Borderland

Listening to Utah Phillips, I heard the voice of a teacher.

From Democracy Now [transcript]:

AMY GOODMAN: …Over the span of nearly four decades, Utah Phillips worked in what he referred to as “the Trade,” performing tirelessly for audiences in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. His songs were performed by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie. He earned a Grammy nomination for an album he recorded with Ani DiFranco and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips in 1935, he later adopted the name “Utah,” from where he grew up. The son of labor organizers, Phillips was a lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. As a teenager, he ran away from home and started living as a hobo who rode the rails and wrote songs about his experiences. In 1956, he joined the Army and served in the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. In 1968, he ran for the US Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.

For the past twenty-one years, he has lived in Nevada City, where he started a nationally syndicated folk music radio show called Loafer’s Glory, produced at community radio station KVMR. He also helped found the Hospitality House homeless shelter and the Peace and Justice Center there.

Today we spend the hour hearing Utah Phillips in his own words. In January 2004, I had a chance to sit down with Utah for an extensive interview. We met at the pirate radio station, Freak Radio Santa Cruz, where Utah had come to perform. I began by asking him why he arrived at least a day early to any city or town where he performed.

UTAH PHILLIPS: When you have an engagement, at least in my world, the world that I create for myself, an engagement doesn’t begin when you hit the stage and end when you leave the stage. It begins when you hit the city limits, and it ends when you leave the city limits.

There’s a whole lot going on in that town. My trade is like being paid to go to schools, and every town is its own teacher. Every town, that’s my university. And there are marvels and wonders. There’s Hobos from Hell, are from Santa Cruz. They’re young people riding on the freight trains, and they’re better at it than I ever thought I would be. You’ve got the Homeless Garden Project. You’ve got just an enormous rich community here.

I was involved some years ago in helping to organize a street singers’ guild in this town, and it—you got to beat the streets and learn from the people, and then you’ve got to get on their stage and, having done that and been with those people, let that audience know that you’re not just doing the show you did in the town the night before, you know. You’re no—you’ve got to know who you’re with and where you are. That’s very important to me. And they’ve got to know that I understand that, that I’m really there for them.

I was curious about Freak Radio:

Free Radio Santa Cruz has been on the air for over twelve years without a license. We broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, in defiance of federal regulations. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is charged with regulating the airwaves in the public interest. We believe that it has failed to do so and has proved itself to be controlled by monied interests.

I logged in to their stream last evening and listened to a show about the history of the Weather Underground, who:

waged a low-level war against the United States government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and finally evading the FBI by going into hiding. In THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, former Weathermen including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and David Gilbert speak frankly about the idealist passions and trajectories that transformed them from college activists into the FBI�s Most Wanted.

It was a great program. This history was something that I remember. I saw it on television, and read about daily in the paper. Times were turbulent, to say the least. The Days of Rage “riots in Chicago took place over a 4-day period beginning October 8, 1969, after members of the Weathermen, a militant offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society, converged on the city to confront police in the streets in response to the trial of the group of anti-Vietnam War activists known as the ‘Chicago Eight’”.

The Chicago Conspiracy Trial was a study in political theater with, most notably, the iconic image of Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom.

The trial transcripts read like a cultural Who’s Who of the times, with people like Phil Ochs, Allen Ginsberg, Bobby Seale, Dick Gregory, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Richard Daley, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Rennie Davis, Norman Mailer, and Jesse Jackson called as witnessness.

From the testimony of Abbie Hoffman:

MR. WEINGLASS: Will you please identify yourself for the record?

THE WITNESS: My name is Abbie. I am an orphan of America.

MR. SCHULTZ: Your Honor, may the record show it is the defendant Hoffman who has taken the stand?

THE COURT: Oh, yes. It may so indicate. . . .

MR. WEINGLASS: Where do you reside?

THE WITNESS: I live in Woodstock Nation.

MR. WEINGLASS: Will you tell the Court and jury where it is?

THE WITNESS: Yes. It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way as the Sioux Indians carried the Sioux nation around with them. It is a nation dedicated to cooperation versus competition, to the idea that people should have better means of exchange than property or money, that there should be some other basis for human interaction. It is a nation dedicated to–

THE COURT: Just where it is, that is all.

