The Tale Of The Seven Samurai-Oops-Denzel Washington’s The Magnificent Seven (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Magnificent Seven, starring Denzel Washington, 2016    

No question every once in a while this reviewer likes to view a good shoot ‘em up in the old cowboy Western tradition that he grew up with in the black and white (film and virtues of the sides) 1950s. Of course the beauty of the film under review, the 2016 version of The Magnificent Seven, is that it revisits the theme first started with the Japanese version of this idea, The Seven Samurai, and later taken up by the original film of a group of small seemingly disinterested warriors coming to avenge the doings of the evil ones against the small honest folk. Fortunately since the plot line of this version is emphatically not a replay of the original it works rather better than expected if you hide the kids from the constant gunfire.    

Here is how the thing played out. Mister Bad (only the names change) has run rough-shot over a small farming community out West once gold was discovered there. In order to clear the area Mister Bad tried every trick in the board including murder and mayhem to drive the settlers out. Then one brave citizen, a woman whose husband had been murdered in cold blood for the slightest resistance, got in contact with Sam Chisolm, played by Denzel Washington, who as an arresting officer of some sort, the law in some instances, seemed to be able to handle himself in tough spots. He balked at first but when he found out who the villain was he was ready to move heaven and earth to help the small folk (he also as the film ended had a very personal motive since Mister Bad had killed his kin in Kansas to fuel his greedy empire).       

Needless to say one man, even a good man with a gun could not face the onslaught Mister Bad could bring by himself. So the early part of the film is spent rounding up the other six who will be the core of the resistance (and if you included the woman solicitor who was handy with a gun herself you had eight). Yeah, seven is still enough against a massed army as long as they are good and disinterested. The only startling thing is who makes up the group this time with a Chinese and Native American on the good side and of course Sam is black and a leader which reflects the real Old West a little better than when I was a kid. The rest of the film is spent figuring a suitable defense using the poorly trained settlers as part of the defense. Then those tasks out of the way there is the big blowout with the defenders holding their own in the end despite Mister Bad’s bringing in of a rapid fire Gatling gun that mowed many citizens down. But you know old Sam will have his vengeance in the end in the mano y mano face-off with Mister Bad. Yeah, a good shoot ‘em up.      

 

I’m Going Away My Own True Love-With Bob Dylan’s “Spanish Boots Of Spanish Leather” In Mind   

By Sam Lowell

Lana Jamison had been frustrated for most of her twenty-eight young life years. Frustrated by her whole past, her past that included a serious bout of a childhood where she was not listened to by her parents, was treated like dishrag, was told to be silent and like it by her tyrannical father and her go-along-with-father mother. Had spent years in therapy after college trying to get to the bottom of what that dishrag business did to her psyche and had come up with few good clues as to how to proceed with her life without feeling she had to look over her shoulder every time she made a remark that expressed her true feelings. That situation had been made worse by the seemingly inevitable run of boyfriends and lovers who had decided on the basis of her demur presence that they could treat her like a dishrag as well. They collectively with few bright spots which usually didn’t last because of Lana’s moodiness  didn’t feel the need to expect that she might have an opinion of her own and tried might and main to direct her life for her. That woeful series included one husband, Jeff Mullins, who made an art form of putting her down wherever she had an idea that did not jell with his. That marriage had fallen apart of its own weight after a couple of years when Jeff decided one night to run off with the next best thing that came along and left Lana cold.     

Then Fritz, Fritz Taylor came along, came along like a fresh breeze after that disaster with Jeff. She had met him one night when she was feeling lonely at a bar in Cambridge that she would frequent before her marriage to Jeff and where they played country music of all things in the heart of Harvard Square. That country music thing had been a throwback to her days on that silent father upstate New York hard-scrabble truck farm and he would play the stuff on the radio every day. Fritz’s interest had been more recent, what he called his outlaw country music minute when that genre had a run even in urban areas of this country. The Wheat-stack had been playing, a group that he followed and which played Willie Nelson covers among others and so he had shown up there one Friday night and kissed fate. He had spied her, so he said, while he was sitting a bit forlorn at the bar since he had recently been divorced from his own didn’t understand him wife. Spied her sitting like heaven’s own angel at  a corner table with her girlfriend, so he said as he told her as she passed by his bar stool as she was going to the Ladies’ Room. She had been impressed by his light touch when he invited her to sit down upon her return from the Ladies’ Room, his giving her room to speak about what interested her, and most of all by the no pressure way that he handled the idea of calling her up once she insisted that she really had to go home with her girlfriend and not with him someplace. But she gave him her phone number. In response he gave her the most gentle good night handshake she had ever received from a man. And so started their love affair.           

