offguardian--2020-05-24--The Unexamined Life: AQA, Edexcel, OCR and the Covid Furlough Scam

Simon Jenkins recent piece in Thursday ’ s Guardian is worth reading .
Jenkins , a right-wing commentator , also happens to be one of the few genuine journalists left on that particular paper .
In this rather bizarre piece , he opines that the cancellation of this year ’ s GCSE ` s and A level exams provides a template for future educational policy .
This is interesting as the ramifications of the cancelled exam have yet to unravel and I look forward to reading Jenkins analysis of the situation in August given that hyperinflation of GCSE ` s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us leave alone the strategies in place to award students with GCSE and A levels this forthcoming August .
Suffice to say , results day , this August , will be devoid of the usual media hysteria .
Filming students opening their exam results , losses something of the tension when the grade has been giving for an exam not taken .
I may be showing my age here but it ` s a bit like climbing the steps of the old Wembley Stadium to receive the FA Cup when the game has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stadium .
A sterile experience and this year ’ s result day may be ` marked ` less by hysteria and rather more by student and parental anger .
How the exam boards are going to award qualifications this year is an issue for a separate article .
Sufficient to say , the current Secretary of State for Education , Mr Williamson , is looking less and less competent .
Even when it comes to dealing with this manufactured crisis .
Given that comparisons with the Second World War are all the rage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Winston Churchill and I mean no disrespect to Mr Edward Wood here .
Halifax would be a Prince among men in the midst of this Parliamentary shower , who sold democratic oversight of the executive for a 10K bonus and 30K office expenses to work at home , not quite 30 pieces of silver but hopefully you see my point .
The awarding bodies for exams in the UK are an alphabet soup of multi-million-pound companies .
Three of these – AQA , OCR and Edexcel ( Pearson ) – have been making @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lifeblood of these organisations is a massive army of Examiners .
All are employed on zero-hours contracts , or are they ?
Educators become examiners for a multitude of reasons .
It is an important feature of their staff development .
Examiners therefore can be in full-time work as teachers so the loss of any examining work is financially , little more than an inconvenience .
However , anyone reading comments by examiners on various educational chat forums will quickly realize that a great many people are almost completely reliant on the income @ @ @ @ @ @ @ children and pay mortgages over the summer .
These examiners work on zero-hours contracts as tutors or educators and subsidise this work with the payment generated by marking over the summer .
These Examiners are often living on less than the bonus payment awarded to British Parliamentarians which was doled out to them in order to shut government down during the bogus crisis .
Examiners are not given any financial assistance to work from home , whereas UK MP ` s – along with their bonus – were granted a 30K payment to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paragons of democratic virtue are hardly going to care about highly qualified people surviving on a pittance .
So on the day that Simon Jenkins wrote his glib piece in the Guardian a real storm in the world of education was brewing .
Mr Jenkins confined to his Ivory Tower would not of course have been aware of this .
On May 17 the education press reported that Pearson ( Edexcel ) would refuse to furlough there massive army of examiners .
This was a decision that they came to after many months @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Examiners expressing concerns about their health since the Covid crisis emerged .
The announcement that they were going to refuse to furlough staff came after the scheme had been extended and now covers just fewer than 8 million people .
This was bad news for those working for Pearson but the article which reads like a propaganda puff piece for Pearson also carried some good news .
The company had decided that some of their senior Examiners ( Principle Examiners and Assistant Examiners ) , while not furloughed , would instead receive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last summer from May to August .
It was generous and showed a good deal of humanity from Pearson they would pay these non-furloughed staff 80 % of last year ’ s earnings .
A precedent was thus set .
It looked like those contracted by Pearson and who had carried out previous work for the company appeared to be in a reasonable position .
Surely , it would go against the law of natural justice for an employer to differentiate between workers and not extend an equitable decision to its entire staff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s or APE actually do any marking , they write the paper and then with the assistance of a Team Leader run a cohort of staff to mark the scripts .
The real work is done completely and utterly by individual markers/workers employed at home reading hundreds of exam scripts online .
The work is monitored to an incredible degree by software designed to highlight any inconsistencies in the assessment process .
It is slave labour and while it is vital work , it is completely and utterly unappreciated by both the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ employers themselves .
It looked like out of the goodness of Pearson ` s heart a humanitarian and decent decision had been made .
However , it is more probable that Pearson found themselves in a legal jam .
While those employed as Examiners are on zero-hour contracts the legal position in terms of employment law is contentious and possibly actionable .
Hence why Pearson dithered and delayed in making an announcement .
Its army of examiners had been contacted continually and informed last week that a decision was imminent and Examiners would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ employs Examiners on a rolling contractual basis .
The company holds the ` employees ` or ` workers ` P45 throughout so , therefore , each examiner remains on the payroll .
Furthermore , the significant degree of control that exists between Pearson and the Examiner might in an employment law context constitute the Examiner as something other than a ` worker ` on a zero-hour contract .
Those , therefore , working for Pearson may actually have employment rights , which Pearson have violated .
This is because yesterday the company announced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They reinstated their decision not to furlough staff , but instead of extending the 80 % payment promise it had made to some Examiners , would for the majority of staff only pay 20 % of earnings generated last year between May to August .
Yesterday was a very busy day for the nation ’ s examination boards .
Just a few hours prior to the announcement by Pearson , AQA another multi-million-pound company informed their staff that they would not furlough staff .
AQA had , it appears , kept its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the start of the Covid opportunity , sorry , crisis began .
AQA , unlike Pearson , would not even be making a derisory payment to some of its staff .
AQA does not retain the P45 ` s of Examiners and hands them back every November ( a factor that will no doubt influence future policy at Pearson ) .
The AQA decision is clearly disgusting but in a strange way at least it is uniform , consistent in as much that it is unfair to all .
Paying a few people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the majority of people who actually carry out the work only 20 % is beyond disgusting .
Meanwhile OCR , the other key examination board and again a multi-million-pound company , has just announced that it has decided to furlough all its Examiners .
One wonders what our MP ` s and Parliamentary Education Select Committee might say about all of this .
Tragically , many examiners have written to their MPs and have indeed encouraged others to do the same .
The multi-million-pound companies that run the examination business in the UK @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claim that they will in no way profit by the Covid “ crisis ” .
Like the crisis itself , that is a bright shining lie , and it is one that needs to be understood by everyone opening their predetermined letter containing bogus exams results this year .
Because those results are also a lie .

Emmett Street
Simon Jenkins recent piece in Thursday’s Guardian is worth reading. Jenkins, a right-wing commentator, also happens to be one of the few genuine journalists left on that particular paper. In this rather bizarre piece, he opines that the cancellation of this year’s GCSE`s and A level exams provides a template for future educational policy.
