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Today's
Stories
Febrauary 10, 2004
Elizabeth Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change CEOs?
Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris
Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush B-Boys
Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment: Boob Tube
Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with Jewish
Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine in
Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide from
Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure: Our
Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan
Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris
0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations
and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia
|
February
10, 2004
Say You Want a Revolution
You
Can Count Me Out (In)
By RON JACOBS
There’s
something about the Beatles that transcends time and other linear realities.
My friend’s daughter—a nine-year-old whom I watch most every
day after school—plays their music constantly. My son, a college
sophomore, does, too. So do I. Even my contrarian anarchist friends,
who are now all in their thirties and somewhat settled (yet still anarchists),
found themselves singing along to their albums when I played them in
the house we used to share in Olympia, Washington back in the late 1980s.
Sure,
they were probably the first global corporate rock band that was over-hyped
and overplayed, but they also were part and parcel of the 1960s cultural
revolution. Like may other aspects of capitalist culture, they not only
reflected the reality of the revolution in mores and politics that occurred
during the period known as the Sixties, they also helped to form and
spread that revolution. Even if you weren’t cognizant of it at
the time, the Beatles influenced your reality. For those who weren’t
alive then, the Beatles still influence your reality.
They
were never overtly political, with the possible exception of their well-publicized
(like everything they did) rejection of their knighthood because of
the Crown’s support for America’s war on Vietnam, yet they
were revolutionary. It’s hard to remember, but rock music used
to be a revolutionary phenomenon. Politicians and parents, priests and
university presidents, and police and professors all used to decry its
influence on youth and society, blaming it for everything from the girl
next door’s pregnancy to the resistance against the war and draft.
I’m not talking about a hypocritical outcry over a popular performer’s
breast baring on television, but a genuine fear that the world as-we-know-it
was crumbling into ashes like Rome in the wake of Atilla and the Huns.
And it was.
I
recently watched the Oscar-nominated documentary The WeatherUnderground
with a group of socialists in their twenties. Besides the obvious criticisms
of Weather’s early politics and politically suicidal organizing
approach, my fellow audience members made several cracks about the rhetoric
from Weather members and others concerning the counterculture. How the
hell, they wondered, could a bunch of hippies be revolutionary? A couple
songs about revolution and some lyrics about a Panther being bound and
gagged do not a revolution make. Freeing a confirmed doper like Timothy
Leary was even less so. LSD is just a drug.
Little
did these young people know, but their comments were echoes of the conversations
I heard all around me in 1969 as I discovered anti-imperialist politics
and acid. To me, rock music and revolution went hand in hand. Like Weather
wrote in one of their communiqués in 1970: “Freaks are
revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks.” The revolution
really was alive wherever counterculture types gathered—rock concerts
and festivals, barracks full of GI freaks and brothers, college dorms
and houses, and high school smoking areas. Yet, at the same time, the
serious politicos who hadn’t got the counterculture bug were working
overtime trying to figure out how their politics could have the same
popular appeal that the counterculture revolutionaries were having.
Unfortunately
for all, the counterculture got co-opted and the politicos took the
road already traveled. The corporate hipsters commercialized the revolution,
sprinkling their advertisements with rhetoric straight out of the Black
Panther newspaper and Abbie Hoffman’s books. Eventually all that
remained was the sex, drugs, and rock and roll. As for the politicos,
they took the square pegs of third world revolutions and the even squarer
pegs of Stalinism/Maoism and tried to fit them into the ever-changing
hole of US society. The politicos rendered themselves irrelevant and
rock went completely corporate with a few exceptions (like the Grateful
Dead) until punk blasted its way into the ears of the angry young.
If
I were to have one criticism of today’s left organizations in
the United States, it would be their seeming failure to understand the
importance of culture in building resistance. Although I would be one
of the first to acknowledge the shortcomings of the counterculture as
a culture of resistance, the more important element in any discussion
of its role in the movements of the 1960s is its success in rallying
people to those movements. I would bet that many more people who took
part in the resistance to war and racism in the 1960s and 1970s came
to it through the counterculture and not through political theory. Of
course, that is also one of the essential reasons that those movements
did not develop into a more permanent revolutionary movement. While
the culture was certainly a culture of resistance, it was not revolutionary
in a fundamental sense, nor did it have a legacy to draw from.
Now
it does. There is a line that can be drawn from the folk movement that
is represented by the Weavers, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and the
rest to the radical rock rantings of the Jefferson Airplane, the late-1960s
Rolling Stones, Bob Marley and even Steppenwolf’s Monster to the
1980s Clash and AKA Special, and onward to the political rap and rock
of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine. It is up to today’s
radicals and revolutionaries to make the connections. Culture does matter.
Even if it is only rock and roll.
(By
the way, the line in the title is from the Beatles’ song Revolution
#1 and reflects the argument going on in John Lennon’s head, the
group itself, on the pages of the Ann Arbor, Michigan underground paper
The Argus between Lennon and White Panther John Sinclair, and in the
counterculture at large. In essence, the argument was over the course
of the revolution. Should we free our minds or the institutions? John
Sinclair had the best answer: why not both?)
Ron
Jacobs can be reached at: rjacobs@uvm.edu
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