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.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
