Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

Below is an excerpt from Naming the System. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC is the Spanish acronym) is the oldest revolutionary army in Latin America. Since 2002, it has been under some of its severest attacks by the Colombian government under the right-wing president Álvaro Uribe, aided by considerable U.S. military aid and personnel, who are in Colombia allegedly to eradicate the drug trade, but really to contain and defeat the FARC. The FARC has suffered many blows in the past few years, including the death of its founder and leader Manuel Marulanda in 2008 and the murder of several of its top leaders. Yet, it continues to fight, and it still controls large areas of the country and maintains its capacity to disrupt the Colombian economy. An update on FARC, with an overall negative view of its future, can be found at http://www.coha.org/farc-a-perilous-future-a-grim-recent-past/. All things considered, I do not think the FARC can overthrow the government, and I think it is likely that the FARC has lost a good deal of its initial revolutionary trajectory. Read More

 When I first began to teach, I had many veterans from the war in Vietnam in my classes. Between my first year in 1969 and the revolutionary victory in 1975, tens of thousands of soldiers returned home.  The college in which I taught was in the steel-mill town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and like most working class cities, Johnstown had more than its share of veterans. Read More

My mother turned eighty-five years old on January 26.  She’s a small, grey-haired woman with plenty of wrinkles.  When she was young, she had long brown hair and a pretty Italian face.  She and my dad were a handsome couple.  We used to laugh a lot together, and I can still get her laughing.  Wordsworth said that the child is the father of the man.  And so too the child is the mother of the woman.  You never really conquer what you were.  A poor girl in a poor town, with a poor mother and no father, breathing in the coal smoke, beset by worries, finds it hard to be happy as a woman.  You always jump when the phone rings.  Anyway, what my mother was and is helped make me, for better and worse, what I am.  Here’s a story I wrote.  My mother has read it.  I think she had mixed feelings about it.  It is from my book, In and Out of the Working Class.    Read More