The Citizen-Petitioner and the Emperor… I see that as much as any single lens view of this remarkable August, taking place alongside a Southern road that leads to the president of the United States.
A citizen movement? An August that has the seeds and shoots to remake, or reshape, the terrible August when the Emperor could not be bothered to read the PDB and 3 years later Condi looked heavenward as she declared the title of the unread PDB to be “historical”, when it announced instead the all too likely (and now we know for certain) intentions of bin Laden and Zawahiri?
It is what it is… 1500 candle-lit vigils across the nation. 400 came out in Pleasant Hill, Contra Costa Co. in the East Bay, that is Ellen Tauscher land. Remarkable.
That cannot be a bad thing… and I am content to watch what it may become. So far, it is in the early stages… other mothers and family members come and go, Sue Niederer (at the Princeton NJ vigil last night) who was arrested last summer at a Laura rally and is a founder with Cindy of GSMfP… now Nadia McCaffrey of Tracy CA, who last year made certain the press was present when her son’s casket arrived in the West. Ray McGovern, Colleen Rowley for her second visit (she was at the Dallas meeting where Cindy got the idea, and Rowley went early on)… others.
Googling around to see if Matt Taibbi had written this up yet (he has been in Crawford for Rolling Stone) I landed on this unsual writer and his chronicles of the phenomena in Crawford. Greg Moses, editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review, seems uniquely positioned and captures the feeling I have for what I am watching.
It looks like headquarters here, the land of the goddess warriors. Near an open van several CodePink organizers pace with their cell phones. Camp director Anne Wright is here, too. Cindy Sheehan is sitting on an ice chest speaking with a reporter.
Further up the parking ditch, here’s a pure Texas classic. From the driver’s window of her brightly polished red Ford pickup truck stick the brown leather boots of legendary Texas activist Diane Wilson. The inveterate nonviolent warrior who changed chemical history down along the coast with her hunger strikes, and who was grinning and tromping around camp at dawn like a trooper on caffeine, has now gone sound asleep in the mid-day heat. She’s hunger striking again, in case you haven’t heard. The hunger strike started on Saturday the moment the cops stopped Cindy in the bar ditch and told her she could go no further. “Are you with me?” she asked Jodie Evans, and Jodie said sure. So Jodie and about 100 others are hunger striking this action.
As I’m marveling at the purple color of the bud or fruit of a five foot tall nettle or thistle, up comes a new car. “I’m playing hookey from work,” admits the man from Austin as he locks up and walks toward camp. The newly installed Port-O-Potty has been inserted into the line of cars here. So the foot traffic is a little heavier than before.
Attached to a car, with California Premium Trailer plates, is an artful steel trailer. Into the panels that surround the trailer an artist has cut reverse silhouettes of the symbol of battlefield death: a bayonetted rifle stuck upside down into the ground with a helmet on top. So this is how the crosses got here. Cicadas and crickets sing as waist high grass blows in the westerly wind. In the ditches one finds abundant evidence of the media flood that has come and gone, leaving tire marks in the lush grasses. Along the East side of Morgan road the fence posts are metal. Along the west side, wood. I’m out on the prairie again any my mind runs free. Dragonflies make their way against the wind.
Back down Morgan Road toward camp, I am beginning to get a sense of family. Here is Annie from the Louisiana delegation running an errand, and Diane Wilson is awake now speaking on the cell phone. She lifts a boot to wave hi, and I make a note: it’s the left boot. Cindy Sheehan and the departing reporter exchange hugs.
I am thinking that Cindy Sheehan and her decision to go to Crawford and petition the Dauphin for a meeting embodies elements of the old folk songs, a transition I have thought for some time that we must make. What may appear soft was in fact subversive, Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, at times banned from radio play, was subversive. The opposition to Cindy will be fierce but she is resolute. Let it be, day by day…
Greg Moses was chronicling Cindy’s decision at the onset:
“That’s Cindy Sheehan,” points the Vietnam War veteran from his seat at the table. “She lost her son Casey in Iraq. And I’m going to follow her to Crawford. You coming?”
Looking up from my plate, I take the vet’s direction and turn to see Sheehan standing on the grass, stage left, mixing with three generations of veterans who have gathered this evening for peace and Bar-B-Que.Twenty-four-year-old Casey Sheehan was killed at Sadr City on April 4, 2004 during the historic uprising (16 months ago to the day). Cindy blames the President for “creating that insurgency by his failed policies,” and on Saturday morning she is going to attempt to visit Bush at his vacation ranch in Crawford, a couple hours’ drive to the South.
