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Greetings of the Season

December 25, 2023 — Lew Rosenbaum

Lew Rosenbaum

Whatever holiday you celebrate at the end of December, one thing is mathematically certain in the northern North America: the days will get colder, but the daylight hours will get progressively longer.  One reason I look forward to December 21: I start counting the minutes of increasing daylight, a light shone into the world.  This is all distinct from the various holiday hubbubs, gift giving, and Salvation Army Santas ringing their bells.  For most of my life I have found the holidays alienating at best, “Merry Christmas” a taunt at least as often as a blessing. I imagine the memory from my childhood in a New Haven department store with customers fighting each other to get what shirt, or handbag, or socks were on the bargain table. The myth that suicides go up during December made sense to me.

Poet/novelist Richard Krawiec writes Sunday morning meditations or “homilies” of a sort. Reading them as I arise has become a blessed weekly opportunity to contemplate. He opened his Dec. 17 piece with these words: “I don’t care if you think this sentimental, but throughout my life I have often found this season to be magical.” Sentimentality is not a problem for me.  After all, I love Tchaikovsky.  But the season is not always magical, and Richard explores some of these contradictory elements.  It triggered me to explore my own relationship to the season, a complicated one. None of the following is intended as a retort to Richard, whose explication is brilliant.

First of all, as a child this season was not quite somber – but certainly isolating.  Growing up in a non-religious Jewish family in the 1940s and 1950s, I couldn’t understand why my classmates were getting presents and I wasn’t.  All the celebratory stuff was about other people.  I did not share in that.  Except for the vacation from school part.  Thank god Jesus was born.  Otherwise we wouldn’t have two weeks off during the snowy time of year.

Chanukah is not a major religious holiday and it wasn’t much of a commercial holiday then either.  So, no menorah, no presents, usually “Chanukah geldt,” which were coin-like circles of chocolate in a gold foil.  On top of all that, my birthday fell on December 10.  My parents, whose main goal in life was to continue to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads, never had enough for additional December presents.  I didn’t get “Santa Claus,” and I didn’t get all the merriment.  The merriest time was a Sunday morning, maybe for my birthday, bundling up to walk with my father to Fox’s Deli on Whalley Ave. or to Glick’s on Legion Ave.  We’d stand in line at the counter inside, bask in the warmth and the smells of corned beef, edging up to order a half dozen bagels and a quarter pound of lox and maybe a piece of whitefish.  And then back home to devour the breakfast treat.

On the other hand, my parents would on occasion take me to New York (we lived in New Haven, CT – a short train ride to the city) for the New Year celebrations.  We would stay in the Hotel Latham, a cheap hotel, and visit relatives and friends, stop by Dauber and Pine’s bookstore, legendary in New York’s book row, where my father had once worked. We might go to a Yiddish theater production, see the Museum of Natural History, and experience the crowds on January 1.  That was magical, exhilarating – Times Square, the lights, the noise, the midnight joy of the New Year, sometimes by the sheer size of it, frightening.  A new year, though I didn’t see any difference the next day. 

When I fled New Haven for college in Los Angeles, I settled in at the University of Southern California.  I no longer recognized winter:  no snow on the ground, temperatures never below freezing, actually swimming in the ocean on January 1.  My brother-in-law and sister, who had moved to the Hollywood hills with their three children, confused and perplexed me: They really celebrated Christmas. 

He was a lawyer, and on his behalf she would host a holiday party for their business friends.  Los Angeles has a large, thriving Jewish population.  Still, it was a small segment of the total population, and a successful legal practice meant breaking out of that isolation. To make more business friends, they appealed to the non-Jewish business community.  Their living room, with its 14-foot ceiling, accommodated a substantial real Christmas tree, which required a ladder to reach to the top for decorating purposes.  And then, on Xmas morning, their three children would appear around the tree to examine what looked to me like an overwhelming assortment of presents and, ultimately, open them and exclaim happily on the findings.  I even found presents for me under the tree, and I began to shop for Christmas presents (usually books for the kids).  The world of such abundant showering of gifts still did not seem real. I took photos. 

My tuition scholarship to USC required that I work for the University. I was assigned to the employment office, where I put in 10 hours a week (and more during break periods). Hopeful graduates paraded through to avail themselves of the dangling carrot of a good paying job.

My wage (during holiday or summer breaks) was $1.00 per hour. The office had three full time personnel: Florence B Watts, the ancient overlord of the department who ruled from the building next to our workplace; Clarion Modell, who as office manager occupied an office on the second floor of our building (a repurposed house); and Mary Pershall, who had a degree in counseling and a desk of her own on the first floor.  Mary had had polio as a child and as an adult walked with two crutches.  At the end of the workday she’d often brandish one crutch in her fist, and leaving her desk, exclaim: “Another day, another dollar, and that’s about the size of it.”  Part timers rotated through, mostly students trying to pick up a little extra cash.  From time to time they gave a fourth person full time work, as long as he stayed sober. 

Our tasks were to match student or graduate job applicants with job offers.  My job was coding applicant punch cards depending on what kind of jobs they wanted, and then pulling matching cards for applicants when we got a job offering.  We didn’t have enough hot-shot engineers in our files to fill all the Jet Propulsion Labs, Autonetics, Hughes Aircraft, and North American Airlines aerospace openings. Few of the people looking for secretarial jobs could type fast enough for the jobs we had. The whole thing seemed futile.  Mary and we part-timers enjoyed a camaraderie of sorts – we were the comrades of the left-outs and the have-nots – so even when we celebrated a modest office party, the holiday season seemed a little desolate.

USC was known for two main degree programs.  A BA or BS in business was a ticket to corporate Southern California; graduating in football was a good chance for a pro career.  The football team was frequently in the Rose Bowl, and as a student I got cheap tickets to the extravaganza. The year was 1963. I took the bus from Hollywood to Pasadena early enough to watch the Rose Parade in the morning, then walk to the Rose Bowl, and finally get the return bus when the game was over.  The parade proceeded up the mansion-lined Orange Grove Blvd and then along the fleabag hotel lined strip of Colorado Ave. The contrast was even more noticeable on the walk through the north side of Pasadena, along Fair Oaks Ave., to the Rose Bowl itself.  Talk about desolate during the holidays. As an aside, USC beat Wisconsin 42 to 37 in one of the most exciting Rose Bowl games ever.   

Six years later I was a social worker in Pasadena, CA.  I had my BS from USC, I’d witnessed the 1965 Watts rebellion, I’d met and worked with San Joaquin Valley farm-workers, their medical clinic and the grape boycott. I had not graduated from USC medical school, I’d taken an unauthorized trip to Cuba, and witnessed the attack by the LAPD on the Los Angeles Black Panther headquarters. The attack on the Panthers in December 1969 made that year especially desperate.  From the welfare office on Holly St. in Pasadena, you could throw a stone and hit the welfare, fleabag, Taylor hotel on Colorado Ave.

The Taylor ran a scam like other welfare hotels around the County. When a person presented a voucher for a week’s room, the Taylor would offer them cash for the voucher at a discounted rate – let’s say 50% of the face value of $16.00.  For the hotels they were redeemable at face value from Bank of America, which held the welfare department account. A neat little profit for the hotel, plus they could still rent the room.  The week before the Rose Bowl, the Pasadena police rounded up the welfare recipients and homeless on the streets and swept them out of town so the tourists wouldn’t see them.  Season’s greetings. 

Two or three blocks from the welfare office stood the restaurant where we would send clients with vouchers for their meals (if they did not have a place to cook).  $10.50 was supposed to provide meals for a week at the B&C Café.  New Year’s Eve, 1969, with the smell of tear gas still in my nostrils from the attack on the Panthers; with the knowledge of the circus about to appear in the streets of Pasadena to celebrate the Rose Bowl; and with the understanding that many of the recipients I had been dealing with were unceremoniously given literally the bum’s rush of town; I had the bleakest meal of my life at the B&C café, where the few people gathered for dinner ate silently, morosely.    Apparently lots of people don’t find the season a time to rejoice. 

My years as a bookseller, beginning in the mid 1970s, gave me another contradictory view of the season.  Being a bookseller at Midnight Special Books in Santa Monica, CA and later at Guild Books in Chicago opened up a new way of looking at Xmas.  First of all, a lot more people came in the stores in that month between Thanksgiving and Xmas. People I had come to know during the year, and who used the opportunity to engage in the kind of meaningful discussion that comes about around good books and good company. Second, their attitude was more upbeat in the season than the rest of the year, and that was contagious.  But third, and most important, since most of our “customers” were also active in some social movement they were in the store looking for a recommendation about a book that we were passionate about.  That we-the-booksellers and they-the-customers shared a common interest in.  It was a time when we could “sell” our cherished books. As a retailer, I understood that if we didn’t sell a lot in these two months before New Year, we would not be around next year to sell books at all.  But for the bookseller at Guild and Midnight Special, the quality was as important as the quantity. “Pick up the book, It is a weapon,”  as Bertolt Brecht said. 

I don’t even remember if the standard greeting was Happy Holidays or Merry Xmas. 

My ten years as Barnes & Noble were a mirror image of this.  Customers flooded into the store, usually with very friendly, smiling attitude. However, as it grew closer to the day, the outlook became more frenetic than upbeat.  And the corporate nature of the retail atmosphere made our lives more frenetic as well – understaffed, running from one customer to the next, overtime and working both weekend days. As much as it was clear that people were there to buy, and did walk out with stacks of everything conceivable, every year reinforced one thing: my cherished books were not necessarily what they wanted.  I “sold” lots of books, but I rarely convinced anyone about a book.  And then, everyone told me Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, ad nauseam.  By the time I was fired from B&N I came to hate the essence of the season: that everyone assumed I was Christian, or that everyone celebrated Xmas.  In response to Merry Christmas I grimaced back through a thin-lipped smile, Happy Holidays.  (A decade later my Catholic mother-in-law (who had known me for 25 years) said she thought Jewish people believed in Jesus Christ.  Didn’t everyone? ). 

Magic? Those years at Midnight Special and Guild, where I felt I was actually making a difference did have a magical essence.  Now, as bombs rain on Gaza and one of my grandkids just took a plea deal in the Dept. of Corrections and over 20,000 people seeking asylum have been shipped to Chicago’s overburdened streets, Merry Christmas seems like a curse and Season’s Greetings a cruel joke. 

In his essay, Richard Krawiec introduced Langston Hughes’ picture of this side of Xmas with these words: “During Christmas, wars and poverty do not take a holiday. They never have.”

Merry Christmas, China

From the gun-boats in the river,

Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,

And peace on earth forever.

Merry Christmas, India,

To Gandhi in his cell,

And to you down-and-outers,

(“Due to economic laws”)

Oh, eat, drink, and be merry

With a bread-line Santa Claus –

Langston Hughes, 1930

But there is another side to the story.

