Casablanca One of America’s Favorite Movies Opened in Wide Release

Although it had an official premier at the Hollywood Theatre back on November 27, 1942 to make it eligible for the 1943 Academy Awards, Casablanca went into general release 83 years ago today on January 24.  That coincided with the last day of the Casablanca Conference with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill which mapped out the general strategy for the Western Front in Europe and was a little more than two months since the city was liberated by the British in Operation Torch.  Both events made the title instantly significant to war-time movie goers.

Although Casablanca misses the top ranks of most lists of the greatest films of all time, it never fails to score at or near the top of lists of favorites.  Never intended to be great art, it none-the-less is the epitome of how the crass movie-by-committee method of the Golden Age of the American studio system could often achieve it despite of itself.

Now a revered classic, the production was troubled and chaotic, and the film was only moderately successful in its first run.  But it swept the 1943 Oscars with eight nominations and three wins including Best Picture, Michael Curtiz for Best Director, and Best Screenplay for Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch.  Humphrey Bogart was nominated for his first romantic lead as the jaded café owner Rick and Claude Raines got a nod as Best Supporting Actor for his role as the Vichy French policeman Captain Louis Renault.  Somehow the luminous Ingrid Bergman was denied a nomination as Ilsa.  From then on, its reputation has only continued to grow.

Everybody comes to Ricks, including freedom fighting refugee Victor Lazlo and his wife Ilsa--a woman with a past.

Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis bought Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, in January 1942 for $20,000, then a Hollywood record for an unproduced play.  He assigned the script to the twin Epstein brothers who made major changes in the story and characters.  Veteran writer Koch was brought in later.  In addition, several other un-credited writers contributed to the script including re-writes by Casey Robinson.  The script was in continuous revision throughout shooting.  Bergman later said she never knew who Ilsa would pick in the love triangle until handed a shooting script on the set of the final scene.  The film's memorable final line “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” was added weeks after principal shooting was completed.

Curtiz, a Hungarian Jew who had relatives still trapped in Hitler’s Europe, was tapped as director only after the first choice, Warner’s ace William Wyler, was unavailable.  

Several actors were considered for the roll of Rick.  Ronald Reagan was mentioned in early press stories on the film, but this was mostly just to keep his name in the papers.  Warner Bros. knew that he would enter the service before shooting began.  Bogart was a long-standing member of the Warner stock company best known for his tough guy and gangster rolls often in support of top studio stars James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and George Raft.  But the Maltese Falcon and High Sierra had recently moved him up to the top ranks of studio assets.  With some trepidation he was cast in the unconventional romantic lead.

Likewise, Ann Sheridan—who would have played the female lead as an American as envisioned in the original play—and European beauties Hedy Lamarr and Michèle Morgan were considered before Swedish born Ingrid Bergman was cast as Ilsa.  Austrian actor Paul Henreid fresh off a triumph as a suave leading man to Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, was cast as the noble Eastern European resistance hero Victor Laszlo, Ilsa’s husband.  Just as he feared, the stiff Laszlo typecast him and prevented him from becoming a major leading man.  The large cast also included Warner standbys Raines; Conrad Veidt, an anti-Nazi German who made a Hollywood career of playing Third Reich villains; and Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, both of whom had appeared with Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.

Rick and Ilsa in Paris,  "Here's looking at you, kid." 

Max Steiner scored the film, but its most memorable musical moments were provided by Rick’s piano playing pal Sam, played by Dooley Wilson, and by the stirring singing Les Marseilles at a critical moment.  Wilson made an instant classic of As Time Goes By, a ballad of middling popularity by ‎Herman Hupfeld that had been floating around since 1931.

A rousing highlight of the film was the spontaneous singing of  Les Marseilles at Rick's as Nazi officers look on. 

The melodramatic plot focused on a ridiculous MacGuffin. Letters of Transit were blank documents signed by a Vichy general that supposedly would allow the bearer to travel freely and were the magic documents needed by the refugees crowding Rick’s Café Américain in the French Moroccan city of Casablanca to get to neutral Portugal and from there perhaps to the safety of Britain or the U.S.  Two of these letters fall into the hands of proprietor Rick Blaine, a cynical American expatriate with a reputedly shady past just as his former lover, Ilsa, arrives with her husband Victor.  In flashback we learn of a near idyllic romance between Rick and Ilsa in Paris which ends when she disappears as German troops occupy the city.  She had never told him of her marriage or left any message as to why she did not meet him at the train station as planned to escape the city with him.

The rest of the film revolves around the search by Captain Renault, at the instance of the Nazi officer Major Stasser, for the valuable stolen letters of transit, and with the moral dilemmas of Rick and Ilsa.  In the end the French cop, the crusty American whose “shady past” turns out have been running guns to Ethiopia to be used against the invading Italians and fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and the wife torn between two loves each makes a sacrifice for the greater good.

Rick explains things to Ilsa at a fog shrouded airport. 

Rick explained it to Ilsa in the fog at the airport:

Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life… I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.

