I'll be off the computer for a few days, but here are The Kinks to help you celebrate the winter holidays with "Father Christmas" (the British version of our American god, Santa Claus). The song's from 1977, but it seems the most appropriate Christmas carol in 2011, this year of Occupation and its discussion of the 1%:
Have yourself a merry merry Christmas Have yourself a good time But remember the kids who got nothin' While you're drinkin' down your wine
Father Christmas, give us some money We got no time for your silly toys Father Christmas, please hand it over We'll beat you up, so don't make us annoyed
Father Christmas, give us some money Don't mess around with those silly toys We'll beat you up if you don't hand it over We want your bread, so don't make us annoyed Give all the toys to the little rich boys
While some neocon chickenhawks like Bush and Rove and Cheney and Gingrich and Qualye will be happy to tell you exactly what great causes the US Government was fighting for in Indochina forty years ago, the only answer to the bipartisan American war that made any sense to anyone I knew was simple: FUCK IT.
Few people expressed that profound meditation on war and peace better than Country Joe McDonald with his "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" (preceded with the Fish Cheer) as performed here at Woodstock in 1969. I didn't have the pleasure of singing along there, but I vividly remember chanting and singing along with Joe and another very large crowd on the National Mall on 4/24/1971.
Enjoy.
"Gimme an F!"
"Gimme a U!"
And, of course, like all the best sixties protest music, there's a great tie-in here to the Occupy Wall Street movement:
Well, come on Wall Street, don't move slow
Why man, this is war a-go-go.
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of the trade,
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on the Viet Cong.
Have fun following the bouncing ball. And singing along.
If you don't know this song by heart already, the American educational system is to blame. This is as important a part of our common cultural legacy as knowing the words to The Star Spangled Banner or Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
Amazing what you can find on the internet. This video is from the first national peace march I went to on April 24, 1971. I was fifteen -- I went on a bus from Philadelphia organized by the Student Mobilization Committee with a 16-year-old girl I really liked (more than she liked me) and her very cool parents, leaving Philly very early in the morning and coming back that night.
I vividly remember Peter, Paul, & Mary taking the stage that day (I didn't know from my vantage point that they had been joined by the less cool John Denver) and singing Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" and Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance". They brought a connection to a famous earlier march in 1963 that made a very strong impression on this young peacenik.
This mass march on the weekend was only part of a much bigger couple of weeks in late April and early May that bore more than a passing resemblance to the current Occupy movement. In the days before the mass march, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted their "limited incursion into the country of Congress" that included camping, demonstrations, throwing medals back over the walls around the Capitol, and Lt. John Kerry's famous testimony in front of the Winter Soldier Investigations -- "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" -- that announced this young veteran as a political figure on the national stage.
The days after the mass march saw planned acts of civil disobedience around the Capitol by the Mayday Tribe that led to the arrest of over 13,000 people between May 1 and May 4 (one year after four were killed by the National Guard at Kent State). These events deserve a larger space in our collective memory. The public reaction against the mass arrests is one of the many events in the late sixties and early seventies that helped turn the mass of the American people against the war in Vietnam. I wanted to be one of those Mayday demonstrators blocking avenues, running from tear gas, and being penned up with my fellow radicals behind fences around RFK Stadium. I guess I understand now why my parents didn't let a high school sophomore take that extra step. I'm glad they let me take the bus for the one-day demonstration. It was one of the highlights of my life.
Thanks for sharing this moment of nostalgia with me.
Sorry to break the mood here, because you're about to watch one of the most beautiful songs and singers (I hope you haven't seen this before, so you can experience Melanie for the first time), but I have to rant for a minute, because I just watched this for the first time in decades and I was struck by the loss of our innocence. Fuck the Republicans and the businessmen and the 'serious' volk everywhere who have tried to tell us for the last forty years that the sixties and hippiedom and love and peace and beads and buttons and Woodstock were anything other than a high point in American civilization. We've been on a long slide from that zenith into a nadir of materialism and militarism and an endless parade of men in dark suits (their lapel-pin flags do NOT count as "buttons".)
Enough ranting. Please watch, and be transported back to 1971:
Beautiful people You look like friends of mine And it's about time That someone said it here and now I make a vow that some time, somehow I'll have a meeting Invite everyone you know I'll pass out buttons for the ones who come to show Beautiful people never have to be alone 'Cause there'll always be someone With the same button on as you
This is the best thing about the Occupy movement. It has nothing to do with policies and politics. It has to do with the drum circles and the new sense of community and the beautiful people recognizing each other by the buttons they're wearing. Moving back to a beautiful time we've seen belittled for most of our adult lives.