We do have something to celebrate this year as never before.  Never before have so many people – including Jewish people – been willing to take on the Israeli established organizations and support the Palestinian cause as their own; despite all efforts to divide us, the voices in Chicago raised in defense of the asylum seekers is unprecedented; the fight to end our carceral system has expanded, the rebellions following the murder of George Floyd continue to smolder and wait, perhaps just below the surface. These are the greetings of the season, harbingers of a new society that means peace and liberation for all. 






















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July 4: Storm, Whirlwind, Earthquake

July 4, 2022 — Lew Rosenbaum 





On This Fourth of July: The Storm, The Whirlwind, The Earthquake





Lew Rosenbaum, 2022





Warning! This Fourth of July essay is not a diatribe against American oligarchy, nor a hymn to the original glory of the American vision. You can give up now if that is what you are looking for.





In 1763 the European Seven Years War came to an end, a war between colonial powers to divide up a world that was not theirs.  In North America, the war is known as the French and Indian War, with the English colonies arrayed against the French.  Indigenous peoples from different tribes fought on either side depending on what they believed was in their best interest.  The French were nearly driven from their North American possessions. The Treaty of Paris established a Western boundary beyond which the English colonists were prohibited from advancing – a guarantee to the Indigenous peoples who had supported the British. 





In Europe, and in the world, England achieved supremacy.  The British monarchy was the most powerful among Western monarchies.  The political form of government that prevailed was “monarchy” – along with all the varied political and economic trappings of feudal relations of production.  There were no united states in North America. A bewildering and contentious variety of settlements from north to south along the Eastern coast satisfied the intentions of the individual groups of colonists – some were “crown colonies,” or land grants established by the British monarch to replicate what they left in Europe.  Others were established by political or religious refugees.  But all of them accepted the dominion of the British monarch. It just seemed like a divine right.  Who could question it?






BERJAYA
Title page of the pamphlet “Common Sense.”






In January, 1776 Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that did question just that. Paine was a craftsman and recent immigrant from England. Common Sense was an instant sensation, a best seller. 100,000 copies were distributed to the two million residents of the colonies.  One out of every 20 people got a copy; even more read it or heard it read, as it was passed around and read in groups everywhere.  It satisfied a need of a disgruntled, angry population.  Whatever the discontent, the cause could be laid at the feet of a monarch who did not care about the needs of the people. Whether it was “taxation without representation,” the government’s right to requisition a citizen’s home to house soldiers, or the prohibition against colonial expansion west of the Appalachian mountains, the English colonist now had an enemy against whom it could organize.





Attempts by the British to export the feudal relations in the home country to the North American colonies failed, as the feudal agricultural system itself ground to a halt.  Mercantile capitalism was on the rise, demonstrated by the wars for colonies, of which the Seven Years War was an example. All hitherto existence of class society has been a process of abolition of the former system of private property and the revolutionary creation of a new form. The “American Revolution,” declared on July 4, 1776 (six months after Paine published his little pamphlet), was in a certain sense an abolitionist revolution. Common Sense was an abolitionist manifesto.  Paine himself left the new United States to foment a revolution in England itself. Under threat of death, he fled to revolutionary France, where he was at first welcomed as an apostle of the anti-monarchist creed.






BERJAYA
Thomas Paine






The American revolution was a singular shot to abolish monarchies, and was seen that way around the world (especially in the halls of power in Europe).  While it aimed at negating feudal private property and the feudal political power that protected it, it could not go beyond that. Many of the social trappings that came with feudal property continued, grafted onto the new capitalist society (e.g. the most egregious questions of women’s rights, of Indigenous peoples, of the enslaved and, in fact, all the propertyless working class).  Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass referred to this time and the makers of this revolution in this way: “They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.” (From Douglass’ July 4, 1852 speech)





The emergence of a waged working class bound to seek employment from capitalist owners of the means of producing wealth in North America began to pose an entirely new contradictory form of private property.  The earliest factories in North America had to be built near a source of power, and the only power of that sort available was along the waterways.  After the invention of the steam engine and its application to machinery came the exponential growth of the factory, of industry, of the new class of a new era, the industrial working class.  The new North American country was quickly divided into a section which produced manufactured goods and food and a section which lived by producing and exporting cotton.  Wage labor in the North, enslaved labor in the South. The latter produced for the world market; the former produced for local consumption and for the South. 





Politically and in terms of wealth, the South was dominant from the 1789 Constitutional Congress to 1860. To maintain its dominance, the South engaged in continuous battle to extend its influence west.  Little by little the South saw its control whittled away as the population of the North grew and, therefore, northern influence in the House of Representatives outweighed that of the South.  In the Senate, the dominance of the South depended on limiting the number of states admitted to the union that outlawed slavery.  Northern states generally opposed the  expansion of the slave states, in part because it limited the expansion of free landholders and limited the expansion of railroads (both of which would be taken from Indigenous lands).  From the 1789 Constitutional debates throughout the 1800s up to the Civil War, a new movement arose which called itself abolitionist. Very small and isolated at first, it gathered steam as the United States itself expanded, at each step a pitched battle between the forces of expansion of the slave system and its abolition.  The penultimate battle came in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857. Effectively slavery became legal in every state of the union, an African-American was deemed not a person, and had no rights that a white person was bound to respect.  The intense reaction to that decision further split the already fractured Democrats and drove independents and disgruntled Whigs into the newly formed Republican Party.  The Republican Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election sealed the fate of the pro-slavery political movement. The South seceded and, with a pre-emptive strike at Fort Sumter, began the Civil War.





If the American Revolution can be seen as a war to abolish the rule of the monarchy and monarch protected private property, the Civil War was a battle to abolish private property in human beings.  In 1865, the military victory established the mixed vision of what abolition would look like.  There was to be no compromise with the supremacy of Wall Street, and the ten years of Reconstruction that followed the signing of the peace broke the back of Southern resistance to Wall St.  At the end of that time, the political compromise of 1877 restored control to the former slaveholders, using the terror of the KKK to drive the freedmen back into peonage.  Washington removed federal forces, which had, until that time, provided some guarantee of the civil rights of the formerly enslaved.  






BERJAYA
Frederick Douglass






When Frederick Douglass gave his 1852 Fourth of July Speech, he had delineated how important the victory over England had been, and where it fell short.  Many of us read the speech today to read this section, which might have been written in 1877 as Knight Riders resumed their reigns of terror: “Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”





“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Frederick Douglass






BERJAYA






Almost 100 years after the defeat of Reconstruction a group of intellectuals assembled at the University of Virginia in the wake of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. There and later at George Mason University, they began the difficult task of persuading the American people that “individual freedom” depended on their friends, the wealthy, that freedom is slavery, that government intervention (under which Social Security and MediCare laws had been enacted) is inherently evil. They were very much like the John Calhouns of the pre-Civil War era who saw the foundations of their society changing and fought tooth and nail to retain power first by persuasion, then by warfare when persuasion failed.  Recognizing that they were greatly outnumbered, James McGill Buchanan and his colleagues tasked themselves with creating an infrastructure that would win people to defend what would crush them.  In the words of scholar Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains), “the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.” If this makes you think of the decades long battle to overthrow Roe v. Wade, there’s a good reason for your thinking.  





Their experiment came to fruition in the great dispossession – the development of a speculative section of the capitalist class grown on a failure to find a place to invest productive capital and hence to employ workers and create value. Unlike in the slaveocracy in the 1850s, this class is confronted by a new class created by a technology that does not need labor. Contrary to an industrial working class whose conditions of existence is the factory where it obtains its subsistence, this class has no place to go without abolishing the structures that keep it in thrall.  We find the theoretical principles most clearly articulated from one section of the movement that has concentrated on the evil that is the prison system.  They also call themselves abolitionists.  Among them are people, such as scholar and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, who state quite clearly that the abolition of the prison-industrial-complex (PIC) can only be accomplished by the reconstruction of society.  You cannot have a society without prisons/courts/police without building a society in which everyone has what they need to survive and thrive. And this is possible today.





This Fourth of July we are compelled to reread Frederick Douglass 170 years after he wrote and delivered this important oration.  We are compelled because of the hope he expresses and because of the fire he breathes.  We are compelled to read it because the abolition of our time is substantially different from getting rid of monarchies and getting rid of chattel slavery. We can get rid of the chains that bind us to the vampirish private property that produces all wealth. We face the greatest challenge and possibility of emancipation ever. At a time like this we need audacity, not beggary. We need a moral vision, not just a recitation of facts and horrors. Returning to Frederick Douglass, this is what we need today:





“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”






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Why A Third Party?                                                                 The Case For A New Abolitionism

May 11, 2022 — Lew Rosenbaum 





With more than 800,000 dead from COVID in the US alone, the questions are urgent: Who will represent us, who will provide for us, who will make sure our political representatives don’t destroy our ability to live on earth? Do we need to rely on the bumbling dunderheads who run the Democrats and the open fascists who control the Republicans?





Political parties are not inherent in the DNA of the United States. In fact, the leading writers of the Constitution wanted a government in which the “most capable” (meaning the wealthiest, white men as individuals) ran the country.  Madison and Hamilton, writing in The Federalist Papers, abhorred “factions.” The faction they abhorred the most, and feared would organize under a political party, was the poor.  This was one reason why neither the President nor the Senate was elected directly. Within the first few years, however, life asserted itself and ousted the ideological purity intended by the founders.





In the very first administration debates arose around the major themes that would plague the country throughout its existence.  What is the relation between the Federal government and the states (“states rights”); the power of the cities versus the rural areas; land-owning agriculture and industry and the power of the banks. Soon political representatives emerged to fight for these interests.  Under the Washington administration, Alexander Hamilton articulated a plan to support the fledgling industry of the North, open a national bank, raise a standing army.  Thomas Jefferson led the opposition faction, with position that the dependence of wage-labor on the employer was inherently inferior to the yeoman farmer.  The Hamilton faction won this round, conceding to the Jefferson faction that the capital would be moved from New York to the District of Columbia. Thus the Jeffersonian (Democratic) Republican Party consolidated around the Southern slavery-based agricultural ruling class, and the Federalist Party formed around the emerging manufacturing sector of the North.





From 1788 to 1836, the Southern states had a firm grip on the Presidency.  In those 48 years, four of the six presidents were Southerners – called “Republicans” — who controlled the White House for 40 of the 48 years.  Congressional battles were fought over whether the Federal government should fund such projects as the Erie Canal, called “internal improvements.”  Southerners opposed paying for the economic improvement of Northern states, arguing that if the states needed such investment, they should raise the money themselves.  There is no reason, they argued, that South Carolina taxes should be used for the exclusive benefit of New York. Implicit in this argument was the recognition that the expansion of Northern manufacturing and the route westward would amplify the political power of the North.  Increasing Northern population would improve its proportion of delegates to the House of Representatives. These dull battles over dollars and cents veiled the contradiction, dubbed the irrepressible conflict, between free and slave labor.