Rick’s anti-fascist adventures would have meant that he was some kind of a Red, most likely a Communist.   Although there were some Western backed (British and French) pre-war government leaders in Eastern Europe who we either underground or heading to Britain to join a government in exile, most of the resistance figures were Socialists/Social Democrats or Communists.  Most of the Communists would have sought protection in the Soviet Union.  Even during a war with the U.S. in alliance with the USSR,  those connections were potentially dangerous to the studio.  Warner execs finally did not demand script changes betting the political naiveté of popcorn munching Americans would make those political connection sail over their heads.  And it did.

Many years later writer Julius Epstein would say that the script contained, “more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there’s nothing better.”   It certainly worked in Casablanca!
 

International Treaty Made Nuclear Arms Illegal—Guess Who Didn’t Join?

Although it barely made a ripple in the American press and media in 2021 something astonishing happened while we were focused on an insurrection, an inauguration, and the Coronavirus pandemic.  The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), a/k/a the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty came into effect on January 22 making the ultimate weapons of mass destruction internationally illegal.  Of course not a single bomb was disarmed and no defiant malefactor states held accountable.  Yet however simply symbolic, the Treaty represented a major breakthrough and offered some dim hope that the famous Doomsday Clock might be turned back just a bit.

The Treaty came into effect after Belize, Jamaica, Malta, Nauru, Nigeria, Niue, Sudan, and Zimbabwe either signed or acceded to the agreement in 2020 bringing the total number of supporting states to 86 signatories and 51 parties. 

This map shows the parties to the Treaty in green and the signatories in yellow as of the agreement becoming international law.

Who didn’t sign?  Every acknowledged or suspected nuclear power—the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—or states on the verge of developing weapons like Iran.  Most reasonably advanced industrial nations with access to plutonium or enriched uranium can probably join the nuclear club within a few years of intentional development.  Of these with at least rumored aspirations only Brazil signed. 

Only a handful of small Western European nations—Ireland, Austria, Liechtenstein, San Marino, the Vatican, and Malta are in the pact. No members of NATO are.  In Eastern Europe Kazakhstan is the lonely member of the anti-nuclear agreement.

So who do we thank for this international breakthrough?  Almost all of Latin America and the Caribbean, much of Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania.  Many of the signatories were among the smallest nations on Earth in both population and land mass punching way above their weight.

Some may wonder why if the treaty doesn’t include those with the ability to blow up the world and is apparently toothless for enforcement it matters at all.  Its proponents assert that is an “unambiguous political commitment” to achieve and maintain a nuclear-weapon-free world.  Unlike a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention, it was not intended to contain all of the legal and technical measures required to reach the point of elimination. Such provisions would instead be the subject of future negotiations.  

The Ban Treaty helped stigmatize nuclear weapons and serve as a catalyst for a move to elimination.  Unlike other weapons of mass destruction—chemical and biological—or recklessly indiscriminate to civilian populations—anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions—nuclear arms are not prohibited in a comprehensive and universal manner.  The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968—the oldest and most important curb on such arms, contains only partial prohibitions, and nuclear-weapon-free zone treaties prohibit nuclear weapons only within certain geographical regions.

 

Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a series of protest camps established to protest nuclear weapons being placed at the Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Berkshire, England in 1981, a catalyst event for the international anti-nuke movement.  

 The origins of the treaty can be traced directly back to the Ban the Bomb movement of the 1950’s, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Britain in 1981, and 60 years of peace activism as expatriate American singer and activist Peggy Seeger, a long-time resident of the United Kingdom, pointed out.

That anti-nuclear activism has waxed and waned over the decades and has often been overshadowed by anti-war activism on specific conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and perpetually Israeli/Palestinian.  But it never went away.

Proposals for a nuclear weapon ban treaty first emerged following a review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2010, at which the five officially recognized nuclear-armed state parties—the U.S. Russia, Britain, France and China—rejected calls for the start of negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention. Disarmament advocates first considered starting this process without the big five states as a path forward and a less technical treaty concentrated on the ban of nuclear weapons appeared to be a more realistic goal.

Three major intergovernmental conferences in 2013 and 2014 on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, held in Norway, Mexico, and Austria, strengthened the international resolve to outlaw nuclear weapons. The second such conference, in Mexico in February 2014, concluded that the prohibition of a certain type of weapon typically precedes, and stimulates, its elimination.

In 2014, a group of non-nuclear-armed nations known as the New Agenda Coalition (NAC) presented the idea of a nuclear-weapon-ban treaty to the NPT state parties as a possible “effective measure” to implement Article VI of the NPT, which required all states parties to pursue negotiations in good faith for nuclear disarmament. The NAC argued that a ban treaty would operate alongside and in support of the NPT.

In 2015, the UN General Assembly established a working group with a mandate to address “concrete effective legal measures, legal provisions and norms” for attaining and maintaining a nuclear-weapon-free world. In August 2016, it adopted a report recommending negotiations in 2017 on a “legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination”.  The vote on the resolution was 123 in favor, 38 against, and 16 abstaining.  North Korea was the only country possessing nuclear weapons that voted for this resolution, though it did not subsequently take part in negotiations.

