old days was
murdered and it looked like a professional hit ordered by the in-power city
machine.I was sent down from my station
in Frisco since I had worked with Marlin previously on a missing load of rare
jade case that had turned south on him. As it turned out this reformer was
nothing but a skirt-chaser and his ever-loving wife, tired of his sordid
affairs, put a couple of slugs in him to even things up. Nothing unusual in
that, happens all the time. What was unusual and put it in the perfect crime
category is that before this guy died he set the crime scene up to point away
from wifey. And she walked, walked when Marlin and I let her walk away without
a murmur.
But that is not the normal case,
take the case of the Lampreys, Jim and Adele, and John Snyder.Seems that this Snyder saved the Lampreys’
lives down in Mexico around the time of the revolution, you know Pancho Villa,
Zapata and those guys. They were being held for ransom by some desperados and
he coolly put together an attack that sprung them. That was their story anyway.
So they were forever indebted to him and in return helped him on some shady
capers back in the old U.S.A. One thing led to another and there was a falling
out over what was supposed to have been done and what and who was supposed to
get the bigger cut of the dough in a caper that went sour. Happens all the
time.
So John Snyder wound up dead, very
dead, in some forsaken ravine down around Del Mar near the cliffs. The
insurance company that had insured Snyder called us in when they were getting
ready to pay out on a big number policy to one Adele Snyder. It didn’t take
much to turn that one over since Adele had actually been married to Snyder down
in Mexico, had abandoned him for Lamprey and headed north. That was how Snyder
got them to do his work in the states not some desperado tale down in Sonora.
He was going to squawk to the coppers about bigamy after that failed caper and
the pair beat him out of that thought one rainy night. The insurance reward money
lured them out and once I got my mitts on them they broke like a cheap piece of
china. So learn something will you and leave the murder racket to the professionals
and stay away from such doings.
***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…
…Jesus, what the hell, no, what the high holy hell, was he doing in this damn tent, this tent with eight snoring guys, out in the middle of nowhere New Jersey getting ready to get up and do, do what, make his bunk exactly right, all hospital corners like even his mother did not insist upon, quick cold shower, dress and then fall out, fall in, some chow, if you could call it that, although some of the southern boys, and not just them either, thought they had died and gone to heaven, had shoes too, Jesus. Shoes to march the bejesus all day. Lights out, tired lights out at nine, Jesus, and the outside as dark as a cave not even street lights, street cars and other signs of civilization, his civilization.
No he was not built for this, this country boy stuff. He had tried to have a word with his friends and neighbors down at the Olde Saco Draft Board when his number was called about his importance to the civilian end of the war effort but they would not hear a word, thought he was a malingerer. Sure he didn’t, just like half the guys in town, sign up on the dotted line after Pearl but he was thinking, thinking maybe he was a conscientious objector or something like that. Some kind of pacifist like the few Quakers in town. He after all had taken the Oxford Pledge in college. So had a lot of other guys who once the war drums started beating tore the thing up. But Jesus he could have never held his head up in his strictly patriotic working-class town, never gotten another date, hell, maybe been even run out of town on a rail so, yes, he went when his number came up.
He couldn’t believe the stuff they threw at him here in basic training every time he squawked about the crazy stuff they, the drill sergeants they, made the troops do. Took more than his fair share of KP as a result but he was no lifer, he was a citizen- soldier and had rights, and so he squawked. Squawked until one day a guy, Prescott Lee by name, from down south, down in the hills and hollows country, down in coal country, Kentucky, some place like that and in his light southern drawl told him to stop whining, stop being a nuisance, and learn to be a soldier if he was going to be a soldier. He also told him to stop belly-aching so much since he had already lost two brothers at Guadalcanal and a cousin in Italy.
That stopped him cold and eight months later he comported himself not badly, not badly at all, in the Anzio landing …
***Preserving The Roots Anyway We Can- The Saga Of A Desperate Man’s Blues- Roots Music Preservationist Joe Bussard- A CD Review
A YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Desperate Man's Blues".
