FILM / William Kunstler : Disturbing the Universe

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe...

Remarkable film tells story of
Famed civil rights attorney

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / October 28, 2009

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, a film by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, premiered as part of the Austin Film Festival Wednesday, Ocober 27. The film, which was also selected for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, has it's public premiere in New York, November 13-15.

The ninety-minute documentary is the story of a larger than life attorney -- a man who left his Westchester suburban home, his wife and his children for a journey to the south of Jim Crow and lunch-counter sit-ins. He never returned to the comfortable suburbs.

Along with Leonard Weinglass, Kunstler was defense counsel for the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial. The eighth defendant, Bobby Seale, was bound and gagged in the courtroom for demanding to speak in his own defense. Kunstler was sentenced to 40 months for contempt by Judge Julius Hoffman. Out on bail and fighting appellate battles, he waded into negotiations at the Attica Prison uprising.

He stood outside the gates listening to the gunshots as 31 inmates and nine guards were killed by police fire. He was counsel for the Catonsville Nine, Catholics who burned draft records with homemade napalm. He traveled to Wounded Knee to defend the American Indian Movement.

These legendary legal battles are documented with remarkable footage and interviews with many of the principals, including Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden, Nancy Kurshan, Dennis Banks, an Attica guard and many of Kunstler’s colleagues. But, it is the tender family scenes with his second wife and young daughters (the filmmakers) that add depth and subtlety to this portrait.

As young girls, Emily and Sarah Kunstler were raised to admire their legendary father. But Kunstler’s later years took him into high profile criminal defense of clients accused of gang rape, cop killing and the assassination of a Jewish Defense League leader. These cases brought angry protests to the daughters’ front door. In many ways the film is the effort to reconcile the legend with the man, the lawyer with the father, the civil rights defender with the attorney for murderers.

This is a film about the uprising of the 60s and 70s told from the perspective of a generation that had to live with a larger than life luminary of those times.

Members and friends of the 12th Street Law Collective in Austin held a reunion Oct. 4, 2009. On sofa, left to right, are Jim Simons, Brady Coleman and Cam Cunningham. On chair to their right is Bobby Nelson. John Howard is deceased. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag blog.

The film underscores the critical role that attorneys played in the uprisings of those times. On October 4th in Austin, there was a reunion for a law office that took on its local share of 60's and 70's defendants. The 12th Street Law Collective principals were Jim Simons, Cam Cunningham, Brady Coleman, Bobby Nelson and John Howard.

Jim was a co-counsel at the Wounded Knee takeover and defender of GI antiwar activists in Killeen. Cam and Brady defended the Gainesville Eight, Vietnam Veterans Against the War accused of conspiracy. Bobby blazed legal trails for women barred from employment as bus drivers, emergency medical technicians, and telephone cable splicers. She took UT to court for sex discrimination and was an early defender of the rights of gays and lesbians.

Those of us who were clients during those years owe a deep debt of gratitude to the attorneys. Their legal fees were often cobbled together through benefits or not at all. Like Kunstler, they used their skills and gave their hearts for the cause.

[Alice Embree, a long-time Austin political activist and writer, was a leader in the Sixties New Left and women's liberation movements and was a founder of Austin's The Rag and New York's Rat, trailblazers in the Sixties underground press.]

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Judy Gumbo Albert : Peoples' Park and Our Sixties Legacy

Art from Peoples' Park 35th anniversary celebration in Berkeley, April 25, 2009. Photo by Z / Bay Area Indymedia.
Berkeley's Peoples' Park Remembered and Zayd Dohrn’s play, Magic Forest Farm

I repeat this phrase, loudly and with more emphasis: 'Our politics have not changed.' Suddenly, with no conscious effort on my part, in an atavistic, Monty Pythonish gesture, my left arm -- and clenched fist -- shoot straight up in the air.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 29, 2009

[This is the second of two articles written for The Rag Blog by Judy Gumbo Albert, a founder of the Sixties countercultural protest group the Yippies, on recent activities in California commemorating the work of Sixties radicals. See her previous article here.]

Sunday around 3 p.m. I find myself in Berkeley’s People’s Park, in front of a crowd of at least 500 what, back in the day, we called hippies and freaks, letting their freak flags fly. Actually, the crowd was maybe 50% hippies and freaks, and the other 50 % just plain folks: men, women, children, neatly dressed students, Vietnam vets, homeless women and men, belly dancers, bongo drummers, black, white and multi-ethnic, one crowd, together, happy under the warm California sun. Sitting on remarkably well tended and clipped grass, with the unmistakable sweet odor of that other grass thick in the air. Just like I remember.

Building People’s Park led to Berkeley’s largest community uprising of 1969. And gave Ronald Reagan a platform on which to build his greed-driven, free-market, laissez-faire, capitalist-loving presidency -- whose upshot is, at least in part, the global financial crisis we suffer today. The economic “chickens” that Malcolm X first warned us about at the time of the Kennedy assassination have “come home to roost.”

In April 1969 a few thousand of us, including my late husband Stew Albert and I, along with many, many others, created a green, eco-before-it-was-fashionable community out of a muddy parking lot owned by the University of California. We dug the earth, laid sod, planted gardens, cooked food, played music, built stuff, and just enjoyed. There were no official or elected leaders, just strong personalities; most of us felt empowered to be our own leader, some of us ended up more “leadership” than others. Decisions (such as they were) were made by consensus (such as it was in those days). At least that’s what I recall.

Shortly after we seized the Park, the Berkeley police sealed it off with a barbed wire fence. Police and National Guard tear gassed the entire city, battled thousands of us in the streets, and, for the first time that I know of in the 1960s, used deadly force against white demonstrators, wounding 100 protestors and killing a young man named James Rector.

Forty years later, it’s easy to spot Michael Delacour. Mike, one of the Park’s originals, is always recognizable by his craggy face and long formerly black now silver hair falling way past his shoulders. He is, as far as I can tell, one of the unofficial keepers of the park’s flame.

He asks if I want to speak. How can I decline?

I start by quoting the Berkeley Liberation Program which a group of about 40 of us put together in an Oakland hotel because, in the immediate aftermath of the Park uprising, the City of Berkeley banned gatherings of more than a few people. Naturally, we model our program on the 10 point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party. The people of Berkeley, I begin, passionately desire human solidarity, cultural freedom and peace. No reaction from the crowd. Not interested? Too stoned? Time to move on -- I’ll talk about Stew’s death. I urge anyone with Hepatitis C to get tested. I tell the story of how, two days before he dies, Stew asks me to type on his blog: “My politics have not changed.” I repeat this phrase, loudly and with more emphasis: “Our politics have not changed.” Suddenly, with no conscious effort on my part, in an atavistic, Monty Pythonish gesture, my left arm -- and clenched fist -- shoot straight up in the air.

It’s just like driving or riding a bike. There are some things you never forget.

I feel great. The crowd doesn’t exactly roar but at least I’ve caught their attention. Stewie would have been really happy.

Wavy Gravy is the event MC. By now his trademark clown outfit is a bit worn, yet he’s still the same kindly, funny person who used to unintentionally scare my young daughter if he turned in her direction. Which leads, in some roundabout, two degrees of separation way, to Zayd Dohrn’s play Magic Forest Farm, which I saw recently at the Marin Theatre Company. Zayd was born when his parents, Weather Underground folks Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were underground. His play directly addresses the question: “How do kids raised in the shadow of the Sixties keep the parts of that experiment that were healthy -- the idealism, the hope, the courage -- while getting rid of the narcissism and silliness that had the potential to undermine it?”

How indeed? It turns out that some of our most cherished, countercultural values—”do your own thing,” dope, nudity, sexual experimentation—had, at least in Zayd’s fictional recreation of Magic Forest Farm, negative, dysfunctional consequences for some -- not all -- of the kids who lived there. I don’t doubt for a moment that the play speaks an inconvenient truth -- especially because, immediately after the play, I meet a total stranger in the woman’s bathroom who feels compelled to spill her story to me. The headline is that, as her mother lay dying, this woman was finally able to forgive her for raising her in such a commune.

