Greetings of the Season

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. 

Resisting Our Hitlers, Exposing Our Holocausts

[I wrote this essay at the end of the year 2000.  With the current events in Palestine, the Masha Gessen affair, and the role of the United States in creating and maintaining the Zionist project, I decided to revisit it. With the rise of our own fascist movements, how we respond to our own Hitlers is a matter of some currency. Gessen, of course, was vilified for comparing the Israeli state to the Nazis. I made some modifications in the original, but the essay is substantially the same as when I wrote it.  I refrained from making direct comparisons with the Republican and the Democrat fascists: but they should be fairly obvious. At the time I wrote it, I emailed it to my sister, Greta, to get her reaction.  She took great exception to the concept of the “holocaust industry,” but I am convinced that with the 23 years experience in between then and now and in light of Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article, if she were alive today, she would agree with these conclusions.]

I have been reading three books about Germany, but I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine.  As the year 2000 ends, I finally finished Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum.  I had promised myself a year ago to reread Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and I have finally gotten to it. And then by chance I this winter I came upon the story of Mildred Fish, one-time student at the University of Wisconsin, who winds up in the German resistance, Resisting Hitler.

600 Israeli soldiers are detained for refusing compulsory armed service.  Their reason is the increasing severity of the Israel Defense Force atrocities against the Palestinians, who are engaged in what we are calling an intifada.  One woman in the IDF, whose job it is to search the Palestinian women, complains about the indignities with which she is forced to treat Palestinian prisoners.  At times, she says, she feels like a Nazi.  A Jewish academic, appalled at the behavior of the IDF, compares them to Hitler’s Nazis.  As this is broadcast to a progressive internet discussion group, objections fly across the screen: how is it possible to compare these two situations that are totally different. Germany’s Nazis were the real Nazis.  YOU can’t have MY holocaust.

Surely this simplifies a very complex subject. But when presumably rational people react so strongly to the feeling of one human being for another; when a rabbi insults the woman who is merely expressing her disgust for the position she finds herself in, one questions what personal stake does this rabbi and other ordinary human beings have in maintaining that destruction of the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe was unique in history?

Let’s not even consider this as a continuation of the thesis that the Jews must justify their existence as chosen people through examples like the holocaust.  For, in the manner of thought I am posing, there are no examples LIKE the European holocaust.  To suggest that the decimation  (taken literally) of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was a holocaust; that the millions who died in the middle passage from Africa to the Western hemisphere was a holocaust; that the calculated and calculating systematic working to death of millions of slaves (whose average working life when “sold down the river” was 7 years) was a holocaust evokes cries of protest.  Eastern Europe was unique, you see.

Well, I suppose it was.  And so was the Triangular Trade in human chattel. And it seems to me only reasonable to grant this uniqueness to seize upon their commonality as well.  If one cannot understand the consciousness of Israeli Jews without understanding the Nazi era, one cannot understand the consciousness of North Americans without understanding the legacy of slavery, one certainly can’t understand the consciousness of Palestinians without understanding the occupation and all that means.

But no.  When victim becomes oppressor, the situation becomes complicated. The oppressor must maintain some aspect of being victim. The Israeli government portrays itself as the object of terrorism. In the U.S. the government defends itself against “reverse racism.”

Of course to grant that the feeling of oppression conforms even in some general way to fascism undermines the ideals and dreams of many who still believe that the Israeli state could achieve the egalitarian goals it once professed.  Israeli leaders in particular cannot grant the possibility, that the government in power is acting very like the state(s)  from which Jews fled in the thirties and forties.  “My power,” these leaders might say if they were candid, “depends upon my convincing the people of my country that they have more in common with me than with the common people whose land we have taken and who work, eat and even bathe at our pleasure.”  The Nazi era is something that Israeli leaders have packaged as a commodity. These leaders trade the “holocaust card” on the market.  It is the bargaining chip that they have in world politics because it keeps the majority of citizens of Israel in their hip pocket and in the Israel Defense Force.

Although I started this article with “I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine,” I really can’t stop thinking about what the Nazi era and what contemporary Palestine has to teach us about ourselves.

