By the Time We Got to . . .
Visions of Freedom through American Decades: Two “Movements”
Lee Drummond
Center for Peripheral Studies
www.peripheralstudies.org
August – September 2014
Abstract
If there is a single core value in American culture, it is the idea of freedom. This essay explores the workings of that idea in two major social phenomena of our recent past: the protest movement exemplified here by David Graeber’s Occupy Wall Street; and the psychedelic movement represented by Woodstock. Charting the careers of those movements provides a certain insight into two visions of freedom as these make themselves known in American culture, American society, the American mind. That dual cultural analysis feeds into a cultural critique of American society, a critique that is as bare-knuckled as I can make it. The critique culminates in a set of anthro-agitprop proposals focusing on pressing social issues of our time: abortion; the corporation as person; the “war on drugs”; and gun control.
By the Time We Got to . . .
Visions of Freedom through American Decades: Two “Movements”
When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be.
That it’s strange,
So strange.
You got to pick up every stitch.
You got to pick up every stitch.
You got to pick up every stitch.
Mmmm, must be the season of the witch.
Must be the season of the witch, yeah.
Must be the season of the witch.
— Donovan, Season of the Witch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm3yKy1hL1M
Donovan, Sunshine Superman
It’s strange, so strange. Mental associations: Where do they come from? How do certain ones grip us? A stranger’s face brings to mind someone you haven’t thought of in years, a scent instantly transports you to another time and place, when “you” were in fact someone else (“so many different people to be”). And a passing word or phrase, perfectly commonplace in itself, somehow stops you in your tracks, leaps decades and realms of understanding to pair with another word, another phrase, another world, another you.
That’s what happened to me recently.
I was reading David Graeber’s gripping account of the birth and development of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Reading it, and agreeing, passionately, with every word he wrote about the system being broken, about America’s grotesque income inequality, its senseless but hugely rewarded occupations, its meaningless political institutions of cookie-cutter Republicans and Democrats, its vile riot police.
Reading it, when I came across a passage:
By the time we got to Zuccotti Park it was clear we had so many people – two thousand at the very least – that we weren’t quite sure how it was going to be possible to hold a General Assembly at all. [my emphasis]
— David Graeber, The Democracy Project
. . . and it stopped me cold. “By the time we got to . . .”: Somehow that phrase, in that context, instantly called forth a different setting, one of times gone by, of a vanished world, and now as the lyrics of a song:
Well I came across a child of God, he was walking along the road,
And I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
Well, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog,
And I feel like I’m a cog in something turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year, yes, and maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere there was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies above our nation.
We are stardust, we are golden, we [are] caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
[my emphasis]
— Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Woodstock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrWNTqbLFFE
Although it may seem a trivial thing, a stray and passing thought, it was a moving experience for me. Why? In the passage and the song I recognized powerful congruities and incongruities, a play of identities and opposites locked in perpetual struggle within the ever-shifting boundaries of what we might call an “American culture,” an “American society,” an “American mind.” On reflection I think it was my vague sense of the play of those forces, and not just the words alone, that somehow brought to mind a connection between the two texts.
First, there is the matter of “by the time we got to . . .” where? Before the events that forever transformed them in the minds, not only of Americans, but of people the world over, Zuccotti Park and Yasgur’s farm were without significance – a convenient place for secretaries to lunch and tourists to stroll in the former case, an open field in the countryside in the latter. But a few days in the summer of 1969 and a few months in the autumn of 2011 forever identified Yasgur’s farm as Woodstock and Zuccotti Park as Occupy Wall Street. They have become icons of American culture, each a nexus of a host of deeply held ideas and emotions, phenomena that have helped shape the imagination and worldview of millions.
Second, both passage and lyrics emphasize the extraordinary numbers of people at the two events. That fact distinguishes Occupy Wall Street from just another political protest with a few dozen marchers and Woodstock from the many commercially organized rock concerts that followed it. They are events, and, as it has turned out, iconic events.
Third, the iconic nature of each event rests on a hope, even a promise, of things to come, good things, momentous things that will change fundamentally how human life is lived. In each case that deep and abiding longing for change, for life to become utterly different, inspires a movement. Although remarkable in themselves, Woodstock and Occupy Wall Street are not simply one-off, one-time affairs. Participants and most observers viewed them as pointing to and calling forth distinct futures. They are process as well as act. Whatever one may say about the outcome of those processes, about whether they may be said to have “succeeded” or “failed,” the underlying fact is that they represent fervent efforts to move people in the deepest reaches of their souls. They are two movements of an American vision.
These, finally and yet roughly sketched here, are the basic congruities I sensed and began to ponder in making the connection between passage and lyrics.
How are these congruities related, if they are, at a deep level of cultural identity? What is the basis for the iconic nature of the two events, Occupy Wall Street and Woodstock? What, at bottom, are they about? Why have they come to signify so much that is fundamental to American culture?
The connection, the correspondence I find between them is that Graeber’s account of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon and Crosby, Still, Nash & Young’s song celebrating Woodstock emanate from and represent two visions of freedom. If there is a single core value in American culture, it is the idea of freedom. It is central to the arguments laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights; it runs like a wide river through all our past and contemporary political debate; it surfaces in a staggering variety of forms and meanings in every corner of our popular culture, from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s poetic “song and celebration” to cultural productions addressed to a different segment of an endlessly diverse American public:
If tomorrow all the things were gone,
I’d worked for all my life.