I hope Melanie's song is stuck in your head.
It's stuck in mine (that may be all you really need to know about me).
Here are the Buffalo Springfield singing (or at least lip syncing) "For What It's Worth":
What a field-day for the heat A thousand people in the street Singing songs and carrying signs Mostly say, hooray for our side It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound Everybody look what's going down
Good Night. And Good Luck to everyone sleeping outside tonight in Occupy encampments.
"... high times on Wall Street and hard times on main street." These words are spoken by Bruce Springsteen in the intro to this version of "The Ghost of Tom Joad". He's joined by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and The Nightwatchman with his guitar that reads "Arm the Homeless" (the 21st century version of Woody's legendary "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitars).
I was just watching this performance on Palladia, and I was thrilled to be able to find it on YouTube so I could share it here:
Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air Look for me Mom I'll be there Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand Or decent job or a helpin' hand Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."
Tom Joad and his creator John Steinbeck would understand the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Back in mid-October I mused about which wedge issue might ultimately pop up as the centerpiece of the 2012 Republican attacks. Down near the bottom of my possibilities I placed "9) Dirty Filthy Hippies Occupying Wall Street (and elsewhere)". A month later, I would place this wedge issue right at the very top. On Fox News this exchange between Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin on November 17th described an Occupy Wall Street movement that bore no relation to any reality outside the Fox News studios:
HANNITY: All right. We see the violence there, one police officer I think had 20 stitches and a gash, things thrown in their face. You see the violence. This is really just a culmination, though. We have seen rape, we have seen arson, destruction of property, sex, masturbation in public, defecating in public, anti-Semitism, anti-American rhetoric, drugs, open-air drugs markets. Well, what do you make of this and the Democratic Party support for this? PALIN: It is amazing that President Obama, Vice President Biden and former Speaker Pelosi along with many other Democrats have actually embraced this movement and actually, you know, patted these folks on their back as they have engaged in these -- some really atrocious activities. I think it speaks to what part of that mission is on the left, and that is disruption, it is distraction. It's very misguided and these are folks who are ill-informed, not understanding really who and what it is that they should be protesting. If they truly want free men and free markets in this country, then they should be, you know, making their voices known at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and letting Barack Obama know that they disagree with the crony capitalism that he has been so engaged in and allowed to perpetuate. These folks are misguided and I think it's just atrocious what is going on.
On November 19th Newt Gingrich got rousing applause in Iowa with his instructions to Occupy Wall Street delivered to Frank Luntz and a pumpkin centerpiece: "Go get a job right after you take a bath." It could have been Nixon rousing the Silent Majority against the hippies.
Continuing in the old strategy to rouse the Silent Majority, we have Americans for Tax Reform President Grover "Rat Head in a Koch Bottle" Norquist, the most powerful man in America according the Alan Simpson, the strategist who has tied up the entire Congress with his no-tax pledge, giving us the final proof that #OWS will be used as a wedge in 2012 when he said,“The Occupy Wall Street is a tremendous asset and it’s a movement that I think will be very helpful [to his GOP clients and paymasters] in the 2012 elections, and I think it’s a mistake to interfere with them continuing to annoy middle class Americans." An annoyed middle class can then be manipulated to vote against their own economic interests.
Please watch the entire video, because the end is as inspiring as the beginning is depressing. This may have been UC Davis yesterday, but it could have been in any of the fifty states. It seems like I saw this exact same trasformation in America when I was in high school and Nixon was in the White House.
If you've watched this entire video, ask yourself. Does this video illustrate the problem of too few militarized police in America? Or too many?
If you don't get chills when the human mic starts repeating "We will give you a brief moment of peace" at the 6'20" mark, you're on the wrong side of the Occupy movement (and you'll probably get a 99% on the Republican test).
My favorite quotations about the Occupy Wall Street movement are the ones that go something like this: "Of course I agree with the ideas of the Occupy movement, but I don't agree with the tactics." You hear it all the time, and the #OWS movement has succeeded every time that sentiment is voiced.
