Joanna
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I can only speak for myself. The South, particularly the white power structure of the South was the icon of everything rotten about the US. Just listening to them on tv (or radio was even worse) generated a great hatred in me.
It wasn't of course just the South. Nat Cole couldn't buy a house above the Wilshire line at the same time he was holding concerts in the Hollywood Bowl. There was a whole white v. black music war going on. It was a big fight to get the Fair Housing Act through the state government. Endless crap about Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans and of course Japanese-Americans, with antisemitism tossed in. This shit was palpable, in the air everywhere.
There was something about this massive bigotry that spilled over into all sorts of attitudes, including my parent's attitude toward me---and I wasn't alone in that respect either. This was the so-called generation gap---but that name was more like a media propaganda name to mask something much more serious. Kids, these days... ha, ha.
A lot of this social attitude stuff doesn't show up much in the history because it doesn't have enough materiality. It had to be experienced. And then, we were supposed to go in the Army and kill Vietnamese for America?
Anyway, we had the same enemies, for some of the same and some different reasons. That's about as close as I can come. It wasn't sacrifice for the cause. It was more like solitarity for several causes. This was not do-gooder stuff. That attitude was suspect. I had to unlearn that and figure out a different way. There was a lot of political learning going.
There were other aspects, like being exposed to an organized fight or revolt. How that was actually done, planned, put together as an social institution. How to institutionalize a struggle so it is as relentless as its opposition. That's what Savio learned. He was well known here because he was a good speaker, but there were many, many others like him.
And it had a great deal of patriotism to it too. This was another thing that barely shows up now.
In terms of effecting policy, that's a tough one to prove, because a lot depended on that mystery stuff, the public mood, or how it was perceived by power.
A lot of this history reminds me of what's going on now in many different ways. This pervasive gloom and worry about the future. The fact that the system is breaking down---while the raw ugliness (inequality, injustice, etc) of its structure is laid bare by events. The endless permutations of bigotry whipped up over and over. The current bigot waves have a somewhat fake quality, compared to that of yore. But this hammering away with hate will sooner or later work. There's bound to be blood.
Bush and Cheney managed to re-incarnate, re-animate that former period in everything they did. They were the high school kids in Little Rock I watched in the long ago, re-animated like some kind of unkillable thing. They were quite deliberate about it. They were the restoration in policy, but worse in the mindset.
Carrol writes: ``There are good books on this or that aspect of it, but I don't think there is any book that measures up to the period as a whole..''
Agreed. I've often tried to figure out why. There were a lot of obvious reasons like erasing the people's history for example. But there are subtle reasons too. A lot of it was in stories, experiences that summed over time. Some of it was quite radical in a less material sense, in an intellectual sense, in a philosophy of somesort---which I am still trying to figure out, by studying its enemy, Strauss.
Some of it is a change in worldview. All sorts of intangble things like a mindset. Really this is a case, I think that needs fiction or poetry, which I couldn't quite imagine how to write. Some of the best stuff was in jazz, but nobody recognizes it, because it is too abstract a medium. Some of that music was like a dialogue with its period. It was playing to you or something in you. If whatever that was, wasn't in you, you wouldn't get it. It was a philosophy that you could learn from, a kind of intellectual's guide. Not all of it, just some of it. Coltrain tried to write about it a little on his Love Supreme album---in words. It sounds stupid in words, but that was not what it sounded like in music at the time. McCoy Tyner was essential to keeping it grounded in some `real' world. There was a lot of black white collaboration in music that never showed much. It was a collaboration-competition in spirit. I know this sounds like old stoner stuff, too much weed. Well, it was that and it wasn't.
Carrol goes on: ``That "Party" -- no -- That Party could not have been theorized in advance; it never even got properly theorized during its period of existence or since.''
That is all true, crazy as it sounds, that mystery party still exists in a way. Every now and again, you meet people you've never seen before and recognize something about them. One interesting thing back then, you could travel around and find people and just hang out, without much formality at all. It was like you were members of the same secret party.
This `underground' social system used to drive the FBI and police state crazy. They were still looking for leadership to jail or kill, like it was the communist party apparatus. Their files must have gotten so big and so difused that officialdom must have had a real chill. This was a mass with no name, no real leaders except for those on tv, not much organization, nothing much to materially suppress. It also had the annoying habit of popping in and out of existance.
Carrol is also right about the disappearance, sometime between 1970-73. I was stunned. It was gone. I tried to do an art piece on it, called Wait Here, `72. Total failure. Nobody understood it. The tremendous irony was Watergate. The entire public facade of the establishment, crashed. The irony was by then there was little meaningful resistance. It's like they lasted just long enough to stop us. When we disappeared, they fell over.
I also had another thought at the time, ``This was never going to be over.'' This was a war of attrition, you had to build up a culture in your children that would replace this one. I was mediating down in my studio, while my wife was asleep at home, pregnant. I was dreaming about what my son would be like. I didn't know he was a boy. I could feel these tremendously powerful legs pushing out against the walls.
Going through various parts of this thread.
``I think Charles is essentially correct in his account of the CP & anti-racism. I don't remember my source for this, but I recall hearing that J. Edgar Hoover claimed you could recognize a Commist because they were comfortable with Negroes.''
Hoover was right, but there were some material reasons. For example many of the civil rights lawyers were Jewish and had been Communists and had been part of the labor movement and been part of a history of progressive struggle---and fought in courts against the FBI and Justice department lawyers...
The latest incarnation of these struggles are still going on with the grown up children of the children of yesteryear. I went to a poetry reading last November (the poetry was on Charlotte Saloman, do the wiki) and sat in an ancient crowd, mostly Jewish, and most had been staff for Amnesty International's local chapter twenty, thirty years ago. By chance I was sitting next to a former director. Like Hoover I could tell a commie when I met one. I asked her what she thought of Holder? She rolled her eyes and said, we are here to enjoy ourselves.
I recognized one guy who I had met as a youngster (11 or 12) back in the 70s at a party for grown ups older than me. Now his little kids were wondering around, sweet little somethings under 11 while their (step) grandmother read her work.
I tell this for the depth of continuity that seems to flow in history, much like Hegel wrote, and Marx made into material struggle. This zeitgeist of revolt may or may be history, but it is sure as hell in some of the arts, as a polymorphic perversity---linked with sexuality-sensuality-language---the material being, the body, the dialectic of paradise and hell.
CG