The Vietnam vet is a Southerner and Moses recounts a weave of a story Hunt tells of the Civil War and Alabama, then:
What’s important about the story, says Hunt, is that the people of Alabama were not all that eager to start a war in the first place. History is a push and a pull. The closer you get to it, says Hunt, the more you can see how, “it all hangs by a thread!” Here under a big tent overlooking Dallas, three generations of veterans have gathered to blow the embers of a Dixie pacifist revival. Could it be a thing that catches fire?
The Vietnam vet is happy to see how young veterans from Iraq today have a place to meet and talk to people. “When we came back from Vietnam, nobody could talk to you,” he says. “Your best friend couldn’t talk to you. My parents wouldn’t talk to me. Then ten years later, my parents decided they wanted to talk to me about Vietnam, but I’m not talking about it. I’m sick of it.”
The Vietnam vet was there in `70-’71, late in terms of the number of years that the war lasted, but right where the fat part of the wall starts if you’re reading names of people you know at the Washington DC memorial. “Right about the middle of the wall, that’s where my friends are.” He lifts a finger to touch the names in the air.
“I can see it on the young guys’ faces,” says the Vietnam vet, looking at their war from inside out. As he heads back home for the night, he asks again, “You coming to Crawford?”
On the 4th of July this year, Moses was weaving his own unique story of the Civil War (it lives forever in this nation) and Dylan… the rebellion that can be invoked thru song.
For Dylan himself, the Civil War was also a battle between two kinds of time: “In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer. In the North people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells.” It must have been a Southerner who coined the term “New York minute” to describe the Northern kind of time — yes the kind of time that forges capital into imperialism, post-colonialism, and oh-so-helpless-hand-wringing-witness to Jim Crow or Abu Ghraib, whichever.
“After a while,” says Dylan, “you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course.” And the archetype for this sort of story is found in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. “Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”
Resurrection without synthesis. Crucifixion upon the cross of the Fourth of July. This is the underlying song of the great American folksinger. Why he must die in his shoes.
Dylan’s counterpunch against the “lame as hell big trick American mainstream culture” was the folksong. “There was nothing easygoing about the folksongs I sang. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.” He foraged the songs from fellow singers, from 78 records, from archives. He would pitch them fast and hard to his audiences, practicing live in front of people because he couldn’t bear up to the experience of practicing alone in some room somewhere rehearsing for who knows who?
In Irish folksongs especially, Dylan found the rebel voice. “There were songs like that in my repertoire, too, where something lovely was suddenly upturned, but instead of rebellion showing up it would be death itself, the Grim Reaper. Rebellion spoke to me louder.” But Ireland was not an American landscape, and in order to translate the rebel songs he turned to the library. “I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.”
On the other hand, America has weak leaders too, who stitch together for themselves costumes of quasi-fascist adoration. They can be any kind of leader with a name. You praise the Lord in America if you don’t have one of these creatures for your boss. Whereas great folk songs from the Dylan point of view are ever busy tearing the clothes off of this kind of power, there is another kind of music that puts people in the marching mood.
So here I sit on the Fourth of July, slowing down my mind. On this day in particular, I want nothing of the marching kind, certainly none of that music. Give me a 22 verse folk song where a vicious hammer splits open a rebel’s resurrection, yes over and over again.
Another Western voice had this to say… I don’t know if the Democrats can hear Gary Hart tho…
If democracy only works when there is open discussion of opposing ideas and policies, and if the opposition party, in this case the Democrats, has hand-cuffed, blind-folded, gagged, and hog-tied itself to a failed invasion and occupation in the Middle East, where will the expanding majority of Americans look for a representative, a spokesperson, a voice for their anger, frustration, and distrust at being misled?
[…]
And to the embarrassment of both Republican and Democratic establishments, she takes that office more seriously than they–the silent “leaders”–do theirs. When the last Marine leaves Iraq, dead or alive, she can claim more credit than them all. Because of the courage of one brave woman, she quite possible will have had more to do with finally bringing this great nation back to its senses… and to its principles.Remember her name. It is Cindy Sheehan.
A last bit from Moses… from the Crawford Peace House (who knew when they established it a year ago, in a small rural Texas cow town, hard on the heels of the president?)
Bob and his spouse park their tiny dog Biscuit in a side room at the Peace House and catch a shuttle to the camp. When Biscuit starts whining, I look at Linda and she says, “they said we could walk him.” So I take Biscuit to the garden for a walk around the labyrinth. Johnny Wolf laid out the design, which looks very much like the famous pattern on the floor of the cathedral at Chartres.
It makes for an interesting foot trip today. First you think you are heading steadily to the center, then you find yourself moving out to the rim. But why doesn’t the path just take me to the center, you ask yourself, and just as you’re about to curse the labyrinth, you’re standing right in the middle. Very nice. A little lesson in patience for Biscuit and me.
Cross posted from LSF in tribute to the BooTribbers who have made the journey… thanks for the diaries and the photographs… 😉