This conflict broke into the open in 1819 with the Congressional debates on admission of Missouri to the Union.  Political leaders understood that should more states be admitted as free states, the balance of political power in the Senate would shift away from the South. This debate, which was settled by the “Missouri Compromise,” allowed Maine in as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.  It also established a line of latitude, Missouri’s Southern boundary, that separated slave and free states, extending west into the Louisiana Purchase territory.  The most significant thing about this Compromise, for this discussion, is that it established a system of two parties that depended on each other to maintain the status quo.  Nominally, the Federalist Party disintegrated after 1819 and the Republicans split into Northern and Southern factions.  The Federalists of the Northeast as well as Republicans of the North united into the Whig Party; while Republicans North and South came together under the banner of the Democratic Party. Henry Clay, an architect of the Missouri Compromise, joined John Quincy Adams as founders of the Whigs. New Yorker Martin Van Buren engineered the foundation of the Democratic Party along with Andrew Jackson. In this gentleman’s agreement, both parties agreed to kick the can down the road.  Both parties recognized that this compromise would accept the slave power ruling in the South. This paradigm, where two sections of capital made a political agreement to preserve some form of the status quo relation between owners of private property, ruled the country for the next 40 years.  





Other battles took place between 1819 and 1850 to test and adjust the bonds of the agreements between the slave power and the growing manufacturing/industrial North.  Following the 1837 “Texas Revolt” and the declaration of the “Republic of Texas,” Southern expansionists argued for the annexation of Texas and conquest of Mexico, turning the territory conquered into slave states.  In the war with Mexico, the US stole one third of the Mexican territory, including California.  Southern politicians brought to Congress demands to annex Texas and turn it into five slave states. As Texas was beyond the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, once again the slavery question came before Congress. In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman Daniel Wilmot proposed that slavery be prohibited in all territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House, where the more populous northerners (Democrats and Whigs) supported it. It failed in the Senate where there was equal representation, North and South. 





In response to the crisis presented by Texas admission, opponents of the expansion of slavery organized a new Party, the Free Soil Party, and ran former President Martin Van Buren in the 1848 election.  Senator William Seward of New York recognized this achievement: With free soil on a national, presidential platform,  “Antislavery is at length a respectable element in politics.” The appeal of the Free Soil movement was not a pure support of the cause of abolition; it was supported by people who saw their economic betterment only coming by homesteading what had been Native American land and what was now likely to become slaveholder plantations.  Some saw this as insulating themselves from having to compete with an inferior race.  It demonstrates the way in which the objective needs of social motion proceeds along a sometimes indirect path, a path that was nevertheless anathema to the South.





The Whigs won the 1848 election and the long delayed efforts to expand slavery to the lands stolen from Mexico came to the fore. California applied for admission as a free state, the South opposed it, and once again, in 1850, Henry Clay negotiated a compromise. Whig and Democrat again stabilized the slavery question.  The main elements of the compromise allowed California to enter as a free state, but all other territories were allowed to determine their status by the popular vote of white men. The Democrat and Whig political factions, had one main goal: keeping the union together, under the status quo of the increasingly tenuous control of the slave power. As if they had discovered democracy, the Congress called this new formula “popular sovereignty.”  





In 1854 Stephen A Douglas, Senator from Illinois, proposed that Kansas and Nebraska be admitted to the union.  Because these were part of the Louisiana Purchase, their status was governed by the Missouri Compromise, north of the Compromise line and hence necessarily part of free territory.  When the South opposed this, Douglas introduced legislation that would allow people in those states to choose their status – extending popular sovereignty to the Missouri Compromise area.  The Kansas Nebraska Act passed, but the debates on this subject shattered the party alignment that had been containing the slavery debate.





The Whig Party, unable to respond, collapsed, joining with Northern Democrats, who opposed the nullification of the Missouri Compromise, and Free Soilers to form the Republican Party.  Republicans were not abolitionists; they wanted to contain slavery in the territory it already occupied. The South became solidly Democratic. Another party emerged to play a role, the Know Nothings, whose basic outlook was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, but also anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act.  The 1856 election, resultd in a Democrat James Buchanan winning the presidency, capturing all but one of the Southern states and five Northern ones.  Nevertheless the Republican Party’s John Freemont won 11 Northern states and captured one-third of the popular vote. The Know Nothings ran Millard Fillmore, who won in Maryland alone.





In the short period from 1854 to 1856 the Republican party was born, solidified their position in the North, and grew into a legitimate contender in national elections.  The Supreme Court threw a gauntlet at the political system in 1857, deciding, in the Dred Scott case, that slavery was legal in all states. The Know Nothings fell apart, the anti slavery members joining the Republicans.  John Brown’s attempt to seize the armory and Harper’s Ferry and begin an insurrection against the slave power failed, but his execution in 1859 and the cause he represented galvanized the nation. The battle was on. Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the Presidency in 1860 with a platform stopping the expansion of slavery. Republicans won 18 Northern and Western states.  Southern Democrat John Breckinridge won the Southern 11 states.  Two other parties won the other four states. The South was convinced that they had lost the political battle.  The only way left, the Southerners understood, was the military subjugation of the North.





While there is a line of abolitionism that runs through this entire period, it should be understood that never, in the period leading up to the Civil War, was abolitionism the majority opinion.  At the time of the Missouri Compromise, only a small number of people carried on that propaganda war.  At the opening of the Civil War, many abolitionists refused to take part in the Republican Party debates, seeing the ‘free soil” party program as too bound by compromise.  Nevertheless, it was the Republican Party, in all its contradictory messiness, that shepherded the government through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.  Unconscious of the necessity of abolition as late as 1861, practical reality forced them to that conclusion and to the conclusion that the Southern planter oligarchy would have to be subjugated. Militarily, the Northern armies and freed slaves broke the back of the slave-owners political control of South as well as North at Appomattox in 1865.  Politically, the Civil War continued in the period we call Reconstruction, until the election of 1876 and the Hayes Tilden Agreement of 1877. Once ready to swear allegiance to their Wall Street masters, the slaveocracy was restored to political power and the freedmen driven back into peonage.





Since the Civil War the two party system has maintained the status quo very well.  And what is that status quo? At the end of Reconstruction, the Northern financial-industrial capitalists had established their supremacy. This victory unleashed the “robber barons” of steel, the railroads, oil, and Wall Street itself. The wars of extermination against Native Americans accelerated, in some cases using the same troops that had been stationed in the South to guarantee the civil rights of the freed slaves. Troops from the South were redeployed to suppress labor insurgency across the country. By the beginning of the 20th century, the system organized itself around the maintenance of political control by the corporate masters of private property. 





Opposing wings of private property have used the party system to fight each other, often with significant differences. Sometimes those differences were so severe as to call into question their common interests. But at no time were their conflicts so severe as to make the parties abandon the rule of private property.  Now, 145 years after the end of reconstruction we are approaching a severe political crisis that makes us look carefully at what is at stake.





A new form of abolitionism is in the air.  For as long as people have looked to the Communist Manifesto as a beacon of future emancipation, we have talked about the abolition of private property. Marx explained the strategy of the working class in this way: “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” [Value, Price and Profit]. In 1865 that was an ideological current in the movement.  Changes in the movement have forced this abolition question to the forefront. Various stages in the development of mechanical automation have produced predictions about the end of work and the distribution of the abundance that automation can produce according to need. The introduction of the microchip, the development of robotics, and the expansion of AI have brought something qualitatively new to the equation. We are actually witnessing the beginning of the end of labor power as a commodity, and hence the end of value.  We are beginning to see the capacity to organize society around production for use, not for exchange. And none too soon, as the rapacious advance of technological change under the dominance private property threatens to end nature’s basis of providing abundance for all. 





Unlike previous periods, when political battles were waged around the dominance of one form of private property or another, today we are beginning to see battles over whether or not private property should dominate at all.  This is the meaning of demands for housing and health care as rights independent of the market.  The abolition of the rule of private property is now the practical answer to the fight for basic needs.





One important way that abolitionism has been introduced into the contemporary conversation is the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. Similar to the earlier abolitionists, today’s fighters started as a small group ideologically and morally convinced of their cause.  In the wake of the George Floyd murder, this abolition has entered the mainstream debate. Some of the leading theorists of this abolition talk about it in terms of ending the domination of private property over the conditions of life that make prisons the answer to the practical problems people face in the community.  For so many years we have talked about abolition as a good idea to win people over to.  No longer. Today abolition is being proposed as the only practical way to achieve what are the basic needs of the people.





Similarly, when Jeremy Rifkin wrote his book, The End Of Work, not many people paid attention to his prediction.  That’s not the case any more.  Guy Standing’s advance of the term “precariat” has been followed by Andrew Yang running for president on the political position of the end of work.  In a way, Yang is the Martin Van Buren of our time (of course Yang was never president, but he is the first to elevate the qualitative importance of robotics to a presidential campaign).





How will this abolition thing come about?





The historical framework we come from is that the contending forces battle it out through the political arena, at first in the electoral arena through representative political parties.  It is a truism that capital has two political parties.  It is becoming better and better understood, and our history leading up to the Civil War confirms, that the system of party politics is keeping us enthralled, that neither party represents us. At the advent of the Civil War, the agreement between two sections of capital no longer could hold, because one section of capital was holding back the revolutionary development of the other.  The great “democrat,” Thomas Jefferson, became (along with Madison and Monroe and Jackson), the leader of the agricultural section of capital that depended on slavery.  The great aristocrat, Alexander Hamilton, at the outset of the country became the political leader of the fight for industry and banking (and hence for wage-labor).  The development of machinery and modern industry created the possibility for abolishing private property in human beings.  It did not make that abolition inevitable, but it established the possibility, and a war was fought to bring that into reality. Because the contending political parties still represented two wings of capital, another form of private property emerged triumphant, championed by its political party, the Republicans.





So how do we get a party to represent us?





A similar but different dynamic is happening around us. What’s different is that no section of capital can be relied on to advance the revolution, as the Republican Party could by representing industrial capital and free labor. What is similar?  Today’s Republicans represent the rural areas and Southern states. Defections from the Republicans show just how reactionary they have become.  In advance of the November election, a number of former members of the current administration declared that they cannot vote for Trump.  Some even pledged to vote for a Democrat.  On the other hand, John Bolton said that he will write in a “conservative Republican,” whom he will name later.  The Lincoln Project also aimed at a section of the conservative Republicans to win them away from Trump.