 

Ambassador. Elayne Whyte Gómez, Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations Office in Geneva was President of the UN Conference sessions that drafted and adopted the Nuclear ban treaty. 

The United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination first met in March 2017 at U.N. Headquarters in New York City.  132 nations participated.  At the end, the President of the negotiating conference, Elayne Whyte Gómez, permanent representative of Costa Rica to the UN in Geneva, called the adoption of a treaty by July 7 “an achievable goal”. Representatives from governments, international organizations, and civil society, such as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, noted the positive atmosphere and strong convergence of ideas among negotiating participants. They agreed that the week-long debates  set the stage well for the negotiations in June and July.

After  Gómez presented a first draft of the treaty in May several European and NATO nations noted that draft Article 1, 2a prohibiting any stationing of nuclear weapons on their own territory would require them to end contracts on nuclear sharing with the US.  They therefore refused to participate in on-going negotiations.  The only NATO member participating in the treaty negotiations was the Netherlands which came under enormous diplomatic pressure from America and Germany.

The second conference started on June 15 and was scheduled to conclude on July 7, with 127 out of 193 UN members participating.  On June 27 “Join and destroy” language was added for current nuclear powers which was somewhat modified later.  A new provision added acceptance of the peaceful use of nuclear technology.

A final third draft clarified language but also debated a limited escape card. The withdrawal clause provided “in exercising its national sovereignty, [...] decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of the Treaty have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country”. The majority perspective was that this condition was subjective, and no security interests can justify genocide, nor can mass destruction contribute to security.  Since a neutral withdrawal clause not giving reasons was not accepted by the minority, the respective Article 17 was accepted as a compromise. Safeguards against arbitrary use are the withdrawal period of twelve months and the prohibition of withdrawal during an armed conflict.

The much tinkered with final draft was adopted on July 7 was with 122 countries in favor, 1 opposed (Netherlands), and 1 abstention (Singapore). Among the countries voting for the treaty’s adoption were South Africa and Kazakhstan, both of which formerly possessed nuclear weapons and gave them up voluntarily. Iran and Saudi Arabia also voted in favor of the agreement although Iran seemed to be in development of the weapons and the Saudis had financed Pakistan’s Islamic Bomb and was suspected of planning to buy the results for its own use.

Global Parliamentarians, many of them from Western nations but not in governments, campaigned for the Treaty's adoption.

Not every nation that voted for adoption ultimately officially signed the treaty or became parties to it.  57 nations signed in 2017.  Others followed in fits and starts over the last four years until the critical mass to make the treaty official international law.

In December 2021, Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said: 

We do not support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Seeking to ban nuclear weapons through a treaty that does not include any of the countries that actually possess nuclear weapons is not likely to produce any results.

Along with other nuclear-armed states, the United States said that it does “not accept any claim that [the TPNW] contributes to the development of customary international law”.  It also called on all states that are considering supporting the  TPNW  “to reflect seriously on its implications for international peace and security.”

n October 2020 with the TPNW’s entry into force imminent the US called on states that had already ratified the treaty to withdraw their support.  However, in September 2021, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and international Security Bonnie Jenkins, said that the United States is no longer “telling countries that they shouldn’t sign” the TPNW.

The incoming Biden administration was expected to resume negotiations with Iran over the agreement that Trump abandoned in which they agreed to halt arms development.  It leaned on Israel on their implied threats to use the nukes that they pretend not to have against regional rivals.  

Relations with North Korea were entirely unpredictable. The administration remained committed to the traditional American position of nuclear deterrence, although it left the door slightly ajar  to negotiations to stave off an expensive new arms race and perhaps somewhat reduce the Pentagon nuclear arms budget.  

In Russia Vladimir Putin has been belligerent on nuclear weapons believing that they are essential to rebuilding Russian prestige and influence as a world power.  He has long promoted the use of tactical nuclear weapons which could be deployed if NATO pressed too closely in the old Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.  After his full scale invasion of Ukraine bogged down with heavy casualties and enough heavy armament and artillery destroyed to seriously drain Russian arsenals and Western boycotts and sanctions devastated the economy Putin publicly advanced the notion he was ready to use nukes on the battle field, against infrastructure, and even against staging areas for Western arms supplies in adjacent NATO states.  Trump’s cozy subservient relationship with Putin means that he would be glad to leverage those threats to pressure Ukraine’s allies to withdraw support allowing for an imposed “fair settlement” in which the invaded country would lose a third or more of its territory and most of its industrial capacity and would be barred from joining NATO or forming bi-lateral military alliances.  Under that scenario NATO would be crippled, another long time Trump goal.