Fritz proved, mostly, to be as advertised that first night, except his own bouts of withdrawal and distance which he told her he had inherited from his own dismal childhood down among the working poor by parents who were way over their heads trying to raise six kids on an unskilled worker’s pay. He called them, he and she, soulmates and that stuck, stuck as true as anything he ever said. Lana could take those bouts of darkness for a while as long as they were mixed in with days of happiness. But that mix had of late fallen on hard times. Many times burned she needed some space, needed room to think things through and so one day she mentioned to Fritz that she wanted to head to California by herself, wanted drive across at her own pace and see the country she had missed seeing all her sweet young life. They battled back and forth on the matter for weeks. Fritz telling her that he would improve his disposition and she, having heard it all before and really wanting to get away, arguing for her space. Finally one morning out of the blue he gave in, wished her Godspeed and that she should keep in contact with him in case anything happened along the way. The idea being when she left that she would return and they would try to start over again, start their love on a higher plain.                

So one sunny April day Lana took off in her Chevrolet, a car filled to the brim with seemingly every possible thing that she owed. No pioneer woman trekking across the country bare-boned and intrepidly, not Lana. Told Fritz as they kissed good-bye that she would call him when she hit Philadelphia. Would see when she got there if she couldn’t find him some nice gift to make him feel better, make him get through their separation better. Fritz said in reply simply that he didn’t want any material gift but that the thought of her speedy return was enough to keep him going. That brought a tear to her eyes but she still insisted that she would get him something. So in Philadelphia she called him up one night and asked him if he wanted a nice gold ring that she had seen in a jewelry store that would be a sign of their friendship and love. Fritz begged off again saying he only wanted her own sweet love. They left it at that for a while, didn’t speak of the matter of a gift again when they talked on the phone every couple of days.          

Out in Denver she made a call one night asking Fritz once again whether he wanted a beautiful silver Native American-made bracelet that she knew he had mentioned that he would like to have one time when they had gone to an Intertribal Festival out in Charlton one fall. This time Fritz got his hind legs up, started getting angry since he had previously made it clear that all he wanted was for her to stop roaming and come back home. Did she find another guy in her travels? No, she said almost too quickly. Then he told her that she must not be thinking very highly of him, must have been more interested in travelling and being free to stop and go as she liked. Maybe wanted to stay in California since she had not stopped talking about it for weeks before her departure. Maybe Fritz wasn’t good enough for her. No, no she kept saying with less and less conviction. They got off the phone not on the best of terms. Fritz had asked when she expected to be home again.  Her non-committal answer she had said she was not sure, a few weeks many a month, maybe more. Fritz was steaming.      

One hot late summer night Lana called from Phoenix and before she could say much of anything Fritz said that he would wish her Godspeed and hoped that she would be happy in California as long as she expected to stay there. He was bailing out. Had had it. Before he got off the phone realizing where she was then in the heart of Native-American country he told Lana that she could sent him one of those  Native-American-made silver bracelets that she had mentioned in that  earlier conversation. Enough said.  

Yet Again Starting Over Again-Forever Young-The Bart Webber Saga

By Fritz Taylor

Jack Callahan had to laugh one again, and probably not for the last time, at the love foibles of his old friend from high school days at Riverdale High, Bart Webber, who apparently is organically incapable of not leaving well enough alone. He had initially cornered Jack one night in their favorite watering hole, the Dee Drop Grille in Gloversville a few towns over from growing up hometown Riverdale and where Bart now lives, and after not hearing from Bart for about a year found out in detail about his third divorce, this one from Linda Evans which had lasted the longest. Naturally since it was Bart he had to go into the downfall of his previous two marriages as well to complete the scene.    

Subsequently, maybe two weeks later Bart “shocked” Jack with the information that he was back in the love hunt. This time though since he had no lady friend waiting in the wings and having been with Linda about twenty years and very rusty and behind in the why and wherefores of “senior” dating he had joined a senior dating site on the Internet, paid his dough, and created his profile. The reason that Bart again cornered Jack in their favorite watering hole was that after checking out some profiles he noticed that the age range that most woman did not seem to want to go above was sixty-five. At least for the fifty to sixty year old women that he was interested in meeting. Jack and Bart are now both seventy so you could see the dilemma coming a mile away. He pleaded, begged really, for Jack’s opinion about whether he should shave a few years off his age on his profile page to increase his chances. Jack had answered “no, no way” stuff like that catches up with you and had in the past for old Bart. Moreover unlike the fickle young, including them when they were younger, age is not as great a factor for older, oops, more mature women who have been through a few storms themselves.     

