Nelson Peery, author of Black Radical, Black Fire and The Future is Up To Us, turns ninety this month. Nelson is one of my mentors, a person who I first met some 43 years ago in East Los Angeles. He had come to bring greetings from the workers of Watts, California to the workers in East Los Angeles, besieged by the police while protesting the Vietnam War. His message of class unity across the class divide, and in particular the message of the strategic unity of Chicano and African-American workers, struck home even at that time in my unsophisticated mind.
In the intervening years I’ve had the opportunity to work in various collectives in which Nelson’s insights were crucial, no insight more than the future really is up to us to create, not to wait for some great leader to give us the answers and to follow. This is a time for new ideas that match the new conditions and new times in which we live, and all of us have a part in contributing to it.
It is in this spirit that I take great pleasure in helping to prepare for the celebration of Nelson Peery’s birthday, an important event in which editors of the newspapers that Nelson has helped to found and contribute to over the years will engage in a kind of “fireside chat” with him about his years in the movement and what that has meant. Please join me on
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Celebrating 70 Years of Revolutionary Struggle
5PM to 8 PM
Workers United Hall
333 S Ashland Ave
for dinner, poetry, and conversation
presented by the League of Revolutionaries for a New America
Donation $10 — Tickets (or reservations) Available by e-mailing me at rosetree@mindspring.com
“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” George Smiley said in John le Carré’s 1974 classic, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the center of things.” This concept of necessary, if lamentable, sacrifice in the face of the Soviet monolith helped define the espionage masterpieces of the cold war. Such statements gave fans a rush of pleasure, partly aesthetic, partly clandestine — the feeling they were gaining a bit of secret Machiavellian wisdom.
A DELICATE TRUTH
By John le Carré
310 pp. Viking. $28.95.
Illustration by Ben Wiseman
Times changed. The Soviet empire morphed from our sworn enemy into a sordid kleptocracy with whom business could be done, and le Carré turned his attention more fully to the West, which has always been his real subject. The enemies (big pharma, bent banks, blackhearted multinationals and the weak-willed politicians they buy) became less exotic. The old sacrifices — of lives, and of our own ethics — became less necessary. Many critics grew irritated. What happened to the particular pleasure of John le Carré’s moral relativism?
“A Delicate Truth,” like most of le Carré’s recent novels, feels like a rebuttal to George Smiley’s theory. How many stray cats can we allow to be snuffed in order to reach our ends? Or, as le Carré put it in an essay in last month’s issue of Harper’s, “How far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?” Back in 1963, in “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” we watched that novel’s stray cat, Liz Gold, die on the Berlin Wall. A shame, yes, but in the grand scheme of things an acceptable loss. Fifty years later, “A Delicate Truth” suggests that even little Liz Gold would be too much of a sacrifice.
We open in 2008, when a servant of the Crown known to us only by his cover name, Paul Anderson, is going a bit mad waiting in a hotel room in Gibraltar. He’s been sent to be the eyes and ears of Fergus Quinn, M.P., during Operation Wildlife, which aims to exfiltrate a terrorist visiting the British Crown Colony. Wildlife is a joint endeavor between Quinn and a private American security firm called Ethical Outcomes, which “will be providing the full American-style coverage.” Once he’s finally in the field, Paul realizes that “war’s gone corporate.” Although he sees little of the action, he’s told the maneuver went off without a hitch — a great secret success, for which Paul will later, under his real name, Christopher (Kit) Probyn, be awarded a commissionership in the Caribbean and a knighthood.
We next meet Toby Bell, formerly employed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and later private secretary to the “Honorable” (a title that drips with irony) Fergus Quinn, during the period leading up to Wildlife. Toby is the idealist in the room, for he wishes “to make a difference — or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a post-imperial, post-cold-war world.” A friend from the Treasury gives him and us a reminder of what this new world looks like: “We’re clever and nice, but we’re understaffed and underpaid and we want the best for our country, which is old-fashioned of us. New Labour loves Big Greed, and Big Greed has armies of amoral lawyers and accountants on the make and pays them the earth to make rings round us. We can’t compete; they’re too big to fail and too big to fight. Now I’ve depressed you. Good. I’m depressed too.”