Putin has also touted the possible development and deployment of a new super weapon that would make Western nuclear deterrence and the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) obsolete sort of like the Doomsday machine in Stanley Kubrick’s How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The return of a now politically unrestrained Trump means Isreal’s Benjamin Netanyahu will be untethered from any US pressure for restraint and launch long-threatened strikes on Iranian nuclear program facilities and support, a flashpoint for a probably uncontainable broader war.

And then there is Trump’s bromance with the unpredictable Joker in the deck Kim Jung Un of North Korea whose erratic behavior and threatening bomb and medium and intercontinental missiles gave previous President’s fits. 

All in all despite the well-meaning Treaty an adjustment closer than ever to midnight on the Doomsday Clock is in the offing.

Protestors at the White House demanded the US sing the Treaty. 

The future of real nuclear elimination lies with the people of the world who could launch a major international uprising if annihilation once again overtly threatens us all.
 

Lust, Seduction, Incest, and Suicide in The First American Novel

The Power of Seduction: or, The Triumph of Nature, first edition with a sensational front piece. 

Note—It has been a tumultuous time here at this modest blog and in the country.  It may now be some relief for us to return to our more customary humdrum business such as looking in the nooks and crannies for interesting tidbits.  If you have been missing that, here it is.  But we will remain vigilant and ready to be of humble service to the Resistance as circumstances require.

When The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature was issued anonymously in Boston on January 21, 1789 the publisher, Isaiah Thomas & Company, promised that the book was, “Intended to represent the specious causes, and to Expose the fatal CONSEQUENCES, of SEDUCTION; To inspire the Female Mind With a Principle of Self Complacency, and to Promote the Economy of Human Life.”  And sure enough the book was salted with pious admonitions to virtue and all of its sinners met disastrous ends.

But perhaps the readers snatched up copies for another reason—the plot of what is considered the first American novel was “ripped from the headlines,” a Roman à clef on a still fresh and juicy scandal involving Perez Morton’s incestuous seduction of his sister-in-law Fanny Apthorp who became pregnant and committed suicide, while Morton escaped legal punishment. And, hey, who wouldn’t want to read about that?

 

Perez Morton, the real life weathy cad who ruined a woman, drove her to suicide, betrayed his wife, and walked away with no legal consequences. 

The author, William Hill Brown, happened to be Morton’s neighbor and knew all of the juicy details, of the case that was gossip fodder in Boston.  Brown was the son of a famous clock maker—the one who built the big clock for the steeple of the Old South Church.  He was born to the craftsman’s second marriage in 1765 and was always sickly.  He was encouraged to take up literature by his older step brother, the artist Mather Brown.  He would go on to have a romantic story, Harriot, or the Domestic Reconciliation published in the first issue of Massachusetts Magazine later in the year.  He would follow those up with a play based on the capture and execution of Major Andre in the Benedict Arnold West Point spy case, a series of verse fables, Penelope a comedy in West Indies style, essays, and a short second novel about incest and seduction, Ira and Isabella, all published posthumously.

Later in 1793 Brown went south to study law in a climate more suited to his health.   He died of consumption--tuberculosis--in Murfreesboro, North Carolina on September 2, 1793 at the age of 28.  His literary reputation did not long out live him.

Sarah Wentworth (Althorp) Morton, the agrieved wife and sister to the disgraced and doomed mistress. 

Of course not putting his name on that novel didn’t help.  Novels, which were coming into vogue in England, were considered trifles for bored housewives and probably dangerous to their morals.  The women of Boston were snatching up copies practically off the docks.  Preachers thundered condemnation of them as salacious, seductive, and sinful.  And of course most were, which was their appeal.

Gentlemen read lofty things—endless volumes of sermons from the leading divines, bare knuckle partisan newspapers, the classics in Greek and Latin, philosophy in French and German, and, of course, poetry both epic and lyrical.  They could not deign themselves to read such trash.  But if truth be told, late at night safely locked in their studies, I suspect many more than would admit it found themselves aroused and titillated by the popular tales of lust and just retribution.

It is natural then that throughout most of the 19th Century The Power of Sympathy was popularly supposed to be the work of a woman, as were so many of the English titles reaching America shores.  When Arthur Bayley, editor of The Bostonian, republished it in serial on its centennial, he attributed it to Sarah Wentworth Morton, a poetess and the wife of Perez Morton and sister of Frances Apthorp.

It did not take later scholars, however, too much digging to uncover the true author.

As for the novel as an art form, it took decades to shuck its reputation—and in the loftier precincts of the New England elite never quite did.  As many remember banning books in Boston—mostly novels—was still a big deal into the 1950’s. 

Slowly in the 19th Century British imports Austin, Dickens, Thackeray, et al raised the level of respectability among the middle classes—but still mostly women.  James Fennimore Cooper in America began popularizing more masculine novels as adventure stories, broadening the appeal.  Serious writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville began working in the form—Hawthorne bringing a new depth to the traditional tales of the wages of sin and Melville having a hard time making a living peddling adventure yarns with, you should pardon the expression, depth.

Harriette Beecher Stowe became the first American to have a run-away, must-read best seller with her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that blended the novel’s traditional shocking themes with a searing abolitionist message.