As I recall, the women’s movement was just coming into full flower in Berkeley during People’s Park. We were not especially sympathetic to mothers of young children. Nor did it occur to us -- or me at least -- to empathize with the mothers of those teenagers we so warmly welcomed in People’s Park. The Free Speech Movement’s Jack Weinberg coined the phrase: “Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty” which morphed into Yippie leader Jerry Rubin’s “Kill Your Parents” -- a slogan which, Jerry later admitted, didn’t work because people thought he meant it literally. But symbolically Jack and Jerry were right -- to change the system and completely re-invent ourselves, we had to break from the repressive, war-mongering, right wing, dysfunctional values of our parent’s generation.

The kids of 1960’s parents I know today are terrific people. They are teachers, lawyers, parents, playwrights, writers, documentary film makers, professors, health care professionals, entrepreneurs. But there are also some who didn’t make it, kids who tragically ended up in jail or dead by their own hand. Despite all the humane, positive and progressive values we passed on to our children, our 1960’s activism also gave them difficult stuff to work through. And resent. And rebel against. This may be the moment when our 60’s generation’s chickens are coming home to roost in their own right.

I’m glad that Stew and I were able to pass our Yippie values to our daughter. I’m saddened if they caused her grief or harm in any way. Still and all, my politics have not changed.

[Judy Gumbo Albert was an original member of the 1960s countercultural protest group known as the Yippies --along with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the journalist Paul Krassner, the folk singer Phil Ochs and her late husband Stew Albert who died on Jan. 30, 2006. Judy co-authored The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Greenwood Press, 1984) and The Conspiracy Trial (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). Her articles available online include "The Battle of Chicago," about the 1968 Democratic Convention, and "What Were Those 1960’s Terrorists Thinking Anyway," about the 1971 Mayday anti-war protests.

Albert currently lives in Berkeley and is writing her memoir titled Yippie Girl: My Remarkable Adventures with the Yippies, Black Panthers, North Vietnamese and Weathermen. Judy can be reached at yippiegirl@gmail.com or through her website yippiegirl.com.]

Also see Judy Gumbo Albert : It's 'Celebrate 60s Radicals' Week! by Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2009.

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Judy Gumbo Albert : It's 'Celebrate 60s Radicals' Week!

Judy Gumbo with (left) Stew Albert and Jerry Rubin, May, 1971. Photo from yippiegirl.com.
In California this week, book signings, an historic poster exhibition, a theatrical event and a 'Champion of Justice' award all shine a light on Sixties activists and their progeny.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2009

For some cosmic reason, this is Celebrate 1960s Radicals-And-Our-Children week in California. On Saturday April 18, in Oakland, I and at least 600 others witnessed my friend Steve Bingham get the National Lawyers Guild’s prestigious Champion of Justice Award. On Sunday I attended the opening of the Berkeley Historical Society’s “Up Against the Wall” exhibit of 1960’s posters and artifacts. Last night, in downtown Berkeley, former Weatherman Mark Rudd spoke and signed his long-awaited book Underground.

Friday will be the world premiere in nearby Marin County of Zayd (son of Weather leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Billy Ayers) Dohrn’s play Magic Forest Farm, advertised as a young woman’s journey back to her past to confront the truth. Next Wednesday, Chesa (raised by Bernardine and Billy, the son of former Weather person Kathy Boudin and still imprisoned David Gilbert) Boudin, will be in San Francisco signing Gringo -- his coming-of-age work which recently provoked a disgustingly arrogant and mean-spirited review in the New York Times.

Not too shabby for us Bush-battered 1960s types!

It’s difficult for me to convey how heart-warming and deeply emotional Steve’s recognition event turned out to be. Steve Bingham, you may recall, spent almost 14 years underground in Europe after being charged with five counts of conspiracy murder for allegedly smuggling a gun past metal detectors into San Quentin so that prison leader George Jackson could “escape” -- and be shot to death. In 1984 Steve resurfaced in the Bay Area with his wonderful wife Francoise, and, after a trial lasting six months -- one of the longest, if not the longest trials ever in the State of California -- Steve was completely exonerated.

It felt like a miracle seeing this tall, sweet, gentle man, flying silver hair somewhat trimmed for the occasion, wearing a deep reddish/pinkish crushed velvet shirt and garlanded with a lei, get a long, enthusiastic standing ovation recognizing his lifelong contributions to social justice -- not just the 1960s struggle, or his survival underground, but also for his last 20 years at Bay Area Legal Aid protecting the rights of the imprisoned, the poor and the homeless. For me this was time-travel—back to the day when we proudly used the words radical and revolutionary as self-descriptors. It felt a lot like coming home.

Next day, I ran into Gus Newport, the well known African-American former mayor of Berkeley at the poster exhibit. Many posters came from the remarkable collection of the late FSM (Free Speech Movement) activist turned children’s science teacher and author Michael Rossman. One, the Berkeley Liberation Program, is the exact same poster I gave to the Stew and Judy Gumbo Albert Archives at the Labadie Collection at University of Michigan. My late husband Stew Albert, SDS founder Tom Hayden, I, and a large contingent of Berkeley radicals collectively wrote the Berkeley Liberation Program during the 1969 People’s Park uprising. We begin by making a declaration that still resonates:

The people of Berkeley passionately desire human solidarity, cultural freedom and peace.

Gus and I reminisced about how, back in the day, we rarely put the year on political posters -- just the month and day. We lived so much in the intensity of the present; we were so busy “making history” that documenting it by putting the year on a publication was the furthest thing from our minds.

My favorite long-forgotten artifact was a small pamphlet that Tom, Stew, I, and others put together in 1969, titled "Every Soldier a Shitworker, Every Shitworker a Soldier.” 1969 was the year that, at least in Berkeley, Women’s Liberation came into full flower. This tiny handbook was published, as was the Berkeley Liberation Program, by a collective we named, with no lack of youthful grandiosity, the “International Liberation School.” For a mere 25 cents, young radicals learned, among other organizational skills, that women and men must equally share the “shitwork.” Good soldiers in the revolution give women’s work equal importance to everything else. So we believed and so we attempted to act.

At the exhibit I also ran into Mario Savio’s widow Lynne Savio Hollander, and Michael Rossman’s widow Karen McClellan. We widows of well-known 60s guys share a unique bond, but our grieving process is no different from anyone else—up/down, forward/back, eventually you survive and thrive, but your life is never the same. Mario, a gentle soul and truly charismatic speaker was at the center of Berkeley’s 1964-65 Free Speech Movement. Every fall Lynn and her fellow FSM’ers put on the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture at which they award an annual $6000 prize to a young person or persons with a deep commitment to human rights, social justice, and proven ability to transform their commitment into effective action.

Last night was Mark Rudd’s turn. I had not seen Mark for ages up until two years ago, when my fiancé David Dobkin and I had a warm, affectionate reunion with him and his wife Marla Painter at their New Mexico home. At the time, Mark said he figured Bernardine and Billy wouldn’t like his book. It’s not because of the narcissism that my dear friend Jonah Raskin called him on in The Rag Blog -- I mean, he is Mark Rudd, what else do you expect? It’s his memoir, he’s allowed. Last night Mark described his trajectory as going from schlemiel to media darling, to being wanted by the FBI to going underground—but never truly leaving the schlemiel behind.

I really appreciate Mark’s highly personal writing style -- there are even places where, in my opinion, he could have gone deeper and been more authentic. Marla said essentially the same thing last night. But Mark does explore his feelings with way more emotional openness than Cathy Wilkerson did in Flying Too Close to the Sun -- and for this he is to be congratulated.

What Bernardine and Billy aren’t likely to enjoy about Underground is Mark spilling his version of the beans about his former friends. He has his regrets and doesn’t especially hold back about who he blames. I believe that blaming and regretting are part of the grieving process -- for a while I blamed Stew for dying, for the terrible loss he inflicted on me. Perhaps this is just Mark’s way of channeling his anguish at all the losses: loss of life in the Townhouse and the Brinks robbery, the loss of comrades forced underground and those still in jail, to say nothing of factionalized friendships, lost youth, and the demise of an organization he so dearly loved. A North Vietnamese friend once gave me some strategic advice about dealing with friendships which Mark, perhaps, might have benefitted from: “Be good to friends who are good to you, also be good to friends who are bad to you, for only friends will go with you on the long road to revolution.”

Mark never considered himself a Yippie. He said last night he lost his sense of humor pretty early on in SDS. And we Yippies never felt close to SDS -- we experienced the organization as too serious, too focused on ideology and, as Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin never forgot or forgave, SDS initially advocated not coming to Chicago for the 1968 protests -- before having a last minute change of heart.