CD Review
This CD review complements a DVD review of the same name: Desperate Man's Blues: Discovering The Roots Of American Music, Jose Bussard and a cast of thousands of old 78 speed records, Cubic Media, 2006
Desperate Man’s Blues, various artists from American roots songbook, Dust-to-Digital Records, 2006
In reviewing the DVD of "Desperate Man’s Blues" I mentioned the following which applies here as well:
“Recently I went to great lengths, and rightly so, to tout the “Antone’s: House Of The Blues” DVD that chronicled the trials and tribulations of the late Austin, Texas blues club owner Clifford Antone and his efforts to keep the blues tradition alive by keeping old time Chicago blues legends like Huber Sumelin, Eddie Taylor, Sunnyland Slim and Jimmy Reed gainfully employed. So they could pass the torch to the next generation of aficionados…”
“…Well, apparently running music clubs is not the only way to go in preserving American roots music, as this ‘reality’ film documentary of the saga of a fifty plus years journey by record collector Joe Bussard rather strikingly points out.”
“Joe Bussard‘s trial and tribulations are however of a different order than Clifford Antone’s. Joe has taken on the task of traveling many a mile to find rare old roots music wherever he could find it. In short, he has some of the same obsessive, traits that we saw in the ‘Antone” film. And that is to the good. Plus old Joe has an engaging, if definitely old-fashioned, sense of collecting. Nevertheless when he ‘played the platters’ of Clarence Ashley, Robert Johnson, Son House , Uncle Dave Mason, and a few I really didn’t know I was right there with him…”
And this compilation, sampler compilation really, just proves the point, again. Much of this esoteric material formed the old time American songbook that got passed on to modern blues guys like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, modern country guys like Hank Williams, modern bluegrass guys and gals like the late Doc Watson and the late Hazel Dickens. In short, the definition of what one commentator summed up rather neatly in one line-“the roots are the toots.”
A list of just the most recognizable names puts paid to that sentiment: Robert Johnson, the totally underrated Joe Hill Louis (incredible on When I ‘m Gone), fantastic Lonnie Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Clarence Ashley, The foundational Carter Family, and heaven-bound Blind Willie Johnson.
Note on exclusion:
As I also noted in my commentary on the DVD and I will repost here as an aside I did have one problem with the DVD and now with the CD as well but I will get over it with a couple more listens:
“The only problem I have, a big problem I must confess, is old Joe’s dismissal of “rock and roll” music. Part of that is generational, his against my generation of ’68 rock break-out, to be sure. But part is a different understanding of the nature of American roots music. Jerry Lee Lewis when he was in high swamp redneck form, Elvis when young, hungry and tired of driving truck, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, Chuck Berry and on and on in the rockabilly and rhythm and blues traditions that served as the foundation of the best of rock relied heavily on those very roots. No, I do not agree that rock break-out was all junk, as he put it. For the rest though, Joe I am right with you.”
***“The Roots Is The Toots”-Bruce Springsteen Comes Home- “Live In Dublin”-A CD/DVD Review
Live In Dublin, Bruce Springsteen and the Sessions Band, Bruce Springsteen, 2007 I have been all over the American songbook for the past couple of years. Old –time Appalachia hills and hollows (ya, I know hollas but what is a poor city boy to do) stuff from the Carter Family and Clarence Ashley, country blues stuff from the likes of Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White, bluegrass from Doc Watson and Hazel Dickens, swamp cajun stuff from Clifton Chenier, Tex-Mex stuff, electrified come to the city blues via Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Then to the more “refined” playbook from the hills and hollows of, ah, New York City’s Tin Pan Alley by the likes of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, and Irvin Berlin. Onward to the “founding” fathers and mothers of rock and roll like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Carl, Wanda Jackson and Lavern Baker. Finally, well almost finally, the 1960s folk revival minute around Cambridge and New York that drove my youth with the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Peter Seeger.
And it is that last name, Pete Seeger, that connects all of the above-mentioned genres with the CD under review, Bruce Springsteen’s epic (okay, okay, just monumental) “Live In Dublin” album, which is nothing (or almost nothing) but big kudos to his roots and to Pete’s efforts over a very long career to preserve some forgotten aspects of that American songbook. Peter is well known as a left-wing political activist and folksinger. Less well known is his role in keeping roots music alive (a task handed down from his musicologist father). So Bruce Springsteen, a rock and roll guy known to connect to his roots and to the people, is right at home here paying homage to the parts of the songbook that Pete has helped preserve.
