ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

Fear is an incompetent teacher.
-- Jean-Luc Picard

I don't make it a habit to quote from science fiction, or for that matter television in general seeing as I watch it so very seldom. It so happened that as I began writing, occasionally glancing up from the laptop, I saw Admiral Picard say these words only because my wife was watching the current series with closed captioning; otherwise I'd have heard nothing owing to wearing headphones and listening to Van Morrison's wonderful 1997 album, The Healing Game.

Down those ancient streets
Down those ancient roads
Where nobody knows
Where nobody goes
I'm back on the corner again
Where I've always been
Never been away
From the healing game

The brass section begins playing a riff as the song rounds the final turn and heads for the finishing line, and the passage bears a striking resemblance to "I Can't Get Started," the old popular song popularized by the epochal swing era trumpeter Bunny Berigan. He died in 1942, felled by cirrhosis of the liver.

Three years after Berigan's premature departure, V-J Day at last arrived, and America set off on a series of postwar victory laps lasting until the "Greatest Generation's" box office acme in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The remorseless actuarial tables took their toll, and their kids, the baby boomers, have found it difficult to recall the lessons of WWII and the Great Depression preceding it.

Subsequent generations are too busy simultaneously working three or four gig economy jobs to notice much about history.

That's too bad.

Presently there is a pandemic afoot, which isn't close to being concluded by any stretch of the imagination, but already it will be remembered by future generations for this news item documenting public outreach that was found necessary by the police department in Newport, Oregon.

"It's hard to believe that we even have to post this. Do not call 9-1-1 just because you ran out of toilet paper." 

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We know there are numerous factors helping to explain why the centuries-old Romanov dynasty was successfully overthrown in 1917 by an otherwise motley crew of ragtag Marxists.

The Russian Empire was making baby steps toward economic viability, but was rotten to the core when it came to the abilities of its ruling class. Like a celiac loose in a bakery, Tsar Nicholas II rushed into the one situation guaranteed to irreparably weaken his grip: Total war, in the form of World War I, a mind-numbing conflagration that exposed every socio-economic fault line in Russia and created whole new opportunities for cultural collapse.

There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The first occurred in February (according to the Julian calendar), toppling the already tottering tsar. A provisional government was formed, and it announced a series of comparatively liberal reforms.

However, the briefly powerful Alexander Kerensky failed to properly read the room, and Russia remained "in" the war in the face of overwhelming public sentiment for peace. Society continued to crumble, and in November the numerically inferior Bolsheviks -- the Commies -- welded superior leadership with the broad support of workers and peasants (many of them attracted by V.I. Lenin's brilliant "campaign" slogan of Peace, Bread, Land) and overthrew the provisional government.

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes, the coronavirus, Covid-19, which seeks a vulnerable host for the purpose of self-perpetuation, and could not have found a better candidate than our disunited states of dystopia. 

Still, as Russia proved more than a century ago, opportunism need not be restricted to a virus. Mega-corporations, capital accumulators and the 1% show no visible compunction when it comes to seizing the moment to fleece the rest of us, again and again, and we can't rely on either major political party for usefulness when both suckle the very same teat.

The late Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was the subject of a documentary called The United States of Amnesia, released in 2014.

A curious condition of a republic based roughly on the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.

Are these advanced degrees in consumerism serving us well in a time of flattened curves and social distancing, or are we revealed to be inhabiting a failed state, dragged into the abyss not only by four decades of Hayek's neoliberal claptrap -- a destructive form of social engineering as or more offensive than what Lenin foisted on the Russians -- but more ominously, our own inability (read: unwillingness) as individuals to have an semblance of a clue as to exactly who are oppressors are?

Fetch me my pitchfork, ma -- well, just as soon as we all make it out of quarantine.

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For the second week running I sat down and churned out a column on the fly. Good, bad or indifferent, I'd resolved to try going a whole year without column reruns, and this makes three months. Interestingly, as wordy as I can be, the preceding clocked in at almost exactly the number of words (900) that used to serve as my limit when BEER MONEY ran in the pre-merger New Albany Tribune. Strange days continue to find us, and will during the weeks ahead.

