Light/Breezes

Light/Breezes
SUNRISE AT DEATH VALLEY-Photo by Tom Cochrun
Showing posts with label 1960's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1960's. Show all posts

Friday, May 6, 2022

TWISTED & SINKING

 


        It's called the Twisted Grove, one of the many Redwood families in the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Aptos, California. 

    I see it as a metaphor of now.

        The trees live on the San Andreas fault and changing land in their hundreds of years have caused them to twist to reach to for the light.

         Consider the great palaver about the leaked Supreme Court opinion; That a radical right wing clique appears to be on the verge of banning individual liberty has the majority of Americans dutifully concerned....that the Republican party who packed the court with zealots is more concerned about the leak than a regressive decision, unwanted by a majority of citizens. 

        The Supreme Court we were taught to vaunt and hallow is exposed as being more horse shit offal of our broken political system. Almost holy respect for the Supremes? The mystique is gone.  

       Please recall three of the supremes were nominated by Donald Trump, after one nomination was stolen from President Obama. Two were nominated by George W. Bush. What do Bush and Trump have in common? Both lost the popular vote. 

      The majority of Americans voted against their judgements and character, but they put 5 on the court. At least 3 of those five lied on camera about Roe V. Wade when questioned during their testimony. And on this high court is a man married to a person of questionable character who supported the January 6 insurrection. 

   


        Sinking is another matter.


        The SS Palo Alto began as a concrete ship, a tanker built for WW I in 1918. The end of war left the Palo Alto without a mission. In time it became an oil storage barge. Later it was purchased to be an amusement center and opened in 1930 at Sea Clift Beach in Santa Cruz County.


        It thrived, only briefly. After two years of dances, dinners and the social life, the depression changed the course of the Palo Alto.
      Over the years it languished, interrupted by periods of attempted revival and then more trouble. Storms cracked the hull, there was renewed effort, a hamburger stand, bait shops, more storms and broken masts, more storms and the original crack in the hull worsened, more rehabilitation and repairs, and it was used as a fishing platform. So it was until 2000 when the ship deck was closed permanently.


        The concrete tanker is now a home for sea birds and a flourishing sea life. It has become a kind of reef, as it continues  sinking, slowly into the sea.


        I think this too is a metaphor; 

    the once important Republican party, broken and infested now with extremists, non traditionalists, anti American authoritarians and fans of autocracy. Republicans I covered are repulsed. Generations passed would abhor the party.

    the American ship of state, divided and the constituency not particularly intelligent anymore.

    Tragic comedy-an irony;

    Right wingers have always worried about subversion and infiltration, by the Soviets and then the Russians. There's a great case to be made how that infiltration target was and is the republican party and their nation breaking, hate your neighbor culture wars, and grievances gaggle. Now they attempt to "game" the system, trying to rule as a minority party.

    
    Twisted and sinking.  We have been before. 

    Begrudgingly or with belief, we've course corrected, cleaned up the act, busted monopolies, jailed bosses, chased off demagogues, created government compassion, reformed courts, improved, established liberties and continue to evaluate and struggle.
    Struggle. That is our history. Forces of enlightenment and liberty pitched against ignorance, greed, self interest and control.  

    We've endured, almost as long as the youngest of these big trees, that live on a fault line.


        We were at dinner party and in the rambling conversation conviviality I heard myself say I'm ascribing more dignity and favor to trees than I am to a whole lot of humanity. Trees last. By comparison we are on a short timeline.  

        There are good people. Lots of them. Though we may be old and tired or weary, it's time to go another round for human dignity. There is work to do, truth to be told, challenges to make, courts and government to reform, laws to pass and elections to be won. We can model for and work along side like minded youth. For those of us active in the 60's and 70's, there are lessons to teach and to remember. 


        Trees reach for the light. It's what they do to live for hundreds and thousands of years.  Democratic republics could take note. 

        Find the light.  See you down the trail. 
    



              



Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Confessions of a Radical?

 Brothers John and Jim
your blogger circa '66
what to do about the establishment
   Surely many of you heard or took part in debates about "trusting or changing the establishment." Establishment was the cultural shorthand for the power elite, especially what later generations of politicians came to call "Washington and Wall Street," Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" or even more recently the swamp. It was also about how we lived, loved, thought, and behaved. 
    Change it from with in or by revolution? My brothers, pictured above, were inclined to revolutionary change. As their older brother I was already invested in journalism, observing and reporting and had been since high school.
    We had lively debates often joined by our parents both of whom were political veterans, studied people in addition to being WW II participants. There was no "generation gap" as such with unfixable fissures, but our family had a diversity of opinion.
    John, on the left, two years my junior was of the SDS/Weather Underground mind set. Jim was simply the brightest of the three and a poet philosopher, free spirit and gentle soul who broke with convention in almost every way. I guess I was a pragmatist, relying on reason.


the evolution of a "radical"