Today’s Democrats are splitting as well. The Democratic National Committee has a difficult time controlling who gets elected to Congress.  In the 2018 Congressional elections, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Boston’s Ayanna Pressley defeated powerful, long time Democratic “liberals.” Jamal Bowman challenged and defeated the DNC backed candidate Elliott Engel in New York in the 2020 election primary, and joined the “squad” in his general election victory. Charles Booker barely lost to Amy McGrath in the fight to challenge Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. In the Chicago suburbs in 2018, Loren Underwood ousted a long term Republican while campaigning on a program of expanded health care; and in 2020 Marie Newman ousted conservative incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski in the primary, on a program including Medicare for All.  Over the past 10 years, the composition of the Chicago City Council has changed to reflect some of these changes as well. 





As with the Whigs and Democrats of 150 years ago, where one party could not contain pro- and anti-slavery positions, there is not room in one party for the advocates of expanding public property (like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal) and those wanting to maintain the status quo. This reflects the fact that there is no room any more for capital to grant the demands for basic needs that the 40 million newly unemployed are adding to those being made by the already dispossessed. The most recent example of this is the passage in House and Senate of an infrastructure bill and a defense bill that provide plenty of grist for the corporate profit mill.  Meanwhile a bill, dubbed “Build Back Better” has been cut in quarters, and the quarter left languishes in the Senate and won’t be passed unless it is further gutted.





What seems clear is that the Republicans are turning into the equivalent of the Democrats of 1860, a party based in the South and dedicated to the utmost reaction. The Democrats are looking like the Whigs of 1848. While Biden won the presidency in November, 2020, Democrats arrived in Washington in January ready to do battle on how to control or respond to the demands of the people.  Just as the Whigs of 1848 splintered over the question of slavery and its abolition, Democrats today are splitting. No one will say it out loud.  It’s not even necessarily conscious.  The issue today is abolition as well, and the subject is public or private property.  Will we have a public health system or one subjected to private corporate greed?  Will housing be a human right, or will we watch increasing numbers of people in tent cities while real estate speculation runs rampant?  Will the public take control of “policing” in America, or will we be further murdered and subjugated by private militias and militarized police forces? Will what happens to the earth be decided by the people, or will corporate/technological profiteers be allowed to place bets on how quickly the arctic ice sheets will melt?





It’s impossible to say how long it will take for this to mature.  The Working Family’s Party can provide sort of a thermometer of how far along this process has gone, as it tries to balance its “fusion” politics with its stated declaration of the need for a third party.  In different parts of the country, grass roots leaders are vying for political office;  in most cases they estimate that they cannot win without the label of a major party (even when that party does not back them).  Paula Swearingen, who tried to unseat Joe Manchin in the West Virginia Democratic primary, has declared her independence.





Of course there are various other political parties running candidates with varying degrees of success at this time, the Green Party and the Justice Democrats being perhaps the most prominent.  As did smaller political parties in the political motion in advance of the Civil War, these parties will play a role. It is likely that a bourgeois third party will emerge first, then a workers’ party. Ultimately a political expression that represents the new, dispossessed class, an abolitionist class, created by the new means of production will emerge. And because it will represent people who cannot survive except by distribution according to need, it will be a practical communist party representing a practical communist class. It’s not likely to be as clean as that; but the process is well underway, and is likely to proceed from the splintering of the major parties and the accumulation of independent forces not affiliated with parties today.











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A Tale of Two Earthquakes

February 9, 2021 — Lew Rosenbaum 





A Tale of Two Earthquakes





Lew Rosenbaum





February 9, 1971 – 50 years ago – barely after 6:00 AM I awoke. For a second I thought I might be in a nightmare. In the next second I realized that the house I lived in really was shaking. My bed was shaking.  The brick and board bookcase perched on my desk swayed back and forth, threatening to spill toward me.  In the third and fourth seconds I remembered that I lived in the fourth, flimsy wooden house up the side of a hill, 86 stairs from the street. It took me about another second to calculate that before I got up and out of the house (without clothes on), the house could go tumbling down the hill; and I had no idea of what manner of peril awaited me if I even got to the door.





I then wrapped myself up in my blankets.  I told myself that if I were going to die on that day, I might as well die comfortably, or as comfortably as I could.  And, curled in that fetal position, I waited through the next five or six seconds of the 12 seconds that the earthquake lasted, the most powerful earthquake in the Los Angeles area in nearly the century preceding it. It’s remarkable how many thoughts can pass through one’s mind in 12 seconds.





BERJAYA





That was the Sylmar earthquake or the San Fernando Valley Earthquake of 1971. It played havoc with steel structures, demolished large sections of the Olive View Hospital in Sylmar, upended large sections of major highways, and collapsed a section of the Van Norman dam, which held 3 billion gallons of drinking water for the city. The city forced evacuation of some 80,000 people for several days because of the flooding risk, until the dam was repaired. No flood took place, but after all casualties were counted, 64 died that day.  I lived about 20 miles from the fault on which the earthquake erupted that day.  The story of the earthquake is remembered in today’s Los Angeles Times. 





The 12 seconds ended, I breathed a sigh of relief, recognized the aftershocks as they continued over the next few minutes.  Soon I realized I could not get back to sleep. Got up, got dressed, got breakfast, listened to the radio (KFWB – give us 27 minutes and we’ll give you the world) to understand what was going on, and figured I should go explore.  I was due in at work in a couple of hours, but had no idea whether L.A. County had closed the welfare office where I worked.  I don’t remember whether I worked that day.  But I do remember driving along the streets the long way round to get from Cypress Park to Pasadena, normally a 15 minute drive on the Pasadena Freeway.  I think instead I drove up along San Fernando Road, heading north to Glendale, and then approaching Pasadena from the West.  I don’t think I saw anything as bad as the twisted steel poles of Sylmar, but I did see many storefronts with broken glass windows, plenty of small and unstable structures in disarray, a lot of businesses that would not open that day. 





That was a natural disaster, a force of nature. A different earthquake is roiling society today, a specter is haunting the world. While not a force of nature, it threatens to upend the structures, which humans have built to govern the way we live. Every technological advance today encroaches upon the labor market, more and more people are thrown out of the ability to earn wages sufficient for them to survive.  A fault line has developed and widened: just in the last year as millions are de-employed while corporations rake in trillions of dollars. The political structure of our country is at least as twisted as the steel columns holding the 210 freeway in 1971. 





Today, Feb. 9 2021, begins the impeachment of Donald Trump on charges of inciting insurrection, a charge which reflects the turmoil wracking the country.  Rep. Cori Bush gave the most accurate analysis of why impeachment and conviction is necessary. This is not a question of semantics or whether or not impeachment of a former president is possible. This is not even a battle around insurrection.  This is the question: will the United States finally move beyond a government based on white supremacy as the tool to batter the working class into submission.





BERJAYA
What is destroying society today is not the same as the earthquake as 50 years ago. 





The battles around the changes at the economic base of society always take place in what is known as the superstructure, i.e. the cultural, social and the political arenas. Here the combatants wage the battle of ideas. Democrat leaders and Republican leaders alike are trying to contain the battle of ideas.  What is the main idea, which is being fought out?  On the surface, in the Congress, it’s whether Trump is guilty.  The fundamental question, which is not being debated, is: Are we going to be a society in which everyone enjoys the fruits of the abundance that is being produced?  Or will we continue to exacerbate the inequity of society and condemn the billions of worldwide poor to death by poverty?  Will corporations strengthen their dictatorship over us, will we allow them to shore up the dam to keep us at bay? Or will we breach the wall of that dam and attain the power to reconstruct society in the interests of all?





There is a specter haunting the world – a real possibility to abolish private property, corporate property.  In 1848 Marx said communism was haunting Europe.  With capitalism expanding, it’s taken almost two centuries to get to the point that capitalism is contracting.   Contraction means many are expelled from having any market relationship to capital. They cannot find work, they cannot buy the necessaries of life.  What can be done, except reorganize society? A century and a half ago abolitionists led a battle to end slavery and thus the practice of holding people as private property. Their demand, resting on the legacy of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown, was that Black lives matter. That war ended legal slavery; but it also elevated industrial and financial private property, a corporate structure which has continued to this day. Conditions have changed. In the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike, pickets carried signs saying “I Am A Man!”  Black lives matter. In 2020 some 26 million people demonstrated against the murder of George Floyd, many carrying signs saying Black lives matter. The only thing left for this class of people who have nothing to lose but their chains of poverty and police terror, this world wide new abolitionist class, is to abolish corporate private property and distribute the goods and services of society according to the needs of the people.  That time has come and the outcome of this quake is up to today’s revolutionary class.    






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Matt Sedillo interviews Lew Rosenbaum

October 12, 2020 — Lew Rosenbaum 














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I, Like You, Am Made of Stars

September 5, 2020 — Lew Rosenbaum 





I, Like You, Am Made of Stars: Matt Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves of Grass





a review essay by Lew Rosenbaum










Anyone listening to Matt Sedillo spit his poems across a crowded room will be mesmerized. It’s the rapid fire of his delivery, the plain speaking, the cadence and rhythm, the word play.  The content.  Yes, it is the content.  After all, none other than Greg Palast calls him the best political poet in America. It’s an important book to read in the midst of a season of uprisings. A new poetics and a new way of seeing the world are needed in a time of rebellion. Having a chance to examine the poems in his book shows that the form you hear in the delivery is there, on the page, too. 





BERJAYA
Matt Sedillo. Photos on the wall are from the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. Journalist Ruben Salazar, whose image appears in a poster behind Sedillo’s right shoulder, was killed in the Silver Dollar Cafe by LA Sheriffs on that day.





Take “Once.”  “Once upon a dream” the poem begins, evoking mythic origins.  “I had this dream once,” he continues a few lines later in the poem. ‘”son/There live the rich/And though you and I/ May never get to see it/One day this hill will run red with their blood.” Much of the rest of the poem reviews dialectical pairs of why the hill will run red – “Mendez and Lemon Grove” refer to the Mendez family’s fight against segregation in Lemon Grove, California. “Rodriguez vs. San Antonio” alludes to the 1971 racial and class equity fight of the School Improvement Association in Texas.  “Saul Castro and the blowouts” is actually Sal Castro, and the reference is to the 1968 high school student walkouts for ethnic studies programs, where the opposition was the LA Unified School District and, in particular at the beginning, Lincoln Park High. These class and racial conflicts fuel the rage that will lead to what the poet’s father predicts. If you’ve not heard of these incidents, that’s part of Sedillo’s poetic strategy.  He wants you to find something with which you are familiar, but he wants you to ask questions about what you don’t know, do a little work, realize that there is more to the poem than lies on the surface.  He is challenging you to inquire.





From the same poem, “I head east/ Toward clinics of cruelty/ All humanity stripped from a system/Sadism posed as social work.”  Clinics of cruelty and sadism posed as social work are two of my favorite metaphors in the book and they jump right off the line.  But this is a setup for Sedillo’s third dream.  “I have this dream/Every so often/Of people/ Beyond borders and prisons/Gathered in the distance/Telling tales of time/When women feared the evening/When communities were punished by color/And grown men hunted children/Hardly able to believe/People once lived this way.”  Three dreams and three outcomes.  Origins, retribution, and the world we want to live in. You can’t leave clinics of cruelty unless you can envision the kind of world you want to inhabit. And that is what Sedillo is giving you here.