The CD compilation I am reviewing is a two CD set with DVD of the Dublin performances complete with probably every known great session player available and, perhaps, every known western instrument from sexy sax to wailing kazoo (nice, right). The stick outs here include Jacob’s Ladder, We Shall Overcome, Jesse James, his version of Blind Alfred Reed’s How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live, and My Oklahoma Home. See the American songbook, and a couple of rock classics thrown in. Got it.
He (and his buddy, Friedrich, but let’s just keep it as he) said struggle. He, when asked by a wooden-headed journalist, “What is?” answered struggle. So struggle it is. He said, from his 19th century lonely graveside a head above his lot, push back, push back hard against, part one, Vietnam, and those who vouched for that war in somebody’s name, not mine or his. He said do not get mixed-message tied up with their politics, that McGovern do-good juggernaut but organize from the base and then strike the match, when it is time for such matters.
He said stay with your people, the wretched of the earth, who you have abandoned (hell, he didn’t know it was really run away from, run hard away from with Jack Kennedy/Bobby Kennedy, hell, Hubert dreams of forty years, a pension, a gold watch and whatever could be stolen along the way in the “service” of the people). He said it would not be easy. Hell, he didn’t know the half of it. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people, with those gold-flecked dreams of yours. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. Damn he was right.
He said look for a sign. He said, although he did not put it this way exactly but you will get the idea, the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy, again. He said it again and again and would not let it, or me, rest. He said what is struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1871, he said it in 1917, and he was ghost dream saying it in 1972. Whee, what a cranky, crazy old guy to disturb my sleep, huh. ***** Struggle. But where to start as I sat, book in hand, Leon Trotsky’s History Of The Russian Revolution, down at a yogurt-devoured bench on the Charles River. Having devoured the Communist Manifesto, Class Struggle In France, Critique Of The Gotha Programme, What Is To Be Done?, and a few off-hand commentaries on them I was pushing for some sense of how to beat the monster. Straight up. For just that Charles River bench seat minute I knew that I had to get beyond books but books and struggle would be the combination to the golden age. Damn that old guy and his progeny too. Damn them.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
***From The Big Muddy-Out In The Delta Saturday Night (And Sunday Morning) Night With Mississippi Fred McDowell
A YouTube film clip of legendary twelve- string country blues singer Mississippi Fred McDowell performing his classic “You Gotta Move.”
Mississippi Delta Blues, Fred McDowell, Arhoolie Records, 1989
Recently I explained (and went mea culpa on and on about it) in a review of Elvis 56 (no need for last names, right), his and our, my generation of '68's, break-out red scare cold war 1950s be-bop doo wop rock and roll creation time, that I listened to (and preferred) black -centered blues at that young age time. Reason: I was able via “magic” midnight airways to get a blues program, The Big Bopper Show, out of Chicago late at night, late weekend nights, on my transistor radio. (As I pointed out in that previously cited review for those too young, or those who have forgotten, look up that ancient communications transistor radio reference on Wikipedia. Basically though it was a small compact battery-driven unit that had the virtue, the very big virtue, it could be taken up into one’s bedroom, placed close to young ears and one’s parents would be blissfully unaware of the “subversion” until, well, until the big break-out came in 1956 and then they were caught flat-footed. At least at first.)
Now The Big Bopper Show (no relationship, as far as I know, to the rock performer who crashed out in a famous rock history plane crash with Buddy Holly, et. al), was mainly about rhythm and blues with the likes of Big Joe Turner and Ike Turner (pre-Tina) holding forth and about that post-World War II emerging big city, big Midwestern city, up river, up Mississippi River, black migrations to jobs and freedom, well, a little freedom anyway out of the Jim Crow South. Those electrified blues, taking country urban, were wailed by the likes of Muddy Waters (and his various famous band combinations) and Howlin’ Wolf (ditto on the bands).
