The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (8 page)

That rattlesnake in the mailbox—is that what the 1960s had become? What had begun as one of a host of idealistic and innovative projects during the previous era had gone off the deep end. Nature, which was supposed to be the great touchstone ideal, had been turned into a particularly malicious weapon against a threat to the absolutist power of this tiny kingdom. Authoritarian leaders and strange cults proliferated. “Only the dregs of the counterculture movement—the hangers-on, the junkies, the derelicts, the freaks, and the weirdos—were anywhere in evidence,” Patty Hearst said of Berkeley in the early 1970s, when she was a college student there, just before she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The violent extremism and conspiracy theories that have been the property of the American right since the 1990s belonged to the left in that long-ago era.

Mark Rudd, in his memoir of being a member of the Weathermen and then a fugitive from 1970 to 1977, writes,

Seeking to emulate the revolutionaries we admired in Cuba, China, and especially Vietnam, we convinced ourselves that violence would be successful in this country. We saw the black-power movement, led by the Panthers, already fighting a revolutionary war from within the United States. In our heroic fantasy, eventually the military would disintegrate internally and the revolutionary army—led by us, of course—would be built from its defectors. But as I postured and gave speeches on the necessity for violence, I was terrified.

Synanon had the Game; the Weathermen adapted the Chinese Communist criticism/self-criticism model into collective attacks on individuals for being bourgeois or counterrevolutionary or a host of other sins: it was revolution as sibling rivalry and peer pressure. The Peoples Temple also included public interrogations and confessions that often ended, by the mid-1970s, with beatings and humiliation. Some of the Weather Underground supported the Symbionese Liberation Army; Rudd considered the SLA “true terrorists without any limits or any sense. They claimed they were acting for the liberation of black people, but actions such as the assassination of Marcus Foster, the first black Oakland school superintendent, or their spraying with bullets a bank lobby filled with customers could only be interpreted as terroristic.” These small groups were to real revolutions what air guitar is to music; they imitated some of the form and never got near the content. They had weapons, titles, rhetoric, and delusions, but not much else.

When the SLA kidnapped newspaper heiress Hearst, she was first of all an audience for their delusions of grandiosity—the flipside of paranoia. Donald DeFreeze, aka “General Field Marshal Cinque Mtume,” the ex-convict African-American leader of the cult, described to his captive a powerful nationwide army he headed. It was only months later that Hearst was told that the SLA was made up merely of the handful of delusionaries camped out with her in the same small fetid apartment. The SLA’s hostage gave them colossal media coverage, and they gloried in it. “I was their passport to fame and popularity,” Hearst noted in her memoir.

“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people”
was the tagline in the SLA’s communiqués. The SLA used a communal toothbrush, because private property was bourgeois. While Hearst lived blindfolded in a closet, they fed her on mung beans and rice—the food of the poor, she was told—and peppermint tea, which was most certainly the drink of hippies. Once she joined, she was told that to meet each others’ sexual needs was “comradely,” and so a bunch of young women who thought of themselves as feminist made themselves available on demand to the men in the group. Hearst didn’t get much sympathy afterward.

On the A side of her first recording in 1974, underwritten by Robert Mapplethorpe’s patron/lover Sam Wagstaff, protopunk New Yorker Patti Smith remade the old standard “Hey Joe”—the one that goes “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand.” In a spoken-word piece tagged on, she said, “Patty Hearst, you’re standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread I was wondering will you get it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women
.
”

THE ARC OF JUSTICE

Even failure has interesting consequences. The first ransom demand the SLA had made was that the Hearsts feed the poor. Their original demands would have cost $400 million, which was out of reach, even for a major newspaper magnate. The Black Panthers—despised by the SLA in that golden age of infighting—had run little-remembered, extremely effective programs to feed Oakland kids for a few years. The food program set up by the coerced Randolph Hearst was run out of the old Del Monte building in China Basin, in San Francisco’s industrial east.

Calvin Welch, who had already been a housing activist in San Francisco for a long time, writes of the far-reaching consequences of that program. Hearst’s father tried just dumping groceries: “It was a disorganized disaster. Scores of people were injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks as huge crowds of people unexpectedly showed up for the food. The size of the crowds shocked the media and so upset Gov. Ronald Reagan that he stated, ‘It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.’”

The SLA responded by demanding that food distribution be managed
by a community organization named the Western Addition Project Area Committee. WAPAC had ties both to Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple and to the Black Liberation Army. According to one biographer of Jones, one of the BLA/Peoples Temple leaders involved in WAPAC had helped torture to death a member of the Panthers—which is to say that it was all tangled up in the mess that was the 1970s. Nevertheless, the Western Addition group was heading back into useful community politics. The sheer modesty and practicality of WAPAC’s endeavors forms an instructive contrast with the SLA. The course of action didn’t lead to revolution as it was imagined then, but it did lay the groundwork for decades of radical change.

First they handed out more than 100,000 bags of groceries at sixteen locations in four Bay Area counties. The program ran efficiently, and the Community Coalition morphed into the Coalition to Register 100,000 Voters, and those voters elected progressive Mayor George Moscone and helped return the city to district elections (whereby neighborhoods would elect their own representatives rather than vote in citywide races for supervisors; this was the shift that made Harvey Milk’s 1977 victory possible.) Welch writes of this organizing coalition:

Within two years, some had begun the creation of community-based nonprofit housing development corporations, building affordable housing for many of the people in those long lines seeking free food. Others went on to transform the urban environmental movement in San Francisco, redirecting it toward limiting high-rise development and demanding developer payments for child care and public transit. The “neighborhood movement” that dominated the political agenda of San Francisco through the early 1990s was born during those two insane months in 1974.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King had said in 1963, and what began as the madness of the SLA ended with the civil, public, inclusive campaign of Harvey Milk (who was opposed by some in the Castro District as a compromiser, as one who would turn the queer sexual revolution into mere reform). Milk was both a visionary and a moderate, one who defended small businesses and cared about city policy, and who saw that what seemed like an outrageous
agenda—the acceptance of gays and lesbians within the mainstream—would open the door for their ordinariness. The tape he made to be played in case of his assassination was the opposite of paranoid: it was practical, naming his preferred successors, asking that there be no violence, and ending with “You gotta give ’em hope.”

