Pete, Bruce, Beyonce and Obama: the Changing of the Guard

Brucespringsteen_l

There they are: two of the cultural icons of my political life.  Pete Seeger, close to 90, peer and colleague of Woody Guthrie, creator of We Shall Overcome and Turn Turn Turn, of Abiyoyo and Sam the Whaler, leader of The Almanac Singers and the Weavers.  If there was a civil rights rally or a labor rally or an anti-war rally, he was there. 

Beside him, Bruce Springsteen, a modern troubadour whose songs speak for many Americans whose opinions are never sought, whose voices are seldom heard.

As they stood together at the Lincoln Memorial in celebration of the Inauguration of Barack Obama, they represented, to me, all that I had believed and tried to help bring into being.  To many, though, they were “the ultimate in subtly old-left populism.”  Speaking about the concert early Sunday before it began, I kept talking about Bruce.  A younger friend gently suggested that he was probably not the day’s headliner.  That would be Beyonce Knowles, she said.  I’m sure she’s right. 

As one who was present the last time “the torch was passed to a new generation;” as a strongly defined Baby Boomer, it’s painful to hear anchormen celebrate the fact that “there will never be another Baby Boom President.”  It’ s not that I mind the fact of that; it’s just painful that it seems to be something to celebrate.  So many of us have tried so to be productive agents of change, have spent our lives working either full or part of the time to see that our country offers more to the least powerful, demands quality education, justice and maybe, even peace.  So to hear Joe Scarborough revel in the fact that “16 horrible years of baby boomer presidents is over” really hurts.  All my adult life we’ve been tarred by the brush of the least attractive of us while the work of the rest of us went unnoticed.  For most campaigns, as I’ve written before, we were the secret weapon of the right.

So as exciting as all this is, especially for one who has supported Obama for so long, it’s also bittersweet because I feel the shadow of the disdain in which so many of us are held.  I really don’t know how to respond.  If I were to try, it might be by offering some of the words to Si Kahn‘s They All Sang Bread and Roses.  It’s better with the music, but it does the job.

They All Sang “Bread and Roses (Si Kahn, 1989,
1991)

The more I
study history,

The more I
seem to find

That in
every generation

There are
times just like that time

When folks
like you and me who thought

That they
were all alone

Within this
honored movement

Found a
home.

 

And ‘though
each generation fears

That it
will be the last,

Our
presence here is witness

To the
power of the past.

And just as
we have drawn our strength

From those
who now are gone,

Younger
hands will take our work

And carry
on.

SARAH PALIN, JOE SIXPACK AND GEORGE ORWELL

081002_palinmccain21I used to run a TV news show, and I told my staff (literally) that using the term "Joe Six Pack" in a script or interview was a firing offense.  I probably couldn’t have gotten away with firing them but it made the point.  I grew up just outside a mill town along the Monongahela River — it was the same town so brilliantly portrayed in The Deer Hunter —  and I  went to school with kids whose parents worked in steel mills and coke plants and river locks.  Some of them lived in trailers.  I was the Jewish Girl – a bit of an outsider but usually part of the gang – parties, sleepovers, crazy afternoons sneaking cigarettes in pine-paneled basement "family rooms."

I guess lots of those parents were what Sarah Palin called Joe Six Pack.  But that’s not who they were- who they are.  America is full of hard working people who drink beer.  Bruce Springsteen portrays them all the time – much better than I could.  They are dads and husbands and brothers and sons and they love their kids and their wives and, where I lived, the Steelers.  They often don’t ever move out of their "starter houses" because that’s what they can afford.  The dads that I knew sent their kids to college though – or to "the service" which paid their tuition, and the next generation did better economically – the American dream at work. 

I admired these people, and loved some of them.  When you spend lots of Saturday night sleepovers at girlfriends’ houses you get to know their parents.  And, remembering those dads,  I do NOT understand how Sarah Palin can talk about "Joe Six Pack" and still say she’s one of "the people."  It’s like talking about "Polacks" and then claiming you’re Polish.  The term is a colossal insult, the speaker setting herself above the folks she’s describing.  For some reason, it’s painful — almost heartbreaking, to hear.  I know it’s partially my rage at her for claiming some special channel to working class Americans while, it appears, cynically performing like a parody of them – much like Frances McNormand did as Marge Gunderson in FARGO.  Her "Joe Six Packs" deserve better.