However, intermingled with those genres was roots, black roots, Africa roots, Mother Earth primordial roots music, country blues, mainly from homeland Delta slave farms (pre-and post -slavery abolition) with some ‘Bama, Carolina Piedmont, Cajun swamp music mixed in. And that is where the performer under review here, Mississippi Fred McDowell, comes in, comes in almost accidentally. See the Big Bopper would play something like Kokomo Blues or 61 Highway, serious classic blues, by various artists, electric and country, and more likely than not when twelve -string time came it was Brother McDowell whose recording was being used.
But here is the real revelation about black roots music, our Mother Africa transposed, disposed, reposed roots. In the early 1960s, after a bout with serious rock and roll (now called the classic age of rock, ouch!) with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, that genre turned to dust (for a while) with the vanilla-ization (nice, huh) of rock. You know Fabian, Ricky Nelson, Booby (oops) Bobby Darren, Vee, all the Bobbys, okay. I turned away from rock and headed back to roots, or what I thought was roots, with the folk revival minute of the early 1960s (Baez-Dylan-Von Ronk-Paxton-Ochs, et. al time). Who do you think, among others, got “discovered” (really re-discovered) in that minute? Yes, Brother McDowell. And later in an effort to put paid to those discoveries when rock “discovered” it blues roots who do you think got his famous classic song “You Gotta Move” covered? Yes. By whom? The Rolling Stones. Like somebody said the roots, the roots is the toots. Let another generation “discover” that fact.
***Just One Year With You That Is All I Am Praying For- Elvis’ Break-Out 1956
Elvis 56, Elvis Presley (who else), RCA Records, 1956 I have beaten myself over the head, eaten humble pie, been flash-flayed, said ten acts of contrition, in short, confessed, confessed publicly, that when I was a know nothing pre-teenager in the 1950s be-bop, doo wop, red scare cold war rock and roll at the creation night I did not like Elvis. (Do I really need to say Presley among this crowd? Come on now there is only one Elvis when it comes right down to it). Now a lot of this was due to pure jealousy, pre-teen style, around the question of, ah, girls. Or maybe not so much girls as male vanity. No actually it was girls and my budding interest in them. And their very focused interest on Mr. Presley.
See I did not look, unlike my best friend Billy Bradley, remotely, like Elvis. I would have been very, very hard pressed, to imitate his side-burn driven hair style with my growing up blondish hair (moreover worn for saving household money sake buzz short). I would have been even more hard-pressed in my Podunk working poor neighborhood, alright, my projects neighborhood, to wear clothes even remotely as cool as Elvis’. Christ I was lucky to get cheapjack denim brothers hand-me-downs from the bargain center and off-color, off-cool color shirts. Worst, much worst when the deal came down in that first blush of school dance church dance last dance time held every once in a while to “keep us off the streets.” I was unable to swivel my hips like the “king.” And worst, although in that case not much worst, was my voice sounded like a frog from the local pond that graced one corner of our projects home.
Moreover I did not like Elvis because I did not like his songs, for the most part. See I was hung up on what I would now call that primordial Bo Diddley sound, that sound from some ancient mist dance around the fireplace to keep the wolves away and rock, rock to perdition time of our distant forbears. (I did know how to sway, hell, anybody could sway.) Even more moreover I was hung up on those black rhythm and blues guys like Big Joe Turner and Ike Turner. That was due to the fact that I was able to catch a midnight radio station, The Big Bopper Show, out of Chicago on the weekends on my transistor radio by some miracle and heard all kinds of stuff that drove me crazy. (For those too young, or those who have forgotten, look up that ancient communications transistor radio reference on Wikipedia. Basically though it was a small compact battery-driven unit that had the virtue, the very big virtue that it could be taken up into one’s bedroom, placed close to young ears and one’s parents would be blissfully unaware of the “subversion” until, well, until the big break-out came in 1956 and then they were caught flat-footed. At least at first.).
