In Which I Ape Larry King
It turns out maintaining a blog while taking on increasing responsibilities at work and trying to finish my Masters degree and trying to maintain some semblance of a personal life is a bit tricky. Plus, I think Facebook statuses suck up an alarming amount of my wit (or potential wit). But before I throw in the towel and start a Twitter, I’m going to try my hand at one of those lazy Larry King round-ups of commentary, reviews and “observations.” (Actually, I’ve never really seen a full installment of Mr. Suspenders’ program, so I’m really just aping those even lazier parodic send-ups of Larry King.) Either these are placeholders for bigger, better posts or else they are the aborted remains of very promising ideas.
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There’s a certain poignancy in that moment of steeling oneself at the front door for a charging dog who will never again slam his 90 pound body into your knees. Or how a leash, brush and bowl in a plastic supermarket bag can require the same negotiation as a chest full of heirloom jewels at the reading of a will. And when does dropping little bits of food on the ground cease being nice, and start being rude?
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Upon third listening, the new Spoon record (a sleeper, like all others before it) sounds like a new, incredible advance. Like many of “Transference’s” reviewers, I’m attracted by the idea of Britt Daniel & Co. fully embracing the bombast that they have spent four successive records stripping to the bone. But the more that the band breaks down their songs to the most spare and elemental, the more I enjoy following them on their journey. I’m ready for their next record, comprising the sounds of Daniels’ pencil scratching paper while Jim Eno tunes his snare.
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How hard is it to find a good coffee table?! I realize that furniture is particularly subjective to taste (and there are few people more particular than me), but sheesh. If it’s not one thing, it’s the color. Black, for the record, is not tobacco, not coffee and certainly not mahogany. It seems like everything out there alternates between the extremely baroque or the post-post-modern. Gahd forbid you want to protect the wood finish with a little bit of glass. Oh, no. If you want a glass-top coffee table, the glass will be held aloft by skinny angular metal, positive vibes and pixie dust.
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Having as many obituaries on my site as I do, I’ve grown accustomed to estranged friends of the deceased learning the bad news by stumbling upon my blarg via Gooooooogle searches. It is somewhat dispiriting to see how long it can take before a good college buddy, former comrade or ex-girlfriend decides to investigate a bounced email or missing Christmas card. The responses to one particular comrade’s death (no names, comrades) are notable for their extreme sadness and their extreme tardiness. Did he make deep, profound connections with his friends and then retreat into his own private world? Am I doomed to do the same?
I’m reminded of the outlaw country singer / mystery writer Kinky Friedman, who writes of his shared fear of dying in his apartment and being devoured by his hungry cat before anyone notices. In his novels, Kinky writes of the “M.I.T. System.” The idea is quite simple. “M.I.T.” stands for Man In Trouble, and the point is to establish a reciprocal understanding with a friend that every few days each will call the other and say nothing more than, “M.I.T., M.I.T., M.I.T.” (Because, really, who wants to force small talk every two or three days?) If you don’t receive an “M.I.T.” call from your friend after three days, convince his Super to let you into the apartment to search for his half-eaten corpse and lay some kibble out for the ravenous cat.
I’ve made “M.I.T.” arrangements with a handful of friends over the years and, come to think of it, I have not received a “M.I.T.” call from any of them, nor they from I, in a long while. Better start Goooooogling.
A Requiem for Departed Comrades
Socialism truly is a dying religion. Tonight, I’m lighting some red candles for some wonderful comrades who have passed on this year. Yesterday, I learned that Ruth Greenberg-Edelstein passed away on November 24th. Ruth was a stalwart of the Socialist Party in upstate New York. On the National Committee, she was an effective advocate for feminist process and gender balance. A retired faculty member at both SUNY and Rutgers, she had, more or less, left active service on the National Committee by the time I got on there – although she had clearly left her stamp. I remember her as a friendly and vivacious backbencher who genuinely enjoyed the company of her comrades – especially the younger ones. Herself, she seemed much younger than she must have actually been, which is why her death comes as such a shock.
Her death follows so closely that of her husband J. David Edelstein, who passed away this July. His death was – forgive me – slightly less of a shock. Retired from Syracuse University for goodness knows how long, he was 90 years old and physically frail. Mentally – and ideologically – he was sharp as ever, and firm and determined in his convictions. Maddeningly so, from my perspective as a teenage socialist. How could such a good Marxist reject our Socialist Party Presidential campaigns in favor of the Greens? In retrospect, I came to see the logic of his argument, but at the time I got hot and bothered in our debates, and out of line, while he remained calm and civil. Fortunately, I was able to apologize while it still mattered. He remained a calm presence and a beacon of sorts. Looking through my inbox, I found a four-year-old email from Dave, gently admonishing me for an irreverent (and highly controversial!) cover from my two-issue stint as editor of “The Socialist” magazine while firmly standing in favor of my continued tenure as editor.