Of course Bart refused to pay any heed to Jack’s very reasonable remarks. Then last week for some reason he began hitting pay dirt with several women on the site. One in particular, a fifty-two year old hospital administrator who also liked folk music, Bart had been in a folk music group back in the early 1960s when the folk minute blew through the American shores, listened of all things to the same folk music station that he did (both are members), liked going to the ocean which Bart had always craved and to art museums a newly acquired taste since his retirement. She had startled him after a several site e-mails chatting about this and that when she asked if he would like to accompany her to the Museum of Fine Arts where a new exhibit was to open over the new weekend. The long and short of it was that he accepted her invitation and they made arrangements to meet for their first “date.” But now Bart is afraid that the chickens will come home to roost on the age question although because he had recently taken up running, well, jogging really he could probably “pass” for sixty-five or so. So Jack will wait with baited breathe to see what falls out this time. Jesus, Bart and his lady love affairs.        

Starting Over, Again- Forever Young- A Bart Webber Saga   

By Fritz Taylor

 

Jack Callahan’s old friend Bart Webber a guy he had known at least since back in high school at old Riverdale High where they first hung out together at Jimmy Jack’s bowling alleys over on Beacon Street looking, well, looking for the heart of Saturday night, Friday too and in summer most every night never could draw a break in the love game, in the until forever do not us part anyway. Bart always envied Jack who had stayed with the same high school sweetheart, Kathy Kelly, ever since despite battle royals when Jack was younger and as a high school and college football hero had the pick of whatever he wanted come three touchdown Saturday evening. Bart, well Bart had just struck out for the third time, third married time and a slew of kids to show for his efforts if not much else after a fairly long term for him marriage to Linda Evans, the mother of his last two of six children.       

The way that Jack knew about Bart’s new found “single” condition since they had not seen each other for about a year as Bart had been in a deep freeze over the burnt embers of that last marriage was the night a few weeks ago when they met at their old watering hole, The Dew Drop Grille and Bart laid the latest chapter in the Bart saga. Naturally Bart, being Bart and always something of dramatist in dealing with his various love affairs whether they led to marriage or not, had to retail every sordid detail of his three marriages starting with the first ill-advised marriage to his own high school sweetheart, Diana Nelson, whom he married in a rush once he got infantrymen orders to Vietnam and he did not want to face young death without having been married in his short sweet life. All that produced was the mandatory two kids and endless infidelities by him once he turned anti-war G.I. when he got back to the “real” world and he, in his turn, could have his pick of any “hippie chick” that he wanted.

Onward. As Jack knew the Bart litany on wife number two Mellissa Loring who in her turn other than producing those two kids had her own endless infidelities at just the time that Bart was slowing down in the skirt –chasing department (although never completely what are you kidding he was organically incapable of such righteous behavior). And then the seemingly happy longest marriage to Linda. What Jack did not know but that Bart was more than happy to fill him in on was that Linda could not take Bart’s change in behavior once he started having a whole series of medical problems the past few years, was taking a slew of pills for about seven ailments stretching back to Vietnam and was having trouble dealing with the onset of his own mortality. Moreover Linda who was prone to try every New Age fad the denizens of the alternative health cabal in Cambridge could muster up at prices that would shock the shock-less Western medicine guys and gals had drifted into her own netherworld. Her parting words were that she had to seek “something” on a journey of her own to reach a new spirituality level wished well Bart and that he should take stock of his own journey as well.    

Some guys never learn, never learn in the love game and Bart Webber was and is prima facie evident for that proposition. A few weeks after the Bart soul-bearing at the Dew Drop he called Jack on his and asked his “advise.” Should he acknowledge his actual age, three score and ten, seventy, or clip a few years off that raggedy sum. Jack listened but he knew in the back of his mind that Bart was on the love trail. Jack told Bart to tell the truth about his age and take what comes. Why? Well it seems that Bart, having lost some of his edge in the dating game and having no ready women friends to console him had decided at seventy, goddam, seventy, that he would join a “senior” dating service and see what came up in the local area. What Bart had noticed was that most of the women on the site, women between fifty and sixty which was his meat, had their own cut-offs at sixty-five. Like seventy was just too old. Jesus, some guys never learn. Step up to the plate, brother, step right up to the sorrow plate.    