NO MORE HEROES

A few other things that mattered began the year Milk was elected. The Abalone Alliance, whose name was inspired by New England’s antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, began protesting Diablo Canyon Power Plant on the central California coast. At the August 7, 1977, demonstration against the poorly designed nuclear reactor, 1,500 people showed up; a year later 5,000 people showed up. By 1981, there was a large and effective antinuclear movement—focused then on the dangers of nuclear power (confirmed by another 1970s disaster, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near-meltdown in 1979).

This movement was organized by anarchist means—without hierarchy or authority—with consensus-based decision-making. Radicals were learning to self-govern without charismatic leaders or coercion, in a shift initiated in large part by feminists. Anarchy became the politics of punk, and punk became the gateway through which a generation decided to embrace anarchism. Abalone Alliance and the activism that came after was committed to nonviolence and worked openly, which undid much of the paranoia of the 1970s. This non-authoritarian and largely nonviolent means of organizing is still central to radical movements everywhere—including Britain, Eastern Europe, India, and Argentina—that have done much to change the world in the last few decades, picking up from the 1960s civil rights movement, the half of that decade that actually worked well.

Those smitten with the conventional notion of revolution had hung onto the notion of vanguards. They believed in the idea that the few would lead the many; thus a lot of college students without a clue of how to get along with the proletariat fantasized that they would bring it into armed revolt. The idea of vanguards—or avant-gardes—had been important in the art world too. A military term presuming linear narrative,
the phrase suggests humanity as an army of sorts that someone was leading forward.

If the 1970s accomplished anything, it was the realization that we actually wanted to go in a lot of different directions, not one. We never had been anything as neatly assembled and homogenized as an army, and we shouldn’t trust leaders. This meant, for art and for revolution, no more avant-gardes, though there might be prophetic and influential elements in both culture and politics. In 1977, the Stranglers released what might be the most anthemic of punk songs, “No More Heroes.” Heroes were leaders; leaders begot followers; following was demonstrated to be literally fatal and otherwise troublesome in that era in which so many followed their leaders down strange and malevolent paths.

To go to or stay in California had always meant to choose to be outside the mainstream, the orthodoxy, to choose other influences and a less Eurocentric point of view. This could mean cults, but it more often meant a little useful distance, literally and otherwise, from the status quo at the center of cultural power. You were further from the culture police—that’s why a painter like David Park could drive all his abstract expressionist paintings to the dump in 1949 and begin to paint in the style that would be called Bay Area Figurative. Artists such as Bruce Conner and Jess made a conscious choice to stay outside the market and the mainstream by settling in California and abandoning the reigning aesthetics.

In the 1970s, the art world would go “pluralist,” which means only that New York abandoned its dominant narrative of an avant-garde and admitted to the variety of artists and directions that had always been there. While race was talked about by the New York–based national media as though it were a black/white division well into the 1990s, Californians had, since the Gold Rush, inhabited a region where indigenous, Asian, and Latino presences mattered. To be in California was to braid together various possibilities and to unravel the main thread. Further away from Europe and the notion of an elite white lineage, those under the big black sun of the Golden State were closer to all sorts of fecund things—Asian, Latin, and indigenous traditions; esoteric subcultures and the burgeoning countercultures of Buddhists, bikers, communes, foodies, druggies, Diggers,
and more—as well as to the vastness of deserts and mountains, the untamed landscape.

More of what began as 1960s revolution became part of everyday life. Communes mostly failed, but organic farming, food co-ops, and attention to food as politics, health, and pleasure spread. Arenas like health care were democratized (a comment that only makes sense to those who know that before feminists took on the medical establishment in the 1970s, doctors were autocratic figures who made decisions for you, including whether you should know your diagnosis and prognosis). Queer people advanced astonishingly in both legal standing and cultural acceptance. The conservative movement has made its own inroads, particularly in the economic organization of the country, but the genies of reproductive rights, women’s rights, queer rights, and the rights of people of color are not going back into any bottle. The SLA’s food program failed; Milk was assassinated; many visible projects failed; many subterranean forces moved onward; everything changed. In the 1970s, many things blew up spectacularly (and sometimes literally), but a lot of seeds were quietly planted.

“You can go your own way,” sang L.A.-based British émigré band Fleetwood Mac in 1977, the year that the Avengers sang an ironic “We Are the One.” Music was unraveling into several strands that year when hip-hop was being born in the Bronx. In his 1977 hit “Disco Heat,” San Francisco queer black disco king Sylvester sang, “Dancing’s total freedom / Be yourself and choose your feeling.” The 1970s were as generative as they were terrible.

2010

CONCRETE IN PARADISE

Some Pictures of Coastal California

Et in Arcadia Ego
, says the famous inscription on the tomb in Nicolas Poussin’s paintings of that title. Even in Paradise there am I. He twice painted a group of shepherds and a woman who looks like a goddess standing around a tomb in a pastoral setting, as though he were wrestling with the meanings himself. The phrase was sometimes thought to be spoken by death itself: even in Arcadia death is present. Other interpretations suggest that it is instead spoken by the dead shepherd whose tomb is being inspected. Whether the text refers to death itself or to one dead friend, the tomb is two kinds of intrusion into the landscape.