THE WITNESS: It is in my mind and in the minds of my brothers and sisters. It does not consist of property or material but, rather, of ideas and certain values. We believe in a society–

THE COURT: No, we want the place of residence, if he has one, place of doing business, if you have a business. Nothing about philosophy or India, sir. Just where you live, if you have a place to live. Now you said Woodstock. In what state is Woodstock?

THE WITNESS: It is in the state of mind, in the mind of myself and my brothers and sisters. It is a conspiracy. Presently, the nation is held captive, in the penitentiaries of the institutions of a decaying system.

MR. WEINGLASS: Can you tell the Court and jury your present age?

THE WITNESS: My age is 33. 1 am a child of the 60s.

MR. WEINGLASS: When were you born?

THE WITNESS: Psychologically, 1960.

MR. SCHULTZ: Objection, if the Court please. I move to strike the answer.

MR. WEINGLASS: What is the actual date of your birth?

THE WITNESS: November 30,1936.

MR. WEINGLASS: Between the date of your birth, November 30, 1936, and May 1, 1960, what if anything occurred in your life?

THE WITNESS: Nothing. I believe it is called an American education.

MR. SCHULTZ: Objection.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection.

THE WITNESS: Huh.

MR. WEINGLASS: Abbie, could you tell the Court and jury–

MR. SCHULTZ: His name isn’t Abbie. I object to this informality.

MR. WEINGLASS: Can you tell the Court and jury what is your present occupation?

THE WITNESS: I am a cultural revolutionary. Well, I am really a defendant—full-time.

MR. WEINGLASS: What do you mean by the phrase “cultural revolutionary?”

THE WITNESS: Well, I suppose it is a person who tries to shape and participate in the values, and the mores, the customs and the style of living of new people who eventually become inhabitants of a new nation and a new society through art and poetry, theater, and music.

[...]

MR. SCHULTZ: You and Albert, Mr. Hoffman, were united in Chicago in your determination to smash the system by using any means at your disposal, isn’t that right?

THE WITNESS: Did I write that?

MR. SCHULTZ: No, did you have that thought?

THE WITNESS: That thought? Is a thought like a dream? If I dreamed to smash the system, that’s a thought. Yes, I had that thought.

THE COURT: Mr. Witness, you may not interrogate the lawyer who is examining you.

THE WITNESS: Judge, you have always told people to describe what they see or what they hear. I’m the only one that has to describe what I think.

MR. WEINGLASS: I object to any reference to what a person thought or his being tried for what he thought. He may be tried for his intent.

THE COURT: Overrule the objection.

THE WITNESS: Well, I had a lot of dreams at night. One of the dreams might have been that me and Stew were united.

MR. SCHULTZ: Mr. Hoffman, isn’t it a fact that one of the reasons why you came to Chicago was simply to wreck American society?

THE WITNESS: My feeling at the time, and still is, that society is going to wreck itself. I said that on a number of occasions, that our role is to survive while the society comes tumbling down around us; our role is to survive.
We have to learn how to defend ourselves, given this type of society, because of the war in Vietnam, because of racism, because of the attack on the cultural revolution—in fact because of this trial.

Given that Seale ended up bound and gagged (and became the heroic victim in Graham Nash’s song, Chicago), and that Abbie Hoffman and the rest of the defense team were not going to take the trial seriously. Judge Hoffman had his hands full, and issued numerous contempt citations.

From Abbie Hoffman’s contempt hearing:

Specification 8: On October 30, when the Court was compelled to deal appropriately with Mr. Seale, Mr. Hoffman engaged in the following:

“MR. SEALE: The Judge is not-he is not trying to give you no fair trial. That’s what you are. You are lying. You know exactly what you are.
MR. HAYDEN: Now they are going to beat him, they are going to beat him.
MR. HOFFMAN: You may as well kill him if you are going to gag him. It seems that way, doesn’t it?
THE COURT: You are not permitted to address the Court, Mr. Hoffman. You have a lawyer.
MR. HOFFMAN: This isn’t a court. This is a neon oven.
MR. FORAN: That was the defendant Hoffman who spoke.
THE COURT: Let the record show that the defendant Hoffman spoke.” Official Transcript, Page 4,846. And very shortly thereafter he continued in the following interchange:
“MR. HAYDEN: I was not addressing the jury. I was trying to protect Mr. Seale. The man is supposed to be silent when he sees another man’s nose being
smashed?
MR. HOFFMAN: The disruption started when these guys got into overkill. It is the same thing as last year in Chicago, the same exact thing.
THE COURT: Mr. Hoffman, you are directed to refrain from speaking. You are ordered to refrain from speaking.” Official Transcript, Page 4,847.
After this interchange the Court determined that a recess would be appropriate. When the Court left the bench the defendant Hoffman refused to rise in the customary manner.