It was not until the second half of the 19th Century that the novel really took off as a popular and literary art form in America and not until the early 20th Century that it finally blew poetry out of the water to become the per-eminent literary form.

The handsome Penguin Classics edition paired The Power of Sympathy with another early American novel and morality tail.  Despite the double dose of scandal and ruination almost nobody read the novel in any of several contemporary editions.

The book that started it all, The Power of Sympathy, being out of copyright and therefor cheap, can be found today, if you look very hard, in paperback editions, including a Penguin Classic edition.  I never found any one who read it.  And neither have I.   

 

From Ford to Trump Redux—The Vagaries of Presidential Mercy

On his first day in office President Jimmy Carter ordered a sweeping amnesty for Vietnam era draft resisters including those who had fled the country or gone underground.  It was no small irony the flags over the Capital where Trump was sworn-in were flown at full staff despite the official 30 day mourning period for the late President after Trump expressed his displeasure over the display of respect.

Forty-eight years ago another incoming President on his first full day in office, January 21, 1977, issued a blanket amnesty of most draft evaders, including those who went to Canada or assumed new identities and went underground in the states.

President Jimmy Carter’s controversial act, which brought harsh criticism from veterans’ organizations and near mutinous grumbling from some high level officers in the military, was not unexpected.  It fulfilled a campaign promise.  The idea was to put the bitter national divisions over the Vietnam War and the Nixon years behind us, or in Carter’s own words, “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

The accidental President, Gerald Ford, had issued a conditional pardon for draft offenders, including those who were abroad, in September of 1974.  That was mainly to provide cover on the left for his pre-emptive pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon for any offenses that he “may have committed.”  The Ford conditional pardon is generally better remembered than Carter’s much more substantial action because of that linkage despite requiring those who accepted the pardon to work in alternative service occupations similar to those of conscientious objectors for six to 24 months.  Far fewer men than expected took Ford up on his offer.

Gerald Ford's limited conditional pardon for draft resistors and evaders was meant to placate the Left and distract from his pardon of Richard Nixon for "crimes he may have committed.

Carter’s action was much more sweeping, but a little noticed provision said that amnesty would be given to all offenders who requested one.  Some resistors refused to make a request because to do so was an admission that they had committed a crime in the first place.  Many, many more were unaware, because of hazy press coverage, that they had to make a request.  The Justice Department did not even make a cursory effort to inform the eligible by a letter to a “last known address.” 

The wording also was unclear on an important point for men like me—did the amnesty cover those who were already convicted and had served sentences for draft offenses?  I don’t think that last point has yet been fully answered.

None-the-less tens of thousands of draft refusers, evaders, and military deserters acted on the assumption that they were covered and the Justice Department de facto ceased actions against anyone who could have been covered by amnesty. 

More than half a million young men were either charged with draft evasion and resistance, avoided, or refused to serve in the Armed Forces and were never charged during the Vietnam War.

During the war and continuing after it ended until Draft call-ups stopped in 1973, 209,517 men were accused of violating draft laws, and another 360,000 were never formally charged.  Around 100,000 went abroad, 90% of them to Canada.  The exact number who went “underground” has never been established but is thought to be in the tens of thousands.

Upwards of 50,000 of those in Canada chose to stay there rather than return home.  Most were granted Landed Immigrant status and eventually Canadian citizenship.  A highly educated group with significant resources, these people had an impact on Canada.  Many became leading figures in academia, the arts, and in politics.  They are widely credited with/accused of moving Canadian politics generally to the left.

Likewise, a good, but unknown, number of those who went underground chose to continue to live their lives under the identities that they assumed.  In the 1960s and early ‘70s it was absurdly easy to establish a new identity.  It was thought that as this cohort became eligible for Social Security or died many of these assumed identities would unravel, but that seems to be exception rather than the rule.

As for an old Draft con like me, I never got any amnesty papers.  But I have lived my life quite openly and even drawn some modest attention to myself without further molestation.  So far so good.

 

Barack Obama was unusually active with clemency orders and pardons in his last days in office.

In 2017 Barack Obama spent the last days of his Presidential term churning out sentence commutations.  Hundreds were given to non-violent drug offenders facing draconian sentences under the exceptionally harsh Federal Sentence Standards, the most vindictive in the world.  But there were so many of those victims of the failed war on drugs that the commutations hardly made a dent in the American gulag.  Also given leniency were some white collar criminals, the kind of offenders that drew the stingier grace of Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush.  Even a beloved baseball icon, Willie McCovey of the San Francisco Giants who was convicted on Income Tax evasion was one of 64 that drew and outright pardon from the President.  

Most controversially Obama commuted the sentences of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the former Army Private Bradley Manning, and Puerto Rican nationalist leader Oscar Lopez.  Inexplicably he did not commute the sentence of ailing American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier who was behind bars for more than 40 years.  

