The Great Depression meets the Great Recession
By Howard Lisnoff
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 20, 2009, 00:12
Few novels written in the U.S. are more penetrating and riveting than John Steinbeck’s 1939 blockbuster The Grapes of Wrath. Winning both the 1940 Pulitzer Prize and The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, it recounts the fictional odyssey of the Joad family as they are dispossessed from their homestead in the dustbowl of Oklahoma and set off in search of the promised land of California.
As the protagonist of the story, Tom Joad represents the idealism in the first half of the twentieth century played out against the backdrop of the shortcomings of the U.S. social and economic system. The Great Depression looms in the background as the Joads face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, including the discomforting knowledge that the jobs they seek as pickers in California’s produce industry may be illusory. The 5-cent guarantee per load of peaches quickly diminishes to the 2½ cents that a story character warns them is awaiting if they cross the picket line outside the gates of a peach orchard.
Fast-forward to the economy of the contemporary U.S. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released unemployment figures for October 2009. The figure stood at 10.2 percent nationwide. State by state statistics show widely divergent figures with states like Michigan, Rhode Island, California, and Florida suffering more than the average nation-wide figures indicate. With the cost of the federal bailout of banks and other businesses deemed “too large to fail” amounting to trillions of dollars, President Obama announced a jobs summit at the White House in December 2009 in an attempt to address both the issue of unemployment and the Labor Department job report “that showed one out of every six workers—17.5 percent—were unemployed or underemployed in October” (Jeff Zeleny. “Obama Announces Jobs Summit,” The New York Times, November 12, 2009).
These are the highest figures for both of these categories since December 1982. In planning for the summit the president says, “This is one of the great challenges that remains in our economy, a challenge that my administration is absolutely determined to meet” (The New York Times, November 12, 2009).
Many critics of the economic bailout, which rescued those who “mattered,” were accurate in their predictions that the so-called trickle down effects of an economic rebound will make little or no difference for the unemployed, and have no effect on the continued foreclosure crisis, as those both unemployed and underemployed lose their homes. With a globalized economy, and major producers like China showing the first signs of an economic rebound, the effects of pouring trillions into huge U.S. conglomerates may never impact business on Main Street or homes just off of Main Street. To date, the Congress has enacted no meaningful legislation to address the roots of the global and national economic meltdown that led to the current economic recession.
I recently responded to a job offer in a local newspaper for part-time work to supplement my employment as a reading and writing tutor at a local community college. The area where I work, Western Massachusetts, is not as well off as the rest of the state with a per capita income of $38,774 (2006). The area is a major tourist destination in the U.S. with a large number of cultural venues. Typically, such economies appear much like a pyramid with a few well-paid employees at the top and a large base of lower-middle class and working-class employees in the middle and at the bottom.
The employment agency I traveled to is situated in the downtown area in a city that has long suffered from the economic vagaries of a less than vibrant economic base. Many storefronts are dark and empty. A major employer in the area, General Electric, left years ago, depositing dangerous levels of PCBs into the environment. A cleanup has been underway to address some of the PCB pollution.
The job description distributed at the beginning of the informational session for work as a driver’s helper on one of the two largest delivery services in the U.S. was at odds with the job offering in the newspaper. While the jobs advertised were supposed to last an entire workday, a representative from the company stated that a worker could expect to work as little as 3 hours a day. Workers would be “on call,” which meant that the company could either call them or not call them, depending on the daily workload on a particular delivery route. There were all kinds of prohibitions for the job. Long hair and beards were not allowed. The threat of legal action was clearly stated as a warning to applicants who filled out their applications fraudulently. When I mentioned to the interviewer that I had just passed a background check (for a substitute teaching position), she snapped back, “Well, you’ll have a new one done for this job!” The online job application, that had to be completed before reporting to the informational session, was a highly invasive document that seemed to be asking the same questions repeatedly in an attempt to “trap” the applicant into disclosing sensitive information to the prospective employer. The same question was asked more than once in different contexts in different parts of the application.
What amazed me was the large number of people who showed up for this mass orientation and interview. The person who sat next to me in the conference room where the orientation took place noted that similar orientations had been conducted several times earlier in the month, so the employer had a huge worker base from which to draw, much as growers had during the Great Depression. I thought of The Grapes of Wrath again when a character in the migrant worker camp informs others that the offer for thousands of workers to pick produce in California is, in reality, a ploy to drive already meager wages down.
Since there would be down time before we were called to the brief interviews being held in another room in the employment agency, I struck up a conversation with the person I had been sitting next to. He talked about the difficulty he experienced finding jobs since he was illiterate, a disclosure I thought was fairly brave since I had never seen him before the morning of the interview. The irony that I had been a reading specialist for 25 years in public schools was not lost to me as we spoke. He talked about the kinds of low-paying jobs he had worked over the years and complained that a worker “had to know someone” to get reliable work in the local economy. It occurred to me that knowing someone in an economy with a vanished manufacturing base is little solace.
New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Hebert compares the “financial elites” to “ordinary Americans” in “A Recovery For Some,” (November 14, 2009). He states that “financial elites have flourished in recent decades to a great extent because they have had government on their side . . . For ordinary Americans, it has been a different story, with jobs shipped overseas by the millions and wages remaining stagnant . . .”
The Great Depression of the 1930s and The Great Recession at the end of the first decade of the twenty first century have many parallels. Much misery has been created by a global economy that has left many at the bottom of the economy in dire straits. The race to the bottom for wages and job benefits in the U.S. is nearly complete, as was obvious in the large number of people showing up to be interviewed for this very part-time employment. Employers -- at least those still hiring -- have huge slush piles of resumes of well-qualified workers who, like members of the fictional Joad family, are willing to do any kind of work to fulfill their basic needs, unmet by a society they believed would at least offer them the opportunity to work.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached through his website howielisnoff.com.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
The Senseless Acts of Mass Murder Continue
The senseless acts of mass murder continue
By Howard Lisnoff
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 10, 2009, 00:18
The mass murders pass by like the images of a surrealistic dream that are suppressed with the coming of the dawn. This time it was Major Nidal Malik Hasan who killed 13 and wounded 28 at the Soldier Readiness Center at the largest military base in the U.S., Fort Hood, Texas.
In Texas, the bizarre and ironic nature of this latest mass U.S shooting were too strange to be able to easily comprehend: Hasan is an Army psychiatrist who was slated for deployment to Afghanistan, and who had listened to the trauma of returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan at the fort’s mental health center. He had a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Tech, the site of the heinous mass killings of April 2007; he carried two personally owned handguns to the scene of the massacre.
I learned about the slaughter while watching local news on Thursday afternoon. Though I instinctively mistrust national television news outlets, I turned to CNN to get some of the factual outline of the murders, and then to The New York Times to fill in the blanks left by the incessant spin of the major television networks. The spin on CNN was unmistakable!
First, a spokesperson for The Heritage Foundation demurred from commenting about the statements by a relative that Major Hasan had been subjected to harassment because of his Islamic background. Dr. Hasan’s cousin, Nader Hasan, reports that the doctor “was mortified by the idea of having to deploy” (James Dao, “Suspect Was ‘Mortified’ About Deployment,” The New York Times, November 5, 2009). Further, the cousin recounts, “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.” Dr. Hasan had unsuccessfully attempted to sever himself from the military. Brought into the discussion about Dr. Hasan was the allegation that he had posted disturbing and violent messages on a website. The latter remained unclear as of this writing.
Another CNN commentator on the massacre, a former deputy commander at Fort Hood, said that the issue of harassment ought to have been dealt with effectively on a personal level by someone of Dr. Hasan’s rank. As if the spin of this grotesque tragedy had no end, Larry King had the psychologist Dr. Phil on his show following the regular news coverage of the massacre. Rather than listen to someone who felt he could instantly transform himself into a specialist on violence at a military base, I turned the television off. Readers who are familiar with Dr. Phil know that he specializes in castigating “clients” publically for their private relational and psychological torments.
