Rainbow for sale

'Rainbow' is my favorite film on Judy Garland because it doesn’t show the usual cliché image of Judy as the sensitive genius driven by self destructive insecurities,but as an exploited entertainer driven by the real insecurities of being a contract player for MGM Studios in the 1930’s.
It’s a Judy being treated as a commodity to be bought sold or traded on terms determined by businessmen who care for nothing but profits
It’s a Judy being told what to do what to sing and what to say
At one point she is offered the magic shoes she wore in ‘Wizard of Oz’ as keepsakes by an MGM studio official.
“What for?”she says”its just another pair of shoes”

dead books

Ryerson Room Notes

Havn’t been up on the second floor of Atwater Library since I did a drama course there in 2002 and got too weak to make it up the stairs
Up there at the tip top of the marbled staircase a pillared landing circling around a ceiling skylight that only lets in a milky ghost white light doom of gloom
old old darkbrown decayed left behinds of Anglo Ascendancy Montreal that are for me sinister reminders of the past
Framed illuminated prints of King George V in 1931 and another of Queen Elizabeth 11 in 1953 with a plaque stating “Donated by the Members”
Another framed sepia photograph print of the library staff in 1937 when the library was still called the Mechanic’s Institute
I take a closer look at the faces and sure enough recognize the hard glint in the eyes of the young assistant librarian,Estelle Bentley,who was Head Librarian when I drifted into the place in 1961 looking too obviously like a kid off the Avenues with my DA haircut and collar up like Elvis so obviously I could not be allowed into the bookstacks

Today I had one of the younger volunteer librarians help me up the steps to the Ryerson Research Center Room,housing the personal library of one of Canada’s best known Marxist historians,with large sections on political economy,history of the labor movement and Marxism
Two volunteer librarians were setting up when I entered and during the whole time I was there setting was all they talked about
Not the contents of the books or papers but where they properly belonged on the shelves
The Ryerson Collection itself is interesting but selective in a way that comments only too clearly on the Communist Party’s distorting and deflective take on working class history
Example:
There is a booksize study on the wrecking of the militant Canadian Seaman’s Union by the Canadian government but no mention of one of the CSU’s key organizers Dan Daniels who later quit the CP in protest
Dan told me that when he handed in his membership card,shortly after the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet troops, he ended up yelling at the end of an argument
“Trotsky was right”
Its to Stanley Ryerson’s credit,I suppose,that he did not end up right of center like so many disillusioned ex-CPers but the complete collection of Stalin’s works lined up on the shelf still tells the tale
Dead books in a dying library

cannon fodder a la carte

3,131 Americans,2 Australians, 132 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, 6 Danes,2 Dutch,Estonians,1 Fijian,1 Hungarian,32 Italians, 1 Kazakh,3 Latvian,18 Poles,2 Romanians,5 Salvadoran,4 Slovaks,11 Spaniards,2 Thai and 18 Ukrainians have died in the war in Iraq as of February 15, 2007, according to a CNN count.
Sort of sounds like a take out order,doesn’t it?..
“Uh,gimme two Danes,two Thais,one Hungarian,twenty six Italians..oh?..no Canadian?.. but you think you’ll have some soon?..

hot Summer

The following is an analysis on the iraqi war by american historian Mike Davis
He says,amongst other things, that he expects strikes or mutinies in the American army by the end of the summer,a prediction based on fact that a third of the American troops over there are against the war
That would explain why the majority of top officers in Iraq themselves called for withdrawal
They are old enough to remember what happened in vietnam when the American troops starting in 1968,refused to go out on combat duty
The inability of the Washington elite to appreciate whats happening stems from their elitist perspective
They cannot imagine foot soldiers or any of the lower ranks of the lower class actually thinking for themselves and acting in their own interests
Gonna be a hot summer