Toby may be depressed, but he hasn’t quite lost his idealism. Once he realizes his minister is hiding something important from him, he begins to dig until he uncovers some of the machinations and personal interplay that are leading inexorably to Operation Wildlife. He even meets the leaders of Ethical Outcomes, a dodgy British operative named Jay Crispin and Mrs. Spencer Hardy of Houston, Tex., “better known to the world’s elite as the one and only Miss Maisie.” Toby recognizes what Paul/Kit does not: namely that a government minister is embarking on a private military op with the help of mercenaries. Alarmed, Toby shares the news with a trusted ear, but he is working in a sphere in which no good act goes unpunished, and so it goes for him.
These events form the prologue for the action that takes place three years later when a member of the British Special Forces assigned to Wildlife unexpectedly confronts Sir Christopher Probyn — Kit — in the midst of his idyllic retirement in North Cornwall. He’s come to share the darker facts of Wildlife, the operation Kit still holds on to with secret pride, his great act of derring-do for the nation.
The narrative dominoes fall with masterly precision once Toby Bell returns, and by the time he’s joined by Kit’s alluring daughter the story settles into classic conspiracy thriller territory, the two of them racing to assemble evidence before they can be silenced by the men who pull the strings. As ever, le Carré’s prose is fluid, carrying the reader toward an inevitable yet nail-biting climax.
This is John le Carré’s 23rd novel, and neither prolificacy nor age (he’s 81) has diminished his legendary and sometimes startling gift for mimicry. More than the inventory of closely observed outfits, chronicles of public schools and slumped, bookish frames, it’s the voices that give the characters in “A Delicate Truth” their most immediate claim to three-dimensionality. With, however, one exception: Miss Maisie, Ethical Outcomes’ down-home right-wing zillionaire, with a mouthful of accent and affectation to match. Her appearance among the sophisticates of the Foreign Ministry is like a slap in the face, and while she’s ushered offstage quickly, you’d be forgiven for seeing in her caricature evidence of the accusation leveled at le Carré regularly these days: anti-Americanism.
Having lived in Europe for the last decade, I’m particular about how to use that label. To me, “anti-American” means just that: to be contemptuous of Americans, one and all. I’ve met those people. Blinded by their ignorance, they’re to be scorned. But then there is John le Carré, whose January 2003 argument against the Iraq war, printed in The Times of London, was called “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.” He made his ire plain: he was against the foreign policy of an American administration he despised. If this is what qualifies him, then half of our own population is anti-American.
The enemy in le Carré’s universe, both fictional and not, isn’t America. It’s the virus of shortsightedness, hypocrisy, lies and unfettered greed that plagues the “post-imperial, post-cold-war world” Toby Bell so wants to help shape. And while the few Americans in “A Delicate Truth” are not to be loved, their British counterparts are even more despicable, particularly the New Labour politicians who have clearly disappointed le Carré the most deeply, having marched willingly with America into Iraq.
Describing a posting to Cairo early in Toby’s diplomatic career, le Carré writes: “At weekends, he enjoys jolly camel rides with debonair military officers and secret policemen and lavish parties with the superrich in their guarded desert condominiums. And at dawn, after flirting with their glamorous daughters, drives home with car windows closed to keep out the stench of burning plastic and rotting food as the ragged ghosts of children and their shrouded mothers forage for scraps in filthy acres of unsorted rubbish at the city’s edge.” Here is le Carré with the gloves off, turning his back entirely on George Smiley’s old stray cat theory and aiming his dagger at those who would twist Smiley’s words for their own purposes. Is this what we’ve done with our cold war victory?
The spymaster-as-hero is gone, replaced by the whistle-blower, the outsider who retains enough of his heart to be appalled by the slaughter of strays. In Cairo they’re the young trash collectors living on the city’s edge, but in Gibraltar they’re even more insignificant: one mother and her child, around whom the whole novel rotates, and for whom le Carré’s rage simmers. By the end of “A Delicate Truth,” you either share his anger at the injustices between its covers, or you don’t. If you do, then you’re one of le Carré’s people. If not, you’re one of Smiley’s. It’s up to you to decide which one is more worthy.
Olen Steinhauer is the author of eight novels, most recently “An American Spy.” He lives in Budapest.
This is the second in an ongoing series, coming at a time when UNO charter schools financial shenanigans are finally being examined.
