VISTA Trains Me

     In 1967 I received my B.A. with the ordinary Angst concerning the step to follow. My distaste for capitalism eliminated most career options at the outset even if anyone might actually care to employ an English major with minors in German and Ancient Greek. To complicate matters, graduation meant I would lose the student exemption that had held the draft at bay for four years.
     My desire to avoid money and career coalesced with my wish to dodge the draft and with the government’s interest in coopting the radical spirit of the young. Foreign as the inclination to work for subsistence may seem to the present generation, I was far from alone at the time. My social conscience combined with more than a dash of infatuation with the Other, and I joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, created in 1965, later to change to a division of AmeriCorps and only recently all but eliminated. The protection from Selective Service was never guaranteed, and, in fact, one of my cohort was drafted a few months later and went promptly underground.
     Though another may be able to characterize such service as part of a glorious continuum of human betterment stretching from early abolitionists and labor organizers through the SDS ERAP projects and Barack Obama’s days with the Developing Communities Project in Chicago, I cannot.
     I had specified a preference for work on an Indian reservation, but I was assigned to inner-city youth. The six weeks training period began with classes but quickly turned into a month-long internship. I was to work with Hull House, the historic settlement house in Chicago. At this time Hull House was conducting a pilot program for Job Corps in their rural work camp.
     The concept of Job Corps from the start had been that taking individuals out of their own neighborhoods and placing them in a new environment might allow them to develop new habits and values. For years Hull House had operated a summer camp for poor city kids called Bowen Country Club near Waukegan which had been donated by the banker, manufacturer, and Hull House chair Joseph Bowen in the ‘30s. This had since been sold and another property purchased in East Troy, Wisconsin, a short distance across the border from Illinois. I don’t know whether some sociologist had suggested the change, but the plan at Hull House’s camp was to bring groups of gang youth en masse so that people’s friends could accompany them to ease the transition. They were to receive a low hourly wage during the week, be paid on Friday and returned to Chicago for the weekend where the administrators hoped they would seem successful with their earnings and attract more youth to give up the gang life and work for a living.
     Thus I came to know a few dozen members of the Vice Lords. Referring to the north Lawndale neighborhood where the group had originated they would call out “K-town -- from hell we came to claim our fame – mighty, mighty Vice Lords.” Their leader was Looney, a physically unimposing young guy with a jaunty little fedora on the side of his shaved head. Looney was able to direct his troops by means of oblique and imaginative language. When rendering an opinion or a mandate, he seemed only slightly more explicit than the Delphic oracle. “Weeell,” he would slowly begin, “I knew a lady once, lived about 29th and Federal, and this little dog would bark at her ass every day and she never said a word and one day that little shit-ass dog don’t bark and don’t nobody know where it is and when they asked her, she said, ‘Why you asking me?’ And the son-of-a bitch never bothered her again.” In his crew were Hawk, Cowboy (also called Mossie), Three-Corners (aka Wolfman), Spooky, Peyton, Butch, Midnight (or Captain Midnight), and Peanuts. These are the people with whom I worked and lived. The other main faction was a group of Latin Kings who called each other names like Chico, Flaco, and Bongo.
     The blacks were close enough to migration from the South for the urban/rural contrast to be a status distinction (as it is in line from a Willie Dixon song that Bo Diddley made a hit: “I may look like a farmer, but I’m a lover.”). They were always calling out, “You dumb-ass Mississippi-bred nigger,” “Hey, black-ass country-bred boy.” They had an elaborate set of literary conventions and tropes. One might say “You my man – die for you – killed three panthers, a lion, and a mountain goat.” I also heard the ironic inversion of this figure: “I killed three roaches, a fly, and a gnat for you, my man.”

     I had arrived at the work camp with two VISTA comrades, though the other two were gone after three days. The first was a very nice fellow, a bit callow perhaps, who had just dropped out of training as a Jesuit. As most of us were solidly middle class, during our lectures in preparation for service, we had been instructed about the nature of the poor and the under-class. One speaker had enlarged upon class distinctions among blacks based on income, hair, skin tone, and the like, linking this invidious system of values to the distinction during slavery days between house niggers and field niggers. On our second day in the camp, the first day of contact with “clients,” my colleague found himself washing dishes next to a proud Vice Lord. Probably something at a loss (he wasn’t particularly at ease even in bourgeois company), he seems to have recalled his lesson and made some comment about house and field niggers. Doubtless his interlocutor heard only the epithet and immediately knocked him to the floor with a single punch. Though he shortly came round, he departed that evening.
