Life of Steve continued

    Steve remained a communist but the world was changing
    In the same year of 1979 when the new pope visited Poland, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. This act seemed to reignite the Cold War. U.S. President Jimmy Carter tried to bring back the military draft, but he failed here.
   Still his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski kept pushing U.S. foreign policy into a confrontation with the Soviet Union. He visited the Persian Gulf, pointed for the t.v. cameras and said, "There is the arc of crisis." He was referrring to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran.
    In 1979 in Iran, a revolution led by the Islamic cleric Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah. In Saudi Arabia in the same year, a group of zealots, perhaps inspired by the Iranian revolution, siezed part of the holy city of Mecca. Later these insurgents were captured and killed. Meanwhile Iranian revolutionaries took hostages from the American Embassy in Tehran, and held them until Ronald Reagan became  U.S. president.
    The U.S. government helped fund guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, one of whose leaders was Osama Bin Laden. The Soviet army tried to crush the guerrillas and a brutal war broke out. The Soviet troops died by the thousands while killing more than half a million Afghanis. Steve looks back at the Soviet invasion to-day and says, "It was a great mistake." Certainly it helped destroy the Soviet Union.
    To compound Soviet troubles, the new Reagan government in the U.S., upped its massive military budget with more new and frightening weapons. Reagan unveiled  a new weapon system called 'Star Wars'. It would bring peace , Reagan assured the world, by shooting down incoming rockets going towards the U.S.
   The ageing Soviet leaders saw correctly that Star Wars was aimed at them, or at least would shoot down any incoming Soviet rockets if a nuclear war broke out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the Soviets's ailing economy couldn't match anything like Star Wars. The new information technologies springing up in  the U.S. and western Europe left the Soviet economy far behind.
    "The weight of the social subsidies for ordinary citizens," writes Jim Laxer, "plus the cost of keeping top Communists well outfitted, as well as a vast military were too much for the communist's inefficient economy to bear."

                          To Be Continued

The Life of Steve continued.

   Steve was now working on a tug boat again. But he spent hours, sometimes days, marching in demos, picketting companies who were being struck by their workers, and running off pamphlets for coming demonstrations.
     He was a militant who'd found his religion or passion in life and worked happily within it. He had also found a family, someting he hadn't had in many years.
     But he had fun too. He ended up on the downtown eastside or 'skid road' as it was known back then. Here he drank, partied and often stayed in the area's cheap hotels for months on end. "The downtown eastside wasn't a bad area back then," he recalls.
    Steve also went back to school. He fulfilled his adolescent dream of going further than high school. He studied at a local community college. Then he went to the University of British Columbia and got a Bachelor of Arts in political science. Now he aimed to get a Master of Arts in political science. But his thesis advisor didn't help him here. And Steve alleges that the advisor sabotaged his efforts.
     But then the world changed.
     In 1979 the new pope John Paul the Second went back to visit his native land of Poland and held an open air mass in Warsaw. The Poles had been the most rebellious of the eastern European people who lived under Soviet control. Millions of Polish people turned out to see and listen to the pope. Soon a new trade union appeared in Gdandsk, called Solidarnosc or Solidarity. It was led by a tough talking moustached shipyard worker called Lech Walensa.
     Walensa and the Gdansk shipyard workers struck against their communist bosses. Soon they were joined by other Polish workers. And unlike previous Polish revolts in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, the communists couldn't crush this uprising.
   "This Walensa is an agent of the C.I.A.," Steve claims. In any case, it's clear that the new pope did shovel$40 million to Solidarity and the striking Polish workers. The western media adored and feted the Polish workers though such media had never given the same treatment  to strikers in their own country.
    One thing was clear. Many Polish workers weren't happy living under communism.
     Nor were the Afghanis. 
   

The Life of Steve..continued

    "It is reasonable to expect that a communist party is unlike any other," wrote John Berger in l965. "It is more than a political party. It is a school of philosophy, an army, an agent of the future; at its noblest it is a fraternity."
    To-day in 2012 all of this sounds like nonsense. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, spelled the end of communism across most of the world, and no one joins a communist party to-day in Canada, looking for fraternity or solidarity. Still, 50 years ago, many people like British writer John Berger believed communism was the wave of the future and joined communist parties to create a brave new world.
    Communist parties were what political scientists call 'cadre parties'. They demand intense commitment. They control the books members read, the films they see, and the lives they lead.
    "The party would call for a demonstration somewhere," Steve says. "And you had to be there at that time and at that place."
    In short, the communist party was an ideological army that marched together towards the goal of a world revolution that would bring socialism.
     People who joined the party often left it. "It's not for me," a few leavetakers told Steve. " It's too intense." And they vanished. Others clashed with the party leaders over some political issue or another. They vanished too.