       My involvement in campus politics (that candidate for class senator on the far right is a baby version of your blogger) combined with my professional work as a street and police beat reporter in Muncie edged me in my own direction.
       I would sometimes ride with cops on a Saturday night as they rounded up drunks and broke up fights, which in blue collar Muncie was a full deployment. The way some of the detainees were beaten with night sticks seemed at odds with the sociology courses I took.
      It was the mid '60s and the Klan still marched, and blacks were denied access in some establishments. I covered sit ins and marches and got tossed down stairs by a Klan leader.
      All of this was a vastly different world than my beautiful campus and the vibe in the fraternity house. I began to cogitate. Academia would not, nor should it, insulate. Like the world, our campus was changing. 
     I raised issues of equality and civil liberties in Student Senate where I served my freshman and sophomore years.
    I got behind a Professor's declaration of Human Rights-ground breaking and long before feminism and LGBTQ entered the public mind. It was at a time when blacks were treated as less than full citizens in housing, banking and access.
     The writing seems a bit leaden and ponderous but it was 50 years ago and I was a kid.
the radical box
     I became an advocate for the abolition of dorm hours-that moved me onto the "radical" list. 
      Colleagues in the long and complex battle to eliminate women's hours were Jeff Lewis, Jon Hughes, and Jim Davis.
      Jeff went on to a vibrant career in public policy, marketing and later in opinion research. 
     Jon became a noted photographer, writer and professor who drove the establishment of a journalism school at the University of Cincinnati. 
     Jim Davis is the creator of Garfield the cat and presides over the Paws empire. 
      Butting heads with a University administration and government was a tall order but we were eventually successful. That changed the campus landscape and culture.
     I ran for the University Judicial Board (Supreme Court) my Junior year. I felt restrained by the traditional campus parties  and sensed the world was changing more rapidly than we were responding. The Judicial Board in my senior year would be a way to move ideas.
     The 1968 political campaign loomed and there were explosive issues of war and peace, civil rights and change that stirred me.

      Brother John shaved most his beard and cut his hair to 
"get clean with Gene", Senator Eugene McCarthy, the anti war democrat. John worked for McCarthy and above is seen serving as a body guard and beer drinking pal of actor Paul Newman who campaigned for McCarthy.
      I suffered my first campus election defeat that year as our  party was swept by a vigorous opponent.

progressive arises
       I came back my senior year with different ideas. I had been studying the emerging intellectual political movements of Dadaism, Herbert Marcuse, the Provos of Amsterdam, the Diggers of San Francisco, intellectual anarchism, Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and others. All of that was a far stretch for a state university in the mid west.
   A ready ally was a fraternity brother who may be the deepest thinking and most intelligent person I know. People still marvel at how he ate through Philosophy classes and professors. He went on to a fine career serving as an attorney, prosecutor, Judge and just maybe the Rolling Stone's greatest fan. He's traveled the world to see them. 
   Ed was always up for a good joke and we thought we'd try to introduce a few "new ideas" to what we saw as the moribund political culture on campus. We created PUP-the Progressive University Party.
    We got pilloried by the campus newspaper.
    In the cartoon below-Ed is portrayed as speaking to the reporter. I am the pup.
   The editorial was more precise than the cartoon.

Fine Arts Building, Ball State University
Photo by Encyclopedia Brittanica 
   We had in fact accomplished something. We were able to "unite" a divergent group with a unified objective.
    The historic arts building displayed a giant US flag on a main hallway. The flag was old, dirty and even a bit frayed. PUP was able to get cooperation from the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL), Young Republicans, Young Democrats, the fraternity council IFC, sorority council Panhellenic, the Newman Society and others, that the issue of the flag should be addressed and something needed to be done. The flag had been there for decades. Ed and I took delight in thinking we were able to bring all of the extremes and different groups together. We though PUP would be politics with a sense of humor.

   These are notes from one of our brainstorming sessions as we began to articulate what would become our manifesto.
    We would not have signed off on all of these-in fact the fight over what to select would be interesting, but this demonstrates the range of thought in our "thought group."
     Abolition of Hours, one quarter housing fees, pass fail in general education courses, faculty evaluation, equal student representation, discussing changes in tenure and department  chairman reports hold up as solid ideas.
     But life intervened. The day after our "flag union" I was involved in a serious auto accident. I was riding in the front seat, in an era before seat belts were the norm. I was thrown through the windshield, was jerked back through, and tossed from the car. I suffered a compound skull fracture, breaking 
everybone in my face and would have bled to death had it not been for fraternity brothers and a Muncie police officer who was also a Ball State student. I was in a coma for a while and when I came back to campus I struggled to graduate, work and get healthy.
      My days of "radical" politics were over. After that I spent almost 5 decades in journalism and broadcasting and left the politics to others.
      I came across these papers in an old file as I have been working to organize some of my archives for the Indiana Historical Society that has curated some of my early journalism and investigative reporting.
      A few of us from that era were together recently and we concluded the late 60's were without precedent and peer.
      From here it all seems so playful and hopeful. 

celebrating the fava


  Lana's green ways delivered us another bountiful year of our beloved fava beans.

for your amusement
a dancing chair




    

        See you down the trail.



Monday, July 9, 2012

FLASHES-BACK & FRICTION POINTS

A FLASH BACK

     It was on this day, July 9 in 1962 that some of Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame began.  The Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles opened an exhibition of the pop artist's iconic work pictured here.
      Hard to believe this "modern art" is 50 years along. And 
a half century seems a long 15 minutes doesn't it?
MODERN TRAVAILS
     Thanks to the NEW YORK TIMES we know our cellphone carriers responded to 1.3 Million "demands" from law enforcement agencies last year. 
      Text messages, caller locations and other information was sought for investigations.  Congress is conducting an investigation of its own on what the TIMES says is "an explosion of cellphone surveillance."
      I read the full 9/11 Commission Report and recommendations  and have followed changes in intelligence, security and law enforcement agencies since. So I wonder, despite the gathering of all of this data, are our security agencies sharp enough to do anything with it?  As a journalist I saw how vital information was mishandled, miscommunicated, not shared, was amassed without appropriate analysis and even misinterpreted by federal, state and local law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies.  I'm not convinced, nor are experts and those in the field, that things have improved much. That does not, however, negate the serious questions the data collection raises. 
      Just another entry in the age of Information Wars.   
DAY FILE
THE SHORE





See you down the trail.