Socialist Worker 2038, 14 February 2007
Features
Mike Davis on US politics

Not since 1949 has the US foreign policy establishment been so theoretically unified as it is today around the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton plan and the “realist” strategy of multilateral imperialism.
All the leading figures from the George Bush senior and Bill Clinton years are singing in unison – a dramatic contrast to 1968, during the Vietnam War, when open civil war raged in the ranks of the Cold War mandarins.
The neo-conservatives are politically discredited and intellectually marginalised.
Yet their ultimate goal – a military attack on Iran – looks highly likely.
Despite the midterm election victory of the Democratic Party, US policy, for the moment at least, is still being dictated from the bunker.
George Bush junior (the puppet of Dick Cheney) is no more willing to concede defeat or personal error than was Hitler in early 1945.
But what would the victory of the “realist” consensus bring us?
Possibly a phased withdrawal (if that is possible) from the wreckage of Iraq,but an intensified emphasis on collaborative military interventions with Europe and possibly Japan.
Afghanistan – another wrecked country governed by druglords and mass murderers – is the realist utopia,the “good war” that needs to be waged everywhere.
Imperialism
The debate over Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s forced at least temporary reflection on the underlying dogmas of Cold War anti-Communism. Today’s debates are simply about “smart” versus “dumb” imperialism.
The Democrats’ critique of Bush’s policy in Iraq is about reinforcing the larger logic of the phoney “war on terror”,including interventions in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, the oppression of the Palestinians,and so on.
There is another paradox – the vote that gave Congress back to the Democrats was an overwhelmingly anti-war vote, yet – unlike during the Vietnam War – there is no national anti-war movement to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.
The broad grassroots movement that so dramatically contested the march to war in 2002-3 was absorbed into the Howard Dean campaign during the Democratic primaries in 2004 and then liquidated altogether during John Kerry’s presidential candidacy.
If organised anti-war forces have continued to exist in New York,Washington DC and the Bay area,the movement has also lost its national presence and identity.
Hopefully the large and very grave demonstration in Washington at the end of last month – I have never seen American protestors so sober or conscious of the darkness of the hour – is the beginning of the rebirth of a national movement.
Otherwise, the Democrats – the Black Caucus and a few genuine progressives aside – have no more real interest in ending the war than Bush has had in killing or capturing Osama Bin Laden.
Moreover, there is a shrinking and small difference between the Democrats and the Bush regime over Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, etc.
According to one poll, only one third of GIs support the US strategy in Iraq.
Nothing is more unpopular than the extensive deployment of the National Guard in Iraq and the high casualties these “dad’s army” units have suffered.
I live in San Diego, one of the most militarised cities in the country.
I have been convinced by conversations with young sailors and Marines that unless there is some movement toward withdrawal, you will see strikes or de facto mutinies by the end of this summer.
More immediately, there is the defiant symbol of Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first regular US army officer to refuse to serve in Iraq.
He has refused to serve on the grounds that the war is “immoral and unlawful… and would compel complicity in war crimes”.
His court martial began last week in Fort Lewis, Washington.
It has become the rallying point for anti-war resistance within the military.


Further reading
Mike Davis’s latest book,'Buda’s Wagon: A brief history of the car bomb'is published this month.
Also by Mike Davis:
• Planet of Slums',looks at the growth,development and political implications of the huge slum cities of the Global South.
• 'Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World',charts the role of imperialism and colonialism in the creation of so-called natural disasters in the Global South.
• 'The Monster at our Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu',is a timely examination of the role of big business and neoliberal governments in the creation of the avian flu crisis.
These are all available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE, phone 020 7637 1848 or go to www.bookmarks.uk.com

contortions of history

An episode on the History Channel from the ‘Peoples’s History of Canada’series produced by Mark Starowitz,former radical student at McGill.It covers the same historical period of the 1860’s that I examine from a very different perspective in my play “Joe Beef:A History of Pointe Saint Charles”
Starowitz profiles some of the Fathers of Confederation,Thomas D’Arcy McGee,Sir John A. Macdonald,Sir Georges Etienne Cartier,focusing on their private and personal pains.He lingers with soft background music on the sorrow that Sir John A. felt when he lost his first wife and son
No mention of the impersonal and massive suffering of ordinary working class people due to the economic and political policies Macdonald championed in parliament,
policies that lead to the premature deaths of one out of every four kids born in the Pointe
Starowitz presents McGee and Cartier as pristine champions of a united Canada based on equal opportunity
No mention of the fact that both McGee and Cartier were paid promoters of the Grand Trunk Railway,the same company that used the militia to shoot down workers in the Grand Trunk yards in the Pointe when they went on strike for a living wage
He does mention that there was extreme poverty in the 1860's in cities like Montreal but fails to make the connection that this poverty was largely the result of the same people eulogized as Canadian heros
Its no surprise that Starowitz didn't make that connection because if he did,he wouldn't be a television producer.

new york city 1965

My experience in New York City in 1965?
I swam right into the barricuda’s mouth surprising him into spitting me back out

blue surprise

Not many people in the EMC theatre last night maybe because ‘Factory Girl’ the story of 60's Superstar Fashion Queen,Edie Sedgwick,got a bad review in the Globe&Mail.
But the director of the film cared about what happened to poor little rich girl Edie and that’s what mattered to me
He took a side
He took her side
Edie was in New York in the Village in 1965 around the same time as me but I wasn’t able to connect
I took my name from one of Dylan’s songs but she went to bed with him
Dylan its seems warned Edie that Andy Warhol was a bloodsucker
She became part of Warhol’s reinvention of Art as a Spectacle
Used up and discarded like an empty Campbell’s soup can
Dead at 28
Nobody in that small audience could know like me what it was like to be lost in New York City
Nobody else remained seated listening to Tim Hardin’s song when the lights went back on
“Hidden in a red balloon
Got a blue surprise
Took the lovelight from my eyes
blue,blue surprise”