I was going to write about all the Orwellian rhetoric too — McCain and Palin repeatedly claiming untruths and running against things McCain himself helped to put in place.  Here’s what I mean:  They talk about Wall Street malfeasance when they and their party repeatedly squashed efforts to bring it under control.  They talk about change when they’re fighting it and economic insecurity when their policies helped to cause it.  That’s not a working class agenda, it’s just cynical pandering.  Mr. Orwell would be proud.  "Joe Six Pack" — and the rest of us, deserve better than that, too.

IS THIS THE COUNTRY WE WANT? SARAH PALIN’S CRUEL ADDRESS

Before I say anything else, I want to show you this great response to Gov. Palin.  Take the time to watch it.

I started this post last night but waited to post it until I cooled off and now I’m glad, because there are so many thoughtful responses from people who have gone beyond the rage I have been feeling.  The first is the above video response from Nerdette.  For some reason the mocking of community organizers was particularly painful to me.  Of course since I’ve been listening to The People Have the Power  for days now I guess that’s not a surprise.

I also recommend. thanks to a tweet from Pundit Mom, the ever-wise Gloria Steinem’s response in the Los Angeles Times, which includes this: It
won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified
woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most
other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job
for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere.
It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us
for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer
by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard
Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton.
Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize
a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates
as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the
right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s
candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in
protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my
shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs."

My good friend Mocha Momma offers some very personal yet universal and policy-based observations – YES you can be personal – as SP was – and still think about policy — as Mocha did.  Here’s a sample but go read the whole thing.  She’s a wonderful person and educator whose commitment to schools in underserved neighborhoods is profound. She scoffed at Obama’s community organizing and pushed for her own
small town agenda. You know what I heard in that thinly veiled line?
Her lack of experience with people of color and the power of community
organization. She doesn’t know cities or poverty that way or even what
that does for education. She is keeping that dividing line bold and
prominent by letting me see what she thinks about that: small town =
hard-working white farming families vs. city/community = blacks and
latinos and asians and other people she knows nothing about.
She so wasn’t talking to me.

More from a Daily Kos-ite, noted by Soapbox Mom or try this one if you just want a laugh.

OK I can’t hide any longer.  Here’s me talking.  I’ve been around a lot of political campaigns and presidencies.  I remember Spiro Agnew and his vicious attacks on the press — many other Republican "red meat" speeches and Democratic ones too.  But I don’t remember anything like this (except Pat Buchanan in 1992 but that was different.)  Cruelty, sarcasm, disguised bigotry, language so beyond the appropriate, in my view, that it was breathtaking.  Literally. 

In Mocha Momma’s post there’s a link to a New York Times piece on Palin’s time as mayor of Wasilla.   Here’s a taste:

Shortly
after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said,
Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of
banning some books, though she never followed through and it was
unclear which books or passages were in question.

Ann Kilkenny, a
Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms.
Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of
banning some books at one meeting.
“They were somehow morally or
socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.

The librarian,
Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms.
Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking
office but changed course after residents made a strong show of
support.
Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years
later, declined to comment for this article.

If you have read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, you’ve seen a society in which these values  were completely in control.  Not only government control of women’s bodies but a government of rage,  male-domination and the absence of liberty.  Of course not even these folks can take us that far but every time we get into one of these periods it’s all I can think about.

Someone on Twitter last night wrote:  When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Sinclair Lewis

OK.  So that’s why this song says so much.  It has to.

MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK

Kristopherson_2For weeks I’ve been writing about politics here, but today – some personal politics. They say the personal is political, and for me, the personal is music (and political) — and music makes all the difference — through time, sadness, joy, loneliness, political anguish, even spiritual connection. 

I’ve started walking every morning – around two miles.  Part of the reason is that I never get to listen to music anymore, so on my walks, I pretty much let my iPod take me wherever "shuffle" wants to go.  For while we moved from Bruce to Great Big Sea to Juno.   Then things got serious – an anthem really, of a time in my life when I valued awareness, aliveness, presence above all else: along came Me and Bobby McGeeKris Kristofferson wrote it but this is one of the few videos I could find of him performing it – Janis Joplin’s version was the famous one.  Still — it was this version, Kristofferson’s, that spoke to me.