Just in the last few days the Chicago Sun-Times is finally exploring some issues pertaining to UNO charter schools. Finally. Not that much of this information hasn’t been available before. It’s just that only those willing to dig for it have been able to find it. Meanwhile, UNO has developed an empire of 13 charter schools while scooping nearly 100 million dollars from public coffers to build those same schools. Their political connections to the Democratic Party machine flowered under the Daley administration and came to fruition when Juan Rangel, UNO CEO, was a campaign manager for Rahm Emanuel in his successful bid to become Chicago’s Mayor.
This teach in, the second in the “Who Is Stealing Our Education” series presented by Occupy Rogers Park, couldn’t come at a more significant moment, as school closings butt up against a plethora of charter openings; as public money is used to deplete the neighborhood schools of needed resources.
This new poetry chapbook (28 pages) is now available, more or less hot off the press. It can be purchased by sending a check or money order (made out to Lew Rosenbaum) for $6, which includes the cost of first class postage, to
Lew Rosenbaum
1122 W Lunt 4A
Chicago, IL 60626.
cover illustration by Diana Berek
cartoon self-portrait computer generated by the author
Chris Mahin wrote this article 10 years ago, on the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Much is being said to decry the significance of the deed. The Proclamation was a product of the time in which it was written, and so its influence and importance needs to placed within that context. What then are the implications for today? Surely not that we need a great leader to follow. That might be the lesson if we took from history the idea that Lincoln, with the stroke of the pen, freed the slaves. That isn’t what happened, and the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation need not enshrine that myth. The issue today, the 1% vs the 99% as Occupy phrases it, is similar to the issue then, when a handful of the richest people in the United States had the right to own, as their private property, 4 million slaves. The Proclamation was a step across a nodal line of ending a form of private property. It raises questions about how we treat the right of billionaires today to own what should be public property.
****************************************************************** 140TH ANNIVERSARY OF A REVOLUTIONARY DECREE
THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION SET A PROFOUND PRECEDENT; LET’S UTILIZE IT!
By Chris Mahin
The document makes dull reading — but it inspired millions. No music rings from its carefully constructed sentences — but it sounded the death knell of slavery. Deliberately understated in form, its content gave a bloody war a higher, more noble purpose.
Jan. 1, 2003 marks the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Much has changed in the United States since the Civil War, but the story of how the proclamation came to be issued, and what it wrought, contains important lessons for the
struggle for justice today.
Despite its dry, legalistic tone, the Emancipation Proclamation was a radical document. It declared that all persons held as slaves in states or parts of states in rebellion against the United States on Jan. 1, 1863 were free — forever. Because this step affected over 3 million people at a time when the selling price of a slave averaged $1000, the proclamation removed over $3 billion of legally obtained property from the slaveowners without any compensation whatsoever. Since slavery in the United States was an especially brutal form of capitalism, at its time the Emancipation Proclamation decreed the greatest single expropriation of capitalist private property in human history. (It retained that distinction until the Soviet Revolution).
The Emancipation Proclamation changed the course of the Civil War.In the beginning, the Lincoln government insisted that it was fighting the war because rebellious forces in most slave states had conspired to organize secession, not because those states permitted slavery within their borders. (Most supporters of the Union felt that secession was illegal, even treasonous. While many of them abhorred slavery, most felt that it was protected by the Constitution, and that as a result the federal government could not interfere with slavery in those states where it had always been legal.)
At first, the Lincoln government adhered to this policy so rigidly that it was official policy for the Union Army to return to their masters those slaves who fled to its battle lines and offered to help the Union cause. This callous obsession with the absolute letter of federal law meant that the war dragged on, casualties mounted, pro-Confederate traitors inside the Union wreaked havoc, and international support for the federal government could not be fully mobilized. Perhaps most dangerous of all, this policy prevented the Union from aiming at the secessionists’ Achilles Heel: the presence of more than 3 million slaves in Confederate territory who would act against the Confederacy if they could be sure that acting would help them win freedom.
As the bloodletting continued, and the Union suffered numerous defeats, the situation reached a crisis. Either the war could continue to be fought on the basis of the narrow legal technicalities it was begun on in April 1861 — without disturbing the property relations in the states where secession had taken place — or it could be fought in a revolutionary way. By late 1862, the Union had to face a stark fact: The only way to save the country, to stop the rebellion, would be to end slavery.