Neither did his successors until Joe Biden in one of his last acts buried among a flurry of preemptive pardons for prominent critics of Donald Trump and members of his own family.  Except for those on the Left who have been urging a pardon or clemency, no one noticed.

The headlines were all about using his executive prerogative as a shield against revenge by the return of the Orange Menace his while also guaranteeing his closest relatives aren’t subject to future prosecutions and clemency for Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members of Congress who served on the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.  It was announced early Monday morning minutes before Trump was to be inaugurated. Biden also issued pardons for members of his family: his brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and their spouses.
The pardons were a stunning flex of Presidential power that is unprecedented in history. They protect several outspoken critics of the incoming President, including former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, whom Trump has vowed retribution against.

After Obama no one, except possibly sex offenders, gun nuts, and White nationalist terrorists could expect any such displays of mercy from Trump’s first term in  the Oval Office.  On the contrary.  The former Pumpkin-in-Chief and his administration sought to swell the prison population with those who resisted his autocratic rule, immigrants, and minorities of every sort.  And the recipients of his tender mercy were of a very different sort including pardons for the ilk of Arizona racist sheriff Joe Aripio, Watergate figure Scooter Libby, right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, Army Lt. Michael Behenna who was convicted of murdering an Iraqi man, right wing Canadian media mogul Conrad Black, Chalmer Lee Williams convicted of illegal firearms sales, Army Major Mathew Golsteyn who was awaiting trial on a charge of murdering a suspected Afghan bomb maker, Lt. Clint Lorance convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and a slew of former officials, aides, and associates who might testify against him.   

Trump's first end-of-term batch of sentence commutations included well connected bank fraudster Sholom Rubashkin, arsonists Dwight and Steven Hammond who inspired Nevada anti-government extremists Ammon and Ryan Bundy in their armed seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and Medicare scammer Ted Shul who ran faith-based behavioral healthcare treatment centers for juveniles.

 Do you detect a pattern here?  Because it repeats its self. 

 

Joe Biden and Donald Trump swapped Inauguration Day pardons and commutations.

Trump was undoubtedly outraged by Biden’s last minute move that put many of the targets he boasted about prosecuting/persecuting out of revenge but there was nothing he could do about it.  Even boldly trying to overturn them in defiance of the law like his attempt to end birthright citizenship for a blustery show for his most rabid supporters was not an option  because arguing that Biden exceeded his authority would undercut the legitimacy of his own sweeping actions.  He had long signaled plans for pardons for Capitol Siege insurrectionists but had hinted that might not include those convicted of actual physical assault on police, but he pardoned them all.  “These are the hostages, approximately 1,500 for a pardon, full pardon," Trump said during remarks from the Oval Office. “This is a big one.”

Clearly those pardons are a signal to his most extreme and dangerous supporters including armed Militias, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Klansmen that they will face no consequences for using violence and intimidation on his behalf.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.



 

 

Eight Years Ago—Murfin Verse on the First Inauguration of the Banality of Evil

 The Great Crash at Crush, Texas in 1896.

I’m still processing today.  I am on my way out the door to the Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Interfaith Prayer Breakfast sponsored by Faithbridge here in Crystal Lake.  I think I will spend the rest of this day honoring Dr. King and his legacy…and avoiding the TV and hours of wall-to-wall coverage of the anointment of a dark second coming.  I don’t have the stomach for it.   

I will get the essential gist in summaries and recaps.  I will pay attention to the sixty or so reported executive orders ready for signature and the chaos, fear, and oppression they unleash.  I will be vigilant about things like the mass deportation campaign originally set to launch today in Chicago but which may or may not be delayed.

Eight years ago, with Donald Trump taking an oath he never meant to keep, my mood was very dark.  This poem was an introduction to my Poems of Resistance, a little self-published (and out of print) chapbook. 

January 20, 2017

The locomotives are aligned on a single track,
    throttles lashed wide open,
    the engineers jump as they pick up speed
    belching black smoke and urgency.

The time has come, nothing can stop it now.

There is nothing to do but stare slack jawed
    or turn your head and cringe.

If in your enthusiasm for the spectacle
    and to get your money’s worth
    for the excursion ticket,
    you crowd too eagerly close,
    you are riddled with cast iron shrapnel
    and scalding steam.

It’s exactly like that.

—Patrick Murfin
 

On the Eve of the Martin Luther King Holiday an Old Man Rants

 

Note:  I have posted this in one form or another on or around the Martin Luther King Day Federal Holiday for 16 years.  Long time readers may be sick of it.  Some of those who were offended in earlier rounds have left the building in a huff—or come to see that maybe it was not so far off the mark after all.  The thing is, year by year, it becomes more relevant.  

Today is the eve of the Federal Holiday celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was born on January 15, 1929 and was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.  It was a long, hard fought effort to create a Federal holiday, following proclamations in several states.  President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation creating the holiday in 1983 and it was first celebrated nationally in 1986.  The senior George Bush moved the holiday to the third Monday in January, which by coincidence this year falls on January 20, the same day as the Presidential Inauguration.  Savor, for a moment the bitter irony of that  

Despite the national observance, several states refused to enact state proclamations. After a national economic boycott threatened the Super Bowl in Arizona, the holiday was officially observed in all 50 states for the first time in 2000.