     I had suspected my second colleague might be a government agent. He introduced himself as a Berkeleyite, active in the Movement, and wore political buttons as though to reinforce the claim. I had already as an undergraduate known a few infiltrators and agents provocateurs, and I thought this fellow seemed quite suspicious. I must have been wrong this time, though, since, on the evening of our very first day in camp, while socializing, he offered some marijuana to our young charges. Though he may have imagined this would help him to establish rapport as a cool white guy, he was in fact immediately given up when one of his new friends was busted in the city that weekend. “My social worker gave it to me!” VISTA quenched the legal consequences, but he, too, vanished from the program. Though I cannot claim to have accomplished much, I at least had enough sense to avoid such catastrophes.
     Some of the urban youth were disturbed by the darkness and silence of the countryside. A few were clearly reluctant to stray from the lighted areas after dark. Before long the belief in a malevolent monster called Grippo began to emerge. Grippo lurked in the woods, awaiting an opportunity to rush in on horseback and seize some careless human. Some of his characteristics, I feel sure, derived from Southern stories of violent night riders. I can’t say whether some of the more clever guys made this up intentionally to mock the credulous, but I think it is fair to say that the belief spread as time went on. There is no doubt, though that the forest ogre was associated with a real-life figure. My time at the Work Camp coincided with the civil rights demonstration led by Fr. James Groppi in Milwaukee. Rather like Martin Luther King’s open housing campaign in Chicago the year before, Fr. Groppi dramatized Northern segregation in a series of militant marches. The Vice Lords, however, viewing news footage of the priest leading mostly black crowds into hostile neighborhoods, did not seem to view him as a friend. Even to those unsure of exactly what his con was, his motives seemed dark. I heard comments that implied that he was the enemy of blacks, that he was taking advantage of the people with whom he marched. Somehow this suspicion coalesced into a misprision and he achieved the status of a myth. Talk of Grippo increased.
     The management was concerned about our image in the small town nearby. Though the camp did patronize local stores and thus curry favor with some merchants, the country folk virtually never saw the urban youth unless they were driven to town for a medical appointment. Several were being treated for gonorrhea, and our administrator thought this might reflect badly on the operation. As many of the gang members were interested in music, he hit upon the expedient of inviting the local village’s big shots to a talent show showcasing their abilities. He could begin with an elaborate dinner to show off the skills of the kitchen staff. He wanted an open bar – not just wine and beer, but all sorts of spirits -- to ensure the jollity of the locals. He even purchased elaborate floral displays from a local shop to impress the guests. When the florist arrived, he caused considerable hilarity when he turned out to be an effeminate guy who was clearly interested in the young campers. Not surprisingly, a good share of the liquor was diverted the instant it arrived. By the time dinner was prepared, we staff members assigned to the bar were taking our own share as well. In spite of various snafus, we made it through dessert. Unfortunately, by this time, at least half the acts were in no condition to take the stage. Those that did perform made, for the most part, a sorry spectacle. And then, suddenly, a Latin King who had not long before suffered a femur-shattering gunshot wound and walked with an artificial leg, came forward out of turn with some urgent message which he never managed to deliver since, as soon as he had gained the stage, he tripped and stumbled and lost his prosthetic while announcing something in Spanish that he considered very important.
     The training concluded, and I made it to a permanent assignment in Minneapolis. I heard that the director was fired shortly after I moved on. If the mingling of middle-class and underclass was to change society, I could not see it from my perspective. What had been learned during my training was, I am afraid, little to the credit of any of those involved.

Hippie

     Even now, at the head of the page, I find the word most annoying. Though I went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, though for some months I actually lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (in an apartment, though I would not be surprised to meet someone who lived in the actual intersection), though I sport beads and a Paisley vest handmade by my lover in my first passport picture, though I remain profoundly influenced by ideas of “hip,” I cannot stand that diminutive term. (The word passed into common usage after Herb Caen began using it in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen had also invented the equally obnoxious and derisive “beatnik.”)
     Not that “hippie” has no place. In my own memory, before I saw the word in print, I heard it used to describe young teens who aspired to be hip and were just becoming acquainted with the scene, not so different from the sort of person who might have been labeled a “teenybopper” in the context of musical taste. As such the word had a useful niche, but failed to describe the counter-culture in general. Despite my distaste for “hippie,” I had no good alternative. In the sixties “hip” served for some uses, though sounding slightly broad and old-fashioned. I do recall both both “freak” and “head” (referring, naturally, to “pothead”) having some currency, but neither seems really adequate.