II

The biography of Mildred Fish-Harnack begins with its outcome. Hitler overturned the sentence of his own court and ordered her guillotined. That is, on Hitler’s direct orders she was the only American woman to have been executed.  Born and raised in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Fish returned to Wisconsin to college. While a student at University of Wisconsin, she met Arvid Harnack, who was studying for his doctorate (one of two he took). It was the 1920’s, they got married, and they settled in Germany.  Harnack was a member of a leading academic family, a family which mingled among a social circle including Nobel prize winners, men of the clergy, lawyers and statesmen.  They expressed their patriotism in their love for German culture.  For them, Germany was synonymous with Goethe and Beethoven.  For them, the rise of Hitler was anathema, signaled the death of that culture.  In the meticulously researched pages of Resisting Hitler, you will not find any indication that the Harnacks considered joining the Nazis.

After 1933 the Harnacks began to develop discussion groups and study circles and social circles out of which they built a small anti-fascist network.   Arvid was highly schooled in economic theory and visited the Soviet Union to study their planned economic formations.  Mildred, who was taking her doctorate in American Studies, was doing work on the transcendentalists in literature and philosophy.  Her lectures on Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson were highly regarded.  She was engaged in translating work from English to German, when the censors allowed such books to be published. The two were close to the American Ambassador to Germany, but especially to his daughter, Martha Dodd.  Resisting Hitler is filled with interviews and insights from some of the people who knew them well in this period. And from some of these interviews emerges the picture of people turning toward Marxism and the political-economic formation that was developing in the East, in the Soviet Union.

Of course many anti-fascists turned east. That was where someone was listening. They would have been as happy to find a receptive ear with Uncle Sam as with Uncle Joe.  But Sam wasn’t listening at all, and even Martha Dodd offered her services to the Soviets.  In addition, the author makes a good case for Arvid and his friends being as influenced by a promise of the future– central planning and egalitarianism — as much as by revulsion for the present.

Harnack fed information to both the US and the USSR.  For months, the network in Germany reported on the expected attack to the East.  When the attack finally came, network members were astonished as Hitler’s forces moved rapidly to the East.  It appeared that the Reich was invincible.  But when the tide turned with the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, German papers did not report the change.  A radio broadcast from the network to their Soviet contact was intercepted.  In a matter of a few days the 17 key members of what Hitler branded the Red Orchestra were imprisoned. Their trial, in mid December, lasted only 5 days. Harnack and the inner circle of this conspiracy were executed in a few days later. The Court sentenced Mildred to six years in prison, but Hitler was furious. He demanded a retrial. Mildred, too, was killed.  Hitler was determined that they would die without knowing of the prospect of success of the Russian counteroffensive.

III

Bernhard Schlink’s writing is very elegant in its simplicity.  I cannot think of The Reader without thinking of Hesse, not so much for content as for style.  The Reader has no “hero” in the usual sense.  It’s two main characters are quite flawed.  It’s a postwar tale narrated by a lawyer (Schlink himself is a lawyer) who, as a boy, a pubescent teenager, comes to know a woman who was a camp guard during the war.  Comes to know first in a physical, sexual, sensual way.  This rather odd couple, a woman and boy who could easily be mother and son, carries on an intense, curious romance. But know each other they do not. One day she disappears from his town, his life, under mysterious circumstances.  And it is only later in the novel, after the young man becomes a lawyer, that he meets her again and finds out about her position as a camp guard.  But does he even know her then? And what does he know of what she did?

As a young man he reads to her: he finds out that she cannot read herself.  She never learned.  He is such a good reader.  And he makes her so happy by his reading.  But does he really understand what he reads as much as she understands his reading, and even later, in what she requests from him while she is in prison?   In the end, we readers are compelled to question which of the two is the reader of the title.  It is perhaps this ambiguity, which makes this novel so provocative; while it’s resolution in the final separation and search for truth, which makes it so frustrating.

Much of German post-war writing is filled with concentration camp angst.  It’s a genre like Westerns in the US.  Except that in our Westerns the Indians are either noble savages or just plain savage.  We don’t seem to have much angst over our concentration camps.  And probably, looking at Germany from the safe distance of middle America, I can sit here and say “enough already.”  The resolution of The Reader was frustrating because it was so indecisive.  I don’t know who bears the guilt. ‘

It may not be clear who are the friends of the resistance, but there is no doubt in Resisting Hitler who is the enemy. And it’s important to put this novel in the context of the fate that befell the Harnacks once they were dead.