Depending on your state, schools may or may not be open.  It they are you can count on some kind of touchy-feely programming that will assure children that once, long, long ago things weren’t so nice for Black people, but thanks to Dr. King everything is just fine now.  A tremendous amount of time will be spent emphasizing his non-violence and schools now routinely use the occasion as a center piece in their violence prevention programs.  They will also emphasize tolerance of those who are different—which it turns out may be the red-headed kid or the girl with a lisp.  

As laudable as these things are, children are not apt to be told that their grandparents may just have been the ones doing the oppression of Black folk.  Nor are they given any real sense of Dr. King as a truly revolutionary figure willfully defying the power of the state, demanding true systematic change, addressing class inequality, and in time of war leading an opposition to that war.

In cities, towns, and villages across much of the country, there will be obligatory civic observations.  These most often take the form of prayer breakfasts, dutifully attended by local dignitaries of all races.  While some local Black preacher may take the occasion to lay out some harsh truths or even demand attention to continuing injustices, everybody will applaud politely.  Politicians will parade to the podium with bromides.  Someone—preferably the precocious son of a Black preacher—will intone words from the I Have a Dream Speech, and at the end maybe everyone will join hands and sing We Shall Over Come.  I bet you have been to just this kind of event.  Hell, I’ve even helped plan and put them on. 

In fact, Monday morning  at the crack of 7:30 am here in the Northwest boonies of the Chicago area I will be attending the at the 16th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Interfaith Prayer Breakfast sponsored by Faithbridge at the Holiday Inn, 800 South Illinois Route 31 in Crystal Lake  featuring Interpreting the Dream in Our Time a keynote speech by Stella Jones. 

The day is typically celebrated with nostalgic clips of the March on Washington on the news, and there may even be a documentary or two on Public Television.

Many of the people who hated Dr. King when he was alive or who are their spiritual descendants will blandly join in the celebrations.  And then they will turn his words against him.  When you hear a plump politico with a honeyed accent quote, as they all love to do, the one phrase from the I Have a Dream speech where he spoke about the little children being "judged not on the color of their skins but on the strength of their characters, watch out."  That hack is about to use Dr. Kings words to attack that dream.  He will say that now that we have erased statutory discrimination, any lingering program that gives disadvantaged minorities the slightest leg-up is itself discriminatory.  He will claim that Dr. King would want a perfectly color blind society.  Unspoken is his deep conviction that in such a color blind society, white men will rise like cream and be restored to their rightful place on top of the ladder—as if they had ever really lost it.

Six years ago, among the leading hijackers of Dr. King’s legacy was Vice President Mike Pence.  In an appearance of CBS TV’s Meet the Press he actually quoted King to support trading Donald Trump’s phony Border Wall for temporary relief from deportation of the DACA Dreamers.  

Dr. King will also be lauded for his non-violence, which will be translated into passivity.  Law breaking—including the kind the Civil Rights Movement routinely used—will be denounced.  No word will be uttered that Dr. King’s non-violence actually expected to provoke violent opposition and used that response to tweak the conscience of a democratic nation.  

Since Dr. King’s time, police departments have been provided with new arms and tactics.  New crowd control methods and security provisions make the kind of marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations led by King either difficult or kept far away from threatening the safety of those being protested, as was seen repeatedly in attacks on the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter protests, and at Standing Rock. New restrictions on the press—and when that doesn’t work outright attacks, arrests, and physical intimidation—keeps reporters from fully reporting on acts of civil disobedience so that the public consciousness may be safely left un-tweaked.  Of course, as the January 6, 2021 events at the Capitol showed, that militaristic capacity was not used against White insurrectionists.

                        Seven years ago King's daughter Bernice called out reptilian fascist Steve Bannon attempt to hijack her father's legacy.

A few of years ago, rising to a new level of audacious gall, a senior Pentagon official, in a program marking Dr. King’s birth at the Department of Defense, actually argued that the Nobel Peace Prize winner would understand and approve of the “work of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

What is almost never mentioned? Dr. King's denunciation of the Vietnam War in his speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 turned many white liberals and most of the Democratic Party establishment against him.  He expected it would.  He spoke anyway.

We are told that because Dr. King was a faithful Baptist, he would not today support Gay, lesbian, and transgendered people and that it is a mockery to compare their struggle to the Civil Rights Movement.  The Black church is divided on this—even Dr. King’s children are—but it is hard to imagine his rejection of justice for them.

Likewise, some Black leaders will claim, especially in their own communities, that Dr. King fought just for them, that gains he fought for should not be extended to the growing Latino minorities that threaten to displace them as the most oppressed.