The best way to explain that musical taste difference is on the song “Shake, Rattle And Roll, Big Joe’s signature song covered by everybody, including Elvis here (and everybody since from Jerry Lee Lewis on). Elvis is just okay on that one even to fifty years later ears. Big Joe ruled and always will on that one. But here is where the “confession” part comes in and I grant Elvis his pardon. Several years ago I, by happenstance, watched Elvis in the break-out rock film (although the story line is so-so and predictable) “Jailhouse Rock.” I was mesmerized. By the gyrations, but more importantly, by the voice. Naturally, as is my wont, when I “get religion” I went out and gathered up every (early) Elvis compilation I could find, including this RCA break-out album. Big Joe might have been the max daddy of rhythm and blues but when Elvis swiveled for that little pre-military induction period in the mid-1950s, the time of my time, he was the king. Sorry for the delay, Mr. King.
Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal-Partisan Defense Committee
Workers Vanguard No. 1034
Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
This year marks the 28th anniversary of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending stipends to class-war prisoners, those behind bars for the “crime” of standing up to the varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC’s Holiday Appeal raises funds to send monthly stipends to 21 class-war prisoners and also provides holiday gifts for the prisoners and their families. We do this not just because it’s the right thing to do. The monthly stipends, just increased from $25 to $50, and holiday gifts are not charity. They are vital acts of class solidarity to remind the prisoners that they are not forgotten.
The Holiday Appeals are a stark contrast to the hypocritical appeals of bourgeois charities. Whether it comes from the megachurches of Southern televangelists or the urbane editors of the New York Times, the invocation of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” at this time of year is nothing more than a public relations scam to obscure the grinding exploitation of workers and the beggar-the-poor policies that are the hallmark of both major parties of American capitalism. The lump of coal in the Christmas stocking for millions of impoverished families this year is a drastic cut in their already starvation food stamp rations. Christmas turkey for many is likely to be sculpted from cans of Spam.
The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life. As Tom Manning of the Ohio 7 wrote to the PDC four years ago: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.” In a separate letter, his comrade Jaan Laaman observed: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
We look to the work of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. As the ILD did, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and their allies in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism, 1962).
Initiated in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived an early tradition of the ILD. The mid 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle but also a time when the convulsive struggles for black rights more than a decade earlier still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism.
Foremost among these was Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), former leader of the BPP in Los Angeles. Geronimo won his release in 1997 after spending 27 years behind bars for a murder the cops and FBI knew he did not commit. FBI wiretap logs, disappeared by the Feds, showed that Geronimo was 400 miles away in San Francisco at the time of the Santa Monica killing. Other victims of the government’s deadly Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) remain entombed decades later. Absent an upsurge of class and social struggle that transforms the political landscape, they will likely breathe their last breaths behind bars.
Among the dozens of past stipend recipients are Eddie McClelland, a supporter of the Irish Republican Socialist Party who was framed on charges related to the killing of three members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, and Mordechai Vanunu, who helped expose the Israeli nuclear arsenal. At its outset, our program included five British miners imprisoned during the bitter 1984-85 coal strike. State repression of labor struggle in the U.S. added to our program, for a time, other militants railroaded to prison for defending their union against scabs in the course of strike battles: Jerry Dale Lowe of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, Amador Betancourt of Teamsters Local 912 in California and Bob Buck of Steelworkers Local 5668 in West Virginia. (For more background on the PDC and the stipend program, see “18th Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners,” WV No. 814, 21 November 2003.)
The most recent additions to the stipend program include Lynne Stewart and the Tinley Park 5. Stewart is an attorney who spent four decades fighting to keep black and radical activists out of the clutches of the state, only to find herself joining them behind bars on ludicrous “support to terrorism” charges. The youthful anti-fascist fighters known as the Tinley Park 5 were thrown in prison for heroically dispersing a meeting of fascists in May 2012.
At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we warned that the enhanced police powers being amassed to go after immigrants from Muslim countries would also be used against the oppressed black population and the working class as a whole. That the “war on terror” takes aim at leftist opponents of this or that government policy is affirmed by the massive “anti-terror” police mobilizations and arrests that have accompanied protest outside every Democratic and Republican national convention, among other gatherings, in recent years. Other recent examples include the FBI-coordinated nationwide crackdown on “Occupy” movement encampments and the state of siege in Chicago during the 2012 NATO summit.