Many, many questions remain about Dr. Hasan’s motivation in allegedly carrying out these heinous acts. Why should a psychiatrist be immune from the effects of the suffering of soldiers returning from immoral and vicious wars of conquest in which civilians are those who are killed in far greater numbers than members of the military? Perhaps the greatest area for dread, in terms of military authorities, is that Dr. Hasan will get his day in military court where he will recount the details of what led him to commit this horror, and his state of mind as he planned mass murder.
As the events unfolded in the media, I flashed back to the Vietnam War era and my final days of basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in December 1969. The members of the basic training company of which I was a part were standing at ease in front of the mess hall in the morning cold. Most were thinking about going home for the holidays when the news about one of the draftees in the unit reached us on that cold Georgia morning. He had shot his foot off rather than face deployment to Vietnam, where he was slated for duty following individual advanced training that would take place during the winter and early spring of 1970. Such stories of self-mutilation were not uncommon during the Vietnam era.
Remaining again in the Vietnam era, I stood in the medical clinic at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to assess my fitness prior to being discharged from the military. I had already given a social history to a military “social worker,” and had provided a psychiatric evaluation through my civilian attorney during my battle to fight being ordered to active duty status in the regular Army from the Reserves. I was attempting to have the psychiatric evaluation moved up by several weeks, wanting to get back to my family and civilian life and work. The psychiatrist who was scheduled to evaluate me came out into the waiting area of the medical clinic and began screaming at me: “If you don’t leave here immediately, I’m going to keep you on this base forever and write a negative evaluation about you.” Perhaps military psychiatry is to psychiatry, as military music is to music. I had been opposed to the war in Vietnam for many years by this time, but this was not an issue that the military would seriously consider. For readers wishing to read the details of these interactions, the official documents of my case are available in the Swarthmore Peace Collection at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They make for interesting reading all of these years later.
It seems that Black Panther H. Rap Brown’s observation from the 1960s that “violence is as American as apple pie” keeps repeating itself in an endless cycle in both civilian and military matters. The massacre at Fort Hood will take its “place” in the long line of senseless killings that echo from Oklahoma City, Columbine High, and Virginia Tech. Will eight years in Afghanistan and six years in Iraq create additional tragedies? Tragedy is routine for the people of both nations and it has come home once again to haunt us just as the senseless violence did on September 11, 2001. “Lesser” reports of killings and deaths are not uncommon among returning soldiers who have seen one or more tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. The defenders of the proliferation of guns in the U.S. will fall into line in the pantheon of talking heads arguing that more guns are necessary to prevent the next senseless massacre and tragedy. And the next massacre will surely happen.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached through his website howielisnoff.com.
By Howard Lisnoff
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 10, 2009, 00:18
The mass murders pass by like the images of a surrealistic dream that are suppressed with the coming of the dawn. This time it was Major Nidal Malik Hasan who killed 13 and wounded 28 at the Soldier Readiness Center at the largest military base in the U.S., Fort Hood, Texas.
In Texas, the bizarre and ironic nature of this latest mass U.S shooting were too strange to be able to easily comprehend: Hasan is an Army psychiatrist who was slated for deployment to Afghanistan, and who had listened to the trauma of returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan at the fort’s mental health center. He had a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Tech, the site of the heinous mass killings of April 2007; he carried two personally owned handguns to the scene of the massacre.
I learned about the slaughter while watching local news on Thursday afternoon. Though I instinctively mistrust national television news outlets, I turned to CNN to get some of the factual outline of the murders, and then to The New York Times to fill in the blanks left by the incessant spin of the major television networks. The spin on CNN was unmistakable!
First, a spokesperson for The Heritage Foundation demurred from commenting about the statements by a relative that Major Hasan had been subjected to harassment because of his Islamic background. Dr. Hasan’s cousin, Nader Hasan, reports that the doctor “was mortified by the idea of having to deploy” (James Dao, “Suspect Was ‘Mortified’ About Deployment,” The New York Times, November 5, 2009). Further, the cousin recounts, “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.” Dr. Hasan had unsuccessfully attempted to sever himself from the military. Brought into the discussion about Dr. Hasan was the allegation that he had posted disturbing and violent messages on a website. The latter remained unclear as of this writing.
Another CNN commentator on the massacre, a former deputy commander at Fort Hood, said that the issue of harassment ought to have been dealt with effectively on a personal level by someone of Dr. Hasan’s rank. As if the spin of this grotesque tragedy had no end, Larry King had the psychologist Dr. Phil on his show following the regular news coverage of the massacre. Rather than listen to someone who felt he could instantly transform himself into a specialist on violence at a military base, I turned the television off. Readers who are familiar with Dr. Phil know that he specializes in castigating “clients” publically for their private relational and psychological torments.
Many, many questions remain about Dr. Hasan’s motivation in allegedly carrying out these heinous acts. Why should a psychiatrist be immune from the effects of the suffering of soldiers returning from immoral and vicious wars of conquest in which civilians are those who are killed in far greater numbers than members of the military? Perhaps the greatest area for dread, in terms of military authorities, is that Dr. Hasan will get his day in military court where he will recount the details of what led him to commit this horror, and his state of mind as he planned mass murder.
As the events unfolded in the media, I flashed back to the Vietnam War era and my final days of basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in December 1969. The members of the basic training company of which I was a part were standing at ease in front of the mess hall in the morning cold. Most were thinking about going home for the holidays when the news about one of the draftees in the unit reached us on that cold Georgia morning. He had shot his foot off rather than face deployment to Vietnam, where he was slated for duty following individual advanced training that would take place during the winter and early spring of 1970. Such stories of self-mutilation were not uncommon during the Vietnam era.
Remaining again in the Vietnam era, I stood in the medical clinic at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to assess my fitness prior to being discharged from the military. I had already given a social history to a military “social worker,” and had provided a psychiatric evaluation through my civilian attorney during my battle to fight being ordered to active duty status in the regular Army from the Reserves. I was attempting to have the psychiatric evaluation moved up by several weeks, wanting to get back to my family and civilian life and work. The psychiatrist who was scheduled to evaluate me came out into the waiting area of the medical clinic and began screaming at me: “If you don’t leave here immediately, I’m going to keep you on this base forever and write a negative evaluation about you.” Perhaps military psychiatry is to psychiatry, as military music is to music. I had been opposed to the war in Vietnam for many years by this time, but this was not an issue that the military would seriously consider. For readers wishing to read the details of these interactions, the official documents of my case are available in the Swarthmore Peace Collection at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They make for interesting reading all of these years later.
It seems that Black Panther H. Rap Brown’s observation from the 1960s that “violence is as American as apple pie” keeps repeating itself in an endless cycle in both civilian and military matters. The massacre at Fort Hood will take its “place” in the long line of senseless killings that echo from Oklahoma City, Columbine High, and Virginia Tech. Will eight years in Afghanistan and six years in Iraq create additional tragedies? Tragedy is routine for the people of both nations and it has come home once again to haunt us just as the senseless violence did on September 11, 2001. “Lesser” reports of killings and deaths are not uncommon among returning soldiers who have seen one or more tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. The defenders of the proliferation of guns in the U.S. will fall into line in the pantheon of talking heads arguing that more guns are necessary to prevent the next senseless massacre and tragedy. And the next massacre will surely happen.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached through his website howielisnoff.com.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Late For Woodstock
Late For Woodstock
It took me forty years and two months to get to Woodstock. The power of the place is undeniable all of these years later! Woodstock, the site of the 1969 world-shaking concert, is forty-three miles from the locale originally selected for what would be called “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music.” The final place chosen for the concert happened because of the happenstance of weather more than through the careful planning of the four organizers who brought the festival to fruition. Max Yasgur had had a poor hay crop during the rainy spring-summer of 1969, and he needed to recoup that loss for the operation of his dairy farm in Bethel, New York in the southernmost part of the Catskill Mountain region of upstate New York. The good luck of finding Yasgur followed several disappointments as local communities in the Catskills rejected hosting the concert. Generational differences were palpable in those days, due primarily to the coming of age of the 60’s generation: the baby boomers.