Those who are making the movies and writing the books, memoirs, blogs and graphic novels will ultimately define our history. As best as I can reconstruct, both Mark and Cathy Wilkerson believe that, after a certain amazing moment in which everyone in SDS felt empowered to change the world, divisive internal conflicts turned the organization into a cult of isolated, fanatic, self-destructive individuals with, at least for a time, an ideological commitment to offensive violence. Both Mark and Cathy say they disagreed in their hearts with this direction as it was happening, but also went along, victimized by their own ambivalence.

I’ve learned in my life that, when more than one person says essentially the same thing about a shared experience, there’s likely some kernel of truth in what they say. It truly saddens me to recognize that Weatherman turned into a cult. Romantic idealist that I am, I prefer to remember historical Weatherman for what it stood for -- inspirational courage, exemplary risk-taking and a passionate commitment to ending racism and an immoral, illegal war in Vietnam.

Each one of us from back in the day has her or his own Sixties. Mark has made a terrific contribution by sharing his. I encourage you to buy Underground and go to here for his speaking schedule.

On Friday I’ll see what Zayd Dohrn’s play reveals about the search for past truths. I’ll keep you posted.

[Judy Gumbo Albert was an original member of the 1960s countercultural protest group known as the Yippies -- along with her late husband Stew Albert who died on Jan. 30, 2006. Judy co-authored The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Greenwood Press, 1984) and The Conspiracy Trial (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). Her articles available online include "The Battle of Chicago," about the 1968 Democratic Convention, and "What Were Those 1960’s Terrorists Thinking Anyway," about the 1971 Mayday anti-war protests.

Albert currently lives in Berkeley and is writing her memoir titled Yippie Girl: My Remarkable Adventures with the Yippies, Black Panthers, North Vietnamese and Weathermen. Judy can be reached at yippiegirl@gmail.com or through her website yippiegirl.com.]

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Tim Wise : Obama's Victory and the Rage of the Barbiturate Left

Member of the "joyless left."

Now in the wake of Barack Obama's victory these barbiturate leftists are back in full effect, lecturing the rest of us about how naive we are for having any confidence whatsoever in him, or for voting at all, since "the Democrats and Republicans are all the same..."

By Tim Wise

My political entry into the left (and by this I mean the real left, beyond the Democratic Party) came a little more than twenty years ago in New Orleans, when, as a college student I became involved in the fight against U.S. intervention in Central America. In particular, the groups of which I was a part sought to end military aid to the death squad governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, and to block support for the contra thugs our nation was arming in Nicaragua, who by that time had already killed about 30,000 civilians in their war with the nominally socialist Sandinista government.

It was the first place where I came into contact with folks who defined themselves as radicals (I had grown up in Nashville, after all, where at that time, even finding "out" liberals was sometimes a challenge), and where I got to experience all the fascinating permutations of Marxism that the left had to offer. In addition to unaffiliated socialists (which I considered myself to be at the time), there were Trotskyites, old-line Leninists, Maoists, and even some bizarre Stalinists in the bunch. Excluding from consideration those among this number who turned out to be FBI spies, there were still plenty of real and interesting ideologues who had valuable insights to offer, even for those of us who didn't swallow their particular party line.

But despite being interesting, these folks also managed, at least for me, to demonstrate one of the key problems with the left in the U.S. Namely, for the sake of ideological purity few within the professional left expressed any joy about life, or any emotion whatsoever that wasn't rooted in negativity. They were like the political equivalent of quaaludes: guaranteed to bring you down from whatever partly optimistic place you might find yourself from time to time.

This was never so evident as the day I hopped into a car with one of the Stalinoids (a member of something called the Albanian Liberation League, which viewed the brutal regime of Enver Hoxha as a worker's paradise), and headed downtown for a rally to protest Contra aid. Once in the car, I asked about the music playing from his stereo. What was it? I wanted to know. He quickly explained that it was Albanian folk music, and the only music he listened to. I made some joke about how strange it was to be living in one of the greatest musical towns on Earth and yet to restrict oneself to a single genre of music (especially that favored by Albanian sheepherders), to which my revolutionary friend responded with a grunt and a scowl. Of course, because Comrade Stalin never much liked jazz.

The humorlessness of the far left -- to which I remain connected ideologically if not organizationally -- has always struck me as one of its greatest weaknesses. People like to laugh, they like to smile, they like to be joyful, and an awful lot of hardened leftists seem almost utterly incapable of doing any of these things. It's as if they have all taken a pledge that there should be no laughter until the revolution, or some such shit. No positivity, no hope, no happiness so long as people are still poor and exploited and being murdered by cops, and victimized by United States militarism, or performing as wage slaves for global capital, or eating meat, or driving cars. And they wonder why the left is so weak?

Now, in the wake of Barack Obama's victory these barbiturate leftists are back in full effect, lecturing the rest of us about how naive we are for having any confidence whatsoever in him, or for voting at all, since "the Democrats and Republicans are all the same," and he supports FISA and the war with Afghanistan, and all kinds of other messed up policies just like many on the right. Those of us who find any significance in the election of a man of color in a nation founded on white supremacy are fools who "drank the kool-aid," unlike they, whose clear-headed radical consciousness leads them to recognize the superior morality of Ralph Nader, or the pure "scientific wisdom of chairman Bob Avakian," or the intellectual profundity of their favorite graffiti bomb: "If voting changed anything it would be illegal." Yeah, and if body piercings and anarchy tats changed anything, they would be too, and then what would some folks do to be "different?" (Note: there is nothing wrong with either type of adornment, but getting either or both doesn't make you a revolutionary, any more than voting, that's all I'm saying).

These are people who think being agitators is about pissing people off more than reaching out to them. So they pull out their "Buck Fush" signs at their repetitively irrelevant antiwar demonstrations, or their posters with W sporting a Hitler mustache, because that tends to work so well at convincing folks to oppose the slaughter in Iraq. But effectiveness isn't what matters to them. What matters to them is raging against the machine for the sake of rage itself. Their message is simple: everything sucks, the earth is doomed, all cops are brutal, all soldiers are baby-killers, all people who work for corporations are evil, blah, blah, blah, right on down the line. It's as if much of the left has become co-dependent with despondency, addicted to its own isolation, and enamored of its moral purity and unwillingness to work with mere liberals. In the name of ideological asceticism, they spurn the hard work of movement building and inspiring others to join the struggle, snicker at those foolish enough to not understand or appreciate their superior philosophical constructs, and then act shocked when their movements and groups accomplish exactly nothing. But honestly, who wants to join a movement filled with people who look down on you as a sucker?

If we on the left want those liberals to join the struggle for social justice and liberation, we're going to have to meet people where they are, not where Bakunin would want them to be. For those who can't get excited about Obama, so be it, but at least realize that there are millions of people who, for whatever reason, are; people who are mobilized and active, and that energy is looking for an outlet. Odds are, that outlet won't be the Obama administration, since few of them will actually land jobs with it. So that leaves activist formations, community groups and grass-roots struggles. That leaves, in short, us. Just as young people inspired by the center-right JFK candidacy in 1960 ultimately moved well beyond him on their way to the left and made up many of the most committed and effective activists of the 60s and early 70s, so too can such growth occur now among the Obama faithful. But not if we write them off.

At some point, the left will have to relinquish its love affair with marginalization. We'll have to stop behaving like those people who have a favorite band they love, and even damn near worship, until that day when the band actually begins to sell a lot of records and gain a measure of popularity, at which point they now suck and have obviously sold out: the idea being that if people like you, you must not be doing anything important, and that obscurity is the true measure of integrity. Deconstructing the psychological issues at the root of such a pose is well above my pay grade, but I'm sure would prove fascinating.

The simple fact is, people are inspired by Obama not because they view him as especially progressive per se (except in relation to some of the more retrograde policies of the current president, and in relation to where they feel, rightly, McCain/Palin would have led us), but because most folks respond to optimism, however ill-defined it may be. This is what the Reaganites understood, and for that matter it's what Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement knew too. It wasn't anger and pessimism that broke the back of formal apartheid in the south, but rather, hope, and a belief in the fundamental decency of people to make a change if confronted by the yawning chasm between their professed national ideals and the bleak national reality.