Within the German military, a patriotic group developed a conspiracy to kill Hitler.  It was a high placed, anti-fascist formation that did not succeed.  After the war they were given high honors, They were treated as heroes. In contrast, the Red Orchestra became the object of vilification.  They were traitors, not heroes; they sold secrets to the enemy. They were Reds.  I am tempted to say smugly, “The Germans are like that you know.”  Chalk it up to the authoritarian personality and genetic fascism.

But the state of Wisconsin did the same thing.  A proposal to celebrate Mildred Harnack day in the public schools was killed when a University of Wisconsin alumnus, an editor of an Oklahoma newspaper, argued that it was a damned shame his daughter would observe a holiday from school in honor of a damned Communist when she couldn’t even say prayers to her God in the schools.

After Germany reunified, the authorities found that a school in the east had been named to honor Mildred.  Western authorities promptly changed the name to some cipher instead. The outcry from those “totalitarian East Germans” forced the government to concede on the question of the school name: It reverted back to Mildred’s school.

So maybe The Reader isn’t as superficial as I think it is.  And just maybe I’m displacing my anger about America onto this book.  But The Reader is not “about” middle America. It IS about Germany.

IV

In the 1800’s, two North American white women were appalled at the treatment of Blacks and Indigenous Americans. They wrote two novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ramona; they used the limited quality of 19^th century moral force to cast a literary searchlight into the dark places of the national psyche.  A century later the literary moment has degenerated to reflect the acceptability of ethnic boundaries of creativity.  Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie and Diane Glancy write very well; but they are expected (are allowed?) to write only about the debacle and survival of the Native American.  A whole generation of African Americans write about the experience of black America (are they  allowed to write about anything else?). And when they do, they are criticized for not writing about universal human experience. August Wilson was chastised by the New York Times drama critic Robert Brustein for only writing about Blacks! In the same column, Brustein asked Wilson to write about universal themes, like Chekhov did.  Mind you, he did not chastise Chekhov for only writing about Russians. Doesn’t Philip Roth write about Jews?  In this country of 275 million people, are not more than a dozen white novelists writing about OUR holocausts, our ugly Americans, our Americans grappling with the blood history of our country? I am reminded of the incredible debate (who can debate this any more?) going on about whether Jefferson had children with slave mistress Sally Heming. 

The philosophical approach of the “ethnic agenda” requires that each writer must write about his or her community.  Then, by definition, the writing from that category is not universal and hence not of the same quality as . . .  But wait a minute.  What is “my community” and how does it relate to the whole?  Doesn’t a truly American literature spring from the multi-faceted American experience?  Isn’t the blues the quintessential American experience, in this most class-divided of all countries?

While the ethnic agenda frames questions in terms of color, it’s not so much a black and white issue any more. Increasingly the question to writers is: who will finally take up the cause of the least of us all.

V

The ethnic political agenda is part of a cultural assault that has Balkanized American literature.  When David, my (at that time) 17 year-old step-son read To Kill A Mockingbird, it made such a huge impact on him. David’s father is African-American.  The author: a white southerner attempting to come to grips with the American holocaust, but from the perspective of the white southerner. I emphasize that, because the examples of this are few and far between. And yes, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is flawed. But the impact on a 17 year old African American man was undeniable.

Who will take up the cause of the marginalized?  Who will clarify that the experience of American survivors of the uniquely American holocausts merges with the universal? Denise Giardina, in her novels about the Appalachian miners, examines this relationship.  Richard Price’s hard-bitten city dwellers connect to this reality. Russell Banks’ vivid portrait of the abolitionist family of John Brown in Cloudsplitter. Even John Grisham, in A Time To Kill, examines the brutality of Southern law from the viewpoint of a civil rights lawyer. But by and large, the angst over the American holocaust is left to the survivors to write about. There is an acquiescence that white Americans are not survivors also. I want to read someone who expresses the complexity of this relationship, it’s ambiguity and it’s decisiveness.