This is interesting as the ramifications of the cancelled exam have yet to unravel and I look forward to reading Jenkins analysis of the situation in August given that hyperinflation of GCSE`s and A levels is likely.
Let us leave alone the strategies in place to award students with GCSE and A levels this forthcoming August. Suffice to say, results day, this August, will be devoid of the usual media hysteria. Filming students opening their exam results, losses something of the tension when the grade has been giving for an exam not taken.
I may be showing my age here but it`s a bit like climbing the steps of the old Wembley Stadium to receive the FA Cup when the game has not been played, before an empty stadium. A sterile experience and this year’s result day may be `marked` less by hysteria and rather more by student and parental anger.
How the exam boards are going to award qualifications this year is an issue for a separate article. Sufficient to say, the current Secretary of State for Education, Mr Williamson, is looking less and less competent. Even when it comes to dealing with this manufactured crisis.
Given that comparisons with the Second World War are all the rage, Williamson is more Lord Halifax than Winston Churchill and I mean no disrespect to Mr Edward Wood here. Halifax would be a Prince among men in the midst of this Parliamentary shower, who sold democratic oversight of the executive for a 10K bonus and 30K office expenses to work at home, not quite 30 pieces of silver but hopefully you see my point.
The awarding bodies for exams in the UK are an alphabet soup of multi-million-pound companies. Three of these – AQA, OCR and Edexcel (Pearson) – have been making some key decisions recently. The very lifeblood of these organisations is a massive army of Examiners. All are employed on zero-hours contracts, or are they?
Educators become examiners for a multitude of reasons. It is an important feature of their staff development. Examiners therefore can be in full-time work as teachers so the loss of any examining work is financially, little more than an inconvenience.
However, anyone reading comments by examiners on various educational chat forums will quickly realize that a great many people are almost completely reliant on the income to live, feed themselves and their children and pay mortgages over the summer.
These examiners work on zero-hours contracts as tutors or educators and subsidise this work with the payment generated by marking over the summer. These Examiners are often living on less than the bonus payment awarded to British Parliamentarians which was doled out to them in order to shut government down during the bogus crisis.
Examiners are not given any financial assistance to work from home, whereas UK MP`s – along with their bonus – were granted a 30K payment to make working at home easier. These paragons of democratic virtue are hardly going to care about highly qualified people surviving on a pittance.
So on the day that Simon Jenkins wrote his glib piece in the Guardian a real storm in the world of education was brewing. Mr Jenkins confined to his Ivory Tower would not of course have been aware of this.
On May 17 the education press reported that Pearson (Edexcel) would refuse to furlough there massive army of examiners. This was a decision that they came to after many months of consideration, they have been writing to Examiners expressing concerns about their health since the Covid opportunity crisis emerged.
The announcement that they were going to refuse to furlough staff came after the scheme had been extended and now covers just fewer than 8 million people. This was bad news for those working for Pearson but the article which reads like a propaganda puff piece for Pearson also carried some good news.
The company had decided that some of their senior Examiners (Principle Examiners and Assistant Examiners), while not furloughed, would instead receive a payment which related to their employment last summer from May to August. It was generous and showed a good deal of humanity from Pearson they would pay these non-furloughed staff 80% of last year’s earnings.
A precedent was thus set. It looked like those contracted by Pearson and who had carried out previous work for the company appeared to be in a reasonable position. Surely, it would go against the law of natural justice for an employer to differentiate between workers and not extend an equitable decision to its entire staff? What is more very few PE’s or APE actually do any marking, they write the paper and then with the assistance of a Team Leader run a cohort of staff to mark the scripts.
The real work is done completely and utterly by individual markers/workers employed at home reading hundreds of exam scripts online.
The work is monitored to an incredible degree by software designed to highlight any inconsistencies in the assessment process. It is slave labour and while it is vital work, it is completely and utterly unappreciated by both the public and it seems also by the employers themselves.
It looked like out of the goodness of Pearson`s heart a humanitarian and decent decision had been made. However, it is more probable that Pearson found themselves in a legal jam. While those employed as Examiners are on zero-hour contracts the legal position in terms of employment law is contentious and possibly actionable. Hence why Pearson dithered and delayed in making an announcement.
Its army of examiners had been contacted continually and informed last week that a decision was imminent and Examiners would be informed by 21 May. Pearson employs Examiners on a rolling contractual basis. The company holds the `employees` or `workers` P45 throughout so, therefore, each examiner remains on the payroll.
Furthermore, the significant degree of control that exists between Pearson and the Examiner might in an employment law context constitute the Examiner as something other than a `worker` on a zero-hour contract. Those, therefore, working for Pearson may actually have employment rights, which Pearson have violated.
This is because yesterday the company announced that it would breach its own precedent. They reinstated their decision not to furlough staff, but instead of extending the 80% payment promise it had made to some Examiners, would for the majority of staff only pay 20% of earnings generated last year between May to August.
Yesterday was a very busy day for the nation’s examination boards.
Just a few hours prior to the announcement by Pearson, AQA another multi-million-pound company informed their staff that they would not furlough staff. AQA had, it appears, kept its entire work base in the dark since the start of the Covid opportunity, sorry, crisis began.
AQA, unlike Pearson, would not even be making a derisory payment to some of its staff. AQA does not retain the P45`s of Examiners and hands them back every November (a factor that will no doubt influence future policy at Pearson). The AQA decision is clearly disgusting but in a strange way at least it is uniform, consistent in as much that it is unfair to all.
Paying a few people 80% of their wages whilst paying the majority of people who actually carry out the work only 20% is beyond disgusting.
Meanwhile OCR, the other key examination board and again a multi-million-pound company, has just announced that it has decided to furlough all its Examiners.
One wonders what our MP`s and Parliamentary Education Select Committee might say about all of this. Tragically, many examiners have written to their MPs and have indeed encouraged others to do the same. The multi-million-pound companies that run the examination business in the UK (and internationally in many respects) claim that they will in no way profit by the Covid “crisis”.
Like the crisis itself, that is a bright shining lie, and it is one that needs to be understood by everyone opening their predetermined letter containing bogus exams results this year. Because those results are also a lie.


offguardian--2020-05-24--Three New Reads – May

Three New Reads – May

As I had last month , I ’ d wanted in my three reads this month to start addressing the alarming bellicosity of Washington in respect of several nations , but most frighteningly with China .
For all those with some inkling of the material factors placing the West and Eurasia on a collision course , such beating of war dreams – aided as ever by the ‘ liberal ’ Guardian – is wholly to be expected , but its predictability makes the warmongering no less worrying .
