Don't Gel Too Soon

RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS - BUT DID THEY EVER LEAVE?

Some very smart analysts, including POLITICO and  PressThink founder Jay Rosen, are talking about the current Republican strategy in support of Sarah Palin as a "reigniting of the culture wars."  Attacking with all the code words of past anti-"left" vocabularies.  And here's Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

I'll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too. The crustiest old Republican men are shouting "Sexism!" when she's slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a bad mother to be all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates' children is out of bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and therefore believable. "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" That was the lovely sound of class in American politics.

When the McCain Summer of Love ad debuted, I wrote this - They Will Campaign Against Us Until We're Dead, and Maybe After.  If you watch CSPAN, especially Washington Journal, you know from the phone calls how much anger still exists; how much hatred of the generation I grew up in.  Against our opposition to the war, mischief and outrageousness, and even more, our search - no, demand - for peace. Going after all of us, FORTY YEARS LATER, still works.

I guess that since I've been posting quite a lot about that time forty years ago, the memories are long on both sides.  But Barack Obama was 7 years old in 1968.  It's not and never was his culture war.  It is, however, the never-ending flash-point in the conservative playbook, a safe way to rile folks up and re-ignite the hatred and anger manifested in the 60's and 70's and again in the 90's when that Boomer couple, the Clintons, were in the White House.

I've given up trying to figure out how to respond.  Most Americans, including us 60's people, love our country and loved it then.  It was the a desire to return the country to its true nature -- just as it is today -- that drove us.  But it's far more useful to the McCain campaign to taunt us -- and Barack Obama; and to divide us, too, with these ancient battles.  The tough part is figuring out how to answer.

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

For 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 McGee.  Kris 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.   

HILLARY SUPPORTERS AND THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN: DON'T DO THIS!

This is breaking my heart.  Why is it that we Democrats are incapable of NOT shooting ourselves in the foot (feet even)?  In my view (and I'm hardly alone in this) this may be the most critical election of my lifetime.  I've written (are you sick of it yet?) about the parallels to 1968 when the refusal of many anti-war voters to show up at the polls and vote for Hubert Humphrey brought us Richard Nixon and a cascade of disaster.  That could and most likely will happen again if we don't all pull ourselves together.

I heard a commentator quote -- I thought Jefferson but can't find the source -- "True democracy means acceptance of defeat by one vote."  Sounds right, doesn't it?  But there is what we wish were true and there is political reality, and the reality this year is that every moment of hesitation by Senator Clinton's supporters puts another barrier between Senator Obama and the White House.  My most-respected friend PunditMom has a very smart analysis of where all this antipathy is coming from.  And there's a survey of much of the conversation in Lisa Stone's summary at BlogHer.

As I write this I think about the suffragists who won us the right to have this fight in the first place just 88 years ago.  What would they think now?  They were willing to stand up to those who asked them to halt their campaign until WWI was over.  Should women have the same singular focus now -- placing their anger ahead of the outcome of this election?  Is the injustice so great that it justifies putting another conservative Republican in the White House?

I think not.  Our sisters will do us a disservice that will last a very long time if they continue to stand in the way of an Obama victory or even just sit on their hands, because that will betray women who are at the bottom of the power pile, raising children alone, struggling for childcare, lacking health insurance, vacation or sick leave and any kind of job security.  Feminists rightly say that "every issue is a women's issue" and that means that every decision in a McCain administration will have a heavy impact on these women, and on the rest of us.

Beyond that, in my view, the perils of an anti-choice administration that will nominate judges like those who overrode violence against women laws in Virginia and frequently support employers over women seeking redress to sexual harassment or other discrimination, an Administration that will carry on the Bush foreign policy and continue to decimate our constitutional rights -- oh - you know the list -- those perils outweigh any grievance. 

So if sisterhood is powerful, let those whose hearts are broken by the Clinton loss recall their sisters who need so much - and consider how little their interests would be served if Barack Obama does not prevail.  On this, Women's Equality Day, let them ease their pain with the knowledge that they will help on "every issue" and therefore every "women's issue" if they can move past the pain of their defeat and see to it that our country itself is not defeated too.

BLOGGING BOOMERS #83: FROM

OK I'm sorry.  I got so caught up in the convention that I forgot to post this.  The wonderful Janet Wendy Spiegel of GenPlus is this week's host of the Blogging Boomers.  Take a look; you're bound to find something -- work, immigration, fashion, history or politics --  that interests you - boomer or otherwise. 

1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE

I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call "a true believer" and to see policemen behave like that.  To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a "kike" (you had to read his lips - there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps.  To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you'd worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.