What was Yasgur’s farm, sold off in 1971 when Max Yasgur retired form the dairy business, is breathtaking! I had spent part of the summer of 1971 in nearby Swan Lake, but the sheer beauty of the natural bowl formed by the sloping land where the concert took place is almost indescribable. The landform making up the “bowl” itself is reminiscent of the ancient outdoor theaters of Greece still standing on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. But what made the concert site so spectacular is the surrounding and distant hills of the southern Catskills. On the unseasonably cold early-fall day when I arrived, the site was bordered by the rolling orange-fired hills that have made this place a magnet to generations of weary New Yorkers and others seeking temporary solace in nature and an escape from city life. If a small piece of nirvana can be found, then this is one of them.
In 1969 I worked at a summer camp for special needs children located in Waterford, Connecticut, nearly 200 miles from where the concert was held. Though I wanted to attend the concert, as did masses of young people from that era, the dictates of earning some money just after graduating from college was the deciding factor in keeping me away from the historic event. The camp had only a few television sets in the dormitories housing girls and the young women who were their counselors, while the male counselors were housed with young boys in cabins devoid of any technology. I would only learn about the concert from pictures in both Newsweek and Time magazines. The riveting photographs from the concert were of the masses of kids skinny-dipping in nearby Filippini Pond that made a backdrop to the concert stage that was placed in its most logical location at the base of the hills that formed the natural acoustical setting for the three days of music that had been planned (actually four days counting Monday morning August 18) by the festival’s organizers.
Back to generational differences and the concert. By the time Woodstock was staged, tens of thousands of protesters had agitated against the Vietnam War. I was one of them, having become stridently antiwar during the 1967-68 academic year when a group of students formed Providence College Students for Peace in Providence, Rhode Island. Since the campus was quite conservative, the college peace group had its own intergenerational problems and differences to deal with with the school’s administration. ROTC was also a significant presence on campus. I had been in the ROTC brigade during my freshman and sophomore years at PC. Many of my friends would go on to deployments in Vietnam following graduation.
Despite the differences between generations and perceptions of what constituted patriotism, the antiwar movement had had a significant effect on the perceptions of the war by the late 1960s. Television did the rest. Many people in the U.S. were horrified at the sight of TV reporting with a nightly dose of U.S. soldiers igniting the huts of Vietnamese civilians and documenting children being set on fire with napalm. However, as senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern confidently stated, many in the U.S. would not tolerate open and vociferous dissent to the war while U.S. troops remained in harm’s way, no matter what truth was lacking in Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s justification for the unpopular war.
Just eight months following Woodstock, the Kent State and Jackson State massacres occurred. At Kent State, on May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen would kill four students and wound nine, one of whom was paralyzed. At Jackson State in Mississippi, on May 15, two were killed and twelve wounded. These students were killed and seriously injured for the crime of protesting the Vietnam War. In Ohio, Governor James A. Rhodes, with the tacit support of Richard Nixon, created an atmosphere in which open and aggressive hostility towards protesters was encouraged.
Today, so distant from those events, stands The Museum At Bethel Woods (opened in 2008) and a nearby open-air concert venue. Though many justifiably protested the commercialization of the Woodstock site, the exhibition at the museum is quite good, highlighting the history leading up to the 1969 concert, the concert itself, and its impact on the society in later years. I found only one minor error in the museum’s documenting of the history of the 60’s era having to do with the number of protesters who actually took a stand against the Vietnam War and risked imprisonment or exile (the museum’s estimate was far too low). The museum’s film and audio archives, presented within the larger exhibit, are riveting. Whether inside or outside of the museum, the incredible effect of finally being at Woodstock is undeniable: the crowd of 500,000—its colorful dress, the music venue, the massive rain and lightning storms that turned the farmland into a muddy swamp, and the spectacular natural beauty of the place.
Perhaps Max Yasgur’s words are the most memorable as he addressed the crowd of 500,000 from the concert stage in August 1969:
I'm a farmer, I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world — not only to the Town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, New York State: you've proven something to the world. This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place. We have had no idea that there would be this size group, and because of that you've had quite a few inconveniences as far as water, food, and so forth. Your producers have done a mammoth job to see that you're taken care of... they'd enjoy a vote of thanks. But above that, the important thing that you've proven to the world is that a half a million kids — and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you are — a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God Bless You for it!1.
Just before exiting the museum into the nondescript museum store is the section of exhibits documenting the enduring power of the event, titled “The Impact Of Woodstock & The Sixties.” I found the words of Woodstock concertgoer Joe Coakley worth pondering, emblazoned in large letters slightly above eye level on a wall...“I miss the spirit of that whole period of time.” Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell never made it to the concert, but wrote the prophetic words to the song “Woodstock:” “And we’ve got to get ourselves…Back to the garden.” I don’t think it will ever happen again, although I wish it would!
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached through his website howielisnoff.com.
1. Director: Michael Wadleigh. 1970. Woodstock. Warner Brothers.
It took me forty years and two months to get to Woodstock. The power of the place is undeniable all of these years later! Woodstock, the site of the 1969 world-shaking concert, is forty-three miles from the locale originally selected for what would be called “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music.” The final place chosen for the concert happened because of the happenstance of weather more than through the careful planning of the four organizers who brought the festival to fruition. Max Yasgur had had a poor hay crop during the rainy spring-summer of 1969, and he needed to recoup that loss for the operation of his dairy farm in Bethel, New York in the southernmost part of the Catskill Mountain region of upstate New York. The good luck of finding Yasgur followed several disappointments as local communities in the Catskills rejected hosting the concert. Generational differences were palpable in those days, due primarily to the coming of age of the 60’s generation: the baby boomers.
What was Yasgur’s farm, sold off in 1971 when Max Yasgur retired form the dairy business, is breathtaking! I had spent part of the summer of 1971 in nearby Swan Lake, but the sheer beauty of the natural bowl formed by the sloping land where the concert took place is almost indescribable. The landform making up the “bowl” itself is reminiscent of the ancient outdoor theaters of Greece still standing on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. But what made the concert site so spectacular is the surrounding and distant hills of the southern Catskills. On the unseasonably cold early-fall day when I arrived, the site was bordered by the rolling orange-fired hills that have made this place a magnet to generations of weary New Yorkers and others seeking temporary solace in nature and an escape from city life. If a small piece of nirvana can be found, then this is one of them.
In 1969 I worked at a summer camp for special needs children located in Waterford, Connecticut, nearly 200 miles from where the concert was held. Though I wanted to attend the concert, as did masses of young people from that era, the dictates of earning some money just after graduating from college was the deciding factor in keeping me away from the historic event. The camp had only a few television sets in the dormitories housing girls and the young women who were their counselors, while the male counselors were housed with young boys in cabins devoid of any technology. I would only learn about the concert from pictures in both Newsweek and Time magazines. The riveting photographs from the concert were of the masses of kids skinny-dipping in nearby Filippini Pond that made a backdrop to the concert stage that was placed in its most logical location at the base of the hills that formed the natural acoustical setting for the three days of music that had been planned (actually four days counting Monday morning August 18) by the festival’s organizers.
Back to generational differences and the concert. By the time Woodstock was staged, tens of thousands of protesters had agitated against the Vietnam War. I was one of them, having become stridently antiwar during the 1967-68 academic year when a group of students formed Providence College Students for Peace in Providence, Rhode Island. Since the campus was quite conservative, the college peace group had its own intergenerational problems and differences to deal with with the school’s administration. ROTC was also a significant presence on campus. I had been in the ROTC brigade during my freshman and sophomore years at PC. Many of my friends would go on to deployments in Vietnam following graduation.
