Relatively Recent Roots Of Standing Up To Trumpism-- The Sixties

My old friend Danny Goldberg, a father of two kids who seem to adore him whenever I see them together, runs a very hands-on successful business. And he still manages to find the time to write thought-provoking, insightful books. His newest one, In Search Of The Lost Chord-- 1967 And the Hippie Idea, brought me back to the time when I-- as well as Danny-- was coming of age. 1967 was 50 years ago-- a lifetime... and part of my own formative years. That summer I hitch-hiked to Mexico City with my friend Bob and came back to New York via San Francisco where I had slept on a stair in a Haight Ashbury crash pad and took acid in a school bus that wound up at an outdoor Grateful Dead concert on the other side of a bridge, probably Marin.. but who knows?

In her NY Times book review this weekend, 1967: A Year In The Life Of Idealism And Anarchy, Sheila Weller admires Danny's determination to treat the "hippie idea" seriously with "a thorough, panoramic account of the culture, politics, media, music and mores of the year to demolish the idea that it was trivial... Goldberg moves from the province of privilege (Time magazine estimated that there were 300,000 self-identified hippies in America in 1967, mostly white and middle class) to the fight against segregation in the South and the rise of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers. He deals consummately with the power players in the antiwar movement and S.D.S. At times the book feels overpacked. Still, that flaw hides a virtue: proving that so much activism and passion can be crowded into barely more than a single year. When Goldberg was writing his book, that might have been a useful message. Today, in Trump’s America, with a fueled and gathering resistance, it is a potentially mirroring one."

Last month, Danny penned an essay for The Nation, We Have Seen Times This Dark Before-- Here’s How We Fought Back that elegantly makes the point that "1967 offers many lessons for those who want to counter Trumpism." He reminds his readers something that an icon of that era, Martin Luther King, said shortly before he was assassinated: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that." How hippie is that! And how needed to face down the Trump Regime!

1967 was worse than 2017-- at least so far. 50,000 of us were killed fighting in Vietnam. Nixon was formulating the Southern Strategy that led right to Señor Trumpanzee. "Today’s alt-right," wrote Goldberg, "has its antecedents in slave owners, plutocratic haters of FDR, and the John Birch Society. J. Edgar Hoover, Paul Ryan’s idol Ayn Rand, and Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn who were all alive and spewing poison in 1967. Trump is not the first president to invite speculation about his mental health."

Like Trump, President Johnson demonized the media, telling Goodwin (without offering any evidence), “The communists control the three major networks and the 40 major outlets of communication.” LBJ bad-mouthed the New York Times to Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge: “There are two or three Jewish boys there that are-- according to our phone taps-- on the communist side of this operation.”

...What are the lessons from 1967 for those opposed to Trumpism? In Todd Gitlin’s book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, the word “resistance” appears 88 times. It is not clear, in retrospect, that more confrontational tactics did anything to help the cause. Gitlin acknowledges that as the Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular with the American public, so did the anti-war movement. Alienation and rage without positive inspiration spawn apathy, which strengthens the unrepentant right wing. As Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, among others, pointed out in the ’60s, protest rooted in anger and polarization-- even if temporarily cathartic-- usually backfires and creates more darkness than it dissipates. As Naomi Klein suggests in her new book title, No Is Not Enough, the left needs to express a consistent alternate positive vision in broadly understandable cultural language.

Secondly, there must be a reduction in tribal schisms. The divide between the “counterculture” that focused more on inner changes and the “revolutionaries” who focused more on political protest helped neither progressive political goals nor a moral/spiritual balance. Among political radicals, the infighting was so chronic that Che Guevara referred to the American left as a “circular firing squad.” One of the primary tactics of the FBI COINTELPRO programs aimed at weakening the anti-war and civil-rights movements was to foment internal discord.

It was no accident that the DNC e-mails that were curated for media consumption by WikiLeaks and whoever aided them focused on fanning the flames of resentment between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. (One encouraging sign is Sanders and new DNC Chair Tom Perez’s unity tour.)

A third lesson from the ’60s is that liberal elites need to respect the energy and insights of youth if they want to win. In 1967 as now, the younger generation was the most progressive and largest in history, and yet was largely ignored by most Democrats. (In Shattered, the recently published account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, only a single paragraph refers to efforts to communicate with millennials, a reference to an ad Sanders filmed in support of Clinton that was never aired).

Finally, there needs to be a balance between action that addresses immediate suffering, and the long-term consciousness-raising that is required to make lasting changes.

