by Lionel Rolfe

G21 Contributing Editor

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL("http://www.g21.net/amdream78.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.

LOS ANGELES, CA, USA - This is the tale of two Jacks -- one was a Jack who represented progress and democracy, economic and social democracy. The other represented the same thing our incumbent but unelected president does. He was a Jack on the side of the forces of reaction and fascism.

I use these terms knowing such words are quaint for the television generation, but that doesn't make them less meaningful. It only means the generation sadly raised on television instead of books and newspapers doesn't know history. Let us learn a little history now.

Jack London lived a decade or two before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great reformer who saved capitalism from itself. That was what Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s was all about. The revolutionary writings of Jack London. a couple of decades before Roosevel.t had much to do with paving the way for the reforms of FDR.

The other Jack in this tale was old Jack Boden, who hated Roosevelt. He was a banker I happened to know, a friend of my grandparents, who regarded Roosevelt as a "class traitor."

You might remember the Reagan "Revolution," which is "semantic spaghetti" at its worst. It probably is no accident that Reagan was the godfather of the television age.

Reagan and every Republican since him, including the the present shrub who occupies the White House, have been hawking his odd ideology ever since. Reagan's "revolution" is really not an ideology so much as it is an excuse for highway robbery, such as practiced by banks, oil companies, insurance companies and most big corporations on the rest of us. It's greed masquerading as an ideology.

Bush and Reagan's pap wasn't true in the days of the Great Depression, when capitalism as a system had simply ceased to function, and it ain't true now. The interests of the people who have and the people who don't aren't the same. They keep telling me Marxism is dead, and I guess I'll take their word for it, but class struggle sure isn't.

Dear old Jack Boden, who passed away a few years back, was the first one to teach me about class struggle as he sat in a comfortable chair on the sunny porch of my grandfather's five-acre orchard and farm at the top of the highest hill in Los Gatos, next door to the Novitiate. Mostly he would pontificate on the evils of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who he said was a man who betrayed his own class. That got me interested in Roosevelt and the New Deal.

In Jack's world, someone who betrayed his class was the worst kind of man -- Jack had the same sort of scorn for someone who betrayed his own class as Jack London did for scabs. The difference between the two Jacks was their class allegiance. London talked about scabs as having "corkscrew souls" because they betrayed the working class; Boden talked about how Roosevelt, especially Mrs. Roosevelt, were damn socialists, who were selling out their class to the communist-Democrat unions.

Both of these very class-conscious men were born poor Irishmen. Jack Boden was an ambitious lad who went to work in a bank, then married an heir of Bank of America's Gianinni; and along the way ended up as a vice-president at Wells Fargo Bank. The Bodens lived in a big mansion in Saratoga, not far from my grandparents' home in Los Gatos.

Like Jack Boden, Jack London didn't graduate from college. But London knew the value of education, even though his education had come from reading books at the Oakland library, under the tutelage of the city librarian Ina Coolbrith -- appropriately enough the same woman who had been involved in a triangle between those two great California Bohemians, Mark Twain and Bret Harte.

I first learned about class struggle at the feet of Jack Boden, and his worldview was most unappealing. He thought that all the things I loved -- libraries, universities, books, museums and orchestras -- were unnecessary, and maybe even dangerous -- certainly for working people, who were not "responsible." While London reveled in the world of science, and philosophy, and saw them as ways to liberate the species, Boden was uncomfortable with these things. They seemed at best tangential and at worst hostile to the business of commerce and finance, which is how he measured the world. Nowadays the Reagans and Bushes of this world don't say they're against education, but they don't want to have to pay taxes to provide it, and when they do, they want to control it so students are spoonfed only their point of view

My grandfather, on the other hand, loved Roosevelt as much as Boden hated him. Because my grandfather was an immigrant who had done well for himself in California, he had that immigrant's outsize patriotism. But he said that without Roosevelt, there would have been no capitalism. The introduction of a social contract was what made raw capitalism work, he argued.

	writelikegod.com
	When is the last time you talked politics with your dog? dogshatebush.com

As a kid in the '50s, I worshipped Adlai Stevenson and went about campaigning for him. When I got to shake Eleanor Roosevelt's hand, it was the most thrilling thing I had ever done. I regarded her as the Roosevelt with a real conscience.

I tried arguing with Boden, and so he really got to regard me as a dangerous young man. I mean I had just reached puberty, but he saw me as a Bolshevik.

Maybe I was. But even as a kid in the '50s, I found Boden's beliefs the opposite of the values that made any sense. And today, when Bush speaks, I hear Boden.

Years later Boden paid me back for my politics. As the family banker, he was in charge of the family will; I was the only one of eight grandchildren not included in that will.

At least I will have no financial incentive now to tempt me into thinking like Boden and Bush.

---

LIONEL ROLFE is the author of the forthcoming The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather (in October). He also wrote Literary L.A. and The Fat Man on the Left.