<Stephen Colbert offers
some friendly unsolicited advice for Democrats:
Yahoo News>
<i.>
"Public sentiment is everything." Four words, so simple, and so undeniably powerful; few sayings are so succinctly phrased, and yet, ring out, so stark and so unsparing, in their logic. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi often cited these words, originating from President Abraham Lincoln, as an example during Trump 1.0, of how the Resistance should go about its business. Depending on her mood, she sometimes cited the remainder of the quote, which is every bit as relevant: "With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed."
These words bear repeating, especially in light of the backlash that greeted Democratic Minority Leader Charles Schumer's recent announcement that he didn't intend to shut down the government -- which seemed technically doable, since eight of his colleagues would have to help Republicans get the so-called CR (continuing resolution) over the finish line.
With so much bitterness aroused by Trump's relentless power grabs -- coupled with the inhumanity of the CR's contents, as rubber-stamped by the House Republicans -- a little bit of suspense seemed natural. Things are different now, the whispers ran. This time, it's different. Senate Democrats are really gonna show some good old-fashioned gumption, and not get along to go along. Why should they, if the Republicans ignore it, as soon as the ink is dry on the agreement?
For a fleeting moment, it seemed that Schumer and his cohorts might do the unthinkable, and flip the script, just this once. Yet nobody knew how fleeting, it seems, since Democrats voted for that damned CR anyway (Friday, March 14th). Ten Democrats crossed the picket line, so to speak, in helping their Republican cohorts muscle the CR across the finish line.
Those optics were bad enough. But the spectacle looked even more damaging, when Schumer announced the day before (Thursday, March 13th) that his party wouldn't put up a fight. With no resistance forthcoming, everyone could vote as they pleased, which they did -- as he'd apparently planned, all along.
We'll revisit the relevant justifications in due course. Suffice to say, however, that the Democratic base remains utterly dumbfounded, and unforgiving. Those feelings are undoubtedly aggravated by the more disquieting news of book tours that Schumer and his House cohort, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, had already lined up for their respective passion projects (a historical overview of anti-Semitism, and a children's book, The ABC's of Democracy; they won't probably need the remaining letters, if indeed, it disappears).
Because our long-standing democratic experiment may be slipping away before our eyes, yet even amid the steady creep towards autocracy, every author needs to promote his product, right? The mind boggles. Apparently, Jeffries squeezed in a few appearances, while Schumer was forced to scuttle his competing effort -- amid death threats, and pleasant little rejoinders like some of these, posted on his Facebook page:
"DO SOMETHING. STOP FREAKING POSTING AND ACT."
"Find your spine! You didn't even get anything for it. Judas got 30 pieces of silver at least. Disappointed. Just resign. You are the modern day Neville Chamberlain and we needed a Churchill to fight."
"Oh, you are still here? I thought your spine dissolved, and you went with it."
"Since doing something isn't your thing, just pass the torch to someone that will fight for us, instead of making crappy deals, and kowtowing to the right."
"We're waiting for your plan to oppose it."
"You've already made it impossible for young adults to afford homes. Don't forget to blame yourself too."
"You are no match for what our times demand. Step down."
And those were some of the more printable responses! Like the man with the stovepipe hat said: "Public sentiment is everything." How does that work out in practice, though? Let's look at a case study or two.
<Bob Dylan, laying it down
at Clinton Correctional Facility:
Swingin' Pig (YouTube capture)>
<ii.>
I couldn't help but contrast last week's debacle with a different situation from the '70s -- Bob Dylan's song "Hurricane," which raised awareness of the wrongful convictions of middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, and John Artis, for a triple homicide at a Paterson, NJ bar in 1966.
Artis won his freedom on parole, in 1981, while Carter had to wait for a federal judge to overturn his conviction four years later. Prosecutors appealed, only to abandon their efforts in 1988, when the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Carter went free, and promptly moved to Canada, where he became a citizen -- there's a moral in that somewhere -- and spent the rest of his life advocating for other wrongly convicted and imprisoned people. He died, at 76, of prostate cancer in 2014.