The witchhunt against the Tinley Park 5 coincided with and fed into the hysteria whipped up against the anti-NATO protesters, particularly anarchists and participants in Black Bloc actions. Sitting in jail awaiting trial for 18 months are three protesters set up by a police provocateur. They were arrested and charged under Illinois anti-terrorism statutes, the first time these laws were ever used. Free the anti-NATO protesters! Drop the charges!
Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense
The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the Marxist political views of the Spartacist League, which initiated the PDC in 1974. The PDC’s first major defense effort was the case of Mario Muñoz, the Chilean miners’ leader threatened with death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta. An international campaign of protests by unions and civil libertarians, cosponsored by the Committee to Defend Worker and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, won asylum in France for Muñoz and his family. The PDC has also initiated labor/black mobilizations against provocations by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis from San Francisco to Atlanta to New York to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts.
Cannon’s ILD, which was affiliated to the early Communist Party, was our model for class-struggle defense. It fused the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tradition of militant class-struggle, non-sectarian defense and their slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” with the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a revolution made not merely for the workers of Russia but for the workers and oppressed of the world. These principles were embodied in the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR), a defense organization formed in the Soviet Union in 1922 that was more popularly known as the International Red Aid.
The ILD was born out of discussions in 1925 between Cannon and Big Bill Haywood, who had been a leader of the Western Federation of Miners and then the IWW. The venue was Moscow, where Haywood had fled in 1921 after jumping bond while awaiting appeal of his conviction for having called a strike during wartime, an activity deemed a violation of the federal Espionage and Sedition Act. Haywood died in Moscow in 1928. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin, the other half in Chicago near the monument to the Haymarket martyrs, leaders of the fight for the eight-hour day who were executed in 1887.
The ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of class-war prisoners in the United States. Initially, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners for its stipend program, including California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, framed up for a bombing at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant anarchist workers executed in 1927 for a robbery/murder they did not commit. The number grew rapidly: Zeigler miners in Illinois whose fights over wages and working conditions pitted them head-on against the KKK; striking textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey. The ILD monthly, Labor Defender, educated tens of thousands of workers about the struggles of their class brothers and carried letters from prisoners describing their cases and the importance of ILD support.
Many of the imprisoned militants were IWW members. After a brief membership in the Socialist Party (SP), Cannon himself had been an IWW organizer and a writer for its press. Witnessing the anarcho-syndicalist IWW crushed by the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the SP in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. In 1919, that left wing exited the SP, with Cannon becoming a founding leader of the American Communist movement. He brought a wealth of experience in labor defense. As Cannon later recalled, “I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice.”
In the year preceding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the ILD and sections of the International Red Aid led mass actions in their defense, including protests and strikes of tens of thousands on the eve of the executions. The SP and pro-capitalist union tops undermined the growing workers mobilization by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion. Cannon addressed the two conflicting policies:
“One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale.... The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle.”
— “Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” (Labor Defender, January 1927)
The principle of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense has guided our work, in particular our more than two-decade struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a small organization, we don’t pretend that we are able to mobilize the type of hard class struggle that not only built the unions in this country but also harnessed the social power of the working class to the defense of labor’s imprisoned soldiers in the class war. Such struggles are today a very faint memory. Nor do we want to distribute rose-colored glasses through which even the most minimal stirrings against particular atrocities by the racist capitalist rulers appear as sea changes in the political climate—a practice that is common fare for sundry proclaimed socialists.
Instead, we are dedicated to educating a new generation of fighters in the best traditions of the early Communist defense work before it was poisoned by Stalinist degeneration. As Cannon wrote for the ILD’s second annual conference: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one. It is the result of an old struggle under new forms and under new conditions. All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class.” He added, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Keeping the memory of their struggles alive helps politically arm a new generation of fighters against the prison that is capitalist society. We urge WV readers to honor the prisoners by supporting the Holiday Appeal.
The 21 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 36th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.
WRITE LYNNE!
Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!
Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals, but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.
Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin, John Tucker and Alex Stuck were among some 18 anti-racist militants who, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park in May 2012, broke up a gathering of fascists called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race-terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, these five were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three and a half to six years on charges of “armed violence.”
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
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Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.
Reposted from the American Left Historyblog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. And an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers, articulate death row prisoners, anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters who took Che’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.
Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart* (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthersin their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.
