Select this to read [the Whole Story].
Well yes. I became more and more convinced that the system was capitalism. As capitalism, the US system was democratic to a degree. The degree that it was democratic, depended largely on what era you were talking about. I saw it as becoming more and more democratic i.e. more and more run by the people; but not run by the people in many important areas, most importantly the economy. The economy was/is related directly to the question of the military industrial complex and those entities influence on the State. While we could elect representitives to the government, those representitives were often more beholden to the minority which made up the employing class and not the majority who made up the employed i.e. what in common terms is called the middle class.
Did the madness of the sixties influence your affiliation with the antiwar movement?
Probably, the absurdity of bureaucratic acceptance, combined with the knowledge that we are all, "condemned to be free" i.e. we choose, whether we think so or not. We are responsible.
Do you remember '68, with the Tet offensive, the assinations of RFK and MLK, the Chicago convention and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? What did you think of when you watched those events unfold on the news?
Yeah. I remember all of the above. I thought different things about each of the above. I hadn't yet read Marx in '68. By then, I had come to define myself as an anarchist; but I didn't know what exactly I meant by it. I was also contradictory. As I said, I began that year supporting McCarthy and ended it wanting to vote for the Peace and Freedom Party. The assassinations just seemed to stem naturally from a society going bonkers. The Chicago Democratic Convention appalled me. The USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia didn't come as a surprise; after all there had been Hungary.
I'm glad we both speak Bob Dylan. Right now, I would like to explore some of the
frustration you probably felt about awakening others to the terrible things we
were doing in Vietnam, but the public was sleeping soundly underneath all the
"ideolgically impregnated/programmed ignorance" you saw around you. Those days
reminded me of one of the closing verses of "Desolation Row":
all hail to Nero's Neptune
How frustrated did the "ideolgically impregnated/programmed ignorance" make you
and the other protesters around you feel when you tried to make the public aware
of what was going on?
the Titanic sails at dawn
everybody is shouting,
"which side are you on?"
and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
are fighting in the captain's tower
while calypso singers laugh at them
and fishermen hold flowers
between the windows of the sea
where lovely mermaids flow
and nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row.
Pretty frustrated, indeed. We saw the media manipulation of the issues we brought up because we were bringing these issues up and then we'd see them in the press and it would take an entirely different slant. No wonder the "ordinary" silent majority was against us. They had been the victims of disinformation. So, we attempted to build a counter culture, complete with its own media."Music was our only friend--until the end."
[The Doors - "This is the End"]
Select this to read [the Whole Story].
*****
Sure, I remember the Moratorium, but I remember better the attempt to levitate the Pentagon; and even better the May Day demo in DC in 1971, when the local headlines the next day were "Government still in operation."
Select this to read [the Whole Story].