Finally, the most upsetting passing of the year was of Robert W. Tucker. Rob was my favorite old man in the party. A Quaker pacifist and expert on socialized medicine, he had become a lovable curmudgeon by the time I joined the party. For example, Rob had used his (slight) loss in hearing to make a mockery out of Robert’s Rules. I remember a young comrade from Boston rising to make a speech during a convention, and Rob (LOUDLY) whispering to his brother beside him “HE’S THE BEST ONE WE HAVE IN THAT STATE – GOD HELP US!!!” Kinda took the wind out of the sails of the young man’s speech.
In the true spirit of socialism, Rob would share his talent for LOUDLY whispering by acting as an amplifier for your private asides, as when the same young comrade from Boston took a shot at our YPSL National Secretary who was running for Vice Chair of the Party by questioning if the duties of both offices weren’t too overwhelming. “Well, I did them both at the same time,” I whispered to Rob. “YEAH, SHAUN DID THEM BOTH,” Rob shouted to the convention hall. No one ruled him out of order.
It was a bit of a kick in the guts to see see Rob quoted in Maurice Isserman’s biography of Michael Harrington, which I’ve been working my way through since before I learned of Rob’s passing. In it, Rob tells of Harrington’s tendency to date skinny minnie model-types who would sit – wearing their brand new leopard-skin pillbox hats – in the back of whatever hall Mike had dragged them to while he carried on with speeches and parliamentary maneuvers. Isserman does not publish the ribald conclusion of this anecdote that Rob loved to share, which involves (an unofficial) debate about the protein content of semen and Harrington admonishing all participants, “Oh, no, don’t tell her that!”
Nor does Isserman (or anyone as far as I can tell), share accounts of the younger Shachtmanites’ propensity for group-sex at conventions, in which, Rob, as a Quaker, was too prudish to participate but not too prudish to inquire what it was like. “It’s a wonderful feeling of comradeship,” he was told.
Rob was full of stories like these, and I loved hearing them. I don’t think I had seen Rob since the 2005 convention in Newark. By 2007, I had quit the party. Looking through my records, my last contact with Rob was at the time of my resignation from the party’s National Committee to which he responded with a fairly stern disapproval. Four days after I resigned from the party Rob noted his 50th year as a member, asking – a broad list; I was merely the audience – if he would finally be shown the secret handshake.
A few weeks ago, after being assigned to Philadelphia (Rob’s hometown) by my union in August, I wrote to Rob’s AOL email account to see if he was up to meeting for dinner. His wife – well, widow, now – Cornelia wrote back to inform me that Rob passed away in February after a long illness beginning the previous November. I cannot begin to tell you how shitty I feel that it took me so long to learn of Rob’s passing. I’m mad at a lot of people about not being informed at the time of his passing, but none more than myself.
Robert W. Tucker deserves a fuller obituary than this, and hopefully one day I’ll feel up to writing it. But for now, i just feel awful. But grateful to have written this much and to have known him while I could.
Alas Poor Busky. I Knew Him, Facebook.
It’s been previously noted the unnatural oddness that is leaving behind a virtual representation of oneself on the myface. As this shit gets more mainstream, the awkwardness gets more familiar and yet more surreal. In the Times, Adam Cohen writes of a friend’s Facebook profile becoming a sort of living shrine to a dead-too-soon friend. At least it served that function to those who friended him up while he was still alive, and until his surviving family chooses to pull the plug on the profile. But what of those who die unloved, unmourned, unfriended?
I recently threw in the towel and joined Facebook, the creepy, creepy improvement on Friendster and MySpace. Immediately, the computer intelligence starts recommending friends I should connect with. How does this bloody thing know the names of girls that I went on one or two dates with three or four years ago? And why does this blasted thing want me to be friends with Don Busky? Busky died late last year, and in life we were something closer to enemies than friends.