All of this is possible because more than 50 years after his death Martin Luther King has been sanitized.  He has been scrubbed clean of the any semblance of actual humanity, any personal foibles or flaws, and midnight doubts or struggles of the soul.  He has become an empty vessel into which can be poured a safe and bland pudding which can placate pesky Blacks with a pat-on-the-head while protecting the status-quo.

Enough!  The real flesh and blood Dr. King would have none of it.  

Let’s remember him today for who he was, not who the charlatans want to make him out to be.  And let’s remember that as great as he was, he was one man.  Let’s not denigrate the truly historic sacrifices of thousands and thousands of ordinary people who repeatedly literally put their lives on the line—and continue to do so today.  Let’s celebrate him and them by rededicating ourselves to standing up as they did, by putting our bodies, when necessary, on the line to achieve their true dream of an equitable and just society.

Modern movements build on Dr. King's legacy.

And let’s embrace the new generation of committed and imaginative young Black leaders who are making sure America learns that Black Lives Matter and have energized new civil rights/economic justice movements like the Moral Monday Marches and the new Poor People’s Campaign.  If we are White, let us battle our own egos and fragilities, our fantasies of being White rescuers, commit to understand White privilege and systematic racism, and allow us to become true allies respectful of the leadership of the oppressed.

Full Poets in Resistance Again Program on YouTube

Now you can see the full Poets in Resistance Again program presented at Tree of Life UU Congregation in McHenry on Saturday, January 11 on YouTube.

Poets in Resistance Again program

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.  —Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winning American novelist. 

Patrick Murfin is a poet, writer, blogger, amateur historian and lifelong social justice activist who organized the original Poets in Resistance program in 2017.   

Jan Boseman lives and writes in Woodstock. Poetry chose her to play on its team many years ago when she fell in love with The Prisoner of Chillon. She has been honing her skills ever since. Some call her a protest poet. 

Alan Sheer is a retired professor of philosophy, religion, ethics and history. Prior to his teaching career Alan was a congressional press secretary and pastor of several churches where he worked in a variety of social justice ministries.   

Tricia Alexander is an award-winning performing and healing artist, a performance poet, songwriter, and musician.  She said, “Writing has helped me understand and process this multi-dimensional experience of living.  I can’t imagine my life without the beauty and the depth that writing has not only brought  TO me—but also  what it has encouraged me to rise up and out of me.” 

Sam Miller is a Crystal Lake Resident and an art student at McHenry County College.

Kenneth Balmes was born in Waukegan and lives in Island Lake. He started writing poetry at age 65, inspired by persons, places and events in my life, especially those closest to him. Believes in trying to make this world a better place and to express and share beauty and love. 

Julie Ann Monroe is a writer of poetry, music, memoirs, essays and books, she is active in her world of photography as well.  She spends her time writing, playing guitar, hiking, hanging out with her horse. She lives in Woodstock works in Harvard and plays anywhere she can!  

Edward Philip Denofrio  was the former and inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Raue Center of the Arts in Crystal Lake, IL. Since his time there, he spent his time organizing poetry-readings in McHenry and Lake County; writing and reading about the natural world and joy in the face of the never ceasing advancement of evil. 

Julie Huddle grew up in McHenry County, returning after living in a variety of places including Nepal, as a Peace Corps volunteer and Colorado. She finds her inspiration primarily in nature, her dog Clarice, and her community.  

Joe Calvillo is a local McHenry County writer, poet, and founder of the poetry group Paladins of Poetry.  He has been an active poet in the area with many associations including Sanctuary Poets, Atrocious Poets and hosted a monthly poetry night in Crystal Lake.  Joe's poetry publication is Azule-A Collections of Poems  and has maintained a writer's Blogspot on Google since 2010. 

James Hamilton is from Wisconsin and is a  seasoned spoken word performance artist,  and motivational speaker.  He is a member of Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and P.O.E.T (People Of Extraordinary Talent).  James has made a significant impact on the literary scene in Wisconsin.   

Jessica Kemery is a Crystal Lake author who writes fantasy and secretly loves poetry.

Luke Welch lives in Northern Illinois where he works as a sign language interpreter.  He has published poems in various small press magazines.   

Christopher D. Sims has been writing and reciting Resistance Poetry for better than twenty years now. A nationally known artist, activist, and truth-teller, his words seek to empower, impact, or inform. Christopher is known as The People’s Poet in his hometown Rockford, IL.  

The Social Justice Team of Tree of Life UU Congregation would like to thank everyone who made the evening special and possible—our poets, Paladins of Poetry and the McHenry County poetry community;  the staff of Tree of Life especially Congregation Administer Judy Stettner;  our tech crew Ryan Broussard and Julie Huddle; our volunteers; and Lisa Messinger for sponsoring the bar;  our beneficiaries and front line organizations Illinois Community for Displaced Immigrants (ICDI), McHenry County Citizens for Choice (MCCC), McHenry County NOW, and Woodstock Pride.  A shout out to everyone who helped promote the event on social media and elsewhere.

We hope you have been inspired and motivated to dare to personally step up and actively join in the Resistance to oppression.