“The Servant’s Song” goes one step further – the title first makes me think of Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales are filled with the tales of ordinary folk.  But by the end I see it as an allusion to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht –Pirate Jenny’s song. At first it is a song of “Captains of industry/Lords of limited liability,” and a celebration of their power.  But in the servants quarters people are dreaming and singing songs of blood and conquest. This hill too will run red with blood. Just like in Brecht’s poem, where hotel maid Jenny welcomes the pirates bombarding the hotel and the capitalists. Definitely songs for our times.





In “Oh Say,” Sedillo riffs on the lines of “Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful,” writing not only that he never saw any purple mountain’s majesty, but mixes in a refrain from “Strange Fruit” and hits the reader with the contrast – “black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze.”  How can you square one vision of America with another, he is asking, without questioning the blood at the root? Deep within this poem are references to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the ironic “Oh captain, my captain” and “Oh pioneer.” “The myths/ The hymns/ The bitterness/Of fairy tales/Best woven into song,” he says, including myths of Lincoln and the Civil War.  Words tumble over each other to reach the end of a poem of slashing ironies, of “amber waves of chains.”





The title of the book and the title poem demand that the reader come to terms with Walt Whitman.  The title is a challenge:  cut Whitman down to size, perhaps.





BERJAYA





I bought my copy of Leaves of Grass somewhere around 1989 or 1990, after listening to Luis Rodriguez comment about how so many of the talented poets writing in Chicago had not studied the masters, like Whitman, didn’t realize how much we owe to him.  In a 2015 interview, Rodriguez said something similar:  “[Poetry] is not at the center of [our] culture. It’s pushed to the side. And yet we have some of the best, from Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson all the way to the present.” I confess I’ve still not been able to read all of Leaves of Grass, though I recognize what Whitman meant to the poetic canon. At the time Leaves of Grass was published, it was condemned and admired for its sensuality. Some refer to him as the father of free verse. Most don’t realize that the title, Leaves of Grass, was a pun.  Grass was a term used at the time to describe trash literature, and a leaf is a page of a book. Grass, of course, is also a plant, and Whitman, in part 6 of “Song of Myself,” defines and describes grass.





None of that is Matt Sedillo’s contention.  Whitman, in Sedillo’s view, was a racist who deserves no respect.





George Hutchinson and David Drews, in an essay in the Whitman archive, begin as follows:





“Whitman has commonly been perceived as one of the few white American writers who transcended the racial attitudes of his time, a great prophet celebrating ethnic and racial diversity and embodying egalitarian ideals. He has been adopted as a poetic father by poets of Native American, Asian, African, European, and Chicano descent. Nonetheless, the truth is that Whitman in person largely, though confusedly and idiosyncratically, internalized typical white racial attitudes of his time, place, and class.” 





Some are saying, in the context of taking down statues of slaveholders and confederates, that statues memorializing Whitman should be removed as well. Hutchinson and Drews describe Whitman’s inconsistent racial attitudes that more or less mimic the different views of the time, views inconsistent with the “democratic spirit” of his poetry.  They conclude their essay thus:





Because of the radically democratic and egalitarian aspects of his poetry, readers generally expect, and desire for, Whitman to be among the literary heroes that transcended the racist pressures that abounded in all spheres of public discourse during the nineteenth century. He did not, at least not consistently; nonetheless his poetry has been a model for democratic poets of all nations and races, right up to our own day. How Whitman could have been so prejudiced, and yet so effective in conveying an egalitarian and antiracist sensibility in his poetry, is a puzzle yet to be adequately addressed.





But this is about Matt Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves of Grass, so what does Matt Sedillo say?  The title poem is, in a way, Matt Sedillo’s own “Song of Myself.”  Beginning “I am the as yet written vengeance of Elvira Valdez,” the poet leads us through a litany of Southwestern cities drawing connections to the Chicano past and present on a path through miseducation and misrepresentation and punishment unless we accept the canonic political and literary leaders.  These include Chaucer and Shakespeare and of course Whitman.  “If we let you in/What will become/ Of the canon?” The voice becomes that of the oppressor: “I will show you/ Who you are/ In a book/ And you will believe it/ ‘Cause I said it.”  But the poet seizes control again, says check out my poetry — “The universe/ Is a muralist/ The Cosmos/ Our self-portrait,”  and here comes Joaquin,  “Triumphant/ Marching/ Through the halls of Tucson/Mowing down leaves of grass/Fuck Walt Whitman.”  There it is:  the punch line, followed by the affirmation of what it means to be alive,  “all that we are and all that we have been.”





Whitman worked on a New Orleans newspaper for three months.  Having witnessed slave auctions with revulsion (also described in “Song of Myself”), he returned to Brooklyn, New York and founded a free-soil newspaper.  Free-soilers were not abolitionists, but they played a role in demanding the end of the expansion of slave-owner controlled territory and in opening the fight for the end of slavery.  The leadership of the fight to break the back of the slave power was industrial capital in the north.  Wall Street brought Reconstruction to an end when it reached an accommodation with the slave power and returned the planter aristocracy back to control, now under the domination of northern interests. The freedmen lost what they had gained and were driven back into peonage. This is the context in which all the transcendental poets and writers worked.  A group of New England abolitionists, dubbed the “Secret Six” and connected to the transcendentalists, raised money for John Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry.  Whitman attended John Brown’s hanging, and joined Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson in condemning the execution. 





Today’s cause is also a form of abolition – a form that strikes deeper into what divides American society than ever before.  When we hear today the call for prison abolition or for abolishing the police, and we engage some of these abolitionists in conversation, we find that they are talking about restructuring society entirely. A secure and safe society is one in which human beings have all their needs met and in which they thrive, not just survive.  If 150 years ago the battle was to end chattel slavery, today increasing permanent unemployment demands why wages are necessary to obtain the abundance available today. Poets have been modernizing the democracy of 150 years ago, taking their verse into the streets with the demonstrators, taking the open mic to the people’s mic.  If free verse liberated poets to write in a more democratic form, contemporary spoken word has dragged poetry into the battle for today’s new world democracy – the democracy of distribution according to need. 





BERJAYA
Sal Castro, a teacher at Lincoln High School, one of five high schools who took part in the “blowouts,”  a coordinated school walkout in 1968.  In the wake of the blowouts, Castro was arrested and charged with 15 counts of conspiracy to disrupt public schools and 15 counts of conspiracy to disturb the peace. The charges were dropped in 1972.





That, in my view, is Matt Sedillo’s genius.  I don’t disagree with Greg Palast, when he assessed Sedillo as America’s most important political poet.  But our new generation comes out of a cauldron that is producing – can’t help but produce – an army of brilliant writers with a vision of a new world.  I think Sedillo himself says this in “El Sereno.”





 “El Sereno” is one of my favorites in this collection, perhaps because the poet so concretely and vividly describes an area of Los Angeles I know well.  He speaks of the “industrial petrified forest,” and the people who worked there.  “As a child/ I could never quite/ Make the connection/Between the broken/ And empty bottles/ Across the steps/ And the broken and empty men/ Poured out the rust factories/From across the tracks,” he writes.  And there’s another, related  connection he could not make. His father “A prince among men/In a backward kingdom,”  Sedillo couldn’t make the connection “Between/ His fingers around my throat/And the anguish/In his chest.” It’s the same anguish he has explored in many of these poems, the same as the black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze.  In the face of all this, and perhaps because of all this, the poet is defiant, but more than defiant. He evokes the communist poet Roque Dalton’s “Como Tu” when he writes “I like You/Am made of stars/ You like me/So full of pain/Are brimming with genius/Listen to no one/Who would make you feel different.” 





Listen to no one who would make you feel different.






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Book Covers 1.” They Got Us On A Rack”

May 24, 2020 — Lew Rosenbaum 




Book Covers 1. John Edgar Wideman and “They Got Us On A Rack”


In 1984 John Edgar Wideman published Brothers and Keepers, a bestseller memoir and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for best book of non-fiction that year.  The book explores how he became an award winning novelist, while his brother wound up serving a life sentence convicted of murder.  I was working at the Midnight Special


220px-SentForYouYesterday
Cover of the first (Avon) edition of Sent For You Yesterday


Bookstore in Santa Monica.  I didn’t read Brothers and Keepers, but I did pick up his novel, published the year before, the third of what is called his “Homewood Books.”  Wideman is known for his experimental writing techniques, and perhaps that is what drew me into Sent For You Yesterday. The use of language, its color and rhythm and musicality.  But what really hit me hard was this passage, early on, when John French waits on a street corner in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, early on a chilly, damp morning, to be picked up for day labor. I wrote this four years ago about my daughter Courtney, her kids, and Diana and me, how we experience the life we lead mirrors what Wideman wrote many years ago:


How do you write about a life lived intensely, from crisis to crisis. Persistent, determined, bright, Courtney struggled as a single parent with three kids, still struggles. Mostly employed, but never employed enough to get out of debt, pay rent, buy enough food, afford health care.  Mirroring the irregularity of her precarious existence, Courtney shows the heights of creativity necessary to pick her way through the mine-field of poverty, falling into the depths of depression when circumstances gang up around her and block her way.  We’ve been lucky enough to be in a position to help when the depths were deepest; after all part of the joys of family is to alleviate the pain of those close to us.  But the other part that we have had to come to grips with is that we are living the life of a new section of society that is being born.  Yes even us, the old ones, Diana and I.


John Edgar Wideman wrote about it in a novel called Sent For You Yesterday. This is an image which has stayed with me for more than 30 years


wideman-autograph




“They used to put people on wheels and pull them apart. Pull the arms and legs out of the sockets just like a kid do a bug. Boiling people in oil and slamming their heads in a helmet full of spikes, and horses tearing men into four pieces and that wheel with ropes and pulleys stretch a man inch by inch to death. The rack, Albert said . . . They got us on a rack, John French.  They’re gon keep turning till ain’t nothing connected where its supposed to be. Ain’t even gon recognize our ownselves in the mirror.”




Courtney has her own image, a personal one, that comes from the character in the Lil Abner comic strip.  Joe Btfsplk, the world’s worst jinx, the well-meaning character who walks around with a rain cloud over his head.  Ever since I wrote [my poem to Courtney when she turned 21]  “Twenty-one Is,” we’ve been coming to grips with how one’s personal luck fits in the context of the relations of society.  The dialectic of taking responsibility for what is in your power to control, but not accepting guilt for what cards class society deals you.