Those are the basic facts, which director-producer Joel Gilbert explores brilliantly in his four-hour documentary, "Bob Dylan 1975-1981: Rolling Thunder & Gospel Years." Gilbert opens with the story with how Dylan started crafting the song, after Carter sent him a copy of his book, The Sixteenth Round.
Carter sent the book detailing his unfortunate experiences to Dylan because of the singer's full-throated support of civil rights in the 1960s. And it didn't take long for "Hurricane" to take on a life of its own, in ways that neither man could ever have imagined.
My favorite example focused on the circumstances surrounding Dylan's performance of the song at Trenton State Prison, on December 7, 1975, which proved noteworthy, for several reasons. First, because the venue was a women's prison -- where the state of New Jersey, jittery of the public blowback, had temporarily shunted Carter. Second, because once the word got out, frenzied Dylan fans actually tried to scale the fence, in hopes of sneaking inside, to hear him!
Whoever heard of anyone breaking into a prison? "Only Bob Dylan," I told myself," could inspire such a reaction." It made me laugh my ass off, and will evoke the same response, if you see the film. Third, and most critically, the show enabled Carter to break his isolation, since the guards allowed him to hear the proceedings over a phone extension -- where he briefly addressed the crowd, and provided a powerful reminder of his presence against a legal system that was trying to bury it.
But Dylan was hardly the only high profile supporter, as it happened. Another powerful example came from Muhammad Ali, who'd lost three years of his boxing career over his refusal to be inducted into the US Army. He used an unlikely forum ("The Tonight Show") in September 1973, to wish Carter good luck on his appeal, as he prepared to launch it.
It's also interesting to note that Dylan experienced his share of setbacks, as the film notes. Libel concerns from CBS's lawyers forced Dylan to change some lyrics, and ultimately, rerecord the entire song for his Desire album, due to mic leakage issues that precluded him from simply "punching in" the relevant phrases. A pair of benefits ended as a mixed bag, with the New York outing raising $100,000 -- while a comparable effort in Houston raised nothing, once all the expenses were subtracted.
Yet Dylan never wavered in his belief, as the film explains, that "Hurricane" would become a landmark song. Imagine if he'd approached that task like Schumer and his Democratic cohorts plot strategy: "What if nobody gets this song? What if the cops end up suing me? What if my fans still think he's guilty? What if he loses his appeal, and never gets to leave the slammer?"
Thankfully, he didn't. Without any guarantee of success, Dylan kept his head down, and kept on keepin' on, I imagine that the authorities probably figured the jig was up, the minute they climbed the fence, even if it took another lengthy round of appeals for them to figure out. But it's fair to say, without Dylan's involvement -- and Muhammad Ali, and whoever else lent their name to it -- Carter might have waited a lot longer to win back his freedom, or never regained it at all.
The donkey party could learn a trick or two here, because, remember -- public sentiment is everything.
<John & Yoko, at the "Free John Now" rally, 12/10/71:
Public domain:University of Michigan yearbook,
The Michiganensian, 1972>
<iii.>
The other relevant case study stares at me from under my desk, where the "to read" pile competes fiercely with the "just read" and "reread, yet again" piles. Guitar Army is a featured pick from the last pile, serving as a DIY collection of John Sinclair's columns, essays, press releases, and other writings. If you want a sense of his contributions to the MC5, and the counterculture, Guitar Army offers a great place to start.
Two of my favorite essays are "Poet Is Priest," and "Rainbow Power!", which lay out an eloquent case against the musical/political complexes that John campaigned against, all his life. I don't have to look far for a suitably inspirational quote, such as this one, from the latter essay: "If we live as individuals, or as fragmented little groups, each concerned only with its immediate little interests, we don't have any power at all, and the imperialist vampires and the snakes, rats and pigs who work with them can manipulate us at will."