All the same , I ’ m again placing China on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are integrally connected , for all their surface disparity , by the question : where do we go from here ?
Whatever our views on lockdown , in principle or in the spatchcock manner of its UK and US implementation , [ 2 ] it is going to end .
But on whose terms ?
Will the interests of big business be the sole guide to any return to work ?
Of course they will – unless challenged with greater unity and consistency than so far seen from organised labour … from small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ promises of protection look like so much hot air even as big capital demands bailouts in that socialism-for-the rich fashion we saw in the wake of 2008 … from a disenfranchised precariat for whom compensation has been slow , bureaucratic , unfair and inconsistent … from worried parents and … well , feel free to make your own additions to this roll call of the dispossessed-through-disempowerment in our hollow , revolving door charade of democracy .
That challenge must focus too on the safety of workers .
An early salvo in Britain has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ union , NEU .
Since teachers hold huge potential power , less through their overt role as educators than their half-hidden one as child minders for the UK economy , rightwing media have been predictably swift to damn them .
This question – who calls the shots ?
– informs the first of my three reads this month .
Shortest and simplest of my May reads is this piece by Caitlin Johnstone .
I ’ ve chosen it for two reasons .
One , she pairs speaking truth to power , at which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our spiritual nature .
( I hate the s-word but it ’ ll have to do . )
That aspect is buried , as Marx incisively lays bare , by our alienation under the commodity fetishisms of capitalism .
Caitlin ’ s ongoing attempts at synthesis – we might go so far as to say ‘ healing ’ – chimes with me , graduate from both a Trotskyist and , a decade on , ‘ spiritual ’ cult .
Each had much to offer , and much to deplore .
Two , implicit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to suspend sectarianism in uniting to challenge big capital over its presumed right to dictate the terms of ending lockdown .
My third read , addressing the demands of working toward the end of capitalism , carries the same implication .
I ’ m not speaking of burying division in ‘ rainbow alliances ’ : candy floss coalitions guaranteed to blow apart at the first test .
Debate is necessary , and must be robust .
But how to conduct it ?
A tragi-comedy of the human condition is our pairing of marvellously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of an adolescent chimpanzee .
Teachers of ‘ enlightenment ’ call for subjugation , even annihilation , of the ego [ 3 ] but I ’ ve seen no evidence that such a thing is possible .
Living gurus have feet of clay – corrupted by sex , money and/or addiction to power – while those conveniently dead are scrubbed spotless to serve agendas they are in no position – “ when did I ever say I was a fucking saint ?
” – to challenge .
With the monster in us all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debates are of the essence .
We might even aspire to a modicum of self-awareness !
Next time we slam down an ‘ opponent ’ – her aims not so far from ours when we really get down to it – for having The Wrong Take on this issue or that , we might pause to ask , what are we trying to do here ?
Change a rotten world ?
Be The One Who Knows ?
Take dark pleasure in the ignorance and stupidity of The Other ?
For most of us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be that our motives , even on a good day , are mixed .
What we ’ re speaking of here is doing what we can to stay in touch with our best instinct , and at least try to rein in those others .
The bad news is we ’ ll never slay the monster .
The good news is we don ’ t have to .
We just have to give it a little less food is all .
Revolution in the Twenty-First Century : A Reconsideration of Marxism ( 5,481 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Read , a piece by Chris Wright in Dissident Voice ( reproduced in CounterPunch ) .
It addresses a dilemma I ’ ve wrestled with for a decade .
If you ’ ll excuse my certainty on this small point , it is a truth universally acknowledged , by all unbiased persons looking seriously into the question , that capitalism long ago ceased to work for most people .
Its accelerating inequalities – not just obscene but systemically destabilising – are matched by an intrinsic tendency to war in a nuclear age , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
To borrow from Lenin , what is to be done ?
I know the ‘ parliamentary road to socialism ’ to be an oxymoron .
I know too that the vanguard party model of revolutionary change is outdated .
In the face of a modern capitalist state – its monopoly on violence and coercion honed in the world ’ s hell holes from Aden to the Gaza ; its surveillance technologies beyond the wildest dreams of twentieth century totalitarianism – the idea of ending bourgeois rule with armed bodies of workers ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It is also , a point Wright explores in some depth , at root unmarxist .
One of Marx ’ s profoundest insights is that the seeds of revolutionary change are sown when new means of production are held back by the social relations of the old .
But they come to fruition only when new relations of production are in place .
The classic cases being the French Revolution and American Civil War .
Both succeeded because , over decades and centuries , the social and property relations vital to capitalism ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feudalism and slavery had been built .
By contrast , the idea of revolutionising the social relations of wealth production by first seizing state power and then using it to build socialised property relations is idealist .
In fact , though it be blasphemy to say so , the great man himself had his thoroughly unmarxist moments !
Still more idealist is the proposition that bottom-up resistance movements , thrown into being by the relentless logic of capital itself , can seriously challenge the status quo .
Imaginative at the level of tactics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gilets Jaunes – but lacking in strategy and blind to the lessons of history , they are doomed to fail .
So what to do ?
Turn our back on all three ?
And on other tendencies thus far unmentioned : the cooperatives , trade unions , people ’ s banks and other mechanisms capitalism itself ushers into being ?
Far from it , argues Wright .
All have strengths as well as limitations .
The challenge as he sees it is that of renouncing both sectarianism ( see Caitlin ) and impatience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be argued that humanity hasn ’ t the luxury of allowing the dialectics of real revolution to play out over the century or so Wright envisages .
That is true .
But the revolution all thinking people crave will not come about simply because it has to .
It will come about if and when – and only if and when – the circumstances , material and objective , of its emergence are in place .
Which is to say that it may never happen .
This outcome , given capitalism ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But how could that possibly be any excuse for our refusing to try ?
For the full archive of Three New Reads , click here

Philip Roddis
As I had last month, I’d wanted in my three reads this month to start addressing the alarming bellicosity of Washington in respect of several nations, but most frighteningly with China. For all those with some inkling of the material factors placing the West and Eurasia on a collision course, such beating of war dreams – aided as ever by the ‘liberal’ Guardian – is wholly to be expected, but its predictability makes the warmongering no less worrying.
All the same, I’m again placing China on the back burner. My choices for May are integrally connected, for all their surface disparity, by the question: where do we go from here?
The financial resources government has made available for a pause in economic life show the viability of non-capitalist economic planning. But as in 2008, such largesse will come at huge cost to ordinary people unless the labour movement can show leadership and substantially influence, if not control, the narrative. Via bankruptcy, de facto insolvency and debt, key sectors of the economy can be held to ransom by government for regressive state intervention and social engineering.[1]
Whatever our views on lockdown, in principle or in the spatchcock manner of its UK and US implementation,[2] it is going to end. But on whose terms? Will the interests of big business be the sole guide to any return to work?