And I had to start again,
With just my children and my wife,
I’d thank my lucky stars,
To be livin’ here today.
Cause the flag still stands for freedom,
And they can’t take that away.
And I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I won’t forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me.
And I gladly stand up
Next to you and defend her still today.
Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land,
God bless the USA.
[my emphasis]
— Lee Greenwood, God Bless the USA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOv4g552h5E
Lee Greenwood, singing “God Bless the USA”
(in appropriate attire)
And here those incongruities I sensed at the start, in coming across that passage in Graeber’s book, surface. As we know all too well, one person’s freedom is another person’s oppression. All too often the search, the quest to achieve it runs afoul of riot police, guns and attack dogs – and ends in a super-max prison. Despite the smug certainty manifest in political oratory and country-western songs, “freedom” is not a state of being, an achieved condition to be defended from its detractors, hoarded like a precious commodity. Rather, it is as I’ve just described it, a search, a quest, a process that beckons us on to some future world.
Kazantzakis perhaps said it best:
Freedom, my lads, is neither wine nor a sweet maid,
Not goods stacked in vast cellars, no, nor sons in cradles,
It’s but a scornful, lonely song the wind has taken.
— from the “Prologue” to The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
http://www.philzone.com/shows/poem.html
What vision of freedom beckons in Occupy Wall Street? What vision of freedom beckons in Woodstock? Are they identical? Antithetical? Related in complex ways? I suggest that a partial answer to these questions, which I attempt to provide in this essay, will map important contours of a semiotic domain we may call “American culture,” “American society,” the “American mind.”
Since I’ve already suggested that the two phenomena are two movements of American visions of freedom, it is clear that I see significant differences between them. They are not simple iterations, one in text, another in song. What are those differences?
Perhaps the most important difference issues, paradoxically, from a profound similarity between the two visions: each yearns for a time when the State, society as we know it, falls away. Graeber’s “democracy project,” as developed in that book and all his political activity seeks to advance the cause of non-violent anarchism. The endless meetings, demonstrations, and occupations aim at eroding and nullifying social distinctions that have become glaringly obvious and debilitating in a contemporary America composed of the rich and powerful one per cent and the rest, the Other 99 Per Cent as Graeber has described them. If it is possible to capture the kernel of his philosophy and program for action in a phrase, it is that freedom consists in establishing the equality of individuals and encouraging their self-expression. Similarly, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Woodstock urges rejection of established urban society in favor of individual fulfillment: “got to get back to the land, set my soul free;” “I have come to lose the smog;” “I feel like I’m a cog in something turning.” In the visionary world of their song, the State falls away: “And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes riding shotgun in the sky, Turning into butterflies above our nation” to be replaced by something wholly other.
But what?
A telling sign of the most significant difference between the two visions is found in the texts before us. Pursuing his goal of advancing a non-violet anarchism in the very belly of the beast, Wall Street, Graeber is intent on holding a “General Assembly” at which everyone’s voice can be heard, an exercise in pure, participatory democracy. With two thousand people and more in Zuccotti Park, he worries that might not be possible. And facing a city ordinance outlawing megaphones, the crucial ability even to hear everyone’s voice poses a problem. Happily, in his long experience as an activist he has found the solution to that particular problem: the “people’s microphone.” A main speaker addresses the crowd in short, measured phrases, broken by pauses. A few individuals at a certain distance from the speaker are designated as human microphones; they repeat those phrases to that portion of the crowd within earshot, and so on until everyone has heard the address. Someone keeps a list or “takes stack” of members of the crowd who wish to speak, and the procedure is repeated. In this way an all-important consensus is reached regarding the political action to be pursued, a plan which does not involve leaders or a set agenda. The “democracy project” is an exercise in pure democracy, its protagonists “horizontals” rather than “verticals” who favor centralized organization and hierarchy. All this activity aims at conducting a productive General Assembly, which not only settles on a plan of action but, at least as important, encourages other nascent groups of far-flung individuals to organize their own General Assemblies. In this way the action in Zuccotti Park inspired the creation of hundreds of Occupy General Assemblies around the world with tens of thousands of individuals experiencing, many for the first time, life in a true democracy.
The phenomenon of Woodstock could not be more different. Rather than a network of “human microphones” there was a single stage outfitted with enormous speakers. And the crowd of some half a million (or three hundred thousand; nobody seems to know) were not there to conduct person-to-person discussion and debate; they came to hear a select group of musicians – the most famous in the land – perform. The “child of God” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young encountered who “was walking along the road” on his way “to join in a rock and roll band” is not heard from again. Unless that lad was Jimi Hendrix or one of the other superstars, he and his rock and roll band did not make it onto the stage. The music, much of it so memorable that it survives today, mesmerized that enormous crowd because it carried a single, profound message: Diverse as we are in our hundreds of thousands strong, we share a deep, common need for a form of spiritual enlightenment and self-fulfillment that far transcends the established churches, the greedy businessmen, the lying politicians, the hopeless plainness of daily life. “We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon.” You find yourself, not just by aiming for the stars, but by recognizing your inherent identity with them.