At this point, Northern society began to respond to the action of the slaves who ran away to the Union Army’s battle lines and to the heartfelt appeals of abolitionists who urged the government to adopt an openly anti-slavery policy. Slowly but surely, more and more people began to feel that if the only way to defeat the rebels was to abolish slavery, then slavery would have to go. After Union forces stopped an attempted invasion of the North by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the fall of 1862, Lincoln announced his plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
The proclamation had immediate effects. Racist whites were disgusted by it, and vowed to cease fighting for the Union. But opponents of slavery, black and white, were elated, and galvanized into action. Sympathy for the Union skyrocketed all over the world.
While the proclamation applied only to those states and parts of states in rebellion against the United States, and did not apply at all to the 800,000 slaves in those parts of the United States not in rebellion, it was a first step. Everyone understood that after Jan. 1, 1863, there was no turning back; the war was now a battle over whether slavery would exist in the United States or not. Through the telegraphic power of the grapevine, many slaves in the Confederacy soon learned that they would be free forever if they could reach Union lines.
There is a lesson in this for our time. Today — just as in late 1862 — the people of this country have to make a choice. At the beginning of the Civil War, the survival of the United States was threatened by about 475,000 slaveowners who possessed billions of dollars worth of wealth. Today, this country’s survival is threatened by a tiny class of exploiters who are also worth billions. A continuation of the rule of this class threatens America with economic disaster and moral ruin.
In fighting this tiny class of billionaires, we should build on the best in the past of this country. Exactly 140 years ago, the Emancipation Proclamation established the principle that when one section of society’s property rights destroy the human rights of millions of other people, when those property rights threaten the forward progress of society, humanity has a right to change the property relations. The Emancipation Proclamation was a public declaration that there is nothing sacred about the legally obtained private property of brutal exploiters. There are moments in history when society cannot move forward unless that property is taken away and new social relations established.
In the seven score years since Abraham Lincoln took a gold pen and signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the White House on New Year’s Day 1863, it has become fashionable in some political circles to stress what the Emancipation Proclamation did not do. But instead of disparaging the proclamation, real revolutionaries ought to squeeze every ounce of political energy possible out of the moral precedent it established. On this Emancipation Day 2003, we should honor the valiant abolitionist agitators, runaway slaves, and Union soldiers who made the Emancipation Proclamation possible — by declaring: If it was right to wrest the source of strength away from one kind of exploiter in 1863, it is right to take society away from all exploiters today!
******************************************************************
This article originated in the PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE/TRIBUNO DEL PUEBLO
Vol. 30 No. 1/ January, 2003; P.O. Box 3524,
Chicago, IL 60654
This year featuring *Booth 26 dedicated to continuing the work of Chris Drew and the Art Patch Project new patches printed on site!
and
**Booth 27 Chicago Labor & Arts Festival the annual HUMOUNGOUS (great price) BOOK SALE with books in all categories including kids, Spanish language, black history and literature, fiction and non fiction, Marxist and other political science; buy three, get one FREE.
***Plus we are a source of information about all things ré Public Education Crisis:
Occupation Rogers Park Education Committee
Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign
Various community activities coming up
How to support teachers and the campaign for World class schools our communities deserve!
It’s not tax deductible, but your $$$ help tremendously!
Please make checks out to CL&AF
and mail to Lew Rosenbaum, 1122 W. Lunt 4A, Chicago, IL 60626
As always, thanks for checking in with us!
PS. Have you heard about the Pied Piper of Rogers Park? Ask us about this . . .
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You might wonder, for good reason, why we are writing about Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball five months after its release. Some of the reasons have been personal. But there are better reasons why we’re speaking up now, and speaking in the way that we are. Part of it is that we both like to listen slow, and listen frequently. Too much music writing now seems hasty and undigested, and that takes a toll. (Deadline perceptions are fine if there’s nothing important in the details, vastly inadequate if there is.) More important was our desire to hold off until we’d heard a larger dialogue: Just what would the world make of this record and what would we have to add to that conversation? But that dialogue has been slow in coming. Most of what was written and said about the album missed the overriding sense we have that this record speaks directly to the Arundathi Roy/Grace Lee Boggs maxim: “A new world is possible. A new world is coming. A new world is already here.”