When the first few occupiers started in their occupation in the first city, New York, exactly two months ago on 9/17/2011, nobody in the media or government was primarily concerned with the growing American economic inequality. The only economic issue being discussed by "serious" commentators was the debt, and how much more pain was going to have to be doled out to those already suffering from the vagaries of a "free" market skewed to help those at the top (and by those at the top). The range of debate two months ago went all the way from the center right to the far right (and then farther right once the Tea Party got involved).
The Governor of my state, a man with national political ambitions, New York's Andrew Cuomo, has firmly planted himself in the center of that limited frame of reference. But he needs to be careful, because the Occupy movement has reopened the curtain on the left-hand side of the political stage, and a large portion of the electorate has finally seen a set of views and arguments that they can relate to and agree with. Cuomo is all for letting the Millionaire's Tax in New York expire at the end of the year and he's taking the corporate side in the contentious debate over hydrofracking for natural gas, but the center has moved. This is the wrong side of both issues within this state and within his party. In a raucous fall meeting of the Democratic State Committee, the party leaders wouldn't let either issue come up for a vote, knowing that our Governor had staked out the Republican positions for himself on both issues. “Go to hell!” yelled committeewoman Lori Gardner after the fracking resolution was tabled. “The party leaders pretty much protect the governor, they were appointed by the governor, and here, they pretended they won.” To get back to my original point, you can't separate the ideas of the Occupy movement from the tactics. Without the tactics, the overreactions of law enforcement, and the constant presence in the streets of all fifty states over the past two months, those ideas never would have found their rightful place in the national dialogue. Andrew Cuomo is not the only politician who needs to recalibrate (or flip flop) in order to keep his national political ambitions alive. He needs to be listening to the Occupiers in Albany rather than trying to arrest them every night (even though Albany County District Attorney David Soares refuses to prosecute them). Here's the song about clueless politicians I can't get out of my head tonight:
Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's a battle outside And it is ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.
"...You have no choice. You have owners. They own you...." "... The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care ..."
"...because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
Please watch the whole 3'15" of this video, because so much of George Carlin's linguistic beauty comes from the timing and cadences, but this speech would get a standing ovation at any Occupy gathering taking place across America tonight. It's too bad George isn't among us to enjoy this moment when the 99% are recognizing their voices. They would have recognized his.
It's easy to be an internet activist when all you need to do is hit the Tweet button on every Fox News article, including this one about the Occupy movement being a product of one of Fox's bêtes noires, ACORN, the group of community organizers that right-wing activists already succeeded in destroying in late 2010. It's easy for both the left and the right to stay in our own little ghettos on the internet and on Twitter, but sometimes it's important to cross the line and look at what lies are being repeated loudly and often by the other side. This is how absurdities like the birth certificate questions about Obama and the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry seem to spring out of nowhere fully formed.
I personally don't know how these Occupy Oakland participants are able to NOT retaliate against this police violence by finding and throwing the heaviest thing they can find.
They need to be praised for their restraint last night, but if there is an escalation, we all need to remember who it was that started the violence. Scott Olsen, the 24-year-old Iraq War veteran injured (and whose rescuers were attacked) by police in the above video is in the hospital in critical condition. He was never shot or injured in two years in Iraq -- he needed to come home for that. Send Scott your best thoughts, and support #OccupyOakland, because they are not giving up.
My doctor has warned me that neither my heart nor stomach would survive more than a minute of the actual Fox News Channel, but I couldn't help surfing past their website right now. And what did I find? It seems that they have exclusively discovered the source of power behind the Occupy movement. Of couse it's that omnipotent boogeyman, ACORN (I think I'll dress up as an Acorn for Halloween and go to a Republican town -- BOO!). Though it could have just as easily been George Soros. Or Jeremiah Wright. Or the Easter Bunny. The network that helped to engineer the 'spontaneous' Tea Party demonstrations in 2009 (see this MMFA summary of Fox's involvement if you need a reminder) understandably can't understand the making of a truly leaderless movement without corporate support (they find themselves unable to type the word 'leaderless' without quotation marks). But it's just as absurd to think that a small group of community organizers could build a movement in a month that has support from 43% of the American people (or 69% in Fox's own poll of October 7).
Seeing tear-gas clouds in Oakland last night put the voice of Joe Strummer in my head.