     Born in 1946, I grew up reading the Beats, attending Paul Carroll’s poetry series at Second City, seeking out Old Leftists, and learning about Dada. In university I participated in the literary magazine and attended performance events and shows staged by friends. In spite of loose talk about “the sixties,” during my senior year at an institution with tens of thousands of students, I felt I knew the local counterculture: far-out intellectuals, dopers, artists, radicals, anarchists, yogis, sandal-makers, and singers. Virtually everything innovative seemed linked to this crowd. Forward-thinking professors and faculty artists made alliances with the hip youth. Just as Kenneth Kenniston’s studies indicated that, for the most part, student protesters were the very same who had been at the top of their high school classes, many of those participating in middle and late 60s youth culture struck me as unusually thoughtful and productive. Why, even LSD trips were assimilated only through hours of analysis based in part on Scientific American articles and anthropology studies seen in the light of esoteric Buddhism. I was taken aback just a few years later when I heard of people dropping acid to go to a concert or party.
     Thinking I knew the scene in my major Midwestern university, I was surprised and I believe I recoiled when in the spring of 1967, a crew of slightly younger celebrants tripped across the university quadrangle, blowing soap bubbles in celebration of Buddha’s birthday.
     These new folks seemed to be violating canons of cool, while on the national scene, it was obvious that Peter Max was instantly kitsch, Tim Leary at best an entertaining con man, and, late in the day, cooptation seemed fully accomplished when Hair premiered, claiming to be a “tribal, love-rock musical.” Its tunes can now be heard in elevators while the really radical grass-roots theater has vanished to limbo along with underground movies. In 1967 when I made it to the Haight, the kids who liked rock and roll and smoking pot, however genial, had little in common with the people I had known at college who preferred electronic music, Tibetan folksong, or, at any rate, down and dirty blues. Only a few months later the Diggers, who ought to have known, were to proclaim the death of hippie on Haight Street.
     Still, it certainly seemed as though the movement, however vaguely defined, had something to say about every area of life: not merely art and politics, but also interpersonal relations, cuisine, and living room design. How many apartments did I enter with a huge cable spool for coffee table, beaded curtains, and Indian bedspreads? I remember a slightly older poet’s reminiscences of San Francisco only a few years before I (and a horde of my cohort) hit town. He described how he and his friends would often get stoned and eat “phony-burgers,” made with supermarket hamburger buns, ketchup, onions, mustard, pickles, everything but the meat. A few years later no one would have dreamed of eating Wonder buns; every kitchen held brown rice and vegetables.
     I won’t aim here to define hip beyond a few sketchy outlines. Hip is a form of twentieth century Romanticism, celebrating the unconscious, the natural, the ecstatic while striking a counter-cultural pose with bohemian habits and left politics. Hip participates in the double vision DuBois analyzed in African-Americans, also evident in kitsch, camp, and other modern forms of irony. Susan Sontag located the essence of camp in her 1964 essay as occurring in the gap “between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice,” in other words, between signifier and signified.
     Authentic hipness requires the pose at least of a vision sharper and more piercing than others’. That’s what makes it so annoyingly elitist. One can always take irony around yet another turn. In contrast to this off-putting and esoteric claim, hippie was accessible to all, its wardrobe available not in military surplus or Salvation Army stores, each individual his own invention, but in standardized sets at Sears.

Why I am a Socialist

     To call oneself a socialist seems eccentric in twenty-first century America, and indeed, it is even these days somewhat odder in the world as a whole (though left advocacy remains much more mainstream everywhere else, rich countries and poor alike). When I was young, history’s trend seemed to many unmistakable. Socialist (or anarchist) politics were virtually universal among my circle of friends, and armed Third World insurgents were gaining ground everywhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Here I mean, not to recall or analyze those days, but to set out, in simple, non-poetic terms, as a citizen, some part of the case for socialism.