[...]

Specification 21: On April 4, during the cross-examination of the witness Phillips, Mr. Kunstler was examining the witness concerning the witness’ concept of how hippies dress. During that incident, Mr. Hoffman got up and danced around, lifting his shirt and baring his body to the jury, and engaged in antics designed to make light of the testimony of the witness. The incident is reported as follows:

“Q You are the first one that hasn’t identified him. (Hoffman.) This is Mr. Hoffman over here. (There was laughter in the courtroom.)
THE COURT: Let the record show that Mr. Hoffman stood up, lifted his shirt up, and bared his body in the presence of the jury – -
MR. KUNSTLER: Your Honor, that is Mr. Hoffman’s way.
THE COURT: – - dancing around.
(There was laughter in the courtroom.)
MR. KUNSTLER: Your Honor, that is Mr. Hoffman’s way.
THE COURT: It is a bad way in a courtroom.”

This is all just a long way to illustrate what was going on, and how unbelievably strange things were. The outcome? “Though the jury found five of the seven defendants guilty (not of conspiracy, but of individual acts). the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals voided the convictions and the contempt citations imposed by Judge Hoffman. The government chose to not retry the case.”

This quote from Tristero’s review of Perlstein’s book, Nixonland, explains the political fallout, and helps us to contextualize the current class divide in the US political landscape:

Back in the 60′s and early 70′s, Perlstein writes (and this jibes with my own memories), progressives were extremely confident that they were forging a new Democratic coalition, arrogantly ignoring the traditional ties of the Democratic party to blue collar voters and their worries. They were abetted in their arrogance by a press that completely misunderstood, and misreported, the complex political and cultural changes that Nixon’s politics produced. One important wedge Nixonism drove into American life split the Roosevelt coalition of liberals and blue collars in two, creating an enormous amount of downright hostility between the two groups. Nixon harvested the blue collar vote for himself while progressives fooled themselves into thinking those votes were irrelevant to the trend of increasing liberalism. Perhaps they were, but they were also necessary to win elections.

This kind of analysis is real important now. We’re living in the shadow of a time when the seeds for a lot of future problems were scattered. The radical left was engaged in serious political action, and the conservative right was outraged at their style, their tactics, and their political aims. Outrage was the order of the day. And the press gave us theater, a TV digest of what was happening. It was incomprehensible to almost everyone. Not much has changed in this regard, except that people seem more resigned to the same conditions that sparked all of this back then.

We really need to elect people who are clear-headed enough to steer us clear of the conflict that we may reap from rising oil and food prices, war, and climate change – from the excesses of global capitalism. When Amy Goodman asked Utah Phillips how these times compare with the labor struggles of the last century, he said:

I think that—I think that it’s getting—it can get as bad. I think that we’re being frog-marched into a corporate fascist takeover of the country. And no fooling, I think that we’re in the Weimar Republic. And that’s another thing that I would encourage young people to understand, what—that was Germany before the Second World War, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Nazism. Why didn’t people do anything? You know, the big question that young Germans are asking their grandparents: “Why didn’t you do something?” Read about the Weimar, compare the rise of fascism in Germany from the 1920s to what’s happening right here right now.

The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. Listen, you young people I’m talking to, that long member has been taken away from you. You haven’t gotten it in your schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re not getting it anywhere. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. You know, you can’t remember what happened last week, because you’re locked into this week’s crisis.

No, turn that off. You know, walk away from that. Walk out your front door. Go find your elders. Go find your true elders. Go find your people that lived that life, who knew that life and who know that history. And get your hands down into that deep rich stream of our people’s history. We divided our culture up into a market for youngers, a market for young adults, a market for young marrieds, a market for older people, you know. It’s not that way. And mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we’ve been through and trivializing important events. No, our people’s history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions. That huge river, you know, it’s like tributaries that flow down into the polluted river and purify it and purify it.

“Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.

Utah Phillips said that the hardest thing to learn is to “shut up and listen.” We need to do that. We need to listen to stories that give us the courage to go out and ask questions.