Despite the differences between generations and perceptions of what constituted patriotism, the antiwar movement had had a significant effect on the perceptions of the war by the late 1960s. Television did the rest. Many people in the U.S. were horrified at the sight of TV reporting with a nightly dose of U.S. soldiers igniting the huts of Vietnamese civilians and documenting children being set on fire with napalm. However, as senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern confidently stated, many in the U.S. would not tolerate open and vociferous dissent to the war while U.S. troops remained in harm’s way, no matter what truth was lacking in Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s justification for the unpopular war.
Just eight months following Woodstock, the Kent State and Jackson State massacres occurred. At Kent State, on May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen would kill four students and wound nine, one of whom was paralyzed. At Jackson State in Mississippi, on May 15, two were killed and twelve wounded. These students were killed and seriously injured for the crime of protesting the Vietnam War. In Ohio, Governor James A. Rhodes, with the tacit support of Richard Nixon, created an atmosphere in which open and aggressive hostility towards protesters was encouraged.
Today, so distant from those events, stands The Museum At Bethel Woods (opened in 2008) and a nearby open-air concert venue. Though many justifiably protested the commercialization of the Woodstock site, the exhibition at the museum is quite good, highlighting the history leading up to the 1969 concert, the concert itself, and its impact on the society in later years. I found only one minor error in the museum’s documenting of the history of the 60’s era having to do with the number of protesters who actually took a stand against the Vietnam War and risked imprisonment or exile (the museum’s estimate was far too low). The museum’s film and audio archives, presented within the larger exhibit, are riveting. Whether inside or outside of the museum, the incredible effect of finally being at Woodstock is undeniable: the crowd of 500,000—its colorful dress, the music venue, the massive rain and lightning storms that turned the farmland into a muddy swamp, and the spectacular natural beauty of the place.
Perhaps Max Yasgur’s words are the most memorable as he addressed the crowd of 500,000 from the concert stage in August 1969:
I'm a farmer, I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world — not only to the Town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, New York State: you've proven something to the world. This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place. We have had no idea that there would be this size group, and because of that you've had quite a few inconveniences as far as water, food, and so forth. Your producers have done a mammoth job to see that you're taken care of... they'd enjoy a vote of thanks. But above that, the important thing that you've proven to the world is that a half a million kids — and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you are — a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God Bless You for it!1.
Just before exiting the museum into the nondescript museum store is the section of exhibits documenting the enduring power of the event, titled “The Impact Of Woodstock & The Sixties.” I found the words of Woodstock concertgoer Joe Coakley worth pondering, emblazoned in large letters slightly above eye level on a wall...“I miss the spirit of that whole period of time.” Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell never made it to the concert, but wrote the prophetic words to the song “Woodstock:” “And we’ve got to get ourselves…Back to the garden.” I don’t think it will ever happen again, although I wish it would!
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached through his website howielisnoff.com.
1. Director: Michael Wadleigh. 1970. Woodstock. Warner Brothers.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Not Your Mother and Father's Peace Movement
Not Your Mother and Father’s Peace Movement
It was far from the New Jersey border with Delaware that I lost my faith in anything resembling a vibrant peace movement. I think it dropped away bit by bit, much like the wearing away of mountains or the slow melt of ice and snow in a New England winter (even in this age of global warming). It has progressed for years, accelerating after the anti-nuclear (nuclear freeze) movement of the early 1980s. Somewhat like the aging process, it’s not noticed at first, but follows an inexorable and irreversible course. Being a war resister from the Vietnam era, I retained the ideal of holding onto ideals longer than most.
I hadn’t noticed that people I knew from the 60s had ensconced themselves in academia, becoming careerists while I put in thirty years in public schools then worked with students at community colleges with reading and writing skills. Careerism meant nothing to me. Working was a way to pay bills and help support a family. When the late activist Abbie Hoffman spoke to students in the late 1980s and commented how few would remain activists, I foolishly believed that at least a small number of those he addressed would hold onto youthful ideals and actually try to change the world.
Back to the New Jersey Turnpike. I read the announcement on the website of The World Can’t Wait during the early summer, about a demonstration that was planned in Washington, D.C. for October 5, 2009. The demonstration would involve civil disobedience at the White House against the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. I began readying myself to be arrested after a hiatus of thirty-six years. I contacted the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance through a link at The World Can’t Wait website. I even forgot, momentarily, the sense of isolation that comes with following Left principles: how often it is either difficult or impossible to connect with people with whom to travel with to demonstrations. Even though busloads of people still traveled to demonstrations when Bush was inaugurated and when his administration launched the Iraq War, I often felt alone as I headed for these events. By that time, much of the antiwar movement was composed of the remnants of the Vietnam antiwar movement and others committed to activism by way of religious convictions. But just as Abbie Hoffman knew it (a reader could sense it in his later essays): I knew it. When the 1960s and early 1970s ended, something untouchable had changed. The close camaraderie of that period disappeared after the shock of Kent State and the subsequent end of the Vietnam War.
As this past summer ended, I began writing to The World Can’t Wait asking that they put me in touch with other activists from Western Massachusetts who might have expressed an interest in traveling to the demonstration. E-mails to both Veterans for Peace and Code Pink for leads to others who would travel to the demonstration went unanswered. I contacted a few people with whom I had vigiled against war in the town where I live, but there was no interest in going to D.C. Eventually, both The World Can’t Wait and the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance came through and I began writing to find out if I could link up with these organizations and travel with others. But somehow schedules never could be coordinated. One person wanted to leave in the middle of the night, which I was not willing to do. Another expressed apprehension about traveling with someone she did not know (understandable), and in any case, did not plan to return to New England before later in the week when I would have had to be at work. And the wished–for busloads of demonstrators would never materialize, as much an indication of a weak “movement” as to the demonstration’s scheduling on a workday on the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.
In the coffeehouse where I am writing, a poster of Barack Obama hangs that simply reads “Hope.” I’m writing on the day when I would have been arrested for civil disobedience had I continued on my trip to D.C. The red, black, white, and blue of the poster is quite attractive. It is set against the beauty of an early-fall New England midday with cloudy skies, still vibrant green grass, and the red, brown, yellow, and orange of swamp maples already changed. Just last week, as General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Commander of military forces in Afghanistan, requested an additional 40,000 troops for Afghanistan from Obama, and the Right began banging the bellicose drums of war. In a recent interview, the writer Gore Vidal predicts that the U.S. will move toward fascism in the near future (“We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US” Times Online, September 30, 2009).
Reuters reports in “Antiwar Protesters Turns Their Sights on Obama (October 5, 2009), that about 200 people were at the demonstration and sixty-one were arrested for committing civil disobedience. The World Can’t Wait website (October 6, 2009) reports that 500 people attended the demonstration. CBS Evening News began a series “Afghanistan: The Road Ahead” on the same day as the demonstration, which could have been produced as an infomercial for the Pentagon, not questioning the continued open-ended commitment to that country. Lately, no one in a decision-making position in the government brings up the name of Osama bin Laden and the foiled attempt to capture him while he was still in Afghanistan. The newly released movie Rethink Afghanistan, by Robert Greenwald, which is available on You Tube, raises the real issue of the civilian toll that the war is taking and the inhospitable terrain of Afghanistan, that will wreak havoc on any major U.S. escalation of the war.