Of course they will – unless challenged with greater unity and consistency than so far seen from organised labour … from small businesses wrecked by a lockdown whose attendant promises of protection look like so much hot air even as big capital demands bailouts in that socialism-for-the rich fashion we saw in the wake of 2008 … from a disenfranchised precariat for whom compensation has been slow, bureaucratic, unfair and inconsistent … from worried parents and … well, feel free to make your own additions to this roll call of the dispossessed-through-disempowerment in our hollow, revolving door charade of democracy.
That challenge must focus too on the safety of workers. An early salvo in Britain has been the response of the teachers’ union, NEU. Since teachers hold huge potential power, less through their overt role as educators than their half-hidden one as child minders for the UK economy, rightwing media have been predictably swift to damn them.
This question – who calls the shots? – informs the first of my three reads this month.
*
The mind can turn anything into a toy for the ego, and this is never more clear than in online discussion forums. Even forums dedicated to disentangling from ego are dominated by Buddhism nerds or Advaita nerds ego-sparring … This is equally true of anti-establishment forums of all sorts, debating whose sub-sub-subfaction of leftism is better or whose coronavirus theory is right
Shortest and simplest of my May reads is this piece by Caitlin Johnstone. I’ve chosen it for two reasons. One, she pairs speaking truth to power, at which she excels, with calls to embrace our spiritual nature. (I hate the s-word but it’ll have to do.) That aspect is buried, as Marx incisively lays bare, by our alienation under the commodity fetishisms of capitalism. Caitlin’s ongoing attempts at synthesis – we might go so far as to say ‘healing’ – chimes with me, graduate from both a Trotskyist and, a decade on, ‘spiritual’ cult. Each had much to offer, and much to deplore.
Two, implicit in my first read is a call to suspend sectarianism in uniting to challenge big capital over its presumed right to dictate the terms of ending lockdown. My third read, addressing the demands of working toward the end of capitalism, carries the same implication.
I’m not speaking of burying division in ‘rainbow alliances’: candy floss coalitions guaranteed to blow apart at the first test. Debate is necessary, and must be robust. But how to conduct it?
A tragi-comedy of the human condition is our pairing of marvellously sophisticated reasoning power with the emotional maturity of an adolescent chimpanzee. Teachers of ‘enlightenment’ call for subjugation, even annihilation, of the ego[3] but I’ve seen no evidence that such a thing is possible.
Living gurus have feet of clay – corrupted by sex, money and/or addiction to power – while those conveniently dead are scrubbed spotless to serve agendas they are in no position – “when did I ever say I was a fucking saint?” – to challenge.
With the monster in us all, courtesy and respect in those necessary debates are of the essence. We might even aspire to a modicum of self-awareness! Next time we slam down an ‘opponent’ – her aims not so far from ours when we really get down to it – for having The Wrong Take on this issue or that, we might pause to ask, what are we trying to do here? Change a rotten world? Be The One Who Knows? Take dark pleasure in the ignorance and stupidity of The Other?
For most of us the honest answer is and always will be that our motives, even on a good day, are mixed. What we’re speaking of here is doing what we can to stay in touch with our best instinct, and at least try to rein in those others. The bad news is we’ll never slay the monster. The good news is we don’t have to. We just have to give it a little less food is all.
*
Here’s the Big Read, a piece by Chris Wright in Dissident Voice (reproduced in CounterPunch). It addresses a dilemma I’ve wrestled with for a decade.
If you’ll excuse my certainty on this small point, it is a truth universally acknowledged, by all unbiased persons looking seriously into the question, that capitalism long ago ceased to work for most people. Its accelerating inequalities – not just obscene but systemically destabilising – are matched by an intrinsic tendency to war in a nuclear age, and to reckless trashing of the planet.
To borrow from Lenin, what is to be done?
I know the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ to be an oxymoron. I know too that the vanguard party model of revolutionary change is outdated. In the face of a modern capitalist state – its monopoly on violence and coercion honed in the world’s hell holes from Aden to the Gaza; its surveillance technologies beyond the wildest dreams of twentieth century totalitarianism – the idea of ending bourgeois rule with armed bodies of workers’ militias is a childish pipe dream.
It is also, a point Wright explores in some depth, at root unmarxist. One of Marx’s profoundest insights is that the seeds of revolutionary change are sown when new means of production are held back by the social relations of the old. But they come to fruition only when new relations of production are in place.
The classic cases being the French Revolution and American Civil War. Both succeeded because, over decades and centuries, the social and property relations vital to capitalism’s ultimate triumph over the inefficiencies of feudalism and slavery had been built.
By contrast, the idea of revolutionising the social relations of wealth production by first seizing state power and then using it to build socialised property relations is idealist. In fact, though it be blasphemy to say so, the great man himself had his thoroughly unmarxist moments!
Still more idealist is the proposition that bottom-up resistance movements, thrown into being by the relentless logic of capital itself, can seriously challenge the status quo. Imaginative at the level of tactics – witness the chutzpah of Occupy and Gilets Jaunes – but lacking in strategy and blind to the lessons of history, they are doomed to fail.
So what to do? Turn our back on all three? And on other tendencies thus far unmentioned: the cooperatives, trade unions, people’s banks and other mechanisms capitalism itself ushers into being?
Far from it, argues Wright. All have strengths as well as limitations. The challenge as he sees it is that of renouncing both sectarianism (see Caitlin) and impatience.
On the latter, it may be argued that humanity hasn’t the luxury of allowing the dialectics of real revolution to play out over the century or so Wright envisages.
That is true. But the revolution all thinking people crave will not come about simply because it has to. It will come about if and when – and only if and when – the circumstances, material and objective, of its emergence are in place.
Which is to say that it may never happen. This outcome, given capitalism’s existential threat, is a distinct possibility. But how could that possibly be any excuse for our refusing to try?
For the full archive of Three New Reads, click here
NOTES:- [1] The link for this first read is one step removed. It goes to a post on my site which hosts a second link to the full text, also accessible from this piece in the Canary. [2] As a friend pointed out recently, “Even the [deeply flawed] Imperial College model, alleged to be the sole criteria on which decision making was based, factored in only 50% of the populace adhering to any kind of strict lockdown.” [3] ‘Ego’ is here used in the sense of arrogant self importance, not the very necessary self organising principle understood in some branches of psychoanalysis.


offguardian--2020-05-25--Passing Behind Our Backs

Passing Behind Our Backs

I never met the great basketball player , Bob Cousy , the man known as “ the Houdini of the Hardwood , ” yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I never knew , or to be more accurate , in ways I didn ’ t reflect upon except in superficial ways .
