This past weekend I finally saw The Manchurian Candidate. Yesterday was MLK day. Reed and I have been talking about riots in America; LA, Seattle, Kent State, DC. I used to drive down 14th Street almost every Sunday from 1970 to 1984 and have an excellent year-by-year perspective on how DC's outward visible skin recovered after the 68 race riots. Those streets through a car window are my earliest memories. Faces of people emphatically OTHER by poverty and race, people I saw but who did not attend the cathedral in their midst were on view as we went to and from the tiny white enclave down town.
Pile music on top of the memory, discussion and movie viewing. There you are. Cascade of ideas. Tears. I picked up a 3CD collection called Freedom Music, at the CD cellar this weekend. When's the last time you actually listened to The Times They Are A Changin'? Mahalia Jackson makes This Little Light of Mine (which I was taught in an all white church) into something else entirely. PBS collected voices white, black, hispanic from the 60s and 70s that ring with hope. And it just about finished me.
I refuse to be one of those horrid people who believe there were Good Old Days. The myth reads like this: In the Good Old Days, the hippies and the black activists were always going to win. And they did. They got us out of Viet Nam and ended Jim Crow and now everything is just fine.
Balls. That's revisionist crap. Media wants to make things simple, and the only true closure that came out of that era is that we definitively left Viet Nam. Everything else was just a small pendulum swing in favor of the rights of the individual over the perogatives of those with formal received power or social ascendancy. The 60s were at least as much about chaos and fear as they were about hope and renewal. That's the way things are any time there is great change.
I feel a powerful frustration and fear for the issues that frame the decade in which we are living. The Times They Are A Changin' again, but the pendulum is swinging away from where it should be. The Clinton administration, even with all its scandals, was about hope. Hope in the birth of the Internet. Hope in the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act. Hope in the form of NAFTA. The Bush junior administration is about fear. Fear in the form of the new Homeland Defense Dept, fear in the form of war drums beating for Iraq. Trust being placed in organizations whose purpose is to comfort the irational and fearful (churches) instead of organizations meant to explicitly treat the needs of the needy (goals based non-profits).
But the music takes me places where everything is simple and the good guys always win and there is hope. There is no musical voice today for anything but fear, delerium or destruction. And while I like my angry stompy music and my etherial dreamscape music and the beating of techno drums, I *want* modern celebratory music. Hope cast out on the waters NOW.
But all I have is hope 30 years old. To which I find myself clinging most fervently.
--KMHPosted by karen at January 21, 2003 12:00 AM