Lessons From A Failed Childhood-With Childhood Friend Ralph Morse In Mind  

By Sam Lowell

Who knew where it all went wrong for Ralph Morse, went wrong right from childhood it seemed. Now after three score and ten, seventy for those unfamiliar with a score’s value he finally realized that it had not been having been the middle child, the middle boy of three that had undone him. He had previously thought that because his almost always enflamed mother, enflamed to nervous exhaustion by her inability to cope with three boys close together having been a teenage bride as well, that her and her mother’s total attention to his older first born brother Zachary and his father and his mother’s father’s total attention to his younger brother Kenneth that the sentiment deprivation which led him to draw away from the family at an early age had accounted for all the mistakes and errors that he had made in his life. Now he was just beginning to realize, remember he is three score and ten, sorry seventy years old, so a little late in his recognitions, that there were deeper reasons than the relatively simple one of being left out of the family emotional mix.          

One night Ralph bared his soul to his oldest friend Bart Webber, a friend he had known since about fourth grade at Riverdale Elementary and so one who knew first-hand many of the events that he went on to describe, while they were sitting on their favorite barstools at Jazzy’s Grille in Gloversville a few towns over from growing up Riverdale and a town where Ralph had lived for a number of years. The direct cause for that breast-baring had been his recent discovery after several tests that he had cancer and while it was not a terminal kind he had been taken aback by the news. Taken aback as well as he started the procedures to try to get rid of the cancerous growths making him suddenly wonder about his ability to come to grips with his mortality. Funny, but indicative of his sensibilities Ralph had denied his condition to himself using the term cancer in some third person hideaway and had not told others except his wife that he had cancer. Had not told Bart until this night. But since he had been in treatment the previous several week he had tried to sum up his life, tried to see what had gone wrong. Hence this look back at childhood.

No one should short-change that demonic mother of his, not for the statutory neglect of her middle child that was kids’ stuff in the pysch books but of her overweening capacity to make hell for Ralph at every opportunity. A few years back shortly after her passing he and Zachary had talked the situation over and agreed that no way should his mother who had a girlhood dream of being a Roman Catholic nun have married, certainly not as a teenager desperate to get out from under that overbearing Irish-bred father who subsequently seemingly as an act of contrition doted on young Kenneth. They had agreed that the combination of a young ill-prepared teenage mother, an honorably but work unskilled father who could not adequately provide from his family as much as he tried, and three close in age boys was fatal to any possibility that she would calmly and rationally cope with her predicament.             

Here is where it all came down as Ralph remembered several decisive events along this line but gave Bart one that he might not have remembered. Ralph had been maybe six and had a craving, a normal childhood craving, for a candy bar. He had asked his mother, let’s give her a name now in any case, Delores, if he could have the money, maybe a nickel but no more than a dime to go to Vinny’s Variety Store down the street and make the purchase. She said no. He accepted that decision not with good grace but he accepted the decision. Later that day she called out his name to come down stairs she had something to discuss with him. She flatly accused him of stealing money, that was the word she used, a dollar from her pocketbook to buy who knows what. . Ralph rightly denied doing the deed. He was not believed and punished with a few straps of the belt and no television for a week. You might not think that would trigger an everlasting childhood habit of grabbing money from her pocketbook and as he got older to do so with friends and others (not Bart as far as he remembered by he told Bart he would gladly make reparations now if that was the case). Things like that make a huge impression on him, if he was going to be cast as the family criminal then he would act that way and for a long time well beyond young adulthood, and couple of times when he was significantly older, he acted on the principle that if life, his life, was to be nasty, short and brutish as the old time philosopher had it then he was going to take whatever he needed when he needed it. Never enough to be caught criminally but that was a close call of a few occasions too. (By the way in that conversation with Zachary when he mentioned the episode to him which Zack remembered well he told Ralph that he had been the one to take the dollar-make of that what you will.)   