He was the guy who brought professional basketball into the modern era with his bag of fancy tricks that included no-look and behind-the-back passes , uncanny dribbling , and a magical court sense that made the fast break into an exquisite art form .
The captain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1950-1963 , Cousy led the Celtics to six NBA titles , made thirteen all-star teams , and changed professional basketball from a stodgy , boring , and slow game into a fast-paced spectacle , entertainment as much as sport .
He was a wizard with a basketball and set the stage for Guy Rodgers , “ Pistol Pete ” Maravich , Bob Dylan , Magic Johnson , and Steve Nash , among other tricksters , modern Hermes .
Over the years I have written a great deal on a very wide-range of topics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a friend from high school recently sent me Gary Pomeranz ’ s fascinating book , The Last Pass : Cousy , Russell , the Celtics , and What Matters in the End , that something clicked for me .
A few weeks previously , as the weather had turned spring-like , I had started to shoot hoops at our basket in the driveway .
The warm air , the feel of a loose flowing freedom as I dribbled and shot , brought me back to the days when I spent so many hours @ @ @ @ @ @ @ youth , perfecting my skills in what I can only call a fanatical way .
Rushing to the schoolyard after school and on Saturday mornings to be the first there , to command the court , to compete with the older guys and beat their asses .
Traveling around the city ’ s best basketball neighborhoods to play and make my mark .
The endless hours in gyms .
The search for perfection .
The adrenaline rush , the thrill , the joy of the perfect pass , the sweet swish of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a thousand times .
From the age of eleven until twenty-three , basketball was central to my life and identity .
It was my passion .
It was during these recent days shooting around that I started to have almost nightly dreams of my younger years , playing basketball in high school and then in college on a Division I scholarship .
They were very vivid dreams , and at the time , I didn ’ t understand why I was having them .
And they were starting to annoy me , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Begone , dread spirits !
Yet I knew they were telling me to heed their tales told when no one was looking , only this dreamer in the night .
While this was happening , I wrote an article about Bob Dylan and his recent release of “ Murder Most Foul , ” his powerful song about the assassination of President Kennedy , wherein he brilliantly accuses elements within the US government and intelligence forces of killing the president in cold blood , while framing Lee Harvey Oswald for the deed .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his music , and found him an intriguing if enigmatic character , a Houdini of song .
“ Murder Most Foul ” seemed to burst out of Dylan after decades of avoiding straight-forward political themes .
It struck me that with this song he had ripped off the masks he had been wearing for decades , as if he were Odysseus at the end of The Odyssey , shrugging off his beggar ’ s rags and announcing to the suitors of his wife Penelope that the gig was up and they were going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dylan was coming full-circle , as if he were coming home to take revenge on the killers who had scarred his youth , as they did mine and so many others ’ .
“ Like a musician , like a harper , when/ with quiet hand upon his instrument , ” Odysseus lets the arrow sing , Dylan reaches back to sing : Slowly it dawned on me that everyone ’ s life has a shape , as if it were a drawing or story or song .
And that if we pay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ snares and temptations meant to divert us from our true paths , we will find our beginnings in our ends and without directions we will find our way home .
It is very hard to explain to someone who didn ’ t know you once upon a time long before you met , how important certain activities were to you , what they meant and still mean in the deepest recesses of your psyche .
How they shaped you , or better still , how you used them to bend your life when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hit the target that you aimed for .
Or thought you were aiming for .
My life in basketball shaped the man that I became , but my wife only knows the aftermath since she met me when I had taken a long twenty-five-year vacation from basketball .
Like Cousy , sitting and talking with Pomeranz , or Dylan sharpening his arrows and letting them fly in his new song False Prophet , I could say : While I am half-way through reading the Cousy book , I get its drift , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Pomeranz , he is hoping to be inspired to understand the journey that has left him , an old man , frightened , alone , and approaching death in a large house in Worcester , Massachusetts , trying to understand , not only his fraught relationship with his black Celtic teammate , Bill Russell , but what his life has been all about , the court wizardry and cheers , the years on the road , the applause and awards , the championships and the price they exacted .
He went to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home , but now wonders what home really means .
Unlike Odysseus , he only has ghosts to slay .
His wife is dead , and no suitors occupy the great house of shades .
There is no one to kill except his regrets .
My friend , Wayne , who sent me the book , spent three years in high school with me studying Greek , and over the course of those years , we translated Homer ’ s The Odyssey line by line .
We were also basketball teammates .
Odysseus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trickster , the man of many wiles and disguises , what the nymph Calypso , who held Odysseus captive for seven years on her island Ogygia , called “ a rascal.
” Like Houdini , Odysseus was able to escape this phantom island with the help of the messenger and trickster Hermes .
Like Cousy , Odysseus was the Houdini of the ancient world , the hero who could escape any trap and thread an arrow through the smallest space to defeat the enemy .
Cousy ’ s fierceness on the court is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ killer instinct , like Odysseus with his wily habit of standing with downcast eyes to disguise his intent .
Cousy could thread a pass between an opponent ’ s eyes without them blinking .
They often never knew what hit them .
I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan ’ s fascinating and poetic memoir , Chronicles : Volume I , and came upon his memory of hearing the news of the death of “ Pistol ” Pete Maravich , the greatest scorer in college basketball history @ @ @ @ @ @ @ court .
Maravich was Cousy ’ s heir , and the bloodline connects to Dylan also , a Houdini with words .
It was January 5 , 1988 : He goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete ’ s sad death playing pickup basketball , he started and completed the song “ Dignity ” the same day , and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen .
The news of one creative spirit ’ s death gave birth to another creative spirit ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father ’ s death . )
No one wants to end , to fade away .
To not be recognized .
To die and be forgotten .
To fail to make their mark .
Not Dylan , Cousy , Maravich , me , nor you .
We all wish to become who we feel we were meant to be .
To fulfil the creative dreams we had when young and not to waste our lives in trivial pursuits .
Years pass and people often ask @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : I keep thinking : who is you for you ?
For me ?
When I was a young boy , I wanted to stand out , to be exceptional , to be one-of-a-kind , an individual .
Basketball became my obsession and Bob Cousy my idol .
I wanted to be a shooting star , a dribbling star , a passing star .
I watched him on television , studying him .
His every move inspired me to imitate it .
I would spend hours every day practicing behind the back passes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against the wall where I had marked an x in chalk .
I worked on my peripheral vision , so I could see the whole court and control the show .
In the hidden recesses of my basement , I used tape to mark spots on the floor where I spent hour after hour dribbling behind my back , first this way and then that , past imaginary opponents .