In other words, what the 60s freedom struggle took for granted, but which the cynical barbiturate left refuses to concede, is the basic goodness of the people of this nation, and the ability of the nation, for all of its faults (and they are legion) to change. Look at pictures of the freedom riders in 1961, or the volunteers during Freedom Summer of 1964 and notice the dramatic difference between them and some of the seething radicals of today--whose radicalism is almost entirely about style and image more than actual analysis and movement building. In the case of the former, even as they stared down mobs intent on injuring or killing them, and even as they knew they might be murdered, they smiled, they laughed, they sang, they found joy. In the case of the latter, one most often notices an almost permanent scowl, a dour and depressing affect devoid of happiness, unable to appreciate life until the state is smashed altogether and everyone is subsisting on a diet of wheatgrass, bean curd and tempeh.

Hell, maybe I'm just missing the strategic value of calling people "useful idiots," or likening them to members of a cult, the way some leftists have done recently with regard to Obama supporters. Or maybe it's just that being a father, I have to temper my contempt for this system and its managers with hope. After all, as a dad (for me at least), it's hard to look at my children every day and think, "Gee, it sucks that the world is so screwed up, and will probably end in a few years from resource exploitation...Oh well, I sure hope my daughters have a great day at school!"

Fatherhood hasn't made me any less radical in my analysis or desire to see change. In fact, if anything, it has made me more so. I am as angry now as I've ever been about injustice, because I can see how it affects these children I helped to create, and for whom I am now responsible. But anger and cynicism do not make good dance partners. Anger without hope, without a certain faith in the capacity of we the people to change our world is a sickness unto death. It is consuming, like a flesh-eating disease, and whose first victim is human compassion. While I would never counsel too much confidence in far-right types to join the struggle for justice -- and there, I think skepticism is well-warranted -- if we can't conjure at least a little optimism for the ability of liberals and Democrats to come along for the ride and to do the work, then what is the point? Under such a weighty and pessimistic load as this, life simply becomes unbearable. And if there is one thing we cannot afford to do now -- especially now -- it is to give up the will to live and to fight, another day.

Tim Wise is a prominent writer and anti-racist activist. He is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White. He has contributed essays to 17 books, and is one of several persons featured in White Men Challenging Racism: Thirty-Five Personal Stories, from Duke University Press. A collection of his essays, Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male, will be released in fall 2008.

Source / Red Room / Posted Nov. 10, 2008

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Bert Garskof on the Obama 'Movement' : Shoot Where the Ducks are

Turning the Obama campaign into a real movement: Get your ducks in a row.
Ducks in Flight:

The Obama campaign has often been described as the Obama Movement. Why? Because of the huge number of young people, students and others who flocked to work for Obama and what he promised -- change.
By Bert Garskof / The Rag Blog / November 10, 2008

In 1964 I was Middlesex County, New Jersey, Chairman (not yet a “Chair-person”) for “Citizens for Johnson-Humphrey.” I was asked by the regular party chairman to come to his home on election night to watch the results come in. After the victories were reported and the cheering over, the old-time long-time state chairman leaned back in his chair and told me something I have never forgotten. He said with reference to political work, “Shoot where the ducks are!”

Working class, new working class, hippies, students, women, African-Americans, young people. These and others have been suggested as possible flocks over the last century or so. What has been the sign that has lead various parties, groups, sects, factions, fractions, or coalitions to a constituency on which to focus their energies, their theorizing, and hopes? Whom to target? Whom to go after or even, whose lives should we imitate? The latter might be labeled the "be a duck decoy, and they will come to you," approach. At the beginning, what led Marx to bank on the working class? What led the late 1960s, organizers of the quickly proven wrong, “Free Vermont Movement;” to decide to leave the friendly streets of New York for the grass-y fields of Vermont? Or theorists to wonder about the new working class of white-collar workers? The list that could go on.

In most instances, I think that what led hopeful organizers to their constituencies may be expressed in another aphorism, this one with no attribution as far as I know, “Without motion there can be no movement.” That is, we have asked, “where is there noticeable dis-order in what part of the mass and complexly organized population?” Amongst all the people whose lives are otherwise ordered and integrated within the exploitative capitalist system who are at least partially bursting out from their assigned and yet self-imposed confines?

At this time in the United States, as the depth and complexity of economic crisis is only beginning to become apparent, and as war has drained our resources and exposed our weakness, the Obama candidacy arose and separated itself from unexciting recent elections. Kerry and Gore were candidates whose virtues may have been many, but whose campaigns were fueled for the most part by the usual combination of paid professionals and party regulars.

The Obama campaign has often been described as the Obama Movement. Why? Because of the huge unprecedented number of young people, students and others who flocked to work for Obama and what he promised -- change. They are not a Movement. Not now. Not yet. They are in motion. Mobilized by hope and by the chance to participate in a historic moment – one described by Thomas Friedman as “The End of the Civil War.”

To become a movement, the adherents must stay involved and active even though the task it essentially was mobilized to accomplish has been accomplished. It must come to articulate a theory and practice that expresses change more fundamental than electoral change is able to bring about. It must transmute itself so that it becomes one constituency in a broad-democratic worldwide movement to replace Capitalism before Capitalism destroys itself and the rest of us.

A tall order or an impossible dream – which it is, does not matter. For now, the question is more limited, the scope perhaps more manageable. What can we do now to move ahead? Not exactly a small or unimportant question.

I cannot any longer avoid looking at who “we,” is? I intend until corrected by practice for “we” to be broadly defined as leftists. We cannot afford any longer to fight the battles of the 19th and 20th centuries. We need to use what we have learned to move in the present, informed by but without the weight of our own history. Those who understand the current world in terms of the scourge of capital and who hold a vision of a communal/democratic replacement must act as a “we” and act as organizers. There are too many people in motion for us to batter each other with words or for that matter to batter the Democrats or Nader with words. There is good work to be done.

The call for change resonates with our ducks. They moved from the comforts of cynicism and me-ism into action. There is among all of these actors a range of understanding of what is meant by the oft-repeated Emma Goldman quote, “If voting meant anything, they would make it illegal.” Some who worked for Obama are not yet there. They believe that, as it were, the leopard could change its spots. Many who got involved know the limited gains possible within the electoral/two party system and its government. Before Obama, many had worked in free-swinging campaigns against this or that injustice or third party building and settled on lesser goals.

We must organize among the bright- and experience-dulled eyes and all others who for whatever reasons have placed their hopes on and committed their time to Obama. To look at what must be done we must examine Obama himself and the people he mobilized as one inter-locked system. Obama nurtured grass roots volunteerism. He got it. He expressed a vision of grass-roots democratic change. So do we. Change from the bottom up; yet he is now at the top. We must insist on a seeming paradox: The top is the bottom. Hundreds of thousands flocked to this man and this notion. We of the Left must take the “word” for the possibility. The vision -- in every ward, town, county, whatever unit can be traversed, say, in 90 minutes -- encourage the birth of a group to decide on issues, positions, priorities and to forge an ongoing, working two-way communication with Obama. (The internet may give us virtual groups in addition to geographically defined groups.)

Perhaps we can think of these emerging groups as, (say) New Haven Voices for Change (VC). Each VC group would earn the right promised in the abstract, would earn the right to this two-way communication. I cannot imagine all of the problems and permutations opened up by this vision. I think we who might see this the way I do, and probably have already thought of it and who probably have thought more deeply, ought to get together to think collectively. However, I would also encourage anyone who sees this potential to go ahead and start. You will quickly know more about this than I do or than any collection of people theorizing same.

How to find, how to define, how to keep involvement, how to use our voices to share power (we must dare) with our President, all only must be dimly perceived without the practice that will clear our sight and define and redefine our options. I hope we open up a discussion or better yet, try it.

The Rag Blog

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Tom Hayden : Chicago 1968 / Denver 2008

Veteran activist and former California state Sen. Tom Hayden. Photo by Chris Schneider © The Rocky Mountain News
The New Left leader from four decades ago thinks Denver should be skeptical of federal authorities’ warnings about violent protest.
By M.E. Sprengelmeyer / August 8, 2008

CULVER CITY, Calif. — On a steamy spring day, in a cramped office that hot air can't escape, the archetypal child of the '60s does something truly radical.

He wears a necktie.

This is not the hairy, scary leader of the New Left who had Chicago locking up its daughters for the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

It's a clean-cut Tom Hayden, retired California state senator, prolific writer, blogger and sage to a whole new generation of street activists.

Still, he knows most people still picture him as a sort of cartoon version of himself: shirtless, shouting down authority or scuffling with cops on the streets.