    By the early l960's, the B,C. Communist Party had shrivelled to less than a thousand people. For world events as well as harassment by the government could shrink the party too.
    When then-Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev denounced his former boss, the late Josef Stalin for his crimes in 1956, people deserted the communist party in droves.A few months later, Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian rebellion and once again, people tore up their communist party cards and left.
     But Steve stayed on. So did others. In Vancouver and a few other places across B.C. the party organized demonstrations against racial injustice, American and Canadian policies that hurt people, against American-led wars and against many other things. Of course, the communist party did not protest against Soviet crimes.But all of this activity kept Steve busy.

Steve's Life...continued

     Steve is on a boat heading towards South Korea. It's late 1950 and the boat is carrying supplies to aid the war effort in the Korean War.

    The conditions on the boat were terrible.
    "The food we  ate was garbage," Steve recalls. "The seas of the Pacific  were rough and dangerous. Remember this was winter and the winds and the seas were treacherous."
     Steve remembers many times when the shp nearly sank. Then were the skippers who were harsh and tyrannical. But they often had to confront tough crew members, some of whom like Steve were communists and others who were anarchists.
     Steve can't recall how many times he crossed the Pacific during the Korean War."It must have been four or five times."
     Steve ended up ro a tiime in England where he worked in a movie studio. He was shipwrecked off the Horn of Africa, carrying a dangerous hernia in his groin. "I needed an operation, but the British officers in Somalia wouldn't give me the time of day. But the Italians were great. They operated on me and saved my life."
    Steve sailed to Austrlia meeting communists on the way. But in what he calls 'Aussie Land" former comrades he knew, turned their back on him. "They'd become bourgeios," Steve says, "and wanted nothing to do with me."
    By 1962, Steve's journeys were over. He sailed into Vancouver's harbour on another small boat and went back to work in his native land. The anti-communist hysteria had died down a bit. It had broken the communist party to some extent. So it was no longer needed - for now. But the Cold War still raged on.
     But first Steve needed money for he was broke. So he went to a local welfare office. "But it was terrible there," he says." It was the most humiliating experience I was ever put through. I never went to the welfare office again."
    "I'd rather die than go on welfare." And he never did go on welfare again.
    

Steve: Portrait of an old man

      The Life of Steve continued..


     By the late 1940's Steve had joined the Communist Party of Canada and was trying to keep the communist-led Canadian Seaman's Union alive. Steve began to do guard duty on C.S.U. organized ships. he began to work on sthem too. One night he came off his ship that had tied up outside the Welland Canal.
     Two men jumped him, and knocked him down. Then they began kicking him. "You f-ing communists," one snarled at Steve as he smashed one of his steel-toed boots into  Steve's  ribs. "We'll teach you to  stay off these ships, you bum."
     Steve ended up in hospital with a broken nose and three fractured ribs. He recovered in an Ontarion hospital where his friends had taken him. It took him three months to recover from the beating. In the meantime, the ranks of the CSU kept shrinking. For years afterwards, if Steve moved his right arm quickly backwards, he could feel pain where his ribs had been broken.
     Afterwards Steve went back on the picket lines. The communist party also led demonstrations against joblessness and also demonstrated for unemployment insurance for the jobless. One early fall day in the late l940's, Steve joined dozens of mostly men who were picketting  outside the Ontario legislature at Queen's Park, not far from downtown Toronto. The then-Ontario premier who was a Progressive Conservative  invited some of the crowd into his office.
     He promised the people that he would talk to the Liberal government in Ottawa about releasing more money for the jobless.
     Yet wherever Steve looked in the late 1940's, the ranks of the communists were shrinking. They were in prison, or they'd gone underground, or they'd dropped out of the party. It was time to leave Canada.
     Years later, the foremost American anti-communist of his era, U.S. President Richard Nixon said, "When in trouble, travel."
     Steve loathed Nixon's politics but he followed this slogan. He left his country for the very first time and started a worldwide journey. It was a journey of self-discovery. It was a search for a new world and sometimes it was a voyage to the ends of the earth.
    