A cut-loose road song and a love song too.  "Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose."  I remember my mother railing against this chorus — claiming that freedom was real and important and much more than "nothin’ left to lose" and she was probably right, but then…  Then that road life was one I craved but never had the nerve to undertake and this song was my chance to travel along.  Later, on Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner did a monologue as "Bobby McGee" who had moved home, and whose "mom even kept my room for me."  She’d given up.  There I sat on our water bed in our Upper West Side apartment in our married, new baby life, and cried. It was way too familiar.  Made me face the gap between what I had wished and what I was, that gap we all face as we enter "grown up" lives, with kids and responsibilities.

Then, around the time my walk reached Georgia Avenue, I traveled to London’s Grosvenor Square, and Scarlet Begonias.  The Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead song included this description:  "Wind in the willows playin’ tea for two;   The sky was yellow and the sun was blue, Strangers stoppin’ strangers just to shake their hand, Everybody”s playing in the heart of gold band."  It sounds comical now, I suppose, and it was really about Dead concerts, but I remember so many marches where people passed food around, each taking what they needed, and driving on the turnpikes on the way as we gave M&Ms to each tollbooth operator along with our quarters and even, at the first Clinton inauguration, being hugged by some guy I’d never met as I stood alone, close to tears (again) when Bob Dylan came out and surprised everyone.   

Continue reading MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK

PETE SEEGER, JOE HILL, MUSIC, VALUES , PAST AND FUTURE

Pete_seeger_banjo_2
I once had the opportunity to interview BB King.  In preparation, I brought his latest album home and played it for my sons.  The older, then around 5, asked me "Why is this man named King mommy.  Pete Seeger is the king of music, right?*"  Well, how do you answer that?  Our boys grew up on the Weavers, the Almanac Singers, Pete and Arlo at Carnegie Hall… all rich with wonderful songs (with pretty wonderful values) for children.  I asked my husband, no folkie, why he didn’t complain about the "noise" – and in fact joined us every Thanksgiving at Carnegie Hall to hear Pete and later Pete and Arlo. He said (I’m paraphrasing here)  "It’s offering them something whole to believe in.  Even if they don’t always believe it – they’ll understand the feeling of believing – and always seek it."  As far as I can tell, that worked. 

Rerack a few years though — to the Vietnam war, when songs like this informed some of my earliest political ideas.   

In fact, Pete has been a hero of mine for more than 40 years (How is that possible?)  As I sit watching the AMERICAN MASTERS documentary on his life, I can’t stop thinking about all the hope, idealism and dreams tied up in his music – at least in my life — and, for a time, the lives of my sons.  Seeger always has believed that music has infinite power; his own music made us believe that we could bring about the world we dreamed of.  I’m embarassed by how much I long for those feelings; it’s probably one reason Barack Obama and his young supporters interest me so much –  they remind me of…. ME.  Pretty feeble, isn’t it?  To still be whining about long-lost days and dreams.  Most of all, to feel such rage and sadness at what we weren’t able to do for our children; we leave them a world, in many ways, so much tougher than the one we inherited. 

Pete, though, would hate such talk.  I once met him, around the time that there were civil rights battles raging in the old Chicago Back of the Yards neighborhoods that Saul Alinsky helped to organize.  I asked him if it didn’t bother him that the residents there revealed attitudes so contrary to what had been fought for — for them — just a generation ago.  His response "No.  When people are empowered they have the right to want what they want.  If we believe in empowerment we have to accept that too."  NOT a usual man, Mr. Seeger.

The music was more than a transmission of values though — from "A Hole in My Bucket" to Union Maid.  It was our family soundtrack.  One of my kids was watching WOODSTOCK while he was in college, and was astonished to hear Joan Baez singing Joe Hill – and to recognize it from when he was little (this is a bad YOUTUBE version; the proportions are off, but just listen..

In our house, that old labor song had been a lullaby.  I’d learned it from Pete’s concerts. Recently, so many years from those lullabies, another family favorite presented us with a great, rolicking tribute to this remarkable man.  I wanted to end with a more of this (way too) sentimental tribute to Pete, but the joy of watching another generation up out of their seats in song is probably a better way to end.  Right?