"I can't get past that," he says of the stereotypes. "I can't help them with their problem. They can't see me. I can be, like, 68 years old and I'm still trouble, because they're thinking about something in Vietnam or they're thinking about Jane Fonda. Or they think I slept with their daughter. They think I burned my draft card. It's like a big Rorschach of things that I did or did not do."

If speaking out still means "trouble," then maybe Hayden really hasn't changed that much.

Forty years after he helped lead the anti-war protests that ended in violent confrontations outside the '68 convention, he just put out a new book, Voices of the Chicago Eight, about the circus-like conspiracy trial for protest organizers and the consequences of attempts to come down hard on dissent.

He offers regular takes to Huffington Post readers and was an early member of the group Progressives for Obama. He lectures on college campuses and offers an updated version of the Port Huron Statement — the 1962 manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society that challenged young people to boldly venture into "participatory democracy."

And behind the scenes, Hayden closely monitors protest plans for the upcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions, advises organizers and warns that authorities appear to be falling into a predictable pattern of hype and overreaction.

"I think that Denver officials would be well-advised not to believe everything that the FBI warns them about," Hayden says. "That's how things can get out of hand, due to fabricated, exaggerated projections about violence or protest."

As the convention approaches, federal dollars pour into the security effort and law enforcement agencies flex muscle with high-profile exercises.

"They don't learn," Hayden laments. "What you saw in 2000 was the claim that 75,000 anarchists were descending, the secret funding of permanent police equipment, the denial of permits for protesters. You saw the same thing in 2004. You will see the same thing in 2008."

He thinks Big Brother posturing helps scare away peaceful protesters, gives the community a false sense of security and can, in some cases, provoke confrontations at demonstrations that would otherwise be routine and mostly peaceful.

"So they have their view," Hayden says of security planners. "They've learned nothing from 1968."

Nation, party were both divided

As demonstrators get ready for Denver 2008, 40-year-old memories are front and center. One coalition operates under the "Re-create 68" banner, conjuring images of the street clashes that overshadowed the Democratic Convention itself, galvanizing the anti-Vietnam War effort and undermining Democrats' hopes in that long-ago fall.

But Hayden was there in 1968. And there's really no comparison to 2008, he says.

True, there was a war then and there is a war now.

But back in 1968, the country — and the Democratic Party — were more starkly divided over the battle waging overseas.

The Tet offensive by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces at the end of January obscured the light at the end of the tunnel in the war. Hundreds of young U.S. troops were dying every week. Facing a rising voter backlash, wartime President Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to prematurely end his re-election bid at the end of March.

Within days, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. caused rage to explode into riots, arson and looting in 75 cities. Robert F. Kennedy calmed a shocked crowd in Indianapolis, telling them his brother, too, had been killed by a white man. But weeks later, the younger brother, too, was shot dead, fraying emotions even further. The nation was on edge heading into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Until then, some protest organizers held out hope of getting the needed permits to avoid confrontations at marches and park demonstrations. But Hayden says he knew trouble was inevitable.

"I planned for multiple scenarios, not knowing which one would play out," he says, sitting in the cramped office while his research assistant continues working nearby. "But certainly, after the murder of Kennedy, coming on the murder of King, to me it was in the air that we were going to be busted and face serious harm unless we surrendered and left the city and simply went along with the plan . . . just go along with our own disappearance."

They didn't, even though they knew — from personal contacts — that the FBI was tracking their every move, around the clock.

One declassified FBI memo included in Hayden's new book expresses anger that bureau officials were unaware of his involvement in a student occupation of buildings at Columbia University until after his picture appeared in Life magazine.

"In evaluating this case, you should bear in mind that your prime objectives should be to neutralize him in the new left movement," the memo states.

Clashes played out on TV

Other organizers still held out hope of getting permits for access to streets and parks for demonstrations. But Hayden says he was pessimistic — and in the end proven correct.

The city rejected permits for the Youth International Party — the so-called "Yippies" led by the late Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman — to hold a massive "Festival of Life" concert.

Some thought permits would come through at the last minute — a way of giving a nod to free expression only after turnout had been dampened. But that didn't happen, either.

Hayden says Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was "hoodwinked" into believing that "thousands of hairy Yippies were going to have sex in public while drinking from the LSD-laden waters of Lake Michigan. They actually believed that. And this sex in the parks on acid would occur at roughly the same moment that black revolutionaries would storm the convention with guns."

So the stage was set for constant confrontations, games of cat and mouse between police and protesters, and then bloody clashes on television, just as Democrats also were struggling to show they could maintain order among squabbling delegates inside the convention hall.

It culminated on Aug. 28, when Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota was to accept the presidential nomination. That afternoon, while delegates waged a contentious debate over Vietnam War planks in the party's platform, police allowed a "legal" anti-war rally at Grant Park.

Things broke loose after a shirtless teenager climbed a flagpole, ostensibly to turn the flag upside down as a distress symbol. Police swooped in to make an arrest, the crowd surged and some threw stones or dirt clods at a police car, and the scene quickly deteriorated. Thousands of police, soldiers and National Guardsmen surrounded the area. Calm was restored, but by twilight, many protesters were more determined to make unsanctioned parades to reach the convention site or the Hilton hotel, where delegates were staying.

That night, after moving through the city disguised with a fake beard, Hayden ended up in a police skirmish at the hotel's Haymarket Lounge — "named, strangely enough, in memory of Chicago police killed by an anarchist's bomb during a violent confrontation between police and protesters in 1886," Hayden writes.

By the time the week's convention ended, 668 people had been arrested, 101 people were treated at local hospitals for their injuries, and hundreds more reportedly received first aid or treatment by protest medics.

And the Democratic Party's hopes of retaining the White House were the ultimate casualty. Republican Richard Nixon was elected with more than 100 electoral vote margin.

"It simply didn't have to happen," Hayden says of the Chicago chaos, 40 years later. "It takes two for a riot to occur. And if it wasn't for the FBI advisers, Chicago '68 would not have happened — repeat, would not have happened."

City's posture sparks concern

Despite the "Re-create 68" sentiment of some Denver protest organizers, Hayden saw little chance of a chaotic rerun when he sat down in April in his Culver City office to discuss the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

Back then, when the battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton still raged and there was talk of superdelegates throwing the nomination to Clinton, Hayden imagined there could be some sort of drama on the streets if people thought the election had been stolen. But it never came to that.

More likely, he predicted, were smaller demonstrations to keep up the pressure for Democrats in Denver to take tougher anti-war stands, with more fierce protests against the "war-makers" at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota.

By early July, however, Hayden said he was growing concerned about the city's posture toward protesters and the worst-case scenario security exercises, with black helicopters roaring through the downtown skyline.

The ACLU and protest organizers went to court challenging the location of a so-called free-speech zone on the far edge of a parking lot. Planners of "Tent State University," who hoped to use City Park to house tens of thousands of anti-war activists, were told they would have to clear the park at 11 each night. The ban on camping and curfew enforcement raises the specter of the nightly crackdowns at Lincoln and Grant parks in Chicago '68.

"I do think they are playing around unnecessarily with the rights of protesters to protest," Hayden said in a follow-up interview. "I don't know how the negotiations will come out, but you know, naming something a protest zone but then not allowing it to be heard or seen, it's a mockery of the First Amendment. Most importantly, it's not necessary.

"It does seem to me there's a legitimate right to protest at stake," he said. "I don't think the protests will be very large if Obama is the nominee. I don't see the point in interfering with them . . . It's particularly crazy because most of the delegates at the Democratic convention have been in many demonstrations themselves."

The security exercises, with helicopters buzzing the city, reminded Hayden of something out of the movie Dr. Strangelove.

"The implication is very unsettling," he said. "The message was that the people coming to protest deserve this kind of repression if they get out of hand . . . They're just trying to scare the public into justifying more tax dollars for a false sense of security — more gadgets for the police department."

He said people don't realize that in Chicago, the initial protests were rather lightly attended, with about 1,500 people in the parks. But the numbers swelled to an estimated 10,000, in part as a reaction to the police crackdowns, Hayden says.

"If they had given us permits . . . I doubt there would have been much confrontation at all," he says. "What caused the rioting in the streets was the lack of permits and the lack of a place to stay. Too much order creates disorder is the way I've always put it."

One might think that Hayden, one of the pre-eminent social activists of the '60s, would be disappointed with the anti-war efforts and the other movements of today.

He isn't.