Another time a couple of years later something happened that only solidified what he had come to believe about the world- that it was basically him against the rest and that he was on his own. He had had another noteworthy run-in that proved decisive as well in making him think for a long time, for years after he had gotten back from his tour of duty in hell-hole Vietnam. He had been playing with another youngster in a creek near his growing up house and after a while came home all muddied, shoes and pants all caked as he recalled. His mother took a nutty both because the shoes and pants were probably damaged beyond repair but that his father was just then in one of periodic unemployed that would plague his whole life and so replacement would be problematic. Moreover Delores had repeatedly warned him off playing in that creek since a couple of years before a neighborhood boy had drowned when high tide had coming rushing in on him and he  could not swim as he was stuck in a mudflat. Punishment: remember this is an eight year old- banishment from the house. He was forced to go out on his own with essentially nothing to go with. That time he was out of the house for that day and the next before he came home all contrite after not being able to find any food or shelter. Nowadays, and rightly so, his mother would be before some child welfare board. But the net effect on Ralph was to get more inside himself and lose his moral compass for a long time. (He did make Bart laugh that night when he describe how he had spent a great deal of time that first day trying to make a raft and float out into the bay. Needless to say he did not get very far in the construction or in the escape plan.)      

Yeah, Ralph say all of that was pretty hairy stuff, distorted his whole small life for a long time but as he faced his own morality pretty squarely he knew that in his heart his own children would think more kindly of him for his very different way of helping to raise them. Bart laughed and agreed.

Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review Of Sorts

Book Review

By Zack James   

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, New York, 1920     

Josh Breslin, the old time cultural critic, mostly in the music and film milieu but occasionally with an adventurous foray into the printed word which had caused him more anguish from angry authors than he could shake a stick at as they were more thin-skinned than all the Hollywood star prima donnas and pretty boy musicians put together, had to laugh a couple of years back when approaching retirement after many years of free-lance journalism for publishing houses, small presses and an occasional off-beat journal he decided that he would review a wide selection of books by authors long dead. As one might have expected if one was slightly naïve, a babe in the woods in printed word land, he assumed he would therefore not have to deal with those troublesome and irate authors since they would have been long in the grave and beyond care for what some early 21^st century adventurer might have to say, or not say, about some literary gem. Or so he thought when he attempted to do a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early coming of age novel from 1920, This Side Of Paradise.     

Now everybody, everybody that counted for Josh anyway, mostly other reviewers and their hangers-on knew that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s masterwork, knew that it was one of the great classics of the old-time “dead white men” pantheon. He would not when reviewing Paradise try to take that masterpiece away from its proper place in the literary pantheon but instead to tweak a few laconic noses he decided to argue that Paradise was on a level with Gatsby, that it should book-end the classic. Had the nerve to have published such deliberate effrontery in several small literary journals and more importantly the literary blog, American Musings, a blog which several well-paid professional book reviewers, college professors, semi-literate high school English teachers, a smattering of graduate students in American Literature and most importantly a cohort of doctoral and post-doctoral literary lights out to make a reputation as gunslingers in the mad dash of that lightless world read and wrote for. Naturally the damn thing caused something of a fire storm as a result. Maybe you did not hear about it if you are not a devotee of such endeavors and just went about your life in ignorance of such earth-shattering blazes. But in that good night circle guns were drawn and ready, acid was added to the pen of many who saw that they could take down a two-bit has-been reviewer who obviously had not read anything since about age twelve-except maybe comic books.

That was the exact reaction that Josh had expected, had savored the prospect of igniting on fire. Had worried, worried to perdition that when he wrote the review nobody, no sensible person, could give a rat’s ass (his corner boy expression never entirely dismissed from his adult vocabulary) a couple of books almost one hundred years old from a guy who was on that “dead white men” extinction list mentioned above. He smiled with secret glee when the first review by a lonely undergraduate student who was trying to muscle herself up the food-chain by condemning Josh to East of Eden took him to task for even mentioning both books in the same universe much less in the same small breathe. Dared Josh to come up with one paragraph, one which she put in bold-face for emphasis as if Josh was some errant schoolboy that came up to that last couple of paragraph when voice Nick talks after Gatsby’s bloody demise about the feeling of those long ago Dutch sailors who came upon the “fresh, green breast of land” that would later become Long Island and had upon viewing had enflamed their sense of wonder. A paragraph she had written her college freshman term paper on for American Literature which the professor had given her an A on-so there.