I think there are many, many signs that fascism may come to this country. Wars without end, an economy that does not provide for the needs of all of its people—while the well off are always taken care of—a global economy that’s increasingly centralized and unanswerable to any criticism or control, a dying ecological system, and the movement in the U.S. by the Right (both religious and secular) that reared its ugly head just recently during the national “town meetings” concerning health-care reform, all point to a system out of control. Many of the historical markers of movement to the far Right are indeed here and the president seems to want to give in to the rants of the Right at every opportunity. Such issues as The Geneva Conventions and the rule of law in war are off the table and will not be considered.
This time I just ran out of steam, at least temporarily, as I approached Delaware, perhaps as much from a lack of sleep the previous night as from anticipation of the demonstration. But as a diehard Leftist, I will put this personal debacle behind me and live to fight another day.
It was far from the New Jersey border with Delaware that I lost my faith in anything resembling a vibrant peace movement. I think it dropped away bit by bit, much like the wearing away of mountains or the slow melt of ice and snow in a New England winter (even in this age of global warming). It has progressed for years, accelerating after the anti-nuclear (nuclear freeze) movement of the early 1980s. Somewhat like the aging process, it’s not noticed at first, but follows an inexorable and irreversible course. Being a war resister from the Vietnam era, I retained the ideal of holding onto ideals longer than most.
I hadn’t noticed that people I knew from the 60s had ensconced themselves in academia, becoming careerists while I put in thirty years in public schools then worked with students at community colleges with reading and writing skills. Careerism meant nothing to me. Working was a way to pay bills and help support a family. When the late activist Abbie Hoffman spoke to students in the late 1980s and commented how few would remain activists, I foolishly believed that at least a small number of those he addressed would hold onto youthful ideals and actually try to change the world.
Back to the New Jersey Turnpike. I read the announcement on the website of The World Can’t Wait during the early summer, about a demonstration that was planned in Washington, D.C. for October 5, 2009. The demonstration would involve civil disobedience at the White House against the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. I began readying myself to be arrested after a hiatus of thirty-six years. I contacted the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance through a link at The World Can’t Wait website. I even forgot, momentarily, the sense of isolation that comes with following Left principles: how often it is either difficult or impossible to connect with people with whom to travel with to demonstrations. Even though busloads of people still traveled to demonstrations when Bush was inaugurated and when his administration launched the Iraq War, I often felt alone as I headed for these events. By that time, much of the antiwar movement was composed of the remnants of the Vietnam antiwar movement and others committed to activism by way of religious convictions. But just as Abbie Hoffman knew it (a reader could sense it in his later essays): I knew it. When the 1960s and early 1970s ended, something untouchable had changed. The close camaraderie of that period disappeared after the shock of Kent State and the subsequent end of the Vietnam War.
As this past summer ended, I began writing to The World Can’t Wait asking that they put me in touch with other activists from Western Massachusetts who might have expressed an interest in traveling to the demonstration. E-mails to both Veterans for Peace and Code Pink for leads to others who would travel to the demonstration went unanswered. I contacted a few people with whom I had vigiled against war in the town where I live, but there was no interest in going to D.C. Eventually, both The World Can’t Wait and the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance came through and I began writing to find out if I could link up with these organizations and travel with others. But somehow schedules never could be coordinated. One person wanted to leave in the middle of the night, which I was not willing to do. Another expressed apprehension about traveling with someone she did not know (understandable), and in any case, did not plan to return to New England before later in the week when I would have had to be at work. And the wished–for busloads of demonstrators would never materialize, as much an indication of a weak “movement” as to the demonstration’s scheduling on a workday on the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.
In the coffeehouse where I am writing, a poster of Barack Obama hangs that simply reads “Hope.” I’m writing on the day when I would have been arrested for civil disobedience had I continued on my trip to D.C. The red, black, white, and blue of the poster is quite attractive. It is set against the beauty of an early-fall New England midday with cloudy skies, still vibrant green grass, and the red, brown, yellow, and orange of swamp maples already changed. Just last week, as General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Commander of military forces in Afghanistan, requested an additional 40,000 troops for Afghanistan from Obama, and the Right began banging the bellicose drums of war. In a recent interview, the writer Gore Vidal predicts that the U.S. will move toward fascism in the near future (“We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US” Times Online, September 30, 2009).
Reuters reports in “Antiwar Protesters Turns Their Sights on Obama (October 5, 2009), that about 200 people were at the demonstration and sixty-one were arrested for committing civil disobedience. The World Can’t Wait website (October 6, 2009) reports that 500 people attended the demonstration. CBS Evening News began a series “Afghanistan: The Road Ahead” on the same day as the demonstration, which could have been produced as an infomercial for the Pentagon, not questioning the continued open-ended commitment to that country. Lately, no one in a decision-making position in the government brings up the name of Osama bin Laden and the foiled attempt to capture him while he was still in Afghanistan. The newly released movie Rethink Afghanistan, by Robert Greenwald, which is available on You Tube, raises the real issue of the civilian toll that the war is taking and the inhospitable terrain of Afghanistan, that will wreak havoc on any major U.S. escalation of the war.
I think there are many, many signs that fascism may come to this country. Wars without end, an economy that does not provide for the needs of all of its people—while the well off are always taken care of—a global economy that’s increasingly centralized and unanswerable to any criticism or control, a dying ecological system, and the movement in the U.S. by the Right (both religious and secular) that reared its ugly head just recently during the national “town meetings” concerning health-care reform, all point to a system out of control. Many of the historical markers of movement to the far Right are indeed here and the president seems to want to give in to the rants of the Right at every opportunity. Such issues as The Geneva Conventions and the rule of law in war are off the table and will not be considered.
This time I just ran out of steam, at least temporarily, as I approached Delaware, perhaps as much from a lack of sleep the previous night as from anticipation of the demonstration. But as a diehard Leftist, I will put this personal debacle behind me and live to fight another day.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Autumn Meditation
Autumn Meditation
The old man asked for help
Searching among the shelves of the co-op
For green tea, honey, and ginger
A conclusion of his meditation
He was so calm, resolute, and congenial
The surrounding hills were fired in autumn multicolored hues
The sky a steel gray.
The old man asked for help
Searching among the shelves of the co-op
For green tea, honey, and ginger
A conclusion of his meditation
He was so calm, resolute, and congenial
The surrounding hills were fired in autumn multicolored hues
The sky a steel gray.
Senator Kennedy, Liberalism and the Left
Senator Kennedy, Liberalism and the Left
My wife and I traveled across Massachusetts on Friday, August 28, to be part of the public wake for Senator Edward Kennedy. Though much of the summer has been a washout in the Northeast, this morning proved worthy of a late-summer New England day with wispy curls of high cirrus clouds in a sparkling blue sky above Dorchester Bay. A fresh wind rose from the sea to the south and east and onto the peninsula that makes up the landform where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum are located. Jets and propeller-driven planes swooped down out of the west and glided effortlessly over the high roof of the library, then across the bay as their landing gears lowered with the certain prospect of momentarily disappearing over the tree line to land at Logan Airport.
Getting to the library just before 11:00 A.M., we joined the line of thousands of other mourners who had come to pay tribute to the senior senator from Massachusetts, but what also brought us to this place on a day that could easily have been made for leisurely summer sailing was the fact that a great epoch in U.S. history had come to a close.
John F. Kennedy’s life, a president of only mildly liberal politics and Cold warrior, left an indelible mark on the American psyche. No one who remembers that era can forget the wrenching grief of that day on which the young president was assassinated, and the days to follow, in November 1963. A person knows exactly where he or she was when Walter Cronkite announced the news of the president’s death. It was as if that day, forty-six years ago, had just happened. It was as if the nation, like Cronkite, would forever be brushing aside a tear of grief.
Only five years later, in an era so different from his brother’s, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in California after winning the presidential primary and almost certainly assuring himself a place on the national Democratic ticket and a probable win. How different the world would have been! Senator Kennedy had transformed himself from a member of his brother’s cabinet to a bona fide liberal. He had been touched in a positive way by the societal upheavals of the late 1960s and was genuinely antiwar as the all-important California primary drew to an end.