Because we listen both as long-term Springsteen fans and as activists, that’s what we heard here from early on. It’s a big part of what makes Wrecking Ball something different, especially in the way these songs interact with the dialogue about the movements for social change currently taking shape in our society. This album doesn’t sound like anything else he has done, and its call stands apart, both musically and lyrically. It calls for us not only to react, emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually, but also to act, to not just stand but fight “shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart,” the last words sung on the record.
Such a call requires—demands—a response in kind: detailed, direct and the result of lots of interplay between our own ideas and those of others. So we’ve taken our time and as much space as we needed to use. We hope this is part of a beginning.
TO SET OUR SOULS FREE….Dave Marsh and Danny Alexander write: Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball opens with an alarm, with air raid sirens blaring and tribal drums kicking. The singer, recognizing the enormity of what he’s dealing with, begins in quiet caution. He knocks on the palace door; he desperately seeks a map to bring him home; he stumbles over once-kind neighbors turned callous to his suffering and their own. Like the man in “Rank Stranger,” the Stanley Brothers song that influences so many rock dystopias, the singer can’t believe the devastation he’s seeing, not in the streets but in the faces, the gestures, the way people are standing and moving: “Where’s the eyes, the eyes with the will to see…Where’s the work that will set my hands, my soul free…Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?” There’s one thing he needs to make sure of: He chants it obsessively, as if himself amazed that he still fully believes it, even against all this evidence that it can’t be true: “We take care of our own, we take care of our own / Wherever this flag’s flown, we take care of our own.”
[In the following piece a few things might need to be clarified. Greta, my sister, died almost 4 years ago, at 80 years old. Often I want to have a conversation with her. Occasionally I'll write a letter, as this piece begins, because I still feel the loss and because there is something I want to say anyway. She was a trained classical musician who listened to me because she said she envied my ability to appreciate so many genre's that she could not. Chris Drew has contributed to this blog and I've written about him in the People's Tribune as well. Chris died on May 7, 2012 after a heroic battle with lung cancer. Bill Glahn is a friend and music writer and jack of all trades who shared his insights generously to a community of political thinkers and music enthusiasts of which I am privileged to be a part. Clicking the link for each song will lead you to a video recording of the song. The entire album may be heard by clicking on Wrecking Ball here. And last, the comments in this piece reflect what I think of this music, what I take from it into my life, in the spirit of Gwendolyn Brooks, when she wrote: "I give you my poem, it is my life, now do with it what you will." Because I do believe the Highway is Alive Tonight in ways I have never seen. This is the most amazing time in which to live.]
Dear Greta,
May 10 is drawing to a close. I wanted to wish you Happy Birthday, even if it is an abbreviated greeting. There are just so many things on my mind now, things that I want to talk over with you. Things like why I think this is such an amazing moment in history. Things like how it has felt — felt, not what I think about it, but felt — to wind up the artistic life of Chris Drew. I want to tell you how that feels. I want to tell you how when I looked into his eyes as I saw him dying, I thought every minute of you. That will never go away.
And I want to tell you, perhaps most of all, about music. I want to tell you about the Bruce Springsteen album, the one I have been listening to over an over again. Wrecking Ball. How I would have made you a copy, how you would have said the words were good, but the music is still too loud for your ears. How we would have had a conversation about the structure of the album. How I listened over an over to We Take Care of Our Own, learning by bits and pieces the irony and anger and ambiguity and hope in that song. How my friend Bill Glahn made me understand, even before I heard it, the meanings of Jack of All Trades, how the dirge resonates with me more than any other song in the album. How at the same time the travelers on the rocky road remind me so much of the rocky road we are all traversing, and how the bridge to Land of Hope and Dreams is so perfect. And how the tribute to Clarence Clemons which illuminates each show this tour, makes it clear why I am writing this letter. Bruce tells his audience: if you’re here, and we’re here, then they (Clarence and Danny Federici also) are here. And so it is with Chris Drew. And with you.
But as with Clarence’s now stilled sax, so it is with your stilled voice. Rest well.
May 10, 2012
The Highway Is Alive Tonight
I admit to some confusion, some anxiety when I first heard “We Take Care of Our Own,” the song that opens the new Bruce Springsteen record. “We take care of our own, wherever this flag’s flown,” he sings. And inside my head I said “Wait a minute: from Fort Bragg to Baghdad, we are not taking care of our own nor of others — or we are taking care of them like the mob does.” More and more, though, the song resonates with questions, ironies, ambiguities. Who are “we,” who are “our own,” what is “this flag,” and where indeed is it flown? This song cannot be taken at face value.
