Labor Day 2024, As We Face The Most Important Election In American History

 

As we celebrate Labor Day this year, I would suggest that we celebrate it with a sense of caution and use it as an impetus to renew our personal commitments to fight to protect the working class, the middle class, and all threatened classes of individuals with our vote on November 5, 2024, to elect President Kamala Harris.  Labor Day is a day which was set aside as a national holiday on June 28, 1894, when Democratic President Grover Cleveland signed a federal law making Labor Day a national holiday.  Labor Day had previously been celebrated in roughly 30 states.  Labor Day has been celebrated ever since both as celebration of the working class and a tribute to all the people who worked over the past 250 years to make America the country and the Democracy it has always been.  But this year we are facing the worst attack on the American working class, middle class, elderly, infirm, racial and ethnic minorities, women, children, and nearly every human in America who is, in one way or another, vulnerable to those who have no respect for laws, the US Constitution, constitutional rights, human rights, and any other idea which is intended to protect, defend, educate, provide health care, and all other basic rights to such vulnerable individuals.  That attack is being perpetrated by TRAITOR Trump, the Right Wing Radical Repugnican Party, Project 2025, the super wealthy, and those who comprise all such groups and their ideas.  

In this election, we have what is actually the most clear cut choice ever posed in an election for an electorate to choose between Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Human Rights and Total Disregard For Such Rights.  The choice is between Vice President Kamala Harris who represents all those positive possible outcomes and TRAITOR Trump who represents all that is Evil and Destructive in the world. Kamala Harris is a person who has spent her life fighting for and defending all that is Good and Positive in the world.  TRAITOR Trump has spent his life fighting to destroy literally everything in the world which he cannot find a way to dominate, control, and hoard unto himself.  This choice is so simple that it baffles me and millions of other good, decent, rational Americans to understand how any human on earth can fail to understand the simplicity and the seriousness of this choice.  TRAITOR Trump and everything he represents is geared to destroy America, American Democracy, Constitutional Rights, Individual Rights, and to wipe all that is good and productive off the face of America.  

I am asking each of  you who read this to either make or renew a personal commitment to fight every day from now until President Kamala Harris can be elected, protected, and sworn into office to uphold the Constitution, to elect President Harris, and to insist that TRAITOR  Trump finally be held criminally responsible for all his crimes against America, American Democracy, the world, and the planet.  He must be convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned for his crimes.  If he is not, this country cannot survive as a Democracy.  We are literally facing a choice between the future of America and the total destruction of all that America and American Democracy represent.  We will either save America and American Democracy or we will lose them forever as a result of this election.  

"The Town And The City" by Jack Kerouac--Thoughts On A Rereading

 

"The Town And The City" was Jack Kerouac's first published novel and was released by Harcourt, Brace, and Company in 1950.  It began one of the greatest careers in American fiction for Kerouac and was the initial expression of what would become known as The Beat Writers.  I read it the first time in about 1974 after having been exposed to Kerouac by Robert "Bob" Snyder who was the Director of the Southern Appalachian Circuit of Antioch College in Beckley, West Virginia.  Bob was a professor, mentor, and friend to me and dozens of other young Appalachian writers.  I had no exposure to Kerouac at all prior to that, especially in the public school system of Knott County Kentucky.  I might have heard his name but had never read a single thing he wrote until that time.  By the time I began to read him, he had published more than a dozen novels and was a household name in most of literate America.  I had slowly evolved from a young Appalachian boy who was deeply interested in literature, politics, and the arts into a more developed reader and writer and a hippy and opponent of the Vietnam War.  That metamorphosis was complete after my time at the Southern Appalachian Circuit of Antioch College in the company of Bob Snyder and the other faculty and students at what was a small, somewhat experimental campus Antioch had set up as an outreach to what they considered to be disadvantaged groups in several locations around the country.  I was immediately enthralled with Kerouac's writing and the first of his books I read was probably "Dharma Bums" or "On The Road".  I quickly went on to devour nearly every printed word the man ever wrote and regretted that he did not live to write that much more.  He is truly one of the 8 or 10 greatest writers America has ever produced and one of the few about whom it can be said that he actually established, along with several of his friends, a new school of writing.  

Recently, on one of my many trips to small "junk stores", I wandered into a first edition copy of "The Town And The City" which I had bought in a small pile of other older, less  important books in which I was also interested.  As I was going through the owner's small shelf of used books in what is essentially a small antique shop, now on its way out of business to be replaced by a booth in a Peddler's Mall, I saw the title on the spine of the book, pulled it off the shelf and was amazed to see that Kerouac and Harcourt, Brace, and Company had originally published the book under the name "John Kerouac".  I never said a word to the owner whom I like personally, but who knows little or nothing about books and writing.  I immediately laid the book in "my pile" and moved on, as I always do, to find what I want in such stores and then to negotiate a blanket price for the lot.  To say the least, I paid less for the lot than I would have to obtain this book alone which was published under his legal name instead of the pen name he had adopted later and which became how he will always be known to the world.    Admittedly, the book is an ex-library copy with typical library markings and some clinging evidence of a former library dust jacket, but it still well worth keeping forever to me.  

My wife had previously read only two of Kerouac's books and had liked those: "Visions of Gerard" and "The Subterraneans" which we had actually read together with me reading out loud while she washes dishes which I rinse and put away later.  She had tried one of his other more stream of consciousness novels previously and didn't like it at all.  So I had decided to try the softer, gentler, deeply loving pair of novels to attempt to hook her on Kerouac. It had worked and now we moved on to this unique copy of "The Town And The City".  This book is in most ways a very typical first novel by an American author who is deeply committed to getting himself published.  But is also a very good novel, not great, but quite good, well structured with a well developed group of central characters, the Martin family in a small town in Massachusetts and later in New York City.  It is about their lives as a family unit and as individuals and is quite long at 499 pages compared to most of Kerouac's later works.  It leads us through this large family's lives in the years preceding World War II and the War itself, shows the development of the individual children into unique adults, their individual departure from the family nest, a wonderful old farmhouse on the edge of a small, close knit town.  It also depicts the father's descent into gambling, drinking, and losing his small printing company, and eventually the home.  He becomes a printer in companies owned by others, and eventually moves with the wife and two youngest children to New York where he works the last of his career and dies old and broken down in a small apartment.  

The later sections of the book contain two interesting segments.  First, in an encounter on the streets of New York, one of the Martin sons who seems to most closely depict the author himself meets a small group of other young men who appear to depict the young Ginsberg and Burroughs or perhaps Gregory Corso.  Another of the characters in that small group is called "the young thug Jack" which is a fascinating way for Kerouac to have described himself.  To my knowledge, this is the first time America was exposed in literature to part of the group of people who would become known as The Beat Writers.  At the end of the book, the funeral of the father, George Martin, is set in the small New England town in which he and his wife grew up and were married.  The depiction in the conclusion of the novel is one which could have been typically been written about a funeral and visitation in almost any small, rural town in America.  It could have definitely been written about funerals in general in Eastern Kentucky where I grew up.  The entire town turns out to bring George Martin home, say goodbye to him, and bury him in the little country church yard.  A large collection of distant relatives from both sides of the family show up, many of whom the Martin children have never met.  But all of them seem to remember George Martin and his wife.  It is a wonderful depiction of a funeral in rural America and points out just how clearly Kerouac intended to contrast his character's lonely death in a small apartment in the largest city in America as opposed to the funeral which his native small town was willing to provide to one who had not lived there in many years.  It is the perfect ending to a long, complex, wonderful first novel by anyone's standards.