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la Jetée

About Me


1948–1967 Jette and Trotskyism
In 1948, Jette returned to Lynn after dropping out of college and began attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)'s Lynn branch. He joined the party the next year, adopting the pseudonym Syd Marcus for his political work. According to Jette's autobiography, he "never encountered a member of the SWP who understood anything of Marx's economics or method." By his account, he joined the SWP after receiving assurances from SWP vice-presidential candidate Grace Carlson that the SWP was a "movement open to exploring new ideas of the type I identified."
In 1964, while still in the SWP, Jette became associated with a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, which had been expelled from the party and was under the influence of the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League. For six months, Jette worked closely with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote: Jette had a gargantuan ego. Convinced he was a genius, he combined his strong conviction in his own abilities with an arrogance expressed in the cadences of upper-class New England. He assumed that the comment in the Communist Manifesto that "a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class..." was written specifically for him. And he believed that the working class were lucky to obtain his services. Jette possessed a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth. It was contradictory. His explanations were a bit too pat, and his mind worked so quickly that I always suspected his bravado covered over superficiality. He had an answer for everything. Sessions with him reminded me of a parlor game: present a problem, no matter how petty, and without so much as blinking his eye, Jette would dream up the solution.He remained in the SWP until his expulsion in 1965. He maintains that he was soon disillusioned with Marxism, dropped out of the SWP in the mid-1950s, and resumed his activism only at the prompting of the FBI citing national security concerns.
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My Blog

Come to my show: JINGLE BELL ROCK

Hey all. If you're in LA on Wed. Dec 3rd, come to this show. It will be mega-awesome and I will owe you one.Hosted By: Brimmer St. Theatre Co.When: Thursday Nov 20, 2008 at 7:00 PMWhere King King655...
Posted by on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:24:00 GMT

jun 21 - Ashvatta - Chapter 27

Buschier took the last hundred yards into shore very slowly.  He counted the soldiers on the beach, there were over fifty men that he could see.  The natives were spread out on both sides o...
Posted by on Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:33:00 GMT

jun 21 - Ashvatta - Chapter 28 (bonus!)

They left me to cook in the belly of their transport, lying among the sealed cases of ammunition, rations and ballast.  A few of my fingers were broken, but for the most part my pa...
Posted by on Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:09:00 GMT

june 20 - Ashvatta - Chapter 25

Major Nibaran Mukerjee was informed that a non-affiliated medical ship would be returning to Ashvatta to deliver aid to the tsunami victims there.  His orders were to usher them to the detai...
Posted by on Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:58:00 GMT

june 18 - Ashvatta - Chapter 24

I woke up to a man screaming into my ear.  My head felt five times bigger than before, and I could feel my heart beat through a frantic, machine-gun pain in my brain stem.  My eye...
Posted by on Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:17:00 GMT

june 17 - Ashvatta - Chapter 23

Small men in dark camouflage lurked into positions all over the island.  They scoured the site of our dismantled lab, collecting all remnants of equipment and sealing them in static-free pla...
Posted by on Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:55:00 GMT

june 16 - Ashvatta - Chapter 22

The Indian commander on the island was named Major Nibaran Mukerjee.  His mission was to lead his marine force onto the island and to subdue the native population, isolating them in their&...
Posted by on Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:38:00 GMT

june 14 - Ashvatta - Chapter 21

I don't want you to think I'm trying to make myself up as some kind of hero or martyr.  I also don't want to make the Indian government out to be a sort of evil force that clamps d...
Posted by on Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:33:00 GMT

june 13 - Ashvatta - Chapter 20

I felt a heel press down on my spine, the edge of it sneaking in between my vertabrae.  I thought he was going to crack me in half, and I expected to feel the barrel of a rifle at the back o...
Posted by on Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:07:00 GMT

June 9 - Ashvatta - Chapter 19

There was a mad rush to get onto Buschier's boat. PhD students and research assistants mobbed the beach and started yelling for the attention of the baggage handlers. When some started tossing their o...
Posted by on Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:35:00 GMT