I made dribbling glasses with black tape out of my mother ’ s old sunglasses .
Worked on circling the ball behind my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , day after day , year after year , I devoted myself to perfecting my basketball skills as a point guard .
Being like Bob Cousy .
Being the one whose magic feats were the talk of the town the following day .
One day , I met and talked with Paul Newman on the street after high school basketball practice .
When I was leaving , he called me Fast Eddie , which to my mind added to the mystique I felt as a trickster on the hardwood .
I felt fast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eddie Felson in The Hustler when he was on a roll with his cue stick , “ You don ’ t have to look , you just Know .
You make shots that nobody has ever made before .
I can play that game the way… .
Nobody ’ s ever played it before.
” That was my goal and the impetus behind my fanatical devotion to practice .
I loved it , there was joy in it , but there was also a driven quality to my quest .
For whom ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ by conventional life and conventional basketball .
But the conventional world surrounded me .
It was in school , church , the way people talked and walked ; it seemed like people were straight-jacketed , which they were .
Blake ’ s mind-forged manacles .
I sensed people were dissemblers , and that lies were the essence of social life .
Nowhere was this truer than on the basketball court in high school and college where the coaches had their systems and their rules and discouraged innovation , as if it would reveal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weird , less-than-manly men who couldn ’ t run a tight ship .
They always rewarded those who obeyed them and kept within the strict rules of the system .
Creativity frightened them .
The old ways sufficed .
It was just like society , and though Cousy had broken through and been idolized for doing so , he had retired from the Celtics in the spring of 1963 , while the high school and college programs were stuck in the past .
I felt imprisoned .
I wanted to bust out and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was like the classics that I studied in school : the lesson was always that the exploits you read about were things of the past , and now we were civilized gentlemen who must learn the rules of the game and play by them .
Tradition .
But the rules were suffocating me .
The rules of the game had almost brought the world to an end during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 .
The rules of the game had created a system of war and racism that was badly broken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only a President who had undergone a radical spiritual conversion toward peace-making , but four little black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham , Alabama on Sunday September 15 , 1963 , a year to the day after I started college with my trivial young man ’ s dreams of being the Cousy of college hoops .
The rules of the game would soon be violated by Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival , when he would shock Pete Seeger and others with his song , “ Mr .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ with strictly political songs in favor of pure dazzling poetry in song .
That was a Cousy moment , poetry in motion , Houdini out of the locked box , dancing “ beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.
” Bob Dylan , whose life and career follows Odysseus ’ trajectory , ended his 2017 Nobel Award Lecture with the first line of the Odyssey : “ Sing in me , oh Muse , and through me tell the story.
” My friend Wayne and I , together with all our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lines in Greek .
They were ingrained in us for life , as they have been for Dylan .
But tell what story ?
For whom ?
Only you ?
Dylan has told so many .
Here ’ s one I have for you , one you never heard .
Here are the opening lines ; let ’ s call it Book I , not that a Goddess intervened , but it was , in Odysseus ’ words , the beginning of the end of my “ clean-cut game.
” A month after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my first college basketball game .
In those days , all freshman were required by the rules of the game to play one year of freshman basketball before playing varsity .
This was the day I had been waiting for since the sixth grade when my dedication to basketball began .
My blood was flowing fast , I had no fear , and was ready to use all the skills I had spent years honing .
The stands were packed .
My proud family sat a few rows up behind our bench , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , two of whom were quite young at eight and eleven years old .
The game was close , back and forth it went .
With about a minute and a half left , we were leading by two points .
The other coach called a time out with the ball in their possession .
In the huddle , our coach assigned me to guard the opponent ’ s best player , a six-foot-four inch jumping jack who was highly acclaimed and a very good player by the name of Albie Grant .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ offensive skills , was a tough and tenacious very well-conditioned defender who took pride in sticking to an opponent like glue .
They threw the ball in and screened for Grant .
He got the ball and I got in his face .
He went up for a jump shot from about 20 feet out , and since I was not going to block his shot , I did what all good defenders do , I got my hand in front of his eyes .
But he made the shot anyway , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me .
But I never touched him .
It was a terrible call , but I could do nothing about it .
Behind my back , I could hear my coach cursing me out with every name in the book – you fucking bastard , you shit , etc .
He could be heard throughout the arena .
The crowd went silent .
He kept cursing me out and my already sweaty , red face must have turned purple .
I felt on fire .
He took me out of the game , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He kept cursing at me .
I sat away from him on the bench and he came down and stood over me , calling me every name in his limited vocabulary , you fucking this , you fucking that .
I looked at him in rage .
The game continued .
Grant made the free throw and we lost by one point .
As we walked off the court to the locker room door at the end , he kept screaming invective at me .
I could feel my rage swelling .
My @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could hear it all .
I noticed others staring in disbelief .
To say it was humiliating barely captures what it felt like , but just as I played the game fiercely , I was not one to take such abuse .
But I kept telling myself to control myself .
It was the coach who was making a fool of himself .
Then , when we entered the locker room , he let loose at me again , you fucking idiot , you fucking bastard….when I snapped and grabbed him by his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his neck , I threw him up against the wall and let him have it , screaming that I ’ d had enough of his shit and I would kill him if he ever did it again .
All hell broke loose as people were pulling me off him , and my father , who was outside the locker room , came rushing in to intervene .
Years of passionate dedication to becoming the best basketball player I could , came to this .
I had reacted in fury to being humiliated “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of my family .
I think now of Odysseus when he stood on the broad door sill and killed AntÍnoös , the worst of the suitors of his wife , Penelope .
“ Odysseus ’ arrow hit him under the chin/ and punched up to the feathers through his throat.
” How dare he take revenge and defend his honor , came the shouts from the easily offended but secretly guilty .
The other suitors screamed at him : “ Foul !
To shoot at a man !
That was your last shot.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ but that is the rest of the story .
My craft changed in the following years .
I no longer tried to imitate other tricksters like Bob Cousy or Bob Dylan .
They have their own tales to tell and dwell upon .
Their words are not mine .
Now I play with words in my own way .
But like Bob Dylan , “ I return once again to Homer who says , ‘ Sing in me , oh Muse , and through me tell the story.
’ Our stories often happen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t see them .
Telling them is the trick .
You need to turn around and see what ’ s behind you to pass them around .

Edward Curtin
I never met the great basketball player, Bob Cousy, the man known as “the Houdini of the Hardwood,” yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I never knew, or to be more accurate, in ways I didn’t reflect upon except in superficial ways.
He was the guy who brought professional basketball into the modern era with his bag of fancy tricks that included no-look and behind-the-back passes, uncanny dribbling, and a magical court sense that made the fast break into an exquisite art form.
