Sitting in Rough Draft in Kingston NY with a cold Pilsner sitting in front of me. Every year on this day I come here in the early am and lift my glass to my two fallen friends who died in Vietnam fighting a war that was the doing of the war makers in Washington and the money bags in corporate suites. Past time to turn swords into ploughshares.
Westkill Brewing, tucked comfortably in the Catskill Mountains, makes a pilsner that sits at the top of my beer world. It’s so good that it brings to mind the folk wisdom of my unforgettable old friend, Timmy Plummer, who told me, “Living at the bottom of a beer barrel now and then has its merits.”
The concert in Bearsville Theater celebrating Dylan’s music didn’t disappoint. Especially liked the performances of Every Grain of Sand, Baby Blue, Highway 61, and I Contain Multitudes. Every time I go to this annual concert I leave marveling at Dylan’s expansive body of work.
What a singer, dancer, and performer! I saw her in Portland Maine during her Private Dancer Tour in the mid-eighties. What a performance! Did anyone command the stage better than Tina Turner? In my un-expert opinion, her Private Dancer album is one of the best albums of all time. RIP Tina Turner! Your music, sound, verve and style will age well.
Some on the left, including too many communists, fail to understand that the struggle against Trump and Trumpism (MAGA) is the main form of the class struggle for the foreseeable future. It’s not a detour nor a retreat from class.
More to the point, the defeat of Trump and MAGA will not only open new opportunities to defend and expand democracy. It will also shift class relations in favor of the working class, deepen the pivotal class-democratic alliance of labor with its strategic allies, and give depth and complexity to class politics and consciousness. Not to see this dialectic, this mutual inter-dependency reveals a dogmatic cast of mind, a simplification of class and class dynamics, and a misunderstanding of marxism, including the theoretical and political insights of Lenin.