The most dramatic application of that principle followed the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally," which drew 15,000 people to Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena, on December 10, 1971. Organizers struggled to sell tickets for the event meant to raise awareness of Sinclair's own legal plight -- the 9 1/2- to 10-year sentence he'd drawn, for selling two joints to a female undercover officer -- that is, until John Lennon and Yoko Ono agreed to appear. Overnight, the show changed from an uncertain proposition -- "This is a total bomb you have on your hands," warned the eventual organizer/promoter, Peter Andrews, (see link below) -- to one of the counterculture's last great defining moments, before the militant mellowness and shallow cynicism that defined the '70s spread like a virus, and took hold for good.
By most accounts, the musical lineup made a stronger impression, than the all-star speakers who'd been lined up -- particularly Phil Ochs, who performed a newly-written song dedicated to a certain rogue inhabitant of the White House ("Here's to the land you've torn the heart out of/Richard Nixon, find yourself another country to be part of"), and an unannounced surprise guest, Stevie Wonder, whose set raised the energy levels considerably. Sinclair also made an impromptu appearance, speaking from prison, by phone -- just what made those '70s-era jailers so generous? -- a moment that served to underscore the event's purpose.
John and Yoko rounded out the proceedings with a 15-minute unplugged set, backed by an improvised folk ensemble. Characteristically, the ex-Beatle chose to play four new songs -- soon to grace his next album, Some Time In New York City (1972). They closed with "John Sinclair," his ode to the man of the hour, whose case would now prove impossible to ignore ("They gave him ten for two/What else can Judge Colombo do?").
Indeed, they didn't. The day before the rally, the Michigan Senate passed a bill that drastically reduced penalties for marijuana possession, and then -- a mere three days later -- the Michigan Supreme Court granted bail to Sinclair, as he continued to appeal his case. He eventually won a significant legal victory in 1972, when the US Supreme Court ruled, in an unrelated case, that the government could not use evidence against him gained via illegal wiretapping.
Can you imagine such a ruling in our current climate, whose high court obligingly crafted an infinite immunity right for its Chief Executive -- or, excuse me, "unitary executive" -- out of thin air, as long as he claims to wear his presidential hat? Like all power brokers before him, Chief Justice John Roberts will come to bitterly regret opening that door, even if he prefers to erode our rights at a slower pace than his bomb-throwing, ultra-reactionary cohorts.
In any case, our chief takeaways here are the same as the "Hurricane" situation. The Michigan justices claimed their ruling simply came in response to the Michigan Senate's actions, yet the coincidence is impossible to overlook. Having denied six of Sinclair's previous appeals, they had no incentive to hand him a win at this stage of the game, especially with his jailers in no hurry to let go of their prize trophy.
Before the rally sold out, nobody had any reason to believe that the wider world cared about John Sinclair's case, nor the causes that he espoused. And, until John and Yoko agreed to appear, there was no reason to expect more than a modest turnout that might or might not raise funds for Sinclair's legal bills.
Although Andrews lost his job at the university -- and John and Yoko didn't get to pursue their dreams of a cross-country tour, to rally the newly-minted youth vote against Nixon's re-election -- what matters is the energy that the rally jump-started, a force that allowed the players to get beyond the standard refrain ("We can't") to, "We can, and will, because we must." Collective action works wonders that way.
That certainly proved the big takeaway for John Sinclair, as he writes in "Free At Last," a snapshot of the emotions that followed his release: "Because what we did was to show the dinosaurs that we can't be separated off and apart from each other, that we really are a whole thing which cannot be broken, that we can come together and move together to force changes where the control addicts think they've got us safely in our places, right?"
Indeed, this is the reality that keeps those control freaks awake at night. The day that people finally internalize that idea, and act on it, is the day they become irrelevant. How many Trabants sold after the collapse of East Germany's Communist regime? How many Teslas will continue to sell, as more and more of their owners don't want to go "from zero to 1939, in three seconds?" Draw your own conclusions, because public sentiment is everything.