"I think it's a remarkable peace movement," he says. "You don't have the draft. You have one-fifteenth of the American casualties now that you had at this point during Vietnam. The establishment is doing everything it can to keep this war from impacting the American people. And yet, people have seen through it."

The public at large turned against the Iraq war by the end of 2004, he says, "which I think means the ghosts of '68 are still with us. People know a quagmire when they see one."

Source / Rocky Mountain News

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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BOOKS : Dick Reavis on Carl Oglesby

Another view of 'Ravens in the Storm'
By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2008

Comrades:

A week or so ago I more or less promised a review of Oglesby's Ravens in the Storm. I have read the book and don't think I have much to add to Wizard's review, except the notes below.

Oglesby admits that he never advocated socialism and that he tended to view SDS as an anti-war group, not as the cradle of a new revolutionary or socialist movement. He is/was an American exceptionalist and a libertarian or social democrat. Since he states his positions honestly, I see nothing to be gained in expressing my disagreements with his political orientation, with two exceptions.

His attitude towards the black liberation movement of those days seems paternal to me, and he makes a big deal out of Cointelpro's attempts to disorient SDS. But all governments try to disorient all opposition movements. It comes with the turf!

In the pages of Ravens, PL [Progressive Labor Party], which I supported, is beneath his notice, even beneath his contempt. His exposure to socialism comes from what he, I think accurately, terms the "comic book Marxism" of the Weathermen.

But that's almost the point. Nowhere in his book does he describe the daily life of any chapter, or of any role he played in any chapter. He was a spokesman for a movement to which, on the grass-roots level, he did not belong. He learned about shifts in the thinking of chapter members from people like Dohrn, not from living the experience.

That he did so is a great indictment of the supposed democratic nature of SDS. A run of "leaders" was able to "lead" with being held accountable by the members on the ground. The book demonstrates that we had two types of elitism in SDS: the openly-declared elitism of PLP and the covert elitism of the national leadership during the group's latter days.

Klonsky complained about Oglesby's handling of him. I think his complaint is fair. Oglesby refers to him as a "thug of the Left," but never justifies that characterization. One gets the impression that Oglesby was expecting to find thugs on the Left.

I was surpised to see that Oglesby apparently still feels a bitterness towards his former comrades in SDS. That's sad. I would propose that he consider a general amnesty for anybody who took part!

For previous discussion of this topic, go to BOOKS : Carl Oglesby's 'Ravens in the Storm' by Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2008;

And to Susan Klonsky on Carl Oglesby's Memoir / The Rag Blog / July 30, 2008.

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Mariann Wizard : 'I Have No Nostalgia for the 60s’

Updated July 30, 2008

Sixties anti-war demonstration in Austin.
'We glimpsed, briefly, the power people can wield when mutual interests are clarified by adversity'
By Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog / July 29, 2008

"When we attacked the Moncada, none of us dreamed of being here today; we didn't have such dreams even when following the Commander in Chief's orders. We entered this fortress victoriously on January 1st, 1959, exactly five year, five months and five days later. Most of us were twenty or thirty some years old, some were even younger, and half a century seemed to us an eternity. But if there is something we have learned well it is that time flies, therefore, to waste it away out of inertia or hesitation is an unforgivable negligence. We must take advantage of every minute and learn fast from every experience, even from our mistakes, since they always teach a lesson if they are seriously analyzed."

From Cuban President Raul Castro's speech on the 55th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Barracks, July 26, 2008.

Dear Friends,

I have no nostalgia for the 60s. They weren't generally happy times, although as young people we made our own happiness. Objectively, they were years of war, injustice, death, fear, persecution, and frustration. Those of us who fought together for peace, justice, self-confidence, and freedom, and who survived, formed bonds that go beyond friendship, and in fact often have little to do with close personal association. We glimpsed, briefly, the power people can wield when mutual interests are clarified by adversity. Many of us believe we are approaching a similar time.

Those who were "revolutionaries" then, and who are honest now, know that we all made mistakes. We didn't have a clue what we were doing most of the time. We were cut off from earlier rebel generations by brutal repression, intensive propaganda, and our own arrogance. We had only books to learn from, and our own scrapes and bruises. We know we have unfinished business: we still have no peace; we still have no justice; we still have no freedom; and we still too often mistake arrogance for leadership. This is why, I think, so many of us return to the unresolved discussions and debates of our shared, misspent youth; not because we miss it -- goddess save us from a re-run! -- but because we want to at last get it right.

Have we learned from our experiences, not only of the 60s, but of all the intervening years, how to work effectively for social change? Or are we still clueless? How much longer do we have for the serious analysis that is needed?

Comments from Pat Cuney:

This is a reply to the response posted on the Rag to Mariann's piece on nostalgia [see below].

I would want to say that I didn't think there was anything bitter about the article at all.

And I did want to say that I continued my activities in community organizing after finding myself caught up in our own version of a disapora. I feel I learned a lot, and much of it built on the work I did with y'all.

One thing that was so dramatically presented to me that I will never forget, was a scene from the video documenting "The Dinner Party" featuring the artists and the process Judy Chicago and her co-creators used to develop the project. (If you don't know who she is, I think it well worth your time to look her up.) She was sitting in a dinner party with the group and a feminist neophyte asked why women had to look up their herstory almost every generation, or some such. I thought Judy was going to come unglued as she pulled herself up to the whole of her height at about 5', and launched into a lecture in which she practically shrieked something along the lines of, "Because they are too fucking lazy to read and research their own history. Do you think the Chinese peasants just one day picked up their pitchforks and seized state power? No, they read, they formed study groups, they learned their history and they studied economics.'

So one of the things I feel really great about was our work in study groups with the New Left Education Project, with the Rag, with the class i presented on women's history in Labor before there was a Women's Studies Department, and I feel especially wonderful when I reflect on the Women's Liberation Front "consciousness raising" sessions and the many classes we gave in university classrooms on sexism, and the actions we took on sexist assaults in the community. (Who will ever forget the spray painting we did on the "Bust 'em Bevo" "spirit sign" that would certainly have led to a bloody riot if Judy Smith hadn't coolly stepped up to the plate, and if we hadn't had the loving support of Paul, Henry, David R and Wayne, who, bless them always, spent the rest of their day on the West Mall talking with men about sexism.

I love that I saw the paradigm shift from sitting in a meeting in a theater style to sitting in a circle. That single action continued since in all places and times probably did more to undermine the hierarchy construct that is so fundamental to the maintenance of patriarchy in this culture as anything else we've done.

So, I've got it. I make an effort to know my herstory, I currently participate in a reading/discussion group focused on what I'm interested in now, feminist spirituality, and I promote educational seminars in local, state and national groups of women, and generate intense experiences I refer to now as "consciousness deepening weekends for women," and upset everyone by raising issues around class and race.

My movement associates were unable to get me to separate myself from what Jeff and David used to snortingly refer to as "petit-bourgeosie mysticism" and my current spiritual feminist sisters just wish I would shut up about the issues of class and race, if I would just drop any kind of analysis and grok out, their lives would be more pleasant, they think. But I have come to find that my truth is that I do have Tarot cards in one hand and an analysis of patriarchal oppression in the other in which Marx is not forgotten, Lenin is understood, and the multinationals are not invisible, and I, like the Hindu goddess Durga, have more than two hands, thus more than the binary reality we think of as true, and this is increasing in the culture of the computer. While I am mindful of Mao's commentary, "True power comes out of the barrel of a gun," I have also moved through so many corridors of power within and without that I feel I can stand in and on my own power at any moment -- and that was surely one of the great of the journeys of my lifetime. Empowerment has been a central challenge of our generation, particularly for my generation of women.

Another little piece of my pie is my understanding that consciousness is changed pretty much one person at a time, although there may be moments in which the common experience is so intense that a paradigm shifts for the whole collective mass gathered there. We certainly saw that in our marches, demonstrations, music and theater. If we had had more time, there is no telling how many lives we would have affected -- we affected enough to put 100,000 people in DC intent on shutting it down, and that's when they stopped lest they have to shot their children.

I am pretty clear by now that my work will remain with women, and so I continue to seek ways and spaces in which to generate a collective consciousness shift while continually trying to introduce a consciousness of the continuing oppressions of classism, racism, and sexism. In this, theater is important, as is the work in general of the poets, writers and artists, visual and performance, who are the heart and soul of any revolution. In the bigger picture of politics I am not seeing the kind of contribution we supported from the likes of Bob Dylan today. I am willing to be corrected.