NEDA

In 1970, when Gil Scott-Heron first wrote his poem, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," later released as the lead track on Pieces of a Man, there was neither Twitter nor Facebook.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the 
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

So now everyone is saying the Revolution will be tweeted. OK, the machinery of oppression in Iran has moved to grab control of the news and re-shape the story. Social networking sites are making that next to impossible for them. But, let's not forget that the revolution in Iran is not just on computer screens and cell phones. The blood is real. Neda was a real person, a young woman with hopes and aspirations who was shot down and died horribly in the gutter. This video is absolutely horrific and I don't recommend you watch it unless you're ready to shed some tears for our sisters and brothers in Tehran:



While bloodthirsty vampires on the political right, your McCains, Pences, Liebermen and Cantors-- whose only desire is to see blood running in the streets of Tehran-- do whatever they can to inflame emotions and offer Iranian patriots false hope, the entire world is viscerally mourning for Neda. And Twitter is part of that at #neda. Mousavi, no friend of the West by a long shot, says he's prepared for martyrdom-- he tweeted it-- but Neda is already dead. Unlike him, she never ordered the deaths of 30,000 political prisoners or funded Hezbollah. President McCain, President Graham, President Lieberman are wrong-- always... about everything. But it is their cranky, crackpot voices-- voices Charles Pierce explains so very well in Idiot America-- that dominate the incendiary, trivial, ratings-hungry mass media.


In the House last week only one lonely member of Congress, Ron Paul (R-TX), spoke out for a rational approach to Iran. Fortunately, there is somewhat more sanity in the Senate-- at least on one side of the aisle. When's the last time you read anything positive about Arlen Specter at DWT? I guess he woke up and remembered he was a Democrat yesterday: “I think the president is doing the right thing. If we’re seen as siding with the insurgents, we run the risk of turning momentum against them." Too difficult a concept for the doddering and deranged McCain? Lieberman on the other hand, isn't senile; he's working for the Likud to do all he can to foment discord and mayhem.

Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) sides with the Republicans, as he often does on foreign policy. Lieberman said Obama should be speaking out, and dismisses the theory that doing so would incite anti-American sentiment.

“My sense of human nature and the conversations I’ve had with people who have been to Iran and talked to Iranians is that we’re their hope and they need to hear from us,” Lieberman said.

They need to hear exactly what Obama is saying. But that isn't what the neo-Cons want. They want a message like the one George H.W. Bush gave the Iraqi Shi'a in 1991-- or the CIA gave the Hungarians in 1956: rise up against your oppressors and we will help you. They rose up-- and were slaughtered by the thousands. Irresponsible inciters, safely back in Washington, shed a collective crocodile tear for them. Meanwhile, without McCain and without Mike Pence and without Howard Berman, the Iranian people-- or at least the middle class of North Tehran-- may well be delegitimizing the fascist dictatorship and the Supreme Leader. And if Al Giordano is correct, the revolution is spreading from the middle class to the working class. Here's a translation of a declaration from the striking Autobus Workers Union of Iran. (Gee this could be the first time Mike Pence, Eric Cantor, John Boehner and Richard Burr have ever been on the same side as a union!)

In recent days we have witnessed the passionate presence of millions of women and men, the old and the young, and ethnic and religious minorities in Iran, people who want their government to recognize their most basic right, the right to freely, independently, and transparently elect, a right that in most societies around the world is not only recognized officially but for whose protection no effort is neglected.

In the current situation, we witness threats, arrests, killings, and naked persecution, which threaten to grow in dimension and lead to the shedding of innocent people's blood thus bringing a rise in popular protests and not in their decline.


Iranian society is facing a deep political and economic crisis. Million-strong protests, which have manifested themselves with a silence that is replete with meaning, have become a pattern that is growing in area and dimension, a growth that demands a response from any responsible person and organization.


The Autobus Workers Union in an announcement issued before the elections declared, "in the absence of the freedom for political parties, our organization is naturally deprived of a social institution that can protect it."

"Workers of the Autobus Workers Union consider their social involvement and political activity to be the certain right of each member of society and furthermore believe that workers across Iran as long as they submit the platforms of presidential candidates and a practical guarantee about campaign slogans can choose to participate or not participate in elections."

The fact that the demands of the vast majority of Iranian society go far beyond those of unions is obvious to all, and in the previous years we have emphasized that until the principle of the freedom to organize and to elect is not materialized, any talk of social freedom and labor union rights will be a farce.

Given these facts, the Autobus Workers Union places itself alongside all those who are offering themselves in the struggle to build a free and independent civic society. The union condemns any kind of suppression and threats.

To recognize labor-union and social rights in Iran, the international labor organizations have declared the Fifth of Tir (June 26) the international day of support for imprisoned Iranian workers as well as for the institution of unions in Iran. We want that this day be viewed as more than a day for the demands of labor unions to make it a day for human rights in Iran and to ask all our fellow workers to struggle for the trampled rights of the majority of the people of Iran.

With hope for the spread of justice and freedom,

Autobus Workers Union

Neda, a 27 year old philosophy student