"I saw ya!"
(Or Fill in the CREEM-style caption
of your choice here.)
<Dylan in a rowdy mood,
Clinton Correctional Facility:
Swingin' Pig, YouTube capture>
<iv.>
So just where do these case studies leave us, and what lessons can we learn from them? Did Chuck Schumer do the right thing, in backing down, as he did? He cited the millions of federal workers -- whose job status zigzags from fired, to re-hired, then sidelined, or fired, yet again -- as one reason. He further suggested that a government shutdown might have accelerated Trump's power grabs, for which his party lacked an endgame. Still other commenters speculated that Schumer might be saving his powder for the next potential flashpoint in June, when Congress will have to act on raising the debt ceiling.
Such technical arguments hold varying degrees of merit, though how effectively they rally the troops is an entirely different matter. Judging by the comments on Schumer's Facebook page, I doubt he's winning over many, or any of them -- because public sentiment is everything. For that matter, so is timing. Which record would you rather buy? "Free John Now," or "Free John Later?" I rest my case.
The Hurricane Carter and John Sinclair cases tell us something else. The responses they evoked had nothing to do with focus groups and pressers, or appearances on Sunday shows that fewer and fewer of us bother to watch anymore. They had nothing to do with waiting for some higher court to take pity, and issue another restraining order -- more legal catnip, perhaps, for Trump and his minions to ignore, as they've begun publicly suggesting, with increasingly.
Nor did they draw their inspiration from some far-off event -- a lawsuit here, a midterm election there -- that might finally make our lives bearable again, and restore some type of common decency. What's striking, though, is how many refuse to learn these lessons, as Columbia University has shown, in buckling to a laundry list of Trump demands (see link below). Neither did the Paul Weiss legal firm, in agreeing donate $40 million worth of legal work for Trump's causes.
Such arrangements, by any other name, should called for what they are: protection money. The trouble with them is that the price of protection always goes up, up, and out of sight, as the bully returns, bearing a list of new demands, leaving him free to leisurely pick off his opponents, one by one.
However, if the Democrats want to avoid this grisly fate, they might do well to ponder what Kamala Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, observed, during an alternative town hall that he hosted in Iowa: "“There's a responsibility in this time of chaos where elected officials need to hear what people are irritated about. And I would argue that Democratic officials should hear the primal scream that's coming from America, (which) is, ‘Do something, dammit! This is wrong!’”
Which means, in other words, to start from the beginning. Get out of that permanent defensive crouch, and fan out across America, making the case that Republicans don't want their constituents to hear -- that we exist solely to toil for their billionaire donor buddies, just as our descendants did a century or so ago, when inequities existed at levels that would stagger the modern imagination.
The AOC/Bernie Sanders speaking tour, coupled with the handful of Democrats crashing Republican districts, is a great start -- but they need many, many more of their cohorts to join them, to make a major impression. The textbook example is the Democrats' response to Trump's joint address, whether you talk about their tiny signs, the womens' pink outfits, or the failure of Al Green's colleagues to follow after he got ejected, while the rest looked on, like grumpy kids enduring their detention. It was all over the place. And looked like it.
Let's lock the consulting class in the closets that they so richly deserve, and stop fixating so obsessively on playing percentages -- which move will succeed, more than 50% of the time, or won't? If Hurricane Carter or John Sinclair had started that way, their respective fights for freedom would have never gotten off the ground! If history teaches us anything, it's that the cause of justice never unfolds like some carefully calibrated game, at the measured pace of a championship chess match. It's quite the opposite, in fact.
Let's ditch the convoluted technical arguments, and de-emphasize all that elaborate, PBS-style jargon that sends voters off to an early bed, and finally start tapping into that primal scream, as Bob Dylan and John Sinclair did so effectively, a generation ago. And maybe then, there might still be a democracy left to save. Because public sentiment is everything. --The Reckoner
Links To Go (Learn A Lesson From The Past):