The captain and point-guard of the Boston Celtics from 1950-1963, Cousy led the Celtics to six NBA titles, made thirteen all-star teams, and changed professional basketball from a stodgy, boring, and slow game into a fast-paced spectacle, entertainment as much as sport.
He was a wizard with a basketball and set the stage for Guy Rodgers, “Pistol Pete” Maravich, Bob Dylan, Magic Johnson, and Steve Nash, among other tricksters, modern Hermes.
Over the years I have written a great deal on a very wide-range of topics, but it wasn’t until a friend from high school recently sent me Gary Pomeranz’s fascinating book, The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End, that something clicked for me.
A few weeks previously, as the weather had turned spring-like, I had started to shoot hoops at our basket in the driveway.
The warm air, the feel of a loose flowing freedom as I dribbled and shot, brought me back to the days when I spent so many hours playing in the Bronx schoolyards of my youth, perfecting my skills in what I can only call a fanatical way. Rushing to the schoolyard after school and on Saturday mornings to be the first there, to command the court, to compete with the older guys and beat their asses.
Traveling around the city’s best basketball neighborhoods to play and make my mark. The endless hours in gyms. The search for perfection. The adrenaline rush, the thrill, the joy of the perfect pass, the sweet swish of the net from a shot you had practiced a thousand times. From the age of eleven until twenty-three, basketball was central to my life and identity. It was my passion.
It was during these recent days shooting around that I started to have almost nightly dreams of my younger years, playing basketball in high school and then in college on a Division I scholarship. They were very vivid dreams, and at the time, I didn’t understand why I was having them. And they were starting to annoy me, as persistent and weird dreams can do. Begone, dread spirits! Yet I knew they were telling me to heed their tales told when no one was looking, only this dreamer in the night.
While this was happening, I wrote an article about Bob Dylan and his recent release of “Murder Most Foul,” his powerful song about the assassination of President Kennedy, wherein he brilliantly accuses elements within the US government and intelligence forces of killing the president in cold blood, while framing Lee Harvey Oswald for the deed.
I had written about Dylan before, loved his music, and found him an intriguing if enigmatic character, a Houdini of song.
“Murder Most Foul” seemed to burst out of Dylan after decades of avoiding straight-forward political themes. It struck me that with this song he had ripped off the masks he had been wearing for decades, as if he were Odysseus at the end of The Odyssey, shrugging off his beggar’s rags and announcing to the suitors of his wife Penelope that the gig was up and they were going down.
It seemed to me that Dylan was coming full-circle, as if he were coming home to take revenge on the killers who had scarred his youth, as they did mine and so many others’. “Like a musician, like a harper, when/ with quiet hand upon his instrument,” Odysseus lets the arrow sing, Dylan reaches back to sing:
The day they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing
It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
Greatest magic trick ever under the sun
Perfectly executed, skillfully done
Slowly it dawned on me that everyone’s life has a shape, as if it were a drawing or story or song. And that if we pay close attention and see through all the snares and temptations meant to divert us from our true paths, we will find our beginnings in our ends and without directions we will find our way home.
It is very hard to explain to someone who didn’t know you once upon a time long before you met, how important certain activities were to you, what they meant and still mean in the deepest recesses of your psyche. How they shaped you, or better still, how you used them to bend your life when you strung your bow so effortlessly to hit the target that you aimed for. Or thought you were aiming for.
My life in basketball shaped the man that I became, but my wife only knows the aftermath since she met me when I had taken a long twenty-five-year vacation from basketball.
Like Cousy, sitting and talking with Pomeranz, or Dylan sharpening his arrows and letting them fly in his new song False Prophet, I could say:
You don’t know me darlin’ – you never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
I ain’t no False Prophet – I just said what I said
I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head
While I am half-way through reading the Cousy book, I get its drift, where it’s heading. In conversations with Pomeranz, he is hoping to be inspired to understand the journey that has left him, an old man, frightened, alone, and approaching death in a large house in Worcester, Massachusetts, trying to understand, not only his fraught relationship with his black Celtic teammate, Bill Russell, but what his life has been all about, the court wizardry and cheers, the years on the road, the applause and awards, the championships and the price they exacted. He went to the basketball wars and won, came home, but now wonders what home really means.
Unlike Odysseus, he only has ghosts to slay. His wife is dead, and no suitors occupy the great house of shades. There is no one to kill except his regrets.
My friend, Wayne, who sent me the book, spent three years in high school with me studying Greek, and over the course of those years, we translated Homer’s The Odyssey line by line. We were also basketball teammates.
Odysseus, of course, was the ultimate trickster, the man of many wiles and disguises, what the nymph Calypso, who held Odysseus captive for seven years on her island Ogygia, called “a rascal.”
Like Houdini, Odysseus was able to escape this phantom island with the help of the messenger and trickster Hermes.
Like Cousy, Odysseus was the Houdini of the ancient world, the hero who could escape any trap and thread an arrow through the smallest space to defeat the enemy. Cousy’s fierceness on the court is legendary; his poker face hid the killer instinct, like Odysseus with his wily habit of standing with downcast eyes to disguise his intent. Cousy could thread a pass between an opponent’s eyes without them blinking. They often never knew what hit them.
I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan’s fascinating and poetic memoir, Chronicles: Volume I, and came upon his memory of hearing the news of the death of “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the greatest scorer in college basketball history and a magician without par on the court. Maravich was Cousy’s heir, and the bloodline connects to Dylan also, a Houdini with words. It was January 5, 1988:
My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morning news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich, the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I’d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz. He was something to see – mop of brown hair, floppy socks – the holy terror of the basketball world – high flyin’ – magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket –
dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass and caught his own pass. He was fantastic. Scored something like thirty-eight points. He could have played blind. Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.
He goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete’s sad death playing pickup basketball, he started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day, and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen.
The news of one creative spirit’s death gave birth to another creative spirit’s gift to life. (I am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father’s death.)
It’s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them …. The wind could never blow it out of my head. This song was a good thing to have. On a song like this, there’s no end to things.”
No one wants to end, to fade away. To not be recognized. To die and be forgotten. To fail to make their mark. Not Dylan, Cousy, Maravich, me, nor you. We all wish to become who we feel we were meant to be. To fulfil the creative dreams we had when young and not to waste our lives in trivial pursuits. Years pass and people often ask with Dylan in “Shooting Star”:
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or overstep the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
I keep thinking: who is you for you? For me?
When I was a young boy, I wanted to stand out, to be exceptional, to be one-of-a-kind, an individual. Basketball became my obsession and Bob Cousy my idol. I wanted to be a shooting star, a dribbling star, a passing star. I watched him on television, studying him. His every move inspired me to imitate it.