That’s what John French is trying to negotiate that early morning when he waits on the corner to get a day-labor job as a paper hanger, feeling all the joints in his body aching, and trying to explain that to himself.  It’s the social relations that force him into the back breaking work.  And it’s the social relations that force Courtney into having to move every year or two, to struggle to get adequate care and counseling


Screen Shot 2020-05-24 at 12.42.37 AM
Cover art for this edition is by Romare Bearden


for the kids, to get food stamps when out of work, to avoid on pain of starvation and eviction, going to apply for welfare .  It’s the social relations that bring Diana and me to look at our social security to figure out if we have enough to pay rent this month, or pay the medicare premium.


“They’re gon keep turning till ain’t nothing connected to where it’s supposed to be.” This image split my brain 30 years ago.  How is it that such an image that is so horrible is at the same time so beautiful?  It is a Goya painting in words.  It fascinates. Your eyes keep returning to it.  Your fingers want to touch the blood to see if it is fresh, if it is real.  But it is real, because it captures the essence of what I am feeling each time I pay rent, each time Courtney loses a job. And each time I dream of diamonds out of broken glass, pearls growing around sand grains.


A pandemic makes you look at things differently.  Everything, even the rack they’ve got us on.  Wideman wrote about that too, first in a collection of his short stories. I wrote this four years ago:


In the spring of 1989 John Edgar Wideman read from his short story collection, Fever, at Guild Books. He read from the last story, the title story, held me spellbound. He told us that it would be part of a new novel he was writing, and the fever was a famous plague year in Philadelphia. I have this underlined in my copy of the book: “To explain the fever we need no boatloads of refugees, ragged and wracked with killing fevers, bringing death to our shores. We have bred the affliction within our breasts. . . Fever grows in the secret places of our hearts, planted there when one of us decided to sell one of us to another. The drum must pound ten thousand thousand years to drive that evil away.” It’s an allegorical fever that riddled Philadelphia as the 18th century drew to a close; but one that still stalks our streets.


The novel Wideman was referring to came out a few years later, entitled The Cattle Killing. The plague fever was smallpox. Black Philadelphians in the late 18th century were both accused of being the origin of the disease and being immune to it, and thus were charged with caring for the ill.  Unlike today’s plague of COVID 19, the smallpox is spread by a mosquito.  There is no person to person way to spread the illness.  Like the Philadelphia plague, rumors spread early that Blacks were immune to the disease; however, today’s plague strikes hardest among the poorest, most congested populations, especially Black and Latinx.  That underlined passage rings truer even than it did when I first read it.


By 1990, when he published his Philadelphia Fire I was a certifiable John Edgar WidemanScreen Shot 2020-05-24 at 12.42.13 AM groupie.  His autograph in my copy reads “You’re a warrior in a good fight. Stay strong.” If the fight he was talking about was spreading new ideas, then Philadelphia Fire is the novel of a warrior in that good fight. My copy of the book is heavily annotated and underlined.  The inside boards of the cover are filled with page numbers — references to themes and concepts that struck me as I was reading.  Here’s what I wrote about the book a few years ago:


The novel is in three parts, each of which has a distinct musical style to the language. The middle section, also, is an autobiographical riff on when the author taught Shakespeare to Black students in the parks in the summer, and the particular play is The Tempest. Who Caliban really is plays an important part of this section and in some way inhabits the rest of the novel.


[After Wideman’s reading at Columbia College] I joined a few Columbia faculty and grad students at dinner with Wideman. One student asked a question about Shakespeare and about Wideman’s use of language, which reminded me of the question asked at Guild. Why Shakespeare in a novel of Black Philadelphia? The answers to both questions broke the boundaries that separates one genre from another and stretched the complaints about cultural appropriation. English, Wideman pointed out, is his language and he has the obligation to make the most of all his heritage, whether it is the language of the streets or the language of the Bard. It’s all his, and his responsibility to stretch that to its limits. I still find Philadelphia Fire the most exciting of John Edgar Wideman’s work because of this use of Shakespeare [and how rap interpenetrates that section] and because of the rhythmic cadences that mark each section – and because of the way his own biography sneaks into places of the novel, not just the teaching segment, but also basketball and his relationship with some of the political forces in Philadelphia. One of the most artful political novels I’ve read.


The fire in Philadelphia that this novel remembers is not the historical Philadelphia of The Cattle Killing.  It is contemporary Philadelphia, just five years from the date of publication, the five year anniversary of when the city fathers dropped a bomb of C4 explosives on the roof of a row house on Osage Avenue, setting a fire that killed 11 of the 13 people living inside and burned an entire neighborhood to the ground. The residents of the building belonged to a group variously described as radical, anarchist, Black, environmentalist, back to nature activists.  May 10, 2020 was the 35th anniversary of an event that is little known outside Philadelphia, but continues to be traumatic in the city.  ‘We have bred the affliction within our breasts,”  Wideman said in The Cattle Killing. You can see it even deeper in this story. A Guardian article brings some of the history up to date.  Some MOVE activists who had been arrested and imprisoned before the attack on Osage Avenue remained incarcerated for over 40 years.  Ramona Africa, the only adult to escape the holocaust alive, was imprisoned.  Five children were incinerated in the blast and the ensuing fire. One child escaped, running naked through a wall of fire into an alley and away. Or so the story of the novel goes.


Birdie_africa-move-bombing-philadelphia
Iconic photo of Birdie Africa, taken by Michael Mally of the Philadelphia Inquirer as the van took the boy to the hospital.


In a sense, the main character of the novel could be the child that got away.  The novelist himself is a main character as well, under the name of Cudjoe (the historical antecedent of this name stems from a leader of the Maroons, enslaved West Africans who escaped into the hills of Jamaica and for more than a century resisted British colonization). Interviewing a woman who had been a MOVE member, Cudjoe searches for the child who escaped.  The name the woman gives him is Simbha Muntu, or “Lion Man.” In real life he was known as Birdie Africa, 13 years old when he got away. The mystery of his getting away is more important than the history, which is recounted in this Philadelphia Inquirer article. A police officer took the boy to a nearby van, which then took him to a hospital, where he stayed while his burns were being treated. His father, Andino Ward, not a member of the MOVE group, reclaimed his son and renamed him Michael Moses Ward. Birdie/Michael died in 2013 on a cruise ship in the Caribbean at 41 years old.


What is it that survived from the wreckage on Osage Avenue?  How did it come about? What are people thinking?  How does it reconcile with the author’s very comfortable life?  Or with his past life in this very city of Philadelphia?  How can we escape our past,


220px-John_Edgar_Wideman_LOOK_Magazine_1963
Rhodes scholar and basketball star John Edgar Wideman on the cover of Look magazine


how do we beat the drums to recover our humanity?  Wideman poses no answers to questions.  Cudjoe has a dream.  He’s at Clark Park near Osage Avenue. “I’m also a witness, upright, floating, somehow staring down at the basketball court, screaming because a boy is lynched from the rim. A kid hanging there with his neck broken and drawers droopy and caked with shit and piss. It’s me and every black boy I’ve ever seen running up and own playing ball . . .”  Wideman was an All Ivy League team basketball player and leading scorer and captain of his University of Pennsylvania basketball team. Could the kid hanging there have been Simbha?


A howl ends the book:  “A mob howling [Cudjoe’s] name. Screaming for blood. Words come to him, cool him, stop him in his tracks. He’d known them all his life.  Never again. Never again. He turns to face whatever it is rumbling across the stones of Independence Square.”


Romare Bearden’s work explodes from the cover of Sent For You Yesterday (see illustration above). In 2018, Wideman published a collection of short stories, American Histories. I wrote this (you can read the whole essay in this blog) about the lens through which to read American Histories last year: “You can discover the key to American Histories, the profoundly dialectical collection of what purports to be short stories by master craftsman John Wideman, on page 206.  ‘Well, Basquiat asks, how does the artist resolve this dilemma, Maestro? This perpetual losing battle, this shifting back and forth, this absence, gap, this oblivion between a reality the senses seize and a reality the imagination seizes.’”  Basquiat, the young and brash artist, interrogates the old master


240px-John-Edgar-Wideman
John Edgar Wideman


Bearden in an imagined conversation.  They lived a few blocks from each other in Harlem and, as far as anyone knows, never met. That conflict, though, between what is real and what is imagined pulses through American Histories and through all his work; more politically stated, that conflict between what exists and what is possible. I can’t read American Histories without being haunted by the picture of every boy lynched from the rim of the basketball hoop; by the plague that needs no importation of refugees to spread its contagion; by the rack tearing us apart.


“They got us on a rack, John French.  They’re gon keep turning till ain’t nothing connected where its supposed to be.”  That’s still how I experience the world. If there is anything the current plague has shown us, it is that this statement is real.  They don’t care about us.  It remains for us, those whom the system has discarded, mutilated, wiped out of history — it remains for us to imagine and to build what is possible. “The drum must pound ten thousand thousand years to drive that evil away.”  We need to find that howl. We need to pound that drum.  We haven’t got 10,000 years.






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Album Covers #1:  “Just You Wait!”

May 18, 2020 — Lew Rosenbaum 




Danny Alexander kind of challenged me to write about records which have influenced me — using the record covers.


I want to start with the very first album I got — it was 1957, I was visiting my sister, Greta, in Buena Park, Southern California, for the summer. That was the year that I helped her “fix up” the house she and her husband had just purchased in the Hollywood hills — sand and paint cabinets, clean, clean and clean some more. In Buena Park, though, I had made some friends from neighborhood kids my age: Jeff Jones from the family next door, Pinky and Jim Wilcox from the house down the street, Alan Wiggins also living on that street. We played in the street in front of the houses, went to the boys club together, went together with my sister’s family to Knott’s Berry farm, the alligator farm across the street from Knott’s, and of course to Disneyland which had recently opened up. The summer came to an end, I had to go back to school in New Haven, Connecticut, and given that my sister was moving, the chances of my seeing my new-made friends again was practically nil. The families were not well off in this complex of tract homes — working class folks who were from somewhere in middle America where they had been unable to make a 20140815_165252living. But the kids were sad to see me leave, and in a startling gesture I had no way to anticipate, and even today makes me want to reach out and thank them for their kindness again — they gave me my first LP record, “My Fair Lady.”


It was undoubtedly a record my sister had, undoubtedly one I played over and over again while I was there, knew all the words, copied the accents and dialects as best I could. She most likely suggested this album when they asked what they should get for me. But I couldn’t play it. I did not have a record player at home that would play LPs. We had an old record player that only took 78s. I didn’t tell them that though.


When I moved to southern California in 1960, I moved to go to the University of Southern California. When I moved into the dormitory that fall (Trojan Hall, with a room overlooking Figueroa St. at 36th St.), my sister gave me a table top record player. I set it on my desk, where I did my homework, the desk set into the wall under the window overlooking Figueroa. And of course the first record I played was “My Fair Lady.”