BlogHer, Bella, Books and Us Women

Two weeks ago I spent the weekend with 1,000 remarkable women.  You know where; the Web has been full of posts and tweets and messages about BlogHer, the women bloggers conference.  Since its founding, BlogHer has held four conferences, and I've been to three of them.  For those three years I've wondered at the strength and power of both the gathering and each woman, most far younger than I, who is part of it.  Audacious and rambunctious, honest and gifted, they are far beyond where I was at their age.  I've always known that all of us, sisters from the 70's and 80's and 90's, scratched and kicked and pulled and fought to move our lives, and those of the women around us, forward.  In many ways, we made a difference.  I'm proud of that.

Today though I was reminded of a real heroine, one whose star lit the way for much of what we did, in a wonderful piece in The Women's Review of Books: Ruth Rosen's review of  Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, ... Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way--an oral history of the life of Bella Abzug.  Among other things, Ruth says:

She fought for the rights of union workers and African Americans, protested the use of the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War, waged endless battles to advance women’s rights, and spent the last years of her life promoting environmentalism and human rights.
When she plunged into the women’s movement during the late 1960s, Abzug infused feminism with her fierce, strategic, take-no-prisoners spirit. As Geraldine Ferraro reminds us,
She didn’t knock lightly on the door. She didn’t even push it open or batter it down. She took it off the hinges forever! So that those of us who came after could walk through!

And with a bow to Bella and so many others, walk through we have.  It's tough to pass the stories 'I walked six miles to school in the snow' fogey.   Younger women, though, would find courage to fight their own battles in Bella’s story and in many of our own."

For me, Bella was a brave, untamed beacon of defiance and energy. Her story, and ours, laid the ground for these determined, gifted "blogger generation" women. I would so love to be able to tell them about her - and about all of us, just so they could know the solidarity, the battles, the anger and the hope.  And why seeing them all together, hugging, laughing and raising hell, makes me so damned happy.  And that Bella would have loved them.

THE DARK KNIGHT, HARRY POTTER, LORD OF THE RINGS, DARK U.S. DAYS AND POLITICS

I used to see Christ symbols everywhere.  It drove my mother crazy; no matter what film or book, I'd find some kind of symbol in it.  And Christ symbols were fashionable then (Ingmar Bergman, Robert S. Heinlein.)  So I guess it's no surprise that I found implanted meaning, this time political messages, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix  (the loss of Hogwarts students' freedom and rights to Dolores Umbridge) and the Lord of the Rings  - listen to this:

"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it's only a passing thing. The shadow even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those are the stories that stayed with you. That really meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why, but I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. The folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something." "What are we holding onto Sam?" "That theres some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for"- The Lord of The Ring- The Two Towers

Now The Dark Knight joins my array of political films.   Think about it.  Irrational evil -- the Joker (the late Heath Ledger, as good as the reviews but somehow a bit Al Franken-esque)-- drives Gotham City to such anxiety that its citizens are willing to surrender freedom and privacy and even to turn on their Bat-benefactor, to return order to their streets.  Sound familiar?  Throughout the film members of the community at large, as well as Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale), his beloved Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal,) DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and even the sainted Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) face -- and often fail -- deep ethical temptations (including abusing prisoners -- sound familiar?) -- and, surprisingly, those who face the most horrendous choice are criminals and civilians whose behavior is far more laudable than that of any of us (including me) who know what's been done in our name in Iraq and have mourned but not acted to stop it.

[SEMI-SPOILER ALERT]  This gigantic challenge, issued from the Joker himself, is a formidable and hopeful moment in the film.  Many have written that the film is dark and without humor but I don't think so.  This scene, in particular - and I don't want to be too much of a spoiler -- seemed to me to be there to remind us that there is always the potential for good.  Even so, the film is crammed with talk, as in Sam's speech to Frodo, and especially from the wise Albert (Michael Caine) of the pain and sacrifice required in the battle against the troubles ahead.

Maybe it's a reach, and I can hear your saying "Hey, it's ONLY a movie!" but there you are.

THEY WILL CAMPAIGN AGAINST US UNTIL WE'RE ALL DEAD - AND MAYBE AFTER

From the day Richard Nixon was nominated in 1968 until Tuesday afternoon, forty years later, when John McCain began running this "Love" commercial, Republicans have been running against us.  All of us who share a history of opposing the Vietnam war and working to elect an anti-war president.  Against everything we ever were, believed, dreamed, voted for, marched against, volunteered to change, spoke about, created, sang, wrote, painted, sculpted or said to one another on the subway or the campus or anyplace else from preschool parent nights to Seders to the line at the supermarket.

How is it possible that what we tried to do is still the last best hope to elect a Republican?  They used it against John Kerry.  They used it against Max Cleland.  They did it every time (well, almost) they were losing policy battles in the Clinton years.  They called CSPAN and said unspeakable things.   And now they are using the history of people my side of sixty to run against a man who was, if my math is right, seven years old during this notorious "summer of love" which - I might add, had nothing to do with those of us working to end the war.  In fact, there were two strands of rebellion in those years.  The Summer of Love/ Woodstock folks and the political, anti-war activists.   