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Recent columns:

March 19: ON THE AVENUES: If it's a war, then the food service biz needs to be issued a few weapons. We need improvisation and flexibility to survive the shutdown.

March 12: ON THE AVENUES: Keep calm and carry on.

March 5: ON THE AVENUES: I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling.

February 27: ON THE AVENUES: There is a complete absence of diversity among regular News and Tribune columnists.

John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and Warren Beatty's Reds both are recognized as American classics.

Leading off, dialogue from Warren Beatty's classic film Reds, with Beatty as journalist/socialist John Reed, who is meeting with factory workers trying to unionize when the cops arrive to break up the "unAmerican" gathering.

Reed: Officer, these men have the legal right to assemble.

Policeman: What the hell're you doing?

Reed: Me? I write.

Policeman: You right? Uh uh. You wrong ... (skulls are cracked and the oligarchy is buttressed).

The scene is so vivid and lifelike that a Floyd County Democratic Party elder or One Southern Indiana operative might as well be playing the gap-toothed restorer of order, albeit brandishing an electronic muzzle rather than a billy club.

My name's not Reed, but I read, and it's been only a week since I wrote about my limited yearly intake of cinema, but this shouldn't be construed to mean that I don't have favorite movies. Having failed to assemble the requisite "Top Whatever" list, a few preferred films spring to mind:

Animal House
The Lives of Others
Bull Durham
M*A*S*H
The Dark Knight
Anything by the Marx Brothers and Errol Flynn
Foreign films that aren't stupid and violent

And so on, although perhaps my number one movie remains Beatty's 1981 epic.

Based on Jack Reed’s 1919 novel Ten Days that Shook the World, which also provided the title for Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece of Soviet montage “October: Ten Days That Shook the World,” Reds is a first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution. It follows Reed’s life as a Communist journalist and writer, both in the U.S. and abroad in the streets of Petrograd.

Jason Fraley tells the whole story of Reds, which would appeal to me for no other single reason beyond it being released at precisely the point of highest Reaganism, and moreover, for Beatty's use of what were referred to as witnesses.

Most memorable is his decision to intersperse his narrative with actual interviews of prominent real-life figures of the movement — doing for politics what When Harry Met Sally (1989) did for romance. These voices — credited as “Witnesses” — appear in several forms: between sequences as interviews, as voiceover narration and even voiceover music as witnesses sing songs like “Over There,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and the film’s recurring favorite “You Can’t Come in Play in My Yard.” This fusion of reality and melodrama is a credit to Beatty’s filmmaking ability — and a testament to how personal the project was to him. In fact, Beatty began filming the interviews back in the early ’70s before Reds was even an official project, but no doubt already weighing on his mind.

Many of the witnesses had died by the time of the film's release. Writer Henry Miller, another of my faves, was one of them. Now, about those ten days ...

Everybody Knew That Something Was Going to Happen, but Nobody Knew Just What, by Andrew Hartman (Society for U.S. Intellectual History)

This essay, by me, is the first post in our roundtable dedicated to John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World.

John Reed arrived in Petrograd at the dawn of history. The globetrotting journalist had traveled to Russia with his feminist wife Louise Bryant as soon as news of impending revolution broke. It was 1917, and “Jack,” as his friends knew him, had a front-row seat to the October Revolution.

Famous for his vivid first-hand accounts of labor conflict and war, Reed was the perfect writer to tell the electrifying story of Lenin and the Bolsheviks seizing power. Ten Days that Shook the World, Reed’s celebratory account of the Russian Revolution, is now hailed as an American classic. George Kennan of all people praised it as “a reflection of blazing honesty and a purity of idealism.” In a recent New York Times retrospective, Condoleezza Rice, no Bolshevik, writes that Ten Days “provided a riveting and vivid—if not impartial—account of the most pivotal phase of the revolution, as viewed from the ground.”

But Reed’s “slice of intensified history,” as he called it, had trouble finding an audience at first. “Here by wide acknowledgement,” a sympathetic Reed biographer wrote, “was a great American journalist, an eyewitness to the greatest story of the time, but not an editor outside the tiny radical press would give him an inch of space” ...