“The road to good intentions has grown dry as a bone.” This line ends the first verse, that emphasizes the stance of the song and the album. The “good intentions” –debatable of course, but rhetorically correct — of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” FDR’s “New Deal” have no promise left in them. They came from knocking at the door of the throne room. The throne! The uncrowned emperor of the USA. So when the singer intones that we take care of our own, from shotgun shack to the Superdome, it evokes an abdication of responsibility during Katrina specifically, but a more general abdication, a boast that covers a festering reality.
Where are the eyes with the will to see . . . where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?” This series of questions deepens the dissatisfaction with we take care of our own. We can’t really be doing what we are saying. And “this flag” — if it is the flag of the USA, that “wherever” also is an opening to a bigger question, since “this flag” is flown in the most distanced parts of the world, from countries in a crescent surrounding China and Russia, to the NATO countries to wherever there is an armed forces presence around the world, thousands of military bases. Are we taking care of our own? Even if “our own” is defined as US citizens? The casualties, deaths, trauma just among “our own” soldiers. But what about the question about who “our own” really is? Don’t we bear responsibility for the destruction of the countries we bomb, the people killed and left homeless? Are they not as much “our own” as the soldiers we have sent to render that destruction?
These are all questions raised by this song not because the song is explicit, but because it is deliberately ambiguous. And because of this it raises the ultimate question for me: how do we get to the place where “we” – the working class — take care of our own, protect our international class brothers and sisters, wherever our flag, the flag of the international working class, is flown. That is the challenge of this album and it starts from the first song.
“Easy Money” seems like it doesn’t belong. But here is this character in the bleak world, that is tumbling down without him even seeing it, already described, who takes his Smith and Wesson 38 to go out on the town looking for easy money. “Put on your red dress,” we’re goin’ out on the town “lookin’ for easy money.” Bravado without substance marks this song, it seems to me. Can’t make it any other way, which then leads into “Shackled and Drawn.” Bruce Prescott, in a blog he calls “The Mainstream Baptist,” writes about this song:
Bruce Springsteen describes the result of the inequities of our economic system in a number of songs on his new “Wrecking Ball” album. Here’s my favorite:
Gambling man rolls the dice,
working man pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill
Up on bankers hill, the party’s still going strong
Down here below we’re shackled and drawn.
Shackled and drawn, shackled and drawn
Pick up the rock son, carry it on
We’re trudging through the dark in
a world gone wrong
I woke up this morning shackled and drawn.
The gambler and the banker are the ones making the easy money. The poor boy in a world gone wrong can pick up his smith and wesson, but that won’t get him anywhere. The bankers rob you without a gun (or rather, with the armed force of the state behind them). The song ends calling on you to stand up and be counted and pray tonight.
Prescott might like “Shackled and Drawn” best, but “Jack Of All Trades” hits me hardest. “I’ll mow your lawn, clean the leaves out your drain,I’ll mend your roof to keep out the rain.” I’ll do anything, I can do anything — pull that engine apart – “the hurricane blows, brings a hard rain, when the blue sky breaks, feels like the world’s gonna change, we’ll start caring for each other, like Jesus said that we might, I’m a Jack of All Trades, we’ll be all right.” We’ll be all right is still sung like a dirge, an enduring funeral march almost, a death march, a survival march. But with a hint of possibility this time. It’s not the fantasy of easy money, it’s not the despair of shackled and drawn, it’s not the sarcasm or irony of we take care of our own. It is the bridge to possibility of taking care of our own.
Now, jack-of-all-trades, in my family recollection, was always followed by the phrase “master-of-none.” Meaning not being able to do anything well. You can always count on him, he can do anything, he’s a jack-of-all-trades; versus don’t let him do anything too complex, because he can’t do the really tough jobs. Taken collectively, and referring back to “we take care of our own,” the working class is that jack of all trades. All trades are found within the class, all are developed to their specialities within the class. The class will survive. The class will be all right.