Anyway, I think Mariann's observation was valuable. I have and continue to reflect on constructs of strategy and tactics we learned together in my various activities, and I think we would be well-served not to just warmly reflect, but to also name what we did well and give it some thought about what we maybe ought to be doing again.

Pat Cuney / July 30, 2008

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BOOKS : Dreams and Everyday Life by Penelope Rosemont

No revolution ever disappears...
by Len Wallace / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2008

Penelope Rosemont, Dreams & Everyday Life: Andre Breton, Surrealism, sds & the Seven Cities of Cibola, Charles H. Kerr Publishing. Co., Chicago, 2008,ISBN 978-0-88286-234-2.

Despite an era made for modern day state and corporate Metternichs there are stirrings, movement, growing discontent. In the words of Buffalo Springfield's song, "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear." It's difficult to define it, but it's there and it has some folks worried. Today's sparks are being compared to the sixties New Left.

I recently saw a televised panel discussion making just such comparisons. The pundits argued that the sixties youth were a spoiled generation of a consumerist society who never experienced economic depression and political oppression. Left "leaderless" because of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. the movement spiraled off into excessive radicalism and violence. Of course, what other "insight" could one expect from the defenders of the status quo?

I was fourteen in that tumultuous year of 1968 when student youth congregated in protest at the Democratic Party National convention in Chicago and were brutally clubbed, tear gassed, jailed by the riot of the forces of law and order. In Prague, Czechoslovakia, students and workers rallied in the streets against Red Army tanks of the Soviet Union sent in to crush attempts of democratization. In Paris, students spurred on with the slogans of surrealists and situationists occupied universities and, allied with workers, erected barricades in the streets as the country advanced to a general strike that almost toppled the DeGuallist government order. Worldwide protest against the Vietnam War raised consciousness against colonial order. Black Power, the Black Panther Party of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale openly confronted institutionalized and systematic racism of the state. Women's Liberation challenged male privilege and white men in suits.

The following years were for me a passage of discovery grappling with and absorbing wide ranging radical thought, ideas, symbols and images so different from those I obtained through osmosis from the elders of Windsor's left-wing working class Ukrainian-Russian community.

By the time I reached university the New Left train had departed and left the station on the way to derailment. The student rebels had exited the campus and broke into factionalism. Some went off to the factories to join the proletariat and hopefully ferment revolution. Others were swallowed up by increasingly commodified counter-culture. A few would eventually make their peace with capitalism, seeking gain in publicly funded institutions, amused at their youthful endeavors and only speak about their "left-wing principles" in very hushed tones. And by the 1980s the corporate counter-revolution under the various names of Reaganism, Thatcherism, neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism with the correlative growth of state authoritarianism was in full swing.

The actors and activists of that sixties movement have attempted to define and redefine what it was all about. Was there anything here worth preserving? Has any program for dissidence, rebellion and revolution been snuffed out? Is there any hope of resurrection? Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar's Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History tries to tell some of the stories. One of the chapters focuses on the role of Penelope Rosemont.

Rosemont was at the center of the whirlstorm as an activist in SDS, on its national staff and editor of its theoretical journal Radical America. In Dreams & Everyday Life she recounts her journey to becoming a revolutionary from the first moments she stepped onto the campus of Chicago's Roosevelt University in 1964.

Writing forty years later her account is a retelling of that personal journey still with the fresh eyes of youth. Artist, writer, editor, surrealist, she remains a revolutionary still captivated with the vision that freedom is worth fighting for.

The philosopher Hegel once asserted that "nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion." Rosemont's book is a passionate remembering. In an era when we are taught that there is no real history because nothing ever changes, that today's society is the way it has always been and will always be, amen!, remembering becomes a useful and subversive tool.

If one is seeking an analytical and historical text about the rise and fall of the New Left, this is not the book. There are no judgments of people, parties and programs here. No second thoughts or justifications. This is a personal history of a history unfolding -- at once a personal diary and the potent weapon of cultural critique against conformity and the mindless drudge of imposed wage work. Rosemont takes us along a journey and trajectory opening dreams and possibilities. In the conscious surrealist activity of aimlessly walking the streets of Chicago directed by chance she discovers the thousands of instances of daily life that exist far beyond the pale of commodity capitalism, those small rebellions, free spaces of action, art, poetry, music and culture, real human relationships that have not been devalued by the cold exchange of cash. The discoveries on the streets are also discoveries of the links to a revolutionary past that reaches back to the Haymarket strikes of 1886, the birth of the IWW, the street corner soapboxing of old socialists and anarchists. History is indeed an unfolding and the past does not simply disappear.

Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse are part of the journey that accompany her to meetings with the old rebel Wobblies, to London's anarchists and the profound influences of Andre Breton and the surrealists of Paris. This very personal account recaptures the youthful sense of marvel, excitement and desire that are too often pushed aside and buried under the dead weight of life's daily drudgeries. She takes aim at today's spirit-sucking new world corporate Disney Wal-Mart order of ipods, internet, text messaging, commercial bombardment, official government lies and doublespeak that numb us.

André Breton announced in an early surrealist manifesto that imagination balks at being stifled. As we bend to the vicissitudes of capitalist utilitarianism it will abandon us to a "lustreless life." Fast approaching the age of 54 I'll be damned that such a fate lays in store for me. Rosemont's book provides a good reminder never to let go of radical and revolutionary youthful élan.

Go to Charles H. Kerr Publishing

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David Zeiger : Did the GI Movement End the Vietnam War?

Updated July 26, 2008

G.I. dissenters in David Zeiger's documentary "Sir! No Sir!". Photo courtesy of Displaced Fillms.
And What is the real legacy of the GI Coffeehouses?
By David Zeiger / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2008

David Zeiger is an award-winning film producer and director whose highly–acclaimed film Sir! No Sir! documented the little-known GI resistance to the Vietnam War. He was a staff member at the Oleo Strut, a GI coffee house in Killeen, Texas near Ft. Hood that was a major center of anti-war activities from 1968 to 1972.

Zeiger, also a writer and an activist, produces and directs documentary films through his company, Displaced Films.

This article joins a Rag Blog discussion of the history of the GI anti-war movement with articles by Tom Cleaver on the history of the Oleo Strut coffee house and on the founding of a new GI coffee house in Killeen called Under the Hood. Please see Under The Hood : An Anti-War GI Coffeehouse in Texas.

Over the past three years, there has been a significant and heartening growth of opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations among active duty soldiers, and several organizations have been doing tremendous work with soldiers and veterans. From the groups and individuals supporting soldiers who have refused deployment and been court-martialed, to the work of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, the Military Project and Different Drummer Café, serious and determined work is being done to turn the deepening disaffection and anger with the occupations inside the military into a real political movement and force (and I apologize now to everyone who I left out).

It is a source of great joy for me, in that context, to see the story of the GI Movement against the Vietnam War playing a significant role in inspiring and helping shape that burgeoning movement. The reissuing of David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt, along with important books published in the 90s (please see the list at the end of this article), brought to life what had been deeply buried for two decades and made it possible for a film like Sir! No Sir! to be made, and for this new movement to be born.

The GI Movement of the 60s is loaded with lessons for today. But those lessons have to be seen realistically to really be truly learned, and that puts a tremendous responsibility in the hands of those of us who were part of that movement. Memory can be a tricky thing, and it is no more helpful to exaggerate the events of that time than it is to deny them. Mythologizing or inaccurately portraying the GI Movement can, in my mind, do far more harm than good as people struggle to find ways to build a new movement in the military today. But a real understanding of its ups and downs, victories and defeats, and most importantly the tremendous struggle it involved on every level can be a powerful resource.

So I was very interested to read about the effort to open a new GI Coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, outside of Fort Hood. The coffeehouse movement has, since the invasion of Iraq, been one of the few “forms” of organization from the 60s that seem to me to make a lot of sense today. But as I read Tom Cleaver’s depiction of the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse and its relevance for today, I found myself growing increasingly concerned that real understanding may be being replaced by nostalgia (and I speak from experience, as I am always fighting my own nostalgia while looking at the past). And beyond that, Tom’s interpretation of the GI Movement in the 60s raised many issues that I want to discuss here, in the spirit of making history serve the present.