Back to the Dorchester of the present. Remarkably, though visibly in mourning, members of the Kennedy, Smith, and Reggie families pass down the line of mourners greeting everyone who has come to pay respects to either their father, or uncle, or grandfather, or stepfather. The news media does not interfere with these personal and heartfelt interchanges, and instead interviews a few people from the line of mourners as it approaches the entrance to the library. One man quite inappropriately drones on endlessly to anyone who will listen about spirituality, interrupts an interview in progress, as is soon quieted by others who stand in line quietly waiting their turns to pass the senator’s coffin.
In an article in the Socialist Worker, “Myth of the Liberal Lion” (August 28, 2009), Lance Selfa criticizes Kennedy for selling out on the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and eventually supporting regressive bills such as the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, incremental improvements in healthcare legislations verses a single-payer plan (which Kennedy did champion in the early 1970s), budget balancing legislation, and the No Child Left Behind education act.
Senator Kennedy was indeed an effective dealmaker who could forge relationships, both personal and political, with those in the juggernaut of regressive politics that took shape with the ascendancy to the presidency of the far-right former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. It was not so much that Kennedy abandoned his liberalism, as much as the voters in the U.S. jettisoned those values as the economy became less and less egalitarian and their representatives in Congress followed suit. Kennedy’s very real triumphs included legislation in the areas of women’s rights, the rights of those with disabilities, civil rights, health care for children, and the admittedly flawed prescription drug plan now a part of Medicare. Though originally a supporter of the Vietnam War, Kennedy came to strongly oppose that war and the current war in Iraq. He stopped the nomination of the far-right jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He worked tirelessly for his constituents and was an accessible senator to them.
Senator Kennedy was most certainly a flawed individual and came from a family of enormous wealth, but he also witnessed much personal tragedy not of his making and went on to fight the fights in which he believed he could be most effective. After witnessing the vicious assassinations of two brothers, losing one brother to war, and dealing with disease and addiction, he could have easily sat on the sidelines, but he did not.
Liaisons with liberals have always borne the brunt of criticism from the left. But it was just that ability to make working connections with those whom he had nothing in common with politically that makes Senator Kennedy an outstanding person. The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs picks fun at liberals in his humorous parody on liberalism “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” written in the 60s when liberalism and liberals were easy targets. After associating with leftists for all of my adult life, and in many cases with less than rewarding results, it seems that being able to relate to others the way Senator Kennedy did is a most enviable, ennobling, and human trait.
Over the past several years, since the demise of both the anti-globalization and antiwar movements, what remains of the left is hard-pressed in making an argument that connections to political liberals weakens the left in any material way. What indeed is left to weaken?
During the 1980s, while living in Rhode Island, I organized a meeting between the late Senator Claiborne Pell and a group opposed to U.S. interventions in Central America, and in particular in Nicaragua. Senator Pell, a liberal, had lost his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Ronald Reagan was elected president. After several individuals had spoken to the senator in his Providence, Rhode Island office, the senator observed that in order for him to take a more visible role against U.S. intervention in Central America he would need a vibrant anti-interventionist movement from which to draw energy. In other words, the senator knew that in order for him to effectively make the case against intervention there would have to be an increased level of activism among members of the group meeting with him. Several members of the group expressed their dissatisfaction with the senator following the meeting, but Senator Pell had made a keen observation about the political system: it never changes unless pressure is placed on it through outside forces.
That the left has been so weakened in recent years is not due to magical or mysterious forces operating in and outside of the political system, but rather comes directly from the fact that the left is no longer the attractive force for change that it once was in the U.S. The latter is of grave concern for leftists, a problem of organizing real people, and not a problem created solely by liberals! That the left cannot mount an effective campaign of opposition in the face of multiple wars, an economy that meets the needs of fewer people, and a largely failed environmental policy tells more about the left in a complacent society than it does about liberals.
A commentator on one of the major news networks observed how respectful the public outpouring was during the days of mourning for Senator Kennedy. It was indeed respectful, but of greater worry to anyone left or liberal are the continuing vicious expressions by the right against Senator Kennedy’s signature legislation, health-care reform.
My wife and I traveled across Massachusetts on Friday, August 28, to be part of the public wake for Senator Edward Kennedy. Though much of the summer has been a washout in the Northeast, this morning proved worthy of a late-summer New England day with wispy curls of high cirrus clouds in a sparkling blue sky above Dorchester Bay. A fresh wind rose from the sea to the south and east and onto the peninsula that makes up the landform where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum are located. Jets and propeller-driven planes swooped down out of the west and glided effortlessly over the high roof of the library, then across the bay as their landing gears lowered with the certain prospect of momentarily disappearing over the tree line to land at Logan Airport.
Getting to the library just before 11:00 A.M., we joined the line of thousands of other mourners who had come to pay tribute to the senior senator from Massachusetts, but what also brought us to this place on a day that could easily have been made for leisurely summer sailing was the fact that a great epoch in U.S. history had come to a close.
John F. Kennedy’s life, a president of only mildly liberal politics and Cold warrior, left an indelible mark on the American psyche. No one who remembers that era can forget the wrenching grief of that day on which the young president was assassinated, and the days to follow, in November 1963. A person knows exactly where he or she was when Walter Cronkite announced the news of the president’s death. It was as if that day, forty-six years ago, had just happened. It was as if the nation, like Cronkite, would forever be brushing aside a tear of grief.
Only five years later, in an era so different from his brother’s, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in California after winning the presidential primary and almost certainly assuring himself a place on the national Democratic ticket and a probable win. How different the world would have been! Senator Kennedy had transformed himself from a member of his brother’s cabinet to a bona fide liberal. He had been touched in a positive way by the societal upheavals of the late 1960s and was genuinely antiwar as the all-important California primary drew to an end.
Back to the Dorchester of the present. Remarkably, though visibly in mourning, members of the Kennedy, Smith, and Reggie families pass down the line of mourners greeting everyone who has come to pay respects to either their father, or uncle, or grandfather, or stepfather. The news media does not interfere with these personal and heartfelt interchanges, and instead interviews a few people from the line of mourners as it approaches the entrance to the library. One man quite inappropriately drones on endlessly to anyone who will listen about spirituality, interrupts an interview in progress, as is soon quieted by others who stand in line quietly waiting their turns to pass the senator’s coffin.
In an article in the Socialist Worker, “Myth of the Liberal Lion” (August 28, 2009), Lance Selfa criticizes Kennedy for selling out on the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and eventually supporting regressive bills such as the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, incremental improvements in healthcare legislations verses a single-payer plan (which Kennedy did champion in the early 1970s), budget balancing legislation, and the No Child Left Behind education act.
Senator Kennedy was indeed an effective dealmaker who could forge relationships, both personal and political, with those in the juggernaut of regressive politics that took shape with the ascendancy to the presidency of the far-right former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. It was not so much that Kennedy abandoned his liberalism, as much as the voters in the U.S. jettisoned those values as the economy became less and less egalitarian and their representatives in Congress followed suit. Kennedy’s very real triumphs included legislation in the areas of women’s rights, the rights of those with disabilities, civil rights, health care for children, and the admittedly flawed prescription drug plan now a part of Medicare. Though originally a supporter of the Vietnam War, Kennedy came to strongly oppose that war and the current war in Iraq. He stopped the nomination of the far-right jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He worked tirelessly for his constituents and was an accessible senator to them.
Senator Kennedy was most certainly a flawed individual and came from a family of enormous wealth, but he also witnessed much personal tragedy not of his making and went on to fight the fights in which he believed he could be most effective. After witnessing the vicious assassinations of two brothers, losing one brother to war, and dealing with disease and addiction, he could have easily sat on the sidelines, but he did not.