I’m not writing an exegesis of each line or even each verse, but read these lyrics, listen to the patience and sorrow of “it’s all happened before, it’ll happen again,” living through rough times and good times, and bad times of all varieties, and yet you see a chance, a possibility, a new world that hearkens back to a promise made before (the Jesus image), meanwhile living with what exists, making and re-making.
the banking man grows fat
working man grows thin
it’s all happened before
it’ll happen again
now sometime tomorrow
come soaked in treasure and blood
we stand the drought
now we stand the flood
there’s a new world comin
I can see the light
I’m a jack of all trades
we’ll be all right
so you use what you’ve got
and you learn to make do
you take the old
and you make it new
. . .And then there is that one line, coming near the end, where frustration breaks out but where the tone is the same patient sound that has filled this song, the same dirge, and still the character says what he would do
if I had me a gun
I’d find the bastards and shoot em on sight.
No hint that that was coming.
The song ends with an instrumental wail of defiance. This is a Tom Morello solo, a scream of guitar sounds which says more than we’ll be all right, says we will triumph, foreshadows the challenge to those who wield the wrecking ball of the title song. Which then leads into “Death to My Hometown.”
This is not a quiet death, but it is accomplished without one shot being fired. No blood soaked the ground. No bombs from the sky. Still “they brought death to my home town.” The singer mourns the destroyed factories and homes, the vultures picked their bones. Intensity identifies the corporate enemy, and while others have commented about the allusion to Irish music, I hear a French carmagnole, the tumbrils of the mind filled with the bodies of the oppressor. In a workshop on May 13, leading up the the protests against the NATO summit taking place in Chicago, poet Matt Sedillo reminded his audience that the bombs raining down on civilians (and combatants) in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere were only part of the story. The economic side of NATO, the G8 were carrying out murder in the cities of their own countries, but without weapons of mass destruction, other than starvation, deprivation of health care, and numerous other methods accomplished without soaking the ground in blood. The very point that this song intensifies.
Next comes “This Depression,” another dirge. And death to my home town is something to be mourned, to be depressed about. I’ve been down, but never this low. I need your heart, I need your love in this depression. There is a depression of the economy, clearly spelled out in “Death to My Home Town,” alluded to in “Jack of All Trades” and “We Take Care of Our Own.” And perhaps when he sings “I’ve been strong but I’ve never felt so weak” it’s both the physical and emotional toll of the overwhelming and matching depression. I mean it is obvious that there is an emotional toll taken and sung about. But when he says “I’ve never been so low,” it seems that is both.
“Wrecking Ball,” the title song, is a song of defiance. Written about the destruction of baseball stadiums (Mets and Giants), these arenas assume a metaphorical relation to society, where indeed giants have also played the game and suffered the same consequences that we learned about in “Death To My Home Town,”. The character in this song, having weathered the coming and going of hard times over and over again, refuses to accept this fate. Bring on your wrecking ball is at once a voice of experience, coming from the depths of depression, and a challenge. Here is a John Henry for the modern era. In the mythic past, men strove to compete with machines, to prove they were better, faster, harder working. They could not be replaced. But as the machine itself was replaced, so was the life of the town in which they were housed. That death also squelched the lives of the people left behind. Except from out of the rubble, people emerge to challenge the wreckers.
What is it that can tell the rulers/destroyers of our society “Bring on your wrecking ball”? From where does the defeat of the new world order come? “No school ever taught it,” Springsteen sings, “no one ever bought it, Baby you’ve got it come on and give it to me.” This is the real thing. One thread running through all of Springsteen’s work has been trying to find out if love is real. In the context of this record, what are we to think of this love song, “You’ve Got It”? There is a quiet intensity to this piece, sort of a parallel in intensity to “Jack Of All Trades.” No school, because you can’t teach someone “this.” “It” is not a commodity to be bought and sold. We inherit this consciousness by our experience and by our devotion to exploring and learning. It demands an engagement with new ideas that challenge our connection to what makes up the old society. For me this means definitively a break with private property. I say “for me” knowing I am treading on my ground here, not necessarily Springsteen’s. But I would also argue that now that it is out in public, it is the responsibility of the listener to make of it what he or she will. And I would argue that this is a love song to the collective, and “give it to me” is the only love that can transform society.