At the 1967 National Student Association Convention in Maryland, I saw a room full of students boo Timothy Leary off the stage, literally.  We didn't want to "turn on, tune in, drop out" we wanted to organize against the war.   The anti-war movement was not a party.  I know that's not a bulletin but it is so hard to see all of us reduced to a single mistaken stereotype.  Those who chose to find a personal solution weren't nuts; communes and home-made bread were a lot more immediate gratification than march after march, teach-in after teach-in, speech after speech.  "If you're goin' to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair."  Tempting, romantic - and not us.

Even more painful is the fact that the cultural and political divide is still so intense that research (I assume) told the McCain guys that this commercial would work.  That our patriotic, committed efforts to change our country's path, and the cultural alienation that drove others toward the streets of San Francisco, combine to become a stronger motivator than all the desperate issues we face today, this side of those 40 years.  Perhaps even worse, these Bush years have dismantled so many of the successes we did have, so that in addition to facing, yet again, this smear against the activism of 1968 (and I repeat, that was forty years ago -- longer than most of the bloggers I know have been alive) there's the awareness of what we did that has been undone.

I need to say here that I grew up on the shores of the Monongehela River in Pittsburgh and my classmates were kids who mostly went into the steel mills or the Army after high school.  I knew plenty of supporters of the war. I went to prom and hung out at the Dairy Queen with them.  But it never occurred to me to demonize them, to hold against them their definition of patriotism. I'm not writing off or looking down upon those who did support the war; I'm saying that this cynical, craven abuse of the devotion of people on both sides to the future of their country is reprehensible and precisely the kind of behavior that has broken the hearts of so many Americans, on those both sides of the political spectrum, who just want their candidates to lead us in hope for what our country can be, not defame others whose dreams aren't quite the same as theirs.

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy's great New Hampshire primary showing  demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson's weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy's campaign.  I'd been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson.  When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he'd  say "You can't beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody."  So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused. 

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war.  After NSA I organized the Smith campus.  We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war.  So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry. 

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign.  There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice.  This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:
 

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war.  Kennedy won Indiana.  McCarthy won Oregon.  We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA.  Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we'd lost, so we went to Senator's concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn.  We weren't even watching the rest of coverage.  Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy's closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV!  They've done it again!" 

SAD NEWS; SENATOR TED KENNEDY

Catherine Morgan, star of stage, screen, (well not really, but she should be) and (yes this is true) blogs including Political Voices of Women, has sought posts on the news that Senator Edward Kennedy, seen here with Senator Barack Obama, whom he endorsed, is suffering from a malignant brain tumor.  It really is a sad thing.  People make jokes about the Senator, some of them really cruel, as I discovered while searching for images for this post.  And he's made mistakes, including those surrounding the tragic events at Chappaquiddick. 

But as a great speaker and legislator, he's used his talents to be a champion of the "downtrodden" and many of the rest of us, for over 40 years.  Coal miners, civil rights advocates, children who need better schools, American who need access to health care, soldiers in Iraq and veterans of every war and dozens of other causes; he's been a mainstay of support for them all, often when not too many people were willing to be. 

Since he lost his two brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, to assassins, he's also been the protector of their children:  JFK's two, John and Caroline, and Bobby's eleven. He's buried John's son and two of Bobby's.  His own son Edward contracted bone cancer and had a leg amputated at the age of 12.  Kennedy himself nearly died in a plane crash in 1964.  And there's plenty more; take a look at this Wikipedia entry on the "Kennedy curse" which left him with burdens of care for so many.  Weddings, illnesses, even funerals, it was he who was there for them all.

When I first came to Washington, I was a very young researcher in the CBS News Washington Bureau.  Because I was so young, I was assigned to call the Kennedy "boiler room girls" - campaign workers who knew the young woman who had died in that car in Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne, to see if they would talk to us.  I called.  All of them.  Every day for a year.

Every day for a year they took my call.  Every day for a year they were polite, gentle and silent on the subject of the crash.  And so they have remained.  Since I know many other people who have worked for Teddy and shown a devotion and loyalty seldom seen in public life, I am not surprised; that's how people are in the Kennedy universe.  It says a lot about the Senator and his family and the sort of commitment they inspire.

When I think of the Senator though, it's not any of that I think about.  Or of the fact that he can be hilarious, self-effacing and very kind to those around him.  My strongest, and most unambiguous memory, is of his eulogy at the funeral of his brother Bobby* in the summer of 1968.  You'll see why.

*This is audio accompanied by cover footage; I couldn't locate any video of the speech although I remember it vividly and can see it in my head.  Can't get that up on the Web though, at least not yet.