We are back to where we began.  America must own up to its own holocausts.  It must own up to its own fascist practices.  We must recognize the reality that Germans drew up their proscriptions against Jews after reading about the American post Civil War black codes. America relies on certain ideas and institutions to guarantee that the holocausts remain the property of demagogues.

Literature can break this stranglehold.  Literature arises on the foundation of experience.  Forty and fifty years ago, this experience was segregated, balkanized and exemplified politically by liberation movements and civil rights movements. Those movements have gone as far as they could have: they have achieved integration of segments of those communities into the leading circles of the country.  The leaders of those movements of yesteryear today are more representatives of the Democratic Party and all it represents than of the grassroots movements from which they evolved. The experience of today is a different experience. It is the experience of the fragmentation of those movements and the emergence of a class movement.  Such a movement is calling forth its writers, its musicians, its artists.  Only this kind of a movement can confront the past in all its ambiguity with unambiguous honesty.

V.

Many years ago I interrupted the peaceful ending of a family seder, after all the questions had been asked and answered, and after everyone had a warm feeling of democracy that the story of liberation from pharaoh always brings. I asked how we could end this celebration without at least commenting on the suppression of the Palestinians and questioning how this contradicts the notion of liberation in Israel.  I was not a very popular person.  Since then I have come to be encouraged by the number of people who share these opinions.  I was encouraged in 2000 by the number of Israeli soldiers refusing to fight (just as their German anti-fascist forbears tried to undermine the Third Reich). I am encouraged today by the US Jewish Voice for Peace and its clear opposition to the Zionist state of Israel.  And I find the broad social activity for housing, health care, abolition of the carceral state and other fundamental needs – movements to end our ongoing holocausts — very encouraging. These movements need a literary voice. It’s time for a class movement in literature, drawing on the unique and emerging 21st century experience of a newly forming class of disenfranchised:  A class whose historic role is abolition of all previously existing conditions of exploitation and oppression. 

Pi Day Poem 2016

by Lew Rosenbaum

Today is pi day

Three point one four one five nine day

Round this pi day off to three point one four one six

You’ve got a pi year too

Describing the circumference

Of a pie is like making a revolution

Yet the shortest distance between two points

On the pie is a secant which at the longest

Is still only the diameter

Half of which is a radius that is the same name

As a bone in the arm extended with a fork

To eat the pie

Or cocked back to toss it

In the face of the candidate of your choice

A tasty prize for the least of the evils

The shortest distance between a pie

And a face is the arc from the nearest hand

But I’m going off on a tangent what I really want to ask is

Oh saycant you see

Cant you make a political revolution by

Squaring the radius and multiplying times pi?

Still none of this makes any sense

If you haven’t got the dough to buy the pie

Or if you have to bargain with your boss

For a bigger share of the pie

When he or she is getting most of it

And when you are hanging by the neck

In a hypotenuse which has no right angle

In the pi in the first place

And what is pi without I screaming

And if the angle isn’t right

It isn’t acute one either,

So put that in your plum pie

Jack Horner

And fly away with the blackbirds

To take over the bakery

And give pi to everyone.

July 4: Storm, Whirlwind, Earthquake

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?

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.

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.  

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

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.”

Why A Third Party? The Case For A New Abolitionism

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 20^th 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.

To Whom It May Concern — Groceries and Friendship Shall Never Be Forgotten

by W Susan Berek

Susan, my mother-in-law, would have turned 100 on Feb. 4, 2022. It’s a tossup whether it would have been more appropriate to post this on her birthday, or on International Women’s Day. It was bittersweet combing through the scraps of paper mentioned in the introduction — the sweet part being the many discoveries I made along the way, gaining more insight into her curiosity, inquisitiveness, and defiance.

to-whom-it-may-concern-e28094-groceries-and-friendship-shall-never-be-forgotten-1Download

A Tale of Two Earthquakes

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.

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.

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.    

The Presence of Memories

In late November I often think of this picture, an advertisement that appeared in Family Circle magazine, available at checkout counters in every grocery store in the country. That’s my mother, Anna, the matriarch of the picture, and although it’s a pot roast, not a turkey, it’s always Thanksgiving that brings it to mind. She was now a bona fide celebrity.