My father had been a used book dealer back in the early 1930s. As a child I watched my father build bookcases out of oak for the books that remained from the shop that had closed as the depression hit its depth. There was something seriously valuable about these old books is the message that wafted across these musty volumes. Wanting to be like my father, I sought out used book stores from my first visit to Los Angeles in 1953. I don’t know what it was that attracted me to George Bernard Shaw — I don’t remember any volumes of Shaw in his collection — but going into downtown LA and searching the shelves of the Goodwill and the Salvation Army stores, I found old GBS titles which I brought home. Even more, I actually read them. I don’t know if Pygmaiion was one of the plays I read then; but I do know that I knew the myth from my reading of Greek mythology, the fantasy stories that I loved. So I was just ready for loving “My Fair Lady” when it hit the musical stage.


In these years my mother encouraged my interest in the theater by taking me to plays in the local Schubert theater. New Haven was a major place shows on their way to Broadway to “try out.” I don’t remember much, except I saw some amazing actors in plays by . . . Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. And by the time I got to college, I had come to understand that both Shaw and Brecht represented artists who fused their politics with their art. Neither of them were satisfied with the status quo, both wanted a new society. While I didn’t understand the differences between them, I understood that one thing that united them was an understanding of class.


george-bernard-shaw
George Bernard Shaw


No matter what Lerner and Loewe did to transform “My Fair Lady” into a simple love story, for me the question of “other” was always the most important thing in the story. The class representation in language, the idea that the upper class had the right to mold the people of the lower classes the way they wanted, the concept that workers could not think for themselves — all of this was very prominent for me in this play and even the musical. And the idea of Eliza standing up for herself, not just an object of these two wealthy men! And isn’t that what we are struggling with today, in a much more exaggerated form, perhaps even a qualitatively different form? In the 1950s, Lerner and Loewe could satirize the British caste system implying it didn’t exist in the US. In 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, and despite reports that the virus does not discriminate, we know that it ravages “othered” communities; we know that the well heeled have better access to necessary health care. We know that COVID is spreading rapidly among communities where the poorer dialects of English are spoken. The class character of who gets hit by the virus most is clearer and clearer. And the resistance to a system that allows this is growing too. Because unlike the 1950s, those of us in that class have no choice any more. We have learned that the Henry Higginses of our world do not care about us.


So I would like to join Eliza in a chorus that I think is what our own ruling class is most afraid of: “Just you wait Henry Higgins, just you wait. You’ll be sorry but your tears will be too late.”






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Earth Day at 50 — Lenin at 150

April 23, 2020 — Lew Rosenbaum 




“He gave imagination to the writers

His every word became poetry”


by Lew Rosenbaum


On this day, April 22, 2020, perhaps millions of people are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day.  In 1969 then Senator Gaylord Nelson, an environmentalist, called for a national day of teach-ins on the environment for the spring of the following year.  He proposed April 22 as a day when most students would be most likely to participate.  An advertising man suggested that “Earth Day” might be a more broadly appealing name than a day of teach-ins.  And so “Earth Day” was born.  Nelson himself repudiated the idea that the choice of April 22 was a communist plot.  The John Birch Society, among others, had insinuated that the choice of April 22 was driven by the fact that date in 1970 coincided with the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Ilich Ulianov’s (Lenin) birthday.  Nelson quipped that the Birch Society knew more about Lenin than he did;  nevertheless, young people of 1970 knew more about Lenin than he did too.


At the time of the first Earth Day I was 27 and had come rather late to reading the works of the great Bolshevik.  Just a few years later, talking with my niece Ronni, a high school activist organizer working on Earth Day, I asked with a wry smile whether she knew that April 22 was also Lenin’s birthday.  She replied, with the characteristic twinkle in her eye, that was why the date was chosen.


Lenin lives
“Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin shall live forever” V. Mayakovsky


So maybe both stories are true.  Maybe Lenin’s birthday had nothing to do with the choice of April 22; maybe it had everything to do with that choice.  A Talmudic fight about that is really not the point.  The point is the perseverance of Lenin’s influence, even though now, in 2020, when everyone is talking about the 50th Earth Day, little attention is being paid to Lenin’s 150th birthday, which is today.  Here is evidence of that perseverance:  “Lenin in Urdu: His Every Word Became Poetry.” This is one of a number of essays intended to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth.  It is a short review essay of writers in Urdu who have celebrated Lenin.  People who saw him as the embodiment of revolution.  In no small part is this due to the fact that, after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917, Lenin was the main force within the Russian Communist Party who understood and fought for at first a minority position:  that what was then called the “national question” was the main form that the fight for socialism was taking, the liberation of the colonial countries from imperialism.


Well of course Lenin is remembered in many more places than in the Urdu language.  Bertolt Brecht wrote numerous poems that refer to Lenin.  One that is a bridge from the peoples of the East is this one:


The Carpet Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honour Lenin


Often he was honoured and profusely

The Comrade Lenin. Busts there are and statues.

Cities were named after him and children.

Speeches are made in numerous languages

Rallies there are and demonstrations

From Shanghai to Chicago, in honour of Lenin.

But thus they honoured him

The carpet weavers of Kuyan-Bulak

A small village in southern Turkistan:


Twenty carpet weavers stand there in the evening

Shivering with fever, in front of their humble loom.

Fever runs riot: the railway station

Teeming with buzzing mosquitoes – a thick cloud

Arising from the swamp behind the old camel cemetery.

But the train, which

Once in two weeks brings water and smoke, brings

Also the news one day

That the day for honouring Lenin lies ahead

And so decide the people of Kuyan-Bulak

Carpet weavers, poor folk

That for the Comrade Lenin also in their village


lenin-iqbal
Left – V. I. Lenin; Right – Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal


A gypsum bust would be installed.

But as the money is collected for the bust

All of them stand

Trembling with fever and contribute

Their hard earned kopecks with wobbling hands.

And the Red Army soldier Stepa Jamal, who

Carefully counts and meticulously watches,

Sees the readiness, to honour Lenin, and is filled with joy.

But he also sees the uncertain hands.

And all of a sudden he makes a proposal

To buy petroleum with the money collected for the bust

In order to pour it on the swamp behind the camel cemetery

From where the mosquitoes come, which

Cause the fever

Thus to combat the fever in Kuyan-Bulak, and indeed

To honour the late, but

Not to be forgotten

Comrade Lenin.


This was agreed to. On the day of paying respect to

Lenin they carried

Their battered buckets, filled with black petroleum

One behind the other

Over there and spread it on the swamp.


So they benefited themselves, in paying homage to Lenin and

Paid homage to him, in that they benefited themselves and had

Therefore understood him well.


                        2


We have heard how the Kuyan-Bulak folk

Paid their respect to Lenin. As now in the evening

The petroleum had been bought and discharged over the swamp

Stood up a man in the assembly, and he demanded

That a commemoration stone be erected at the railway Station

Reporting these events, containing

The altered plan and the exchange

Instead of Lenin’s bust the fever eradicating petroleum barrel,

And all this in honour of Lenin

And they did that too

And mounted the slab.


(Note: Kuyan-Bulak is the railway station of Ferghana in Uzbekistan. The Slab had the text: ‘In this place there should have been a memorial to Lenin, but instead of the memorial, petroleum was brought and poured over the swamp. Thus Kuyan-Bulak, in memory of Lenin and in his Name smothered malaria’. Translator.) 


The Jamaica Peace Council, an organization of Jamaicans at home and abroad, published in April 2019 this poem by Langston Hughes:


Lenin


Lenin walks around the world.


Frontiers cannot bar him.


Neither barracks nor barricades impede.


Nor does barbed wire scar him.


Lenin walks around the world.


Black, brown, and white receive him.


Language is no barrier.


The strangest tongues believe him.


Lenin walks around the world.


The sun sets like a scar.


Between the darkness and the dawn


There rises a red star.




As explanation, the author on the site writes:




The poem uses the figure of Vladimir Lenin as a stand-in for the march of social equality across the world, the hope of racial and economic harmony in the world.


Though Hughes didn’t identify as a communist and claimed to have never read Marxist texts at his congressional trial led by the infamous “Red Scare” Senator Joseph McCarthy, his poem describes an awakening in the world among oppressed people of the world for justice.




And of course there is the series of four poems, written from 1920 to 1924, by Vladimir


6db237f41c1e158fcfea5dd94c890250a6244359
V. Mayakovsky


Mayakovsky that celebrated the life of Lenin and commemorated his death. “The time has come,” Mayakovsky wrote:




I begin


the story of Lenin


Not


because the grief


is on the wane,


but because


the bitter anguish


of that moment


has become


a clear-cut,


weighed and fathomed pain.


Time,


speed on,


spread Lenin’s slogans in your whirl!


Not for us


to drown in tears


whatever happens.


There’s no one


more alive


than Lenin in the world,


our strength,


our wisdom,


surest of our weapons.




Poetry, then, is a way into understanding the international reverence for V. I. Lenin, and why he might have been on the minds of the young people in 1970, as perhaps they enjoyed a private joke behind the scenes at the expense of their elders who serendipitously chose April 22, 1970 to launch Earth Day.


Chances are, though, they didn’t know who Lenin really was.  They probably didn’t know that he was a Latin scholar, and that his first introduction to revolutionary writing was through the Russian novelist Chernyshevsky.  They probably had never read the essays he wrote about Tolstoy, a novelist whose writing he loved, but whose worship of Russian mysticism he detested: He could never understand how the revolutionary and the reactionary could coexist in one man.  He read widely in Russian literature (Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol).  All of this and more was reviewed in The Guardian (“How Lenin’s Love of Literature Shaped the Revolution”) in 2017, as a way into looking at Lenin’s contribution to the Russian revolution and to the thinking of revolutionaries generally.


Lenin spent two decades building the foundation for the revolutionary organization capable of toppling the czar and establishing socialism in Russia.  At numerous points in that two decades he found himself in the minority among the revolutionaries.  Often he found himself in a small organization of exiles.  What he did in that twenty years was write furiously.  He wrote about the kind of tasks that were necessary (revolutionaries did not agree on those tasks; they did not agree on what forces in society were revolutionary; they did not agree on what role they should play as World War I got underway). He wrote about the ideological, organizational, and tactical building blocks necessary for the kind of political party he thought was necessary.  Some of these contributed some ideas particular to the revolutionary situation in Russia, ideas that he began to formulate when exiled early in his career to Siberia; when he researched and wrote a book that chronicled the Development of Capitalism in Russia. Here he maintained that despite the minuscule size of the Russian industrial working class, capitalism was already developing in Russia. Despite the general consensus that the Russian peasants were a monolithic class, Lenin described the stratification of peasantry into a wealthy section, a middle section, and the great mass of the peasantry at the level of an agricultural working class and serf.