       The small cargo ship headed out into the steel grey, storm-tossed waters of the Georgia Straight. It carried a crew of only five, and Steve was one of them.
    "It was rough, terribly rough out there," Steve recalls. The ship headed north, hugging the coastline  of British Columbia. The ship docked in Kitimat, and then Prince Rupert. Then it headed north again, and threaded its way along the coast of Alaska, passed the Aleutian Islands and then plunged into the icy turbulent waters of the north Pacific Ocean.
     It was November 1950  and this small ship was heading to South Korea to deliver supplies to the Allied forces in the Korean War. Steve who was a communist, was indirectly helping the anti-communist side. But what could he do? Working on this ship was the only job he could find. And the job was dangerous.

1.    To be continued

Steve 's life then and now

   This is not a true story but it could be.


"They're dead from the arse up,"Steve used to say about people who were conservative. Steve's life has been given over to struggles against such right wing people. He sure didn't all the battles he joined . But he tried to.
    To-day Steve's in his early 80's. He's working at a part-time job and trying to get his fellow workers to join a union. Sometimes his brown eyes get sad as he figures out the odds against his latest project. Then also at times like these, he grits his yellowed teeth. Meanwhile his thin grey hair, that was black at one time, grows thinner  and greyer. But he hasn't given up his struggle for social justice.
   Steve was born east of Winnipeg. he grew up in a working class Jewish family but never really got to know his parents. "They were dead by the time I was 16," he says.
    By now, it was the mid-1940's and World War Two had just ended. Steve had a high school degree and the only  job he could find was in a clothing factory. "It was a hellish place," he recalls. "Right in downtown Winnipeg."
     Steve wanted to go to university, but his rich relatives wouldn't give him a penny. So Steve trekked esatwards across Canada and ended up in Toronto. Somewhere in this big city he joined a picket line that was picketting for some social justice issue. Here he met communists, and soon joined the Canadian Communist Party.
   In l948 this was a brave or foolish thing to do. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was already heating up. The two former allies and victors against the Axis powers were now enemies. And Canada sat firmly in the U.S. camp.
    "Soviet spies were unearthed in Ottawa of all places," write Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein. "Civil servants, military officers and scientists betrated their oaths and turned wartime secrets over to Moscow."
    But Steve noted that wherever there was a social justice issue, communists were right there in the middle of the struggle. They fought for the jobless, the homeless and strikers. In short, they were for real. Steve liked their spirit.
     Steve met men and women who had hel;ped build the new industrial unions  in the forests, the auto factories and the steel mills. But now an alliance of businessmen, police, governments, opportunistic union members and goons drove  the left laening union leaders out of the unions they built. Now business-like unions took the place of formerly socially conscious ones.
     In Canada, on the Great Lakes industrial warfare broke out. The Liberal government of Mackenzie King brought in  a gangster from the United States named hal Banks. Banks's task was to smash the communist-led Canadian Seamen's Union or CSU. Steve got involved in this struggle.
     ...To be contined...
      
    

Friedan versus De Beauvoir continued+

   In my last blog I pointed out that Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan didn't agree on whether old age was a nice stage of life. De Beauvoir didn't like old age. Betty Friedan did.
   Betty Friedan knew de Beauvoir and had read her book  'The Second Sex'. "She carefully followed the arguments in de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex'," writes historian Daniel Horowitz, "but mentioned only'its insights into French women."
    She must have read 'Old Age' when it was published in English in the 1970's. So Betty Friedan wrote her book about old age. And it was called 'The Fountain of Age', obviously a play on the expression 'The Fountain of Youth'. It came out in 1993.
     When the young Friedan wrote 'The Feminine Mystique' back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, she was a mother of three, living in an 11-room house, an hour's drive from New York City. By the time she worked on 'The Fountain of Age', she'd moved onward and upward.
   Now she was on a first name basis with some of the world's movers and shakers.
   And the 'Fountain of Age' reflects this change.
   It's chockful of brilliant old men and women who seem to love being old. They're nearly all rich, successful people,who have lived rich, successful lives. In short, they're a lot like Betty Friedan.
    "That is no country for old men' wrote W.B. Yeats. "The young in one another's arms/ Birds in the trees/ Those dying generations at their song."
      Yeats saw the anguish of ageing. Friedan doesn't seem to. Nor does she see many older Americans who're living on small pensions in poor places. Just like in 'The Feminine Mystique', Friedan leaves out working people and poor Americans.
    For her old age is just great. "Awesome," she might have said, if she was alive to-day.
    But unmentioned in most of the book was that old age wasn't so great for Friedan. She couldn't find a man to live with, though she wanted to find one. She had a part-time lover but that left her feeling dissatisfied. Her health was poor and often she was confined to a wheelchair. By the 1990's, Friedan was a legend, but an ageing one.
   And in 'The Fountain of Age' she rarely mentioned death. In fact, many writers on old age don't talk about it. But it's the elephant in the room, for us old people. It didn't seem to bother Friedan.
   So there you have two great women. Two great people - de Beauvoir and Friedan. They both wrote on women and ageing. But they're outlooks on growing old differ sharply.
    I prefer de Beauvoir's take on aging. It's the last stage of life before we die. As Woody Allen said, "I don't want my works to be immortal. I want to be immortal." You can't blame him.+