Liaisons with liberals have always borne the brunt of criticism from the left. But it was just that ability to make working connections with those whom he had nothing in common with politically that makes Senator Kennedy an outstanding person. The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs picks fun at liberals in his humorous parody on liberalism “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” written in the 60s when liberalism and liberals were easy targets. After associating with leftists for all of my adult life, and in many cases with less than rewarding results, it seems that being able to relate to others the way Senator Kennedy did is a most enviable, ennobling, and human trait.
Over the past several years, since the demise of both the anti-globalization and antiwar movements, what remains of the left is hard-pressed in making an argument that connections to political liberals weakens the left in any material way. What indeed is left to weaken?
During the 1980s, while living in Rhode Island, I organized a meeting between the late Senator Claiborne Pell and a group opposed to U.S. interventions in Central America, and in particular in Nicaragua. Senator Pell, a liberal, had lost his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Ronald Reagan was elected president. After several individuals had spoken to the senator in his Providence, Rhode Island office, the senator observed that in order for him to take a more visible role against U.S. intervention in Central America he would need a vibrant anti-interventionist movement from which to draw energy. In other words, the senator knew that in order for him to effectively make the case against intervention there would have to be an increased level of activism among members of the group meeting with him. Several members of the group expressed their dissatisfaction with the senator following the meeting, but Senator Pell had made a keen observation about the political system: it never changes unless pressure is placed on it through outside forces.
That the left has been so weakened in recent years is not due to magical or mysterious forces operating in and outside of the political system, but rather comes directly from the fact that the left is no longer the attractive force for change that it once was in the U.S. The latter is of grave concern for leftists, a problem of organizing real people, and not a problem created solely by liberals! That the left cannot mount an effective campaign of opposition in the face of multiple wars, an economy that meets the needs of fewer people, and a largely failed environmental policy tells more about the left in a complacent society than it does about liberals.
A commentator on one of the major news networks observed how respectful the public outpouring was during the days of mourning for Senator Kennedy. It was indeed respectful, but of greater worry to anyone left or liberal are the continuing vicious expressions by the right against Senator Kennedy’s signature legislation, health-care reform.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Paris Recollections 2
Paris Recollections
Again, at Pere LaChaise
The azure sky
Of piercing clear
Parisian light amid cumulous clouds.
Here notoriety lies abandoned.
I search for Richard Wright
Among the walls of the columbarium.
Again, at Pere LaChaise
The azure sky
Of piercing clear
Parisian light amid cumulous clouds.
Here notoriety lies abandoned.
I search for Richard Wright
Among the walls of the columbarium.
Paris Recollections 1
Paris Recollections
On the Rue de Sommeraud
A child runs
Then spins widly
Laughing with abandon
In the pouring rain.
On the Rue de Sommeraud
A child runs
Then spins widly
Laughing with abandon
In the pouring rain.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Greenwich Village Street Scene 8/9/09
Greenwich Village Street Scene 8/9/09
Mountain ash muted in the mist and perspective of a Renaissance painting on MacDougal Street toward Bleecker where the proprietor of the leather shop says he knew Abbie and a 60’s writer complaining of the kids in his apartment building leaving garbage and subletting to friends with no consideration he says something has changed. Meanwhile, the lovers pass in front of Caffe Reggio, timeless in the lesser canyons of the Village among the motley shades of red brick in early August while a jazz trio plays to a sparse crowd in Washington Square Park.
Mountain ash muted in the mist and perspective of a Renaissance painting on MacDougal Street toward Bleecker where the proprietor of the leather shop says he knew Abbie and a 60’s writer complaining of the kids in his apartment building leaving garbage and subletting to friends with no consideration he says something has changed. Meanwhile, the lovers pass in front of Caffe Reggio, timeless in the lesser canyons of the Village among the motley shades of red brick in early August while a jazz trio plays to a sparse crowd in Washington Square Park.
Friday, July 10, 2009
The Fourth of July
The Fourth of July
July 4, 1971 promised to be my favorite July 4th ever! Three friends and I decided to leave New England and visit a family friend who had settled in rural Ontario, Canada. I looked forward to the visit, as it would not only be an adventure with friends, but also would take me outside of the United States during a so-called patriotic holiday. Expressions of national chauvinism during war have never enthralled me, and the U.S. has been at war for most of my life. By the time our group crossed over the border in upstate New York, I had long since become a resister to the military. I still had the option to return to either a National Guard or Reserve unit at the time of this summer trip, but the murderous viciousness of the Vietnam War, and its expansion into Laos and Cambodia, had set me on a collision course with the government of the U.S.
Just before we left the U.S., while still in upstate New York, my friends and I had a disquieting experience when we stopped at a small restaurant for dinner in a little, out of the way place just off of the Thruway. Both my friend Joe and I had long hair, and as we sat in a booth in the back of the restaurant with the women who had accompanied us, we were the targets of snarling derogatory remarks about our appearance by a few people who sat at the counter. I was mildly surprised by the behavior of these folks, as I thought that that kind of treatment of so-called “outsiders” was something reserved solely for the Deep South.
Driving into Renfrew, Ontario was nothing short of exhilarating. Don had settled there after traveling the world trying to find a haven outside of the U.S. Trips to other parts of the world had proven disappointing to him, and as I drove up the driveway to his partially completed home site he waved along with a crew of friends who had completed only the deck of the first floor of the home. Only the kitchen area provided any protection from the weather with its temporary roof.
Sleeping arrangements on the night of the 4th proved to quickly deteriorate, as the bug population rose exponentially while the sun set over a distant low mountain range. After a short time hopelessly swatting legions of biting insects, my friends and I sought refuge in an empty van that one of Don’s friends owned. It was in the middle of the night, as I would later learn, that my friend Joe assaulted the woman with whom I had traveled with when she got up during the night to use the outhouse. That knowledge would shake my naïve belief that leftists were any more reliable as friends than anyone else, regardless of personal politics! Narcissism is as infectious to leftists as it is to those on the right and to people with no politics at all. The twin of Narcissism, conformity, results in what Herbert Marcuse called the One-Dimensional Man [sic] (1964).
On July 5th, Don introduced me to a real estate agent who took us on a tour of local available home sites. For between five and six thousand dollars I would be able to buy a piece of land in the area and build a small A-frame on it. Since I had developed a serious relationship with the woman I was with, we carefully considered the option of returning to the area later in the summer and striking out on our own and thereby also avoiding any future entanglements with the military. The real estate agent had been a soldier in the German army during World War II and questioned me in his still distinct native accent about my reasons for considering immigrating to Canada. When I countered with a question about what it was like for him to be faced with the decision to fight as part of Hitler’s war machine, he said that he had “no choice.” I never traveled back to Ontario and Don left the area to return to the U.S. in the early 1980s.
July 4th, 2009. I stand in an antiwar vigil with two friends, Mickey and Bill, on the busy corner of a small town in western Massachusetts. Mickey has been coming out every Saturday since before the war began in Iraq to stand in witness against that war. I began joining him and Bill three years ago. Sometimes others join us, and the group of protesters “swells” to around five people. Now we protest more than one war. The vast majority who pass us by on foot and in cars are sympathetic to our antiwar message. A small number shout or display their middle fingers. How much has really changed from the Vietnam era to the present day? The U.S. is still involved in multiple wars, always with horrific effects on civilians, and the government still spies on its citizens. How strange this all seems to me, only a few miles distant from the Mass Pike where I drove west so many years ago on a quest to learn just what it would be like on July 4th in a much different and faraway place.
This July 4th ended at a popular cultural venue in the Berkshires in Massachusetts where I handed out programs to patrons as they entered the gates of this bucolic setting. I’m caught off guard as a handful of people out of the thousands who pass by wish me a happy Fourth. I return their greeting not knowing what else to say.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. His book Notes of a Military Resister is available at his website howielisnoff.com where he can also be contacted.