"They put up a poster saying we earn more than you! When we're working for the clampdown We will teach our twisted speech To the young believers We will train our blue-eyed men To be young believers" --The Clash, "Clampdown"
Some, like Rick Perry and his ilk in the quote we offered yesterday, would have you believe that your liberal idealism is a youthful folly you will grow out of.
"But, you grow up and you calm down and You're working for the clampdown You start wearing the blue and brown and You're working for the clampdown So you got someone to boss around It makes you feel big now You drift until you brutalize You made your first kill now"
It doesn't have to be that way. We can take our youthful idealism and adapt it to the world of the Vietnam War, or No Nukes demonstrations (Clampdown was from the era of Three Mile Island and is mentioned at the end of the song), or our criminal invasion of Iraq, or against the excesses of rapacious capitalism. Just as long as you're not working for the clampdown.
Back on September 24 when it was unclear whether Occupy Wall Street would last for another day, let alone another month, one man, more than any other, was responsible for growing the movement overnight, Anthony "Pepper-Spray" Bologna: Tonight on the West Coast, it's the Oakland Police Department that is doing everything it can to make sure that the Occupy movement grows and lasts for years with this tear-gas barrage and other abuses:
Any violence or property damage taking place later tonight is the fault of the police, not the protestors, no matter what the corporate media may tell you in the morning. As a veteran of a few anti-Vietnam War protests in D.C., Philadelphia, and New York in the early 1970s, I still can't believe the instant communication of these events available on Twitter and YouTube, but where are our famous "24-hour news cycle" outlets while the tear gassing is going on out West? They have canned shows to rerun (though CNN is showing Michael Moore talking intelligently about Occupy with Piers Morgan from earlier tonight) which will attract the same number of sponsors. It's well after midnight here in the East and I have to work tomorrow, but I'll be thinking of #OccupyOakland, where it's still early. Stay safe out there.
John Harwood (NY Times/CNBC): You have this proposal to dramatically cut taxes for people at the top and you want to repeal Dodd-Frank, going back to the old system of regulation of Wall Street. How would you explain that to Occupy Wall Street? You think the previous regulation on Wall Street was adequate?
Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas): Yes, absolutely, I think it was adequate. We had a bunch of regulators that weren’t doing their job. Here's what I would tell those young people — the old Churchill saying, you’re a liberal in your heart when you’re 20, and you’re a conservative when you’re 40. I hope what they will see is that America’s a fabulous country and it gives them the opportunity to go say your piece, go protest on the street. But at the end of the day America’s about having the opportunity to take care of your family. [Emphasis Added]
I could show the full video that accompanied this interview snippet, but who wants to see another Republican with a Texas accent displaying his greed, stupidity, and ability to kowtow to the people who pay his campaign expenses? I'd rather show something more hopeful, a video of someone who was liberal (OK, maybe Communist) at 20 and is still more concerned with human rights than the bottom line today, at 92, as he joins the Occupy Wall Street crowd in New York City. Most of Pete Seeger's friends at Columbus Circle singing We Shall Overcome seem to be past their twenties as well (as am I).
I needed to do something to partially purify my mind after watching a bunch of stuffed suit Republicans (and Michele Bachmann dressed like an admiral) clawing their way to the intellectual and moral depths at a CNN debate in Las Vegas tonight. What better antidote to their ugly visions of the world than the Jefferson Aiplane on a rooftop in midtown in 1968 playing "House at Pooneil Corners" courtesy of Jean-Luc Godard?
You and me we keep walking around and we see All the bullshit around us You try and keep your mind on what's going down Can't help but see the rhinoceros around us and you wonder what you can be and you do what you can to get balled & high...
When the dust settles from the debates and caucuses and primaries, we'll finally know which candidate the Republicans will be sending to face President Obama, but a larger question may remain. Which wedge issue will win? What phony peripheral concern will be the twenty twelve equivalent of twenty oh four's Swift-Boat idiocy? How will the GOP attempt to get millions of Americans to vote against their own economic self interest? 1. Birtherism?
2. Guns?
3. "In God We Trust"?
4. Flag Burning?
5. Evolution?
or 6. Abortion? or 7. Gay Marriage? or 8. "Illegal Aliens"? or 9. Dirty Filthy Hippies Occupying Wall Street (and elsewhere)? . . or something we haven't even been told we need to hate or be afraid about yet? Will Americans sacrifice Social Security and Medicare for assault weapons and prayer in the schools?
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
