File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 281


Date: Fri, 22 Aug 1997 16:02:53 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-I: Ballad of Carl Drega


Write a book, Louis!  Every now and then - certainly not always - my
pinkish innards might baulk at your descriptions and prescriptions.  But of
your writing I never tire.  You're a fucking marvel.

All the best,
Rob.


>"Well," I remember saying, "anyone who smokes two cops, a newspaper editor,
>and a judge (a yuppie to boot!) in one afternoon can't be all bad."  I was
>only joking of course, well, half-joking.  I mean, the part about the judge;
>it IS one way of getting rid of them, isn't it?
>
>I was talking to my friend from Brunswick, where Carl Drega laid his
>ill-starred ambush of the Vermont state troopers that, instead, sealed his
>own fate.  He was shot to death in an ensuing gun battle.  Earlier, he had
>settled accounts with those across the border in Colebrook, New Hampshire;
>those who had been perhaps a bit too overbearing in the discharge of their
>official duties.  Shit happens, I guess.
>
>They said tonight that no one had stepped forward to claim the body.  There
>was a niece from Colorado, but she dropped from sight after coming forward
>Wednesday morning.  Troubles of her own, I think; she doesn't need the
>publicity.  I've been thinking of getting together with a few friends and
>giving him a simple funeral, at least.  Seems only fair.  He was a worker
>and a veteran and someone who let the petty injustices of his day-to-day
>existence wear him down and drive him, finally, mad.  "Hell," I told her,
>"if they can give that fucking Nixon a $300,000 funeral," (I toyed with the
>idea of calling the county morgue) "Hell, look at all the people *he*
>killed."  We talked about something else after that.  Coming to Rhode Island
>or going to Vermont.  Or something.
>
>I was just thinking that I've known quite a few Carl Drega's.  First in the
>service (Vietnam was a prolific maker of lone, disheveled gunmen who after
>killing again and again, returned home to take their own lives, sometimes
>over the course of many years).   Later in plain working class life.  People
>who work hard but never seem to get anywhere, people who are always itching
>for a fight as if fighting --someone, anyone --  somehow will atone for that
>relentless torture that dogs them day-to-day.  People who beat and hit and
>abuse, their spouse, their kids, themselves, and who, after all the beating
>and the hitting, feel less and less,  people who drink too much, and feel
>too little, people who never see the big picture.
>
>Until it's too late.
>
>So, goodbye Carl Drega, whoever you were.  When you get where you're going,
>ask why it is that of all the folks who need to stand up and be counted --
>to throw off the yoke of exploitation, oppression and dispair -- it is
>instead folks like you who end up, stiffened, fetal-postured, dead.
>
>Alone, by the side of the road.
>
>
>Louis Godena
>
>
>
>     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

************************************************************************




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