I would spend hours every day practicing behind the back passes, first right-handed, then left, against the wall where I had marked an x in chalk. I worked on my peripheral vision, so I could see the whole court and control the show.
In the hidden recesses of my basement, I used tape to mark spots on the floor where I spent hour after hour dribbling behind my back, first this way and then that, past imaginary opponents. I made dribbling glasses with black tape out of my mother’s old sunglasses.
Worked on circling the ball behind my back either way. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, I devoted myself to perfecting my basketball skills as a point guard. Being like Bob Cousy. Being the one whose magic feats were the talk of the town the following day.
One day, I met and talked with Paul Newman on the street after high school basketball practice. When I was leaving, he called me Fast Eddie, which to my mind added to the mystique I felt as a trickster on the hardwood.
I felt fast and loose like Paul’s character Eddie Felson in The Hustler when he was on a roll with his cue stick, “You don’t have to look, you just Know. You make shots that nobody has ever made before. I can play that game the way…. Nobody’s ever played it before.”
That was my goal and the impetus behind my fanatical devotion to practice. I loved it, there was joy in it, but there was also a driven quality to my quest.
For whom? Only you?
I was easily bored by conventional life and conventional basketball. But the conventional world surrounded me. It was in school, church, the way people talked and walked; it seemed like people were straight-jacketed, which they were. Blake’s mind-forged manacles. I sensed people were dissemblers, and that lies were the essence of social life.
Nowhere was this truer than on the basketball court in high school and college where the coaches had their systems and their rules and discouraged innovation, as if it would reveal them to be artists in disguise, weird, less-than-manly men who couldn’t run a tight ship.
They always rewarded those who obeyed them and kept within the strict rules of the system. Creativity frightened them. The old ways sufficed. It was just like society, and though Cousy had broken through and been idolized for doing so, he had retired from the Celtics in the spring of 1963, while the high school and college programs were stuck in the past.
I felt imprisoned. I wanted to bust out and play free. Be free. It was like the classics that I studied in school: the lesson was always that the exploits you read about were things of the past, and now we were civilized gentlemen who must learn the rules of the game and play by them. Tradition. But the rules were suffocating me.
The rules of the game had almost brought the world to an end during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The rules of the game had created a system of war and racism that was badly broken, resulting in the savage killing not only a President who had undergone a radical spiritual conversion toward peace-making, but four little black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday September 15, 1963, a year to the day after I started college with my trivial young man’s dreams of being the Cousy of college hoops.
The rules of the game would soon be violated by Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, when he would shock Pete Seeger and others with his song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a radical break with strictly political songs in favor of pure dazzling poetry in song. That was a Cousy moment, poetry in motion, Houdini out of the locked box, dancing “beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.”
Bob Dylan, whose life and career follows Odysseus’ trajectory, ended his 2017 Nobel Award Lecture with the first line of the Odyssey: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”
My friend Wayne and I, together with all our high school classmates, had memorized those lines in Greek. They were ingrained in us for life, as they have been for Dylan.
But tell what story? For whom? Only you?
Dylan has told so many. Here’s one I have for you, one you never heard. Here are the opening lines; let’s call it Book I, not that a Goddess intervened, but it was, in Odysseus’ words, the beginning of the end of my “clean-cut game.”
A month after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I played my first college basketball game. In those days, all freshman were required by the rules of the game to play one year of freshman basketball before playing varsity. This was the day I had been waiting for since the sixth grade when my dedication to basketball began.
My blood was flowing fast, I had no fear, and was ready to use all the skills I had spent years honing. The stands were packed. My proud family sat a few rows up behind our bench, my parents and four of my sisters, two of whom were quite young at eight and eleven years old.
The game was close, back and forth it went. With about a minute and a half left, we were leading by two points. The other coach called a time out with the ball in their possession.
In the huddle, our coach assigned me to guard the opponent’s best player, a six-foot-four inch jumping jack who was highly acclaimed and a very good player by the name of Albie Grant. I was five-foot-eleven, and beside my offensive skills, was a tough and tenacious very well-conditioned defender who took pride in sticking to an opponent like glue.
They threw the ball in and screened for Grant. He got the ball and I got in his face. He went up for a jump shot from about 20 feet out, and since I was not going to block his shot, I did what all good defenders do, I got my hand in front of his eyes. But he made the shot anyway, and the referee called a shooting foul on me. But I never touched him. It was a terrible call, but I could do nothing about it.
Behind my back, I could hear my coach cursing me out with every name in the book – you fucking bastard, you shit, etc. He could be heard throughout the arena. The crowd went silent. He kept cursing me out and my already sweaty, red face must have turned purple. I felt on fire. He took me out of the game, a game I had played throughout. He kept cursing at me.
I sat away from him on the bench and he came down and stood over me, calling me every name in his limited vocabulary, you fucking this, you fucking that. I looked at him in rage.
The game continued. Grant made the free throw and we lost by one point.
As we walked off the court to the locker room door at the end, he kept screaming invective at me. I could feel my rage swelling. My family was descending from the stands and could hear it all. I noticed others staring in disbelief.
To say it was humiliating barely captures what it felt like, but just as I played the game fiercely, I was not one to take such abuse. But I kept telling myself to control myself. It was the coach who was making a fool of himself.
Then, when we entered the locker room, he let loose at me again, you fucking idiot, you fucking bastard….when I snapped and grabbed him by his shirt and tie, my hands around his neck, I threw him up against the wall and let him have it, screaming that I’d had enough of his shit and I would kill him if he ever did it again.
All hell broke loose as people were pulling me off him, and my father, who was outside the locker room, came rushing in to intervene.
Years of passionate dedication to becoming the best basketball player I could, came to this. I had reacted in fury to being humiliated “in my own house” in front of my family.
I think now of Odysseus when he stood on the broad door sill and killed AntÍnoös, the worst of the suitors of his wife, Penelope. “Odysseus’ arrow hit him under the chin/ and punched up to the feathers through his throat.”
How dare he take revenge and defend his honor, came the shouts from the easily offended but secretly guilty. The other suitors screamed at him: “Foul! To shoot at a man! That was your last shot.”
It wasn’t mine, but that is the rest of the story. My craft changed in the following years. I no longer tried to imitate other tricksters like Bob Cousy or Bob Dylan. They have their own tales to tell and dwell upon. Their words are not mine.
Now I play with words in my own way.
But like Bob Dylan, “I return once again to Homer who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’
Our stories often happen behind our backs where we can’t see them. Telling them is the trick. You need to turn around and see what’s behind you to pass them around.