Let me emphatically state first that I am not an organizer, but a filmmaker, and I do not pretend to know what the “right thing to do” is today. Nor do I intend to criticize or direct anyone. I don’t even consider myself an “expert” on the GI Movement. But I do hope that my two years working at the Oleo Strut, and the work that I and others have done to tell the GI Movement story today can be helpful. For the record, I am not a veteran. I went to Killeen in June of 1970 as a 20-year-old drop-out– and scared to death, I might add.

Now to the issues. The biggest for me is Tom’s statement that “GIs stopped the war in Vietnam and they can stop the war in Iraq.” This has become a pretty popular view nowadays among many people, and while it may sound ironic coming from me, I find it to be misleading and potentially very harmful. It takes what is true, the fact that the GI Movement cut at the heart of the war, and uses it as a kind of club over everyone else. But most significantly, it rips the GI Movement out of the political and social context that gave birth to it and nurtured its growth.

Put simply, GIs did not stop the war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was ended by a combination of forces–first and foremost the Vietnamese people, whose struggle for self-determination became an inspiration for millions around the world. And beyond that the antiwar, counterculture Black liberation and revolutionary movements were all key to creating the context for soldiers in their thousands to revolt and certainly play a major role in bringing the war to a grinding halt. It can even be described as the straw that broke the camel’s back–but that wouldn’t have happened without all those other straws!

Look at Tom’s main example from the summer of ‘68–the urban rebellions and demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and the GI’s response to being ordered into riot control duty (“First we fought the Vietnamese, now they want us to fight Americans,” as Dave Cline said). There’s clearly a cause and effect here. If Black people were not rebelling in the cities, and if students and radicals weren’t planning to demonstrate at the Democratic convention, there would have been no riot control in the military, and it wouldn’t have been such a powerful impetus for rebellion that it was.

(In that light I want to correct a significant inaccuracy in Tom’s description of the Fort Hood 43, the Black GIs who resisted deployment to the Chicago convention. Tom describes them as a highly organized group, who had chosen which soldiers would refuse to go based on their service in Vietnam. That isn’t what happened. As vividly described in Sir! No Sir! by Elder Halim Gullabehmi, one of the participants, several hundred soldiers met all night in an open field to protest their deployment and discuss their grievances and make plans. No decision had been made. In the morning, when 43 were still in the field waiting for a response from the base Commanding General, they were ambushed by MPs, beaten, and thrown in the stockade. Many, including Elder Halim, were later sent to Vietnam as further punishment).

What gave the GI Movement so much power was its deep connection to the broader movement it was part of. That movement wasn’t just students resisting the draft to keep from going to Vietnam themselves (another popular myth, in my view). It was the Black Panther Party; it was Vietnam Veterans Against the War; it was national organizations that were constantly expanding the scope of protest against the war; it was students who were shutting their campuses down to force companies like Dow Chemical off campus and end university complicity with the war; it was all those things and more. In 1971, the same time Colonel Heinl wrote his famous article that Tom quotes, Washington was wracked with a myriad of demonstrations, including the May Day attempt by over 10,000 people to shut the city down (which Nixon specifically cited as a reason to “get the troops out as quickly as possible.”).

I’m not saying this to nit-pic, or to in any way lessen or denigrate the impact of the GI Movement. Yes, the GI Movement had become a force in the military that seriously challenged its authority and ability to fight; and yes, thousands of GIs were actively organizing and demonstrating, but that can’t be ripped out of the context it grew in and declared to be the sole force that ended the war. Doing so, it seems to me, could lead to a distorted view of the situation today and very unrealistic expectations. It certainly doesn’t help point the road forward.

Part of the importance of understanding the context for the GI Movement is recognizing that it faced tremendous repression. The whole nature of the military is based on isolation from the world outside, and the more that world intruded, the more they fought back. The coffeehouses were an essential link between soldiers who faced tremendous repercussions for their actions and the broader movement in society. That link was political, and just as importantly cultural, and without it much of what flourished would have been quickly crushed.

And that raises my questions about the differences between then and now. In 1968, the Oleo Strut was for the most part the only way that GIs could be in contact with that movement (although even the local porn shop carried The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice). Most GIs didn’t have cars then, and at night and on weekends the only place you could go was the downtown strip since bus service ended there. Life was very constricted. The Strut was literally a haven, one you couldn’t find anywhere else, and a place to listen to music and read literature that was only available there. Especially in the early years, that made up a lot of what sustained it.

It’s a different situation today, is it not? Mobility and communication are worlds apart from 1968. While we were filming IVAW in their efforts to bring Winter Soldier to the soldiers at Fort Hood this year, much of their outreach was done at bars in Austin–60 miles away! There isn’t the kind of central place today that GIs are locked into, making something like the Strut unique. That seems to me to be a significant change.

One reason this is important is that the coffeehouses themselves faced huge obstacles to staying open. Tom mentioned the KKK and “goat-ropers,” but it went way beyond that. They were physically attacked, hit with bizarre legal charges, and often burned down. But those weren’t the most difficult challenges.

Even the most successful coffeehouses were never self-sustaining financially. We barely survived, even with the Herculean efforts of the United States Serviceman’s Fund, a group whose sole purpose was raising money for the GI Movement. But even with that and the day jobs many of us had, we came close to shutting down many times. In addition the constant legal battles and harassment arrests (I spent nights in jail for such things as hitch-hiking, driving with a dirty license plate, and swearing in front of a police officer), were a huge financial drain.

It was also a constant struggle to keep staff. Burn-out was a big problem in places like Killeen (and I don’t imagine that’s much different today). Keeping a place like the Strut alive wasn’t a weekend or summer gig. The reality is that there were many long periods when it was successfully isolated from the soldiers, and it took tremendous endurance to survive those times. Life in the GI Movement, like life in the military, was characterized by many months of intense tedium punctuated by moments of intense action.

In short, the GI Coffeehouses of the 60’s were a major force that filled a very specific need, one that grew out of the times we were living in. They were also a major commitment of time and resources–extremely difficult to sustain but well worth it for the role they were playing at that time.

Again, I am not raising these things to pour cold water on the current effort. But I believe that to be kept alive, history has to be seen in all its parameters. And I do think it’s important to not view the coffeehouses of the 60s through rose-colored glasses, especially when you’re contemplating diving into the fire. I’m not drawing conclusions, just raising questions.

So as I said in the beginning, I offer these observations and thoughts in the spirit of welcoming all of the work being done today in the military, and wanting to use our history to enrich it. I hope this helps.

The books that I referred to are:

* Soldiers in Revolt by David Cortright (aka The Bible)

* The New Winter Soldiers by Richard Moser

* The Spitting Image by Jerry Lembcke (A wonderful expose of the myth of the spitting hippie)

* A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War by William Short and Willa Seidenberg (This is an incredible book, very hard toget but well worth it. Bill and Willa traveled around the country in the early 90s photographing and recording extensive oral histories of dozens of veterans of the GI Movement. Their work formed much of the basis for Sir! No Sir!).

There are also several great books on the veterans’ movement, and particularly Vietnam Veterans against the War.

PS–Again to keep the record straight, Fred Gardner, one of the founders of the GI Coffeehouses, was not an officer, but a PFC attached to an Army Reserve unit at Ft. Jackson when he and others started the UFO Coffeehouse in 1967. The “Summer of Support” referred to in Cleaver’s article was not organized by him, but by Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, original founders of Students for a Democratic Society. SOS was one of, but not the only organization supporting the GI Coffeehouses.

Thorne,

I heard an interesting story about the Olio Strut and the general attitude of the soldiers to authority. The guy who told me the story was a combat vet send to Ft Hood to decompress along with a lot of other guys who had seen heavy combat. He is the only source but I have no reason not to believe him. He told me that there was a small lake somewhere around the base with a small island in it and that it was common for the soldiers to use rowboats and go to the island where they would have numerous small fires around which they would talk and decompress. Of course there was a considerable amount of the magical herb being smoked out there too. The cops knew what was going on and a squadcar load of them got into a couple of the small rowboats and decided to liberate the island. They landed and went to the first campsite and announced "Y'all are all under arrest" My friend told me that the entire island became silent and then across the island could be heard the sound of the hammers being pulled back on the government issue .45 callibar handguns that the GI's still carried. Needless to say the cops were tripping over one another trying to get back into their boats.

Robert Pardun / July 26, 2008

Under The Hood : An Anti-War GI Coffeehouse in Texas. / by Tom Cleaver / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2008

And Austin, 1969 : Bob Bower, Anti-War GI by Henry Mecredy / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2008

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