Feminists Clash Over Old Age

   The American writer Betty Friedan supposedly loved old age. The French writer Simone de Beauvoir hated growing old. So here were two of the most well-known feminist writers of the 20th century, holding very different views about ageing.
    De Beauvoir  finished writing 'The Second Sex' a pathbreaking book about women's oppression in 1955. About eight years later, in 1963 Friedan published 'The Feminine Mystique' which paved the way for the second wave of  American feminism.
   Then both women got old. Their bones started to creak, their hearts slowed down, their vision dimmed, their hair greyed, their skin drooped and they
 looked back on their lives. But they both stayed active.
     De Beauvoir wrote another massive book, a huge intellectual work, the verbal equivalent of the great cathedral  Notre Dame in Paris. She called her book  'La Veillesse'which in English translates into 'Old Age'
     But in Canada and the U.S. the book wasn't called that. It was titled "The Coming of Age'
     Canadians and Americans you see don't like to refer to themselves as 'old 'even if they're into their 70's. They call themselves instead 'seniors' . But I don't like that name. Why not call a spade a spade?
    "I'm an old man," I tell people. "In  a few years I'll be gone. I'm  70 going on 71." So on this issue I'm in de Beauvoir's corner, and not supporting mainstream North American public opinion. De Beauvoir by the way hated old age. She insisted it was a horrible stage of life. And sometimes while reading the book you do get the idea that she'd rather be dead than old.So what was Friedan's opinion on ageing? Tune in to my next blog to find out.

old man - stories about me and others.

        Old Age by Dave Jaffe




     Marilyn is a woman who's always friendly. She grew up near Deep Cove on Vancouver's North Shore. She lived there as a child and a teenager in hard scrabble poverty. But her early life didn't warp her. Marilyn toiled for years in the Vacouver Public Library system. Now she's retired and enjoys her hard earned leisure.
    I bumped into her in a local library recently and she was still her cheerful self. During our conversation, I told her that I'm now 70 and am now an old man.
      "Oh 70 is the new 50," Marilyn said who herself just turned 50. She assured me that I had many years left to live. I think Marilyn and many others like her who think this way are wrong. Age 70 isn't the new 50; it's more like the new 67. In other words, I've got two or three more years to live now, than I would have had, if I'd turned 70 in 1992. But even so death looms ahead of me.
     Meanwhile my body's aging and my mind is slowing down.
    Most of the rest of this blog is about old age, my old age and the aging years of others. I hope you enjoy it. But I must warn you. It's not always going to be  a cheerful trip down memory lane.

   

Amusing film about murder

'Bernie' starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, and Matthew McConaughey. Directed by Richard
Linklater.


    "The most dangerous man a woman will ever meet is her lover or husband," a feminist on Vancouver's Commercial Drive told me many years ago. She was right and the movie 'Bernie' proves her point.
      "Bernie' is a film about a gay man, played wonderfully by Jack Black who meets a horrible, abusive rich widow, played by Shirley MacLaine.
   In the end Bernie gets tired of the widow called Marjorie Nugent. He kills her in her garage firing four shots into her back with a .22 rifle.
    But in this film, the director Richard Linklater allows the townspeople of Carthage in East Texas, where 'Bernie' happens, a big role. For 'Bernie' is based on a true story. Mixing fiction with fact, Linklater lets the actual people of Carthage to tell parts of the story of Bernie Tiele and Marjorie Nugent. The real Bernie Tiele is serving a 50 year sentence in a Texas penitentairy. We see him at the movie's end.
    But it's Jack Black and the citizens of Carthage who give the movie its flair and excitement. "He was a little light in the loafers," one person says of Black who plays a gay man delightfully. And the Carthage citizens fill in the background of  the story with amusing incidents.
   Sometimes I wondered what really went on between Bernie and Marjorie. But in the end the movie boils down to yet another murder  by a man who was also a liar and a cheater. Matthew McConaughey is the fly in Bernie's ointment. He plays the role of the outspoken prosecutor  Danny Buck Davidson who finally puts Bernie behind bars.
 Is this film politically incorrect? Maybe, but it was fun to watch.
    

taxi driving years ago

'Taxi' by Helen Potrobenko. New Star Press. l989 162pp.