Anna, ever a presence, presiding in her close encounter with celebrity

My parents became an item in the 1920s — I’d say they got married then, but they never did go through the formal paperwork. I was born in 1942, after they’d been together almost 20 years, and 14 1/2 years after my sister, my only sibling, was born. They celebrated their anniversary at Thanksgiving, because it was a chance to get family and friends together. My father’s brother, Abe, and at least two of his children who lived close to New Haven (Herman and Milly) and their families might be there. My mother was close to two of her brothers, but only one, Lou, lived near by and would stop by with family and also their father, Aaron, (before he came to live with us). My mother ruled the kitchen, she prepared a family feast, and her presence was immanent. That’s the other reason I am now thinking of the photograph: in a conversation with my friend Kathleen, she reminded me of the time I introduced her to my mother, probably 1968. She told me the other day that my mother “was a presence.” The words have been rolling around in my brain since she said them.

In 1960 I moved to Los Angeles from New Haven, Connecticut. I moved to get as far away from home as I could, and to be near my sister. One year later, home moved to Los Angeles: my parents settled in an apartment near Olympic and Fairfax on Hi Point. My sister, Greta, and her husband, Leon, lived in the hills above Hollywood, on Outpost Drive. It seemed to me like a mansion, with its huge living room with 14 foot ceilings, its large kitchen, dining room, breakfast nook, and three bedrooms. And the magnificent tiled bathroom next to the master bedroom, that had a stall shower, a bathtub, and a toilet separated in such a way that three people could be using the bathroom and would not see each other.

When Greta and Leon moved to the Outpost house, Leon had been an aspiring lawyer for the Alden Construction Co. since the early 1950s. That is how they had gotten a choice home in a tract built by Alden in Buena Park, not far from Disneyland in Orange County. But Leon decided to start his own firm, based in Los Angeles, and the commute from their home in Buena Park was expensive and prohibitive in terms of time. The move to Hollywood meant finding a school for their children, and Greta found the Hollywood public elementary school severely lacking. They found Oakwood, a school begun by other parents dissatisfied with overcrowding and what educational opportunities they found. The school began in 1951 in the back yard of Robert and Jessica Ryan, and by the time Greta and Leon moved into the Outpost house, the school had a real building and the school community included a number of families in the film and other arts industries.

One of the parents was a commercial photographer — someone whose name I have long forgotten. Although by 1969 Robin, Randy and Ronni — Greta and Leon’s children — had outgrown Oakwood, Leon’s law practice kept him in contact with that artistic community. The commercial photographer was shooting a magazine advertisement for Hunt’s. He was looking for a grandmother-type person; perhaps he had even met Anna at Greta’s for dinner. That I don’t know, any more than I remember who the photographer was. In my fantasy, it might have been Haskell Wexler (whose son went to Oakwood) and whom I met at the time. I just can’t imagine the filmmaker having to make money by shooting advertisements.

The advertisement was published, my mother was a presence at every grocery checkout counter in America and we were properly impressed by our association with fame.

A decade later Leon and Greta were divorced and their children scattered away from Los Angeles. Anna had declined into early stages of dementia — she was no longer capable of living independently, but I would pick her up from her nursing home residence and take her to the Midnight Special Bookstore, then in Venice, where she presided at the checkout counter, greeting customers and regaling them with her favorite story of the family hiding from the Tsar’s Cossacks at her grandmother’s home in Vilnius, Lithuania. Radical students from all different political stripes would attribute their own ideology to whatever she said and walk out of the store reaffirmed by their perception of her steadfastness. In 1979 the Bookstore gave her an 83rd birthday party barbecue in a park in Mar Vista. She was still a presence, although the light in her eyes did not burn as brightly. She was pleased that the party raised $125 to support the organizing work of the Texas Farmworkers Union, where coincidentally granddaughter Robin was involved.

Anna died in 1983 at 87 years of age. We held a celebration of her life in the backyard of friends Kathryn and Brad Stevens in Cudahy. I left Los Angeles four years later.

I keep the presence of memories with me though.

Matt Sedillo interviews Lew Rosenbaum

I, Like You, Am Made of Stars

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. 

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.

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. 

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.