And then comes “Rocky Ground,” which is my second favorite song on the album. We’ve been traveling over the rocky ground. We certainly have. From “We Take Care of Our Own” to this one, filled with religious allusion without hope for religious redemption. There’s a new day is coming (repeated quietly in the background), but its up to us. Of course every song on the album is a collaboration. But this one seems even more a collaboration of styles and artists, reinforcing the collective response to the collective experience of traveling on rocky ground. Just the repetition of “we’ve been traveling” makes this a journey of suffering and of quiet redemption. In the midst of this comes a gospel influenced rap segment that leads inevitably and seamlessly to the “Land of Hope and Dreams,” where all are welcome.
All of the cast out characters of the previous songs are welcome on the train leading to the “Land of Hope and Dreams.” This train is filled with people who will take care of their own. Whores, gamblers, lost souls, saints, sinners, losers and winners. Don’t know where you’re going but you know you won’t be back. Thankfully. We’ll take what we can carry and we’ll leave the rest. We don’t need the baggage that drains us where we live now. It is a glorious celebration, reaching back to “there’s a new day coming,” rescuing us from the depths of despair and misery. (The album contains a version that includes the Clarence Clemons solo; touring for the album and playing sax is Jake Clemons).
“We Are Alive” closes the album
. “We” are of course reading this. “We” are listening to this album. “We” are listening to Clarence Clemons saxophone solo, Clarence who died 6 months ago. “We” are the ancestors who died in freedom struggles, but who are alive and with us. Bruce intones, in his concert performances, “If you are here and we are here, then they are here.” We are alive if we are engaged in the struggle for the future that this album implies is possible.
In another song, from another album, one which he performs regularly with Tom Morello, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Springsteen’s narrator sings “the highway is alive tonight.” Indeed it is, it has not been so alive in decades. And if you look in their eyes, those who populate the highways, you will see the ghost of Tom Joad everywhere.
Commemorations are being held across the country this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the country’s greatest songwriters, Woody Guthrie. Born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, Guthrie wrote hundreds of folk songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Do Re Mi” and “The Ranger’s Command.” While Guthrie is best remembered as a musician, he also had a deeply political side. At the height of McCarthyism, Guthrie spoke out for labor and civil rights and against fascism. In this one-hour special, you will hear interviews and music from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg, and the historian Will Kaufman, author of the new book, “Woody Guthrie, American Radical.”
“Woody’s original songs, the songs that he wrote back in the 1930s … with these images of people losing their houses to the banks, of gamblers on the stock markets making millions, when ordinary working people can’t afford to make ends meet, and of people dying for want of proper free healthcare, you know, this song could have been written anytime in the last five years, really, in the United States of America,” says Bragg, who has long been inspired by Guthrie.
Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” was written in 1940 in response to Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” “Woody saw ['God Bless America'] as a strident, jingoistic, complacent, tub-thumping anthem to American greatness,” Kaufman says. “And now, he had just come from the Dust Bowl. He’d just come from the barbed-wire gates of California’s Eden there. He’d seen the Hoovervilles. He’d seen the bread lines. He’d seen labor activists getting their heads busted. And so, he’s thinking, what — God bless — what America, you know, is Kate Smith singing of?” In 2009, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed “This Land Is Your Land” for the inauguration of President Obama.
AMY GOODMAN: Commemorations are being held across the country this year to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of the country’s greatest songwriters, Woody Guthrie. Born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, Guthrie wrote hundreds of folk songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Do Re Mi” and this song, “The Ranger’s Command.”
NARRATOR: Two fragments of film survive of Guthrie performing. One of them, lost in the archives for 40 years has only just come to light.
WOODY GUTHRIE: [singing] But the rustlers broke on us in the dead hours of night; She ’rose from her blanket, a battle to fight. She ’rose from her blanket with a gun in each hand, Said: Come all of you cowboys, fight for your land.
AMY GOODMAN: A rare 1945 video recording of Woody Guthrie. Known as the Dust Bowl Troubadour, Guthrie became a major influence on countless musicians, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. While Woody Guthrie is best remembered as a musician, he also had a deeply political side. At the height of McCarthyism, Guthrie spoke out for labor and civil rights and against fascism. He died in 1967 after a long battle with Huntington’s disease. But his music lives on.
Over the next hour, we’ll hear from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg and the historian Will Kaufman. But first, Woody Guthrie, in his own words, being interviewed by the musicologist Alan Lomax
ALAN LOMAX: What did your family do? What kind of people were they, and where did they come from?