   Anakana Schofield is a young talented novelist who has recently shot to literary superstardom with her new novel 'Malarkey'.  Anakana and I were neighbours for a few years in the Cambie Village area of Vancouver and then she moved on. We met again in a park not far from where I live in July of this year.
      "Have you read any good books about Vancouver/" I asked Anakana who like myself was born in England.
     "I liked the book 'Taxi'," Anakana said. "I thought it was quite good."
      So on Anakana's say so I started to read "Taxi" and Anakana was right; It is a good book.
      But 'Taxi' isn't an ordinary novel with characters and conflict. It's more of a journal about a woman named Shannon living in Vancouver in the 1970's and driving a taxi. She lives in a house with a basement suite. And she knows the couple who have a baby and who live upstairs.  Shannon is a feminist  and feminism back in those days was just taking off.
     Shannon gets tired of fares who ask her, "How did you become a txi driver/" She also I think is a Marxist  who may or may not believe in a working class revolution. Believe it or not, back in the early 1970's, you could meet  quite a few Marxists in Vancouver.
    After a while taxi driving is a tough trade, tougher even than bus driving where you do get paid by the hour. Still, I recall one bus driver saying, " After a while one bus stop just looks like another."
    Shannon drives many of her passengers from downtown hotels to poor places on Vancouver's East Side, Some of her fares are drunk. Other  are sober members of the middle class. She finds a beautiful spot in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver, around Blenheim and 14th Avenue. That's still a lovely spot though much has changed there in the past 40 years.
     In the meantime much has also changed in Vancouver. Hotels mentioned by Potrobenko have vanished to be replaced by upscale dining places or expensive condos. Potrobenko doesn't drive a taxi anymore. I think she now lives in suburban Burnaby. Most taxi drivers in Metro Vancouver are of  south asian descent. And socialism and Marxism for that matter have had their day.
    Still Helen Potrobenk did write this interesting book about taxi driving  and it's still worth reading. "The novel is the book of life," novelist D.H. Lawrence once wrote. "Taxi' is a book about life in the fast and slow lanes of life.




     

Woody Allen's Rome

'To Rome With Love' Directed by Woody Allen. Starring Roberto Benigni, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page and Alec Baldwin. In English and Italian with subtitles.


    "Movie theatres are temples for the maladjusted," one Italian film critic once said in a book on Woody Allen.
    Allen's Rome may be a temple for the maladjusted too. Five couples converge on Rome or already live in it but not always happily. Allen plays a retired nervous U.S. opera producer who comes to Rome with his wife, played by Judy Davis. Allen makes his daughter's { Alison Pill's} father-in-law-to be famous by having him sing operatic songs in a shower. This part of the film  can make you howl with laughter.
      Roberto Benigni wakes up everyday as an anonymous white collar worker. Suddenly he becomes famous as paparazzi crawl over him. Then suddenly he's anonymous again. "I'm Leopoldo Pisanello," he says. "A schmuck."
    A young Italian couple, played by Alesssandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi go to the Eternal City to live there. They both get swept up in love affairs that don't destroy their marriage.
     A young architectural student played by Jesse Eisenberg falls in love with a flaky actress played by Ellen Page. He nearly loses his down-to-earth girlfriend played by Greta Gerwig. This part of the film was weak, though Alec Baldwin gives us some good moments, as he pops up to give Eisenberg some advice on love and its pains.
       And last but not least, there's Alison Pill, Allen's and Davis's daughter who"s in love with a very left-wing lawyer.
      But all of this,alas, doesn't add up to much. Allen gives us beautiful shots of Rome, especially its tourist spots like the Colossuem and the Spanish Steps. This film is really an old man's ode to a far older city.
      "In this city, all life is a story," a Roman traffic cop says. But in Allen's 42nd film as a director, the stories have little impact.