He was always an odd fellow, more noted for his reclusiveness than his actual politics or personality. As an ambitious young turk, I quickly butted heads with the guy in an attempt to recruit eager new recruits to charter a more active Philadelphia local of the Socialist Party and overthrow an innocent savant who was more interested in publishing silly little zines with a socialist bent. Shortly after I showed up for work in the party’s national office, as a teenage socialist in 1996, my buddy Clement Joseph started cracking jokes about the disembodied brain in a jar that was Donald F. Busky. My only interactions with the comrade were a fairly acrimonious e-mail exchange over his failure to properly represent the party (or, indeed, turn up to a single meeting) in the “Unity 2000” rally planning. His last message to me (and every party member for whom he could find an email address) was addressed, simply, “Cde. Richman owes some apologies.” I met him a few months later at a YPSL convention near Rittenhouse Square in 2001. We spoke not a word, but it was the first time I had been in his physical presence. The brain in a jar was a large man, shy and soft-spoken. He was a devoted Mac user, a labor buff and adjunct professor. We might have been friends if we hadn’t started as enemies. It was a sad loss, but C’est la vie. I soon left the party, and didn’t hear about Busky again until Gabe Ross passed on the unfortunate news about his death last December.
The next time I saw Cde. Busky’s name was on an open public records access request for the list of adjunct faculty at a community college down in southern New Jersey, where I’m helping the part-timers form a union. Prof. Donald F. Busky gets to be a voter in their union election, except that he couldn’t possibly vote “Union Yes” (as he surely would have) because he is No Longer Employed. Still, it was a kick in the guts to see his name on that OPRA list, just as it is a kick in the guts to see him recommended as a friend on Facebook whenever I log in, and to see his name and home address on a mailing label for a mailing we worked on last Friday for the union campaign.
I don’t think his elderly mother (if she’s still alive), or any other surviving relative knows enough to get Cde. Busky’s Facebook profile retired. Therefore, he will continue to haunt me. Perhaps I’ll learn to be a better comrade to those who have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil.
Remembering Sophie Gerson
I learned today from a comrade that Sophie Gerson passed away on March 20, 2006 at the age of 96. Sophie was a lifelong Communist activist whose own work was overshadowed by her husband, Simon W. Gerson, the writer, champion of proportional democracy and shoulda been City Councilman from Brooklyn. At Si’s memorial a year earlier, speaker after speaker (including yours truly) paid tribute to his illustrious career as a public Communist and lightning rod for controversy, but only one (not me, perhaps it was Tim Wheeler) took the opportunity to point out that Sophie was notorious–indeed, framed for murder–before Si’s name was ever known.
In early 1929, 19-year-old Sophie Melvin joined striking National Textile Workers Union members at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, NC. The Gastonia strike, one of NTWU’s smallest at the time, was part of a larger southern organizing campaign initiated by the Communist-led Trade Union Unity League. The T.U.U.L. presaged the C.I.O. movement in the 30’s, training many of activists whose work made that mass upsurge possible. The strike was called in January over some of the lowest-paying, most sped up and stretched out working conditions in the entire south.
Sophie organized a children’s support section in the strikers’ tent city and was present on June 7 when a carload of armed police invaded and declared war on the strikers. In the melee, one union organizer was seriously wounded, three police deputies were slightly wounded and the chief of police, O.F. Aderholt, was killed. Seventy-five strikers were arrested for the murder of the police chief and sixteen were eventually indicted. Among these were three women, Vera Buch, Amy Shechter and Sophie Melvin (this was not, notes Philip Foner in his History of the Labor Movement…, young Sophie’s first arrest connected to her union agitation). The three young women became an immediate cause celibre, their hefty bail raised by Communist charities and national speaking tours serving as strike support fundraisers. Public outcry caused local officials to drop the charges against the three young women, who continued their propaganda work in spite of the losing campaign. By September, strikers were returning to work without a union, although the Loray mill had reduced the work week to 50 hours(!). The real value of the strike was that it laid crucial groundwork for New Deal and C.I.O. organizing that was to shortly follow.
Si Gerson was a cub reporter for the Daily Worker when he was assigned to the Gastonia strike, met and fell in love with Sophie. Of course, they married and were a lovely couple. Sophie continued to be a political activist, in addition to being a mother and grandmother, but Si’s work cast a long shadow. It is a shame that while news of Si’s death reached me by notices from comrades in the Socialist Party, colleagues in the Coalition for Free and Open Elections and general e-mail listserve forwards, I had to learn about Sophie’s passing in passing conversation with a comrade, a year and a half after the fact. Sophie Gerson (nee Melvin) is truly an unsung American hero and deserves more of a monument than this little blog post.