He wrote the fourth book about the foundation of the necessary political party in 1908, and it was published in Russia in 1909. Here he defended the philosophical principles or world view of dialectical and historical materialism (Materialism and Empiriocriticism). It’s really in this book that he expounds on his idea of Marxism as a method as well as a theory and a doctrine.


Lenin in Russia in 1897 to 1917 faced a situation unlike in Germany, England, or the United States.  In those other countries the industrial revolution was well underway, appeared even complete.  Russia was in the beginning throes of the industrial revolution, much of the country enthralled to the big banks of Europe.  Lenin needed to devise a theory of the Russian revolution.  He did that in his description of the relationship of the various classes in Russia, the role of the working class and the peasantry, and the development of the national question in the Russian empire and beyond.  He did that by describing the objective reality the revolutionary classes faced and the role of the revolutionary organizations.  What is most significant about Lenin is his capacity to describe the reality he faced and the new ideas necessary for the new situation of his time and place.  He was a scientist.


What can we learn from Lenin’s experience on his 150th birthday?  In the 1970s, when I read Lenin I read him as the ideologue that I was.  What is to be Done?, State and Revolution, Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder, and Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism were the four books of my Talmud. I do not intend here to dismiss them as unimportant.  No, there are important lessons to be learned from all of them.  But the way we read them is important, especially when we realize we are no longer dealing with a revolution in the midst of industrialization. The great Russian political revolution was part of the 19th to 20th century economic industrial revolution. In fact, the ensuing liberation struggles of the colonies, the struggles that Lenin foresaw as the great movement of the 20th century, pulled those peoples into the orbit of industry and a connection to the capitalist world order, either through a bourgeois or a socialist revolution.  But that era is over.


A new economic revolution is underway.  And there are new Lenins walking the streets of our world, applying their understanding of the real world to develop a theory of today’s revolutionary times.  In 1917 — and from 1917 through the 1960s and the first Earth Day — history has witnessed the completion of the replacement of agricultural private property by industrial-financial private property. Today we are witnessing the demise of capitalism that exists on the exploitation of labor.  That seems counterintuitive, when we see people living in the streets and workers unable to buy the basic necessities of life.  But the robotization of contemporary life points to the end of wage labor.  If labor is excluded from the production of the means of survival, then there is no longer a way to measure the value in exchange of the means of survival. As long as money is the means of exchange, those expelled from the employer-employee relationship have no way to purchase the means of survival. The Lenin’s of our day must be developing a theory of the revolution of the end of the market and the end of private property under new conditions, when the way to resolve the problems we face must mean distribution without money.


On this Earth Day and this 150th birthday of Lenin, it’s time to recognize that the inspiration that Lenin gave to the poets in Urdu, the Russian poets, to Langston Hughes is real and deserving of reverence. We need to cultivate the Lenins of our times. Without discounting his numerous contributions, what we need to revere is Lenin’s scientific outlook and his willingness to find new solutions to solve new problems.






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It Is Difficult (Though Not Impossible)    To Misuse Garlic

June 21, 2019 — Lew Rosenbaum 




It Is Difficult (Though Not Impossible) To Misuse Garlic


by Lew Rosenbaum


In the spring of 1965 I moved into my own apartment.  Located on the corner of Zonal Ave. and Soto St. in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, it had once been a physician’s office in Hollywood.  The office had been sold, cut in half, and one half moved to the site i moved into.  The bottom floor was occupied by a family with small children.  The top floor was accessible easiest by a flimsy, rickety outside staircase, which opened into the living room.  Three of us — Steve, Art, and I — occupied the apartment.  The digs were cheap — we split the $70 rent, Art paying the least because he got the least cubby-hole for a bedroom. The landlord, whom we knew as Don Julio, lived next door, and behind his casita he raised vegetables, chickens, and I think a goat. On the occasion of moving into a place with my own kitchen, my sister Greta gave me a cookbook — actually a pamphlet from Jay Rosenberg, a philosophy student at Reed College, called The Impoverished


You Can Never Have Enough Garlic
Weatherbeaten, food-stained, but unbowed, the  Rosenberg manifesto continues to enlighten


Student’s Book of Cookery, Drinkery and Housekeepery.  From Jay Rosenberg I learned important life lessons:  The proportion of water to rice that makes good RICE; the role of spices in transforming cheap eats; and that it is difficult (though not impossible) to misuse garlic.


Rosenberg categorizes impoverished students into two groups: the merely impoverished and the really poor.  He wrote the cookbook for the first group, not the second (who could not afford to buy a cookbook, or even food).  I actually belonged to the latter group, and, having been gifted the cookbook, have spent the rest of my cooking life learning to adapt its methods  to various cuisines, heavily seasoning what is obtainable cheap.  Or free.  I will not regale you with my methods of obtaining fresh meat for free.  Use your imagination. No it wasn’t from Don Julio’s yard. 


I spent the summer of 1966 in Planada, a small town East of Merced, with five other students. We were on a fellowship designed by the Student Health Project — Margie and Effie, two nursing students from Vallejo, CA and Chicago, IL, respectively; Dave, a dental student from UCLA; and Dale and I, both from USC Medical School. We were documenting health care delivery to San Joaquin Valley farmworkers. The three men rented a small house for the summer and shared cooking responsibilities.  Because chicken was cheap (remember: I was a really impoverished student) — 19 cents a pound on sale — that’s what we had when it was my turn to cook.  Relying on the Rosenberg manifesto, I stocked the kitchen with garlic, rosemary,  paprika, and tarragon.  From there I launched my varied chicken recipes from the pages of that amazing tome, to the surprise and delight of my roommates. It was difficult to use too much garlic. 


A few years later I explored the “Drinkery” part of the cookbook.  That section gives directions for making your own beer.  This was long before yuppie beer-making kits and fancy equipment. Once again my sister Greta indulged me, allowing me to use her basement to store a large plastic trash can within which the various beer condiments — sugar, malt, hops, yeast — were allowed to ferment for the prescribed time after which, with the assistance of a plastic tube, I siphoned the liquid into bottles I had assembled for the purpose.  Then with a bottle-capper and fresh bottle caps, I finished off the process.  To this day, my niece Ronni and a number of my friends — those who are still alive from that time — whenever we see each other we recall those halcyon days of drinking the magnificent home brew. It gets better with every remembrance. Perhaps I need to say here, brewed without garlic. 


The other evening, after dinner, a friend was telling what repetitive task she zones out on.  When I mentioned I meditate while washing dishes, she invited me over (please come frequently).  I might have said the same thing about cooking.  Chopping vegetables.  Slicing meat. It’s almost ritualistic.  Forget the almost.  This is especially true about my approach to Chinese style cooking. Eating in Chinatown, Los Angeles, is where I developed my respect for this cuisine.  My lab partners at USC,  Ed and Sam, would frequent Chung Mei for late night rice porridge — congee is what it is called on most Chinese menus, but we knew it as “juk,” a Cantonese variant. Then there was Green Leaves, a restaurant just down the hill from where I lived in Chinatown, and where my wife Lee and I would have dinner frequently. We came in so often, and always asked the waiter to hold the MSG, sugar, and salt, that he would chuckle as he approached us to take our order. “I know: No msg, no sugar, no salt, no taste.” One shop in Chinatown sold kitchen utensils and other goods made in the People’s Republic of China (every other place only dealt in Taiwanese or Hong Kong commodities).  Along with my long gone Mao jacket, here I purchased a prize:  a wooden handled, Chinese cleaver. I named it Eldridge and it accompanied me when I moved to Chicago. 


In the intervening years of betrayal, I changed the cleaver’s name to Kathleen and began to fear that the wooden handle was disintegrating. My good friend and spiritual advisor, pastor Barry, accompanied me to Chicago’s Chinatown in search of another cleaver.  After weighing all options, the most important of which was “How much does it cost”? followed by “Does it feel balanced when I hold it?” I found one, obtained an ecclesiastical blessing on the implement and whatever it participated in making, and have made it my favorite for slicing garlic and everything else.  The ritual — remember the ritual? — a bowl for every vegetable or meat to be cut: mushrooms, bok choy, bitter melon, onion, red bell pepper, lap cheung (Chinese sausage), you name it. When it comes to garlic, I take a bulb, smash it with the cleaver on the top to separate the cloves, and then take a quarter of the bulb.  Then I look at what is before me and probably add another two cloves. Hold the cloves on the cutting board with one hand, slice the garlic fine with the cleaver with the other, then holding the cleaver with both hands mince the garlic.  You can never have too much garlic. 


Today I’m making a pork based chili verde. It’s going to cook all day, the flavors slowly melding together.  I didn’t get poblano peppers, so it won’t be really green.  I’m starting with a little more than a pound of pork stew meat.  I’m used to slicing the meat into smaller sections that make them easier to sauté, as in Chinese cooking, and so that’s the way I start.  (I don’t deny it. As I cut the chunks of meat I think of all the metaphors that pork or pig calls up, what does the pork represent in political and police culture.  I kind of revel in the thought of pork barrel. Maybe I wield Kathleen and think I hear the Black Panther slogan, “Off the pig.”). Then I brown the pieces in a “Dutch oven”  coated inside with olive oil.   After ten or so minutes, as the meat browns on all sides, I add a can of pinto beans (for this amount of meat, a 30 ounce can will be sufficient).  While they are simmering, I take four tomatillos, of course take the papery covering off, then wash, quarter them and then cut the quarters once or twice more. Putting the tomatillos in the pot, I turn to cut an onion in half, core the end out and peel that half (the other half goes in a container in the refrigerator). Dicing the onion makes me cry, even though I’ve run cold water over it.  Perhaps in spite of myself, I’m thinking of the porker in the White House who praised in a speech last night the “heroes of ICE and the Border Patrol” which by itself is enough to make me sob.


Now I slice a green pepper in half and put one half in the refrigerator for another recipe.  I take the stem and seeds out of the half that I am holding, slice the pepper lengthwise into about 6 or 8 pieces, and then cut each into half inch sections.  Add the onion and the pepper to the beans and pork, add generous amounts of black pepper, cilantro (fresh, diced is best; dried is OK too), and cumin (both ground and whole seed — a generous amount). One whole seeded jalapeño is good; one-half jalapeño with seeds still in if you want a kick, something like what happens when the white house takes away your food stamp benefits.  Not really, the jalapeño tastes good, the government action is in bad taste.


Now is when I pick up the garlic bulb.  And the thought shatters my mind: how do I protect myself, my friends, from all these vampires clutching at my pocketbook, taking away my medical care, pricing me out of my home.  There isn’t enough garlic I can wear, give to all my friends, that will drive them away, is there?  Have I got enough with six large cloves? I still have my first cookbook, weather beaten, acid stained, falling apart though it may be.  Nah!  Add another couple or three or more.  Especially when you are fighting vampires, you can never use too much garlic.






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