Josh, again acting as the provocateur, in return cited the dance scene in the club in Minneapolis with Amory and his prey, Isabelle, as he attempted against all convention to grab a small kiss from her sweet lips. Argued that after all Paradise was about the roamings and doings of a young adult trying to figure out his place in the world and who was finding it not easy to find his niche. Josh contrasted that with the too uppity habits of a small-time hood, Jay Gatsby, nee Ganz, from nowhere USA hustling whatever there was to hustle trying to step up in class out with the big boys and got pushed back down the heap once he got in over his head with uptown Daisy and what she stood for-wealth, conformity and letting the servants clean up the mess.        

That comment seemed to have put that earnest undergraduate in her place since she went mute before Josh’s logic but no sooner had that dust-up settled down that Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary efforts of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the earlier novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances. Nobody though was buying any book-ending of the two, so everything was special pleading among the brethren.  So the battle raged.    

Josh laughed as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel a book that would put Fitzgerald’s sluggish Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison. Let the sparks fly.  

I Am A Man-With Big Bill Broonzy’s "When Do I Get To Be Called A Man" In Mind 

By Fritz Taylor

Ralph Morse had had to have a moment of truth. Had to confront the question of whether he supported the ideas of the Black Lives Matter movement or whether he would once again retreat into what he recognized was his passive liberal and non-violent inclinations that things with that movement seem to be getting out of hand with serious physical confrontations every time you turned around. The immediate cause though of his need for a moment of truth had been when he had placed a CD compilation of classic American Folk music on the machine and during that time Big Bill Broonzy’s When Will They Call Me A Man came up. For those not familiar with the recording Bill had sang the piece during the 1940s and 1950s when the new world order was bearing down on poor and black alike with a vengeance and blacks were right on the edge of getting “uppity.” big time. He speaks of all kinds of inequalities from wages to Mister James Crow’s laws, overt and covert, North and South that confronted the black man despite his own recent military service and the hard fact that this country was built on the slave labor of his forbears as he tries to survive in this wicked old world. Did the black man really have to wait until he was ninety-three to gain redress of grievance? Needless to say that recording could have with some small updating for a little better social interactions been written and sung today. That was the social contradiction Ralph was facing today.                    

It had not always been that way for when Ralph was young back in the early 1960s he had been very enthusiastic in support of the black civil rights movement down in the American South. He had taken plenty of flax first from his parents down in his growing up white working poor Acre neighborhood in Riverdale where the common word for blacks at the table was n----r and later from his corner boys around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor, especially Frankie Riley the leader of the crowd who went out his way to n----r bait Ralph when he so much as got involved with a small project of trying to gather books to be sent to black children down in woe begotten Alabama. Later when he demonstrated in support of black rights in Boston at a Woolworth’s to let them eat at their lunch counters down South and then headed South himself one summer to aid the voter registration drives there he had had to sever all connections with his old friends. Had been red-baited as well. As he thought about the old days he marveled that he had been so active, had such activist liberal views, and had not feared for his life any more than anybody else. Oh youth.

 As that black civil rights declined after the various voting rights acts were enacted and there was still work to do, a few civil rights reforms were not going to change the economic or social position of the vast majority of blacks especially in the North where that had had formal civil rights for a long time Ralph had moved along accordingly. When the avenging angels Black Panther Party with its bulky Ten Point program most of it on point and to the point Ralph had shifted his tactical non-violent approach and avidly supported the brothers, worked hard for their defense in the days when they united with white supporters after a period of social and political hostility to their former brethren. So it was not that Ralph did not have a past, did not have a history if rather in the long in the tooth past.                   

What had happened to Ralph though was that as he aged, as he saw that the old dreams were going up in smoke and that he would not be around to see that great commonwealth come to fruition he had become very passive in his politics as he scurried to build his printing shop business and raise a parcel of kids. Had other than passing some dough along to various causes, mostly anti-war organizations and candidates, been a spectator on the political scene for a fair amount of time. Got involved a little in opposing the Iraq and Afghan adventures but as opposition faded from view so did he.      

Then a couple of years ago, maybe more, right after the Trayvon Martin case exposed the hard fact in everybody’s face that there were serious racial problems still to be addressed he began haltingly to get the old itch. And hence his moment of truth. In or out as an “associate” of the black-led BLM movement. So he again played that old Big Bill song, saw that what Bill was talking about then played hard and strong today-jobs and wages, decent housing, decent schooling, keeping the young black men out of prison and off drugs, and a million other inequalities. Yes, Ralph, although he had his qualms, agreed with Bill that no black man should have to wait until he is ninety-three to get some justice, to be recognized as a man. And the same for black women too!