*He went on to become an enormous BB King (and Albert, for that matter) fan, for the record.

NABLOPOMO GRADUATION DAY MINUS ONE

I_heart_bloggersSo here’s what I know so far:

  1. Everyone loves COSTCO.  Yesterday’s post garnered a ton of traffic; I was frankly amazed.  Of all the things I’ve written about, from Vietnam to Jewish funerals to East Berlin to my kids to Bruce Springsteen, this is the one that hit something.  Not sure what but it’s kind of interesting, no?
  2. Writing every day is definitely good for you.  Hard, but good. 
  3. As I’ve continued to write, I’ve discovered both a capacity to be honest and a certainty that there are things I will never write about.  Those things belong to others, people I love to whom they happened.  They belong to them.
  4. When you’re writing but you’re beyond tired, you should wrap up your document and go to bed.  Which is what I’m going to do now.  Tomorrow we’ll celebrate graduation day together.  G’nite

Magic – Bruce Tells the Truth – Where’s the Rest of It?

MagicLife is complicated.  One day things are great; the next day someone you love breaks an ankle and faces weeks on crutches; another battles heartbreak and  demons. One day you’re lifted high in celebration; the next, angry and resentful.  One day you’re lost in silence – the next you’re listening to Bruce Springsteen warn you to "carry only what you fear" then enchant you with a wistful "Girls in Their Summer Clothes."   

I would have bought Magic sooner or later — if it has Bruce’s name on it, it’s on my iPod.  But my son’s endorsement sent me straight to Amazon right after its  release.  When The Seeger Sessions came out I played it for hours – over and over.  It just lifted you up out of your chair (or the driver’s seat.)  Magic needs more attention; it’s got a lot to say.  No courting froggies or underpaid sailors here.  What there is instead is a mournful, painful set of stories: political and personal.  They describe feelings I’ve struggled to express: anger, disappointment, anxiety over the future. 

Not much more to say except that I once saw Springsteen tell Bob Dylan "You were the brother that I never had."  He is the diary I never had.   In Bruce’s real-life anthems, you can find huge parts of my life. I was a lawyer’s daughter in a steel town.  The football heroes and Dairy Queen cowboys of my teen years were the boys of Springsteen’s New Jersey.  All so familiar: the longings of Thunder Road, the nostalgia of No Surrender

Every time I hear the lines "Now I’m ready to grow young again, And hear your sister’s voice calling us home, Across the open yards" I can see it.  The yard outside our house, the hill up to the neighbors and their tire swing, dusk in the summer when my sister really did call and we tore down the hill, sweaty, dirty and happy as hell. 

I don’t want to feel just as connected to these angry, disappointed words, but I do. It’s not just aging, knowing that childhood summers are long gone.  It’s the reality of the times he’s describing – so much the way I’ve experienced them without the capacity to express what I feel.  Not the only thing I feel — but as usual he’s speaking for a part of me.  This time though, instead of being grateful, I’m just so so sad.

PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER – (AND SO DOES THE MUSIC)

Music has always had power over me – and it seems that rather than growing out of it, as I age, it just keeps getting more intense. Oh – and somehow in the second half of my life, Patti Smith  keeps showing up.  Last night I plugged my iPod into my car radio for a drive home from an evening meeting. I opened the sunroof and the windows to the summer night, set the player to "shuffle" and just let it choose.  What emerged?  THE PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER – the Patti Smith anthem  that closed the final night of the 2004 VOTE FOR CHANGE tour – one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.

So there I was – singing along – beating rhythm through the roof window and just so happy.  Of course the concert tour was unable to produce the change it sought – so maybe the people don’t  always have the power – but even after all the disappointments of my political life – and what for me has been the heartbreak of the past 6 years –the idealism of this song and all that it says: "the people have the power to redeem to work of fools" … and "I believe everything we dream|can come to pass through our union| we can turn the world around|  we can turn the earth’s revolution |  we have the power — People have the power … " still lifts my heart. 

I couldn’t find video of everyone in the tour singing PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER but I did find this and it was so great that even though it’s not what I was writing about, it’s from the same night and  you’ll love it.  Now I have to go do some work.  Enjoy yourselves.

Vote for Change ~ Cleveland ~ Oct 2, 2004

L