July 4, 1971 promised to be my favorite July 4th ever! Three friends and I decided to leave New England and visit a family friend who had settled in rural Ontario, Canada. I looked forward to the visit, as it would not only be an adventure with friends, but also would take me outside of the United States during a so-called patriotic holiday. Expressions of national chauvinism during war have never enthralled me, and the U.S. has been at war for most of my life. By the time our group crossed over the border in upstate New York, I had long since become a resister to the military. I still had the option to return to either a National Guard or Reserve unit at the time of this summer trip, but the murderous viciousness of the Vietnam War, and its expansion into Laos and Cambodia, had set me on a collision course with the government of the U.S.
Just before we left the U.S., while still in upstate New York, my friends and I had a disquieting experience when we stopped at a small restaurant for dinner in a little, out of the way place just off of the Thruway. Both my friend Joe and I had long hair, and as we sat in a booth in the back of the restaurant with the women who had accompanied us, we were the targets of snarling derogatory remarks about our appearance by a few people who sat at the counter. I was mildly surprised by the behavior of these folks, as I thought that that kind of treatment of so-called “outsiders” was something reserved solely for the Deep South.
Driving into Renfrew, Ontario was nothing short of exhilarating. Don had settled there after traveling the world trying to find a haven outside of the U.S. Trips to other parts of the world had proven disappointing to him, and as I drove up the driveway to his partially completed home site he waved along with a crew of friends who had completed only the deck of the first floor of the home. Only the kitchen area provided any protection from the weather with its temporary roof.
Sleeping arrangements on the night of the 4th proved to quickly deteriorate, as the bug population rose exponentially while the sun set over a distant low mountain range. After a short time hopelessly swatting legions of biting insects, my friends and I sought refuge in an empty van that one of Don’s friends owned. It was in the middle of the night, as I would later learn, that my friend Joe assaulted the woman with whom I had traveled with when she got up during the night to use the outhouse. That knowledge would shake my naïve belief that leftists were any more reliable as friends than anyone else, regardless of personal politics! Narcissism is as infectious to leftists as it is to those on the right and to people with no politics at all. The twin of Narcissism, conformity, results in what Herbert Marcuse called the One-Dimensional Man [sic] (1964).
On July 5th, Don introduced me to a real estate agent who took us on a tour of local available home sites. For between five and six thousand dollars I would be able to buy a piece of land in the area and build a small A-frame on it. Since I had developed a serious relationship with the woman I was with, we carefully considered the option of returning to the area later in the summer and striking out on our own and thereby also avoiding any future entanglements with the military. The real estate agent had been a soldier in the German army during World War II and questioned me in his still distinct native accent about my reasons for considering immigrating to Canada. When I countered with a question about what it was like for him to be faced with the decision to fight as part of Hitler’s war machine, he said that he had “no choice.” I never traveled back to Ontario and Don left the area to return to the U.S. in the early 1980s.
July 4th, 2009. I stand in an antiwar vigil with two friends, Mickey and Bill, on the busy corner of a small town in western Massachusetts. Mickey has been coming out every Saturday since before the war began in Iraq to stand in witness against that war. I began joining him and Bill three years ago. Sometimes others join us, and the group of protesters “swells” to around five people. Now we protest more than one war. The vast majority who pass us by on foot and in cars are sympathetic to our antiwar message. A small number shout or display their middle fingers. How much has really changed from the Vietnam era to the present day? The U.S. is still involved in multiple wars, always with horrific effects on civilians, and the government still spies on its citizens. How strange this all seems to me, only a few miles distant from the Mass Pike where I drove west so many years ago on a quest to learn just what it would be like on July 4th in a much different and faraway place.
This July 4th ended at a popular cultural venue in the Berkshires in Massachusetts where I handed out programs to patrons as they entered the gates of this bucolic setting. I’m caught off guard as a handful of people out of the thousands who pass by wish me a happy Fourth. I return their greeting not knowing what else to say.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. His book Notes of a Military Resister is available at his website howielisnoff.com where he can also be contacted.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Winter Surf
Winter Surf
Joe and I rode down Neil Young’s “empty ocean road” at Matunuck
The boiling, frothing, angry winter sea a gray to match the sky
Joe, fearless, paddled out to where the huge breakers began to roll to foam and spindrift
I stayed closer to shore to catch their second break
The pinhole breaks of my wetsuit instructing caution and practicality.
Joe and I rode down Neil Young’s “empty ocean road” at Matunuck
The boiling, frothing, angry winter sea a gray to match the sky
Joe, fearless, paddled out to where the huge breakers began to roll to foam and spindrift
I stayed closer to shore to catch their second break
The pinhole breaks of my wetsuit instructing caution and practicality.
Friday, December 5, 2008
The Town Beach at Narragansett, Rhode Island
The Town Beach at Narragansett, Rhode Island December 4, 2008
The gray-green sea beckons
Unbridled dreams at sunset
In spindrift and point-break
In the unbounded vastness of sea and sky
In the universal and the singular.
The gray-green sea beckons
Unbridled dreams at sunset
In spindrift and point-break
In the unbounded vastness of sea and sky
In the universal and the singular.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Celestial Accident
Celestial Accident
The crescent moon waxing
suspended in a triangle between Venus and Jupiter
in a transparent-blue sky on the edge of a solstice sunset
appeared dream-like as through the lens of a child's 3-D toy
a celestial accident worth pondering.
The crescent moon waxing
suspended in a triangle between Venus and Jupiter
in a transparent-blue sky on the edge of a solstice sunset
appeared dream-like as through the lens of a child's 3-D toy
a celestial accident worth pondering.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Ecologically Unsound
The wood smoke is so inviting in late October
Blown by a north wind along with spent leaf
It stays close among the hills gone to brown
An affirmation in the direction of the solstice.
Blown by a north wind along with spent leaf
It stays close among the hills gone to brown
An affirmation in the direction of the solstice.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Sixties Dream
Sixties Dream
Those days were the ones of great change
That can be touched, now on briefly
On April afternoons that mark the line between seasons
Bordered by hyacinth, daffodil, crocus, forsythia, lilac and new leaf
A haze lightly touching the distant hills
As much a state of consciousness as reality
The night chill, watching Orion approach oblivion in the west
It is almost possible to feel young again on those days
And know that all is possible.
Those days were the ones of great change
That can be touched, now on briefly
On April afternoons that mark the line between seasons
Bordered by hyacinth, daffodil, crocus, forsythia, lilac and new leaf
A haze lightly touching the distant hills
As much a state of consciousness as reality
The night chill, watching Orion approach oblivion in the west
It is almost possible to feel young again on those days
And know that all is possible.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Olivia's Overlook
Autumn had blanketed the Berkshires at Olivia’s Overlook
With burnt orange, red, gold, brown and unvanquished green
That disappeared on mountain ridges in the smoky atmosphere of early fall
Stockbridge Bowl a mirror to this seemingly timeless parade of natural beauty.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Before The Frost
Honeybees dart between the black-eyed Susans and zinnias
A frenzy that seems so foreign to this serene crystalline day at summer’s end
The air is pure before the frost and harvest moon
The night transparent velvet.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Night Is So Silent
The night is so silent
Time seems immutable
The stars appear still as the river exhales mist
Giving off its summer warmth
A plane passes beside Cassiopeia
The moon rises.
Time seems immutable
The stars appear still as the river exhales mist
Giving off its summer warmth
A plane passes beside Cassiopeia
The moon rises.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Bear Mountain
Hiking down from Bear Mountain
Under the shadow of black cumulonimbus
I stoop to pick blueberries beneath mountain laurel
Descending again, the peaks of the Catskills fill the horizon to the west
Thirty-seven years have passed
Since we loved among those hills
Beside country lanes bordered by purple loosestrife and Queen Anne's lace
Spent and squandered at summer's end.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