     Far more difficult, I think, would be to defend the organization of all social production to return private profits to a few. If we want automobiles, surely the goal should be to produce the cheapest, most efficient, least polluting models possible. The recent surge of SUV production, finally brought low by gasoline prices, illustrates how the American system cultivates the opposite. Vehicles that pollute badly (with the looser regulation of “trucks”), use fuel profligately, and threaten the safety of smaller cars became America’s darlings (after appropriate advertising doses). I recall the damning analysis, albeit now out-of-date, of Baran and Sweezy demonstrating that over ninety percent of the price of an automobile under capitalism went to costs other than necessary design and production: advertising, dealers’ commissions (and with many times more dealerships than are needed), nonfunctional design changes (to indicate to the observer that the car is this year’s model and not last year’s), on and on. Given a choice, who would choose to be so wasteful?
     The goal, after all, of capitalism is to maximize not value but profit. That can only mean charging more or giving the customer less. People are rewarded within the corporate system for figuring out ways to do these two things in spite of the fact that both are directly opposed to the interests of most of us.
     Another particularly egregious (and typical) product of capitalism is the American breakfast cereal, a food ironically descended from “health” foods of the nineteenth century (as soda is descended from old nostrums). In the cereal business, companies compete to see who could offer customers the least. Some basic grain is refined until it is little more than pure starch, then given odd and inappropriate forms, puffed up to as large a shape as possible, and coated with sugar. These strategies are reinforced by the bright advertising which helps to develop our children into consumers, so delighted are they to see a food made specifically for the lowest common denominator of kids’ taste and decked out in such alluring packaging, almost as seductive as television. Should the box’s appeal be insufficient still, the manufacturer puts a toy inside. It is clear that the cereal is not what is sold; some self-image dependent on products is what the purchaser receives. The buyer in search of breakfast cereal should be able to select from foods, not from cartoon characters.
     We are, of course, indulgent of our children; the tragedy is that the same system works equally well for consumption-oriented adults. The Hummer, whose demise is noted is today’s paper, is a caricature, but of an everyday reality. Cars and cereals are only dramatic examples of what is true of all production under capitalism. The profit motive creates directly opposing interests between producers and consumers who are forced to ignore their genuine shared interest in high quality goods at a low price. And demand is driven by the devious psychology of advertising, teaching us that our identities, our self-worth are based on consumerism, in spite of the fact that pursuit of merchandise (as the Dalai Lama and the Rolling Stones can agree) brings no satisfaction.
     In terms of labor and the environment, the contrast is clear: capitalist employers will try to pay as little as possible and pollute as much as possible because both practices increase profit. Under socialism, the worker would receive as much reward as possible and the earth would be protected, because the economy would be managed for everyone’s benefit instead of for a few fat cats.
     Right-wing apologists may point to the sad examples of Soviet repression, Maoist fanaticism, and Khmer Rouge genocide, but the examples are not to the point. As one ought to have learned by high school, capitalism and socialism are economic systems defined by ownership of the means of production; tyranny and democracy are political systems describing who makes social decisions. There is no linkage. If despots condemn an economic system, there have been far more right-wing dictators than left, but the examples of Hitler, Pinochet, or Syngman Rhee are no more relevant than those of Stalin, Castro, or Mao Zedong.
     In fact, history unequivocally teaches the liberating potential of the progressive movement. No social step forward has ever come at the urging of business or of conservatives. On the contrary, people once perceived as wild radicals have again and again proved to be the sanest citizens. Even Lincoln thought that abolitionists were extremists, though who today would support slavery? The Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers fought fiercely to retain child labor to the very end, while an advocate for children such as Scott Nearing was fired as a dangerous radical for opposing it. Would women ever have received the right to vote were it not for their agitation, demonstrations, hunger strikes, picketing the White House? Labor unions had to struggle against violent opposition (including state violence from police, national guard, the army, and hired thugs) before they could end starvation wages, twelve hour days, and deadly dangers in the workplace. Socialist activists were, in fact, the spearhead of CIO organizing which resulted in the great American middle class’s enjoyment of private homes and health insurance. Unfortunately, the suburbanites have forgotten the historical process that brought them their comfort.
     Such profound social benefits of left-wing agitation should be no surprise since its goal is to raise the living conditions of all people. When individuals seek only to enrich themselves, in fact, they are all but certain to harm others. How could it be otherwise? Goods are already socially produced – it must have taken the collective effort of thousands to produce the computer at which I sit – it is manifestly absurd for a few to be allowed to hoard profits from the sale of products actually made by others.
     In my opinion the tendency of homo sapiens to share, to take care of the helpless, and to cooperate in projects for the common good is as significant a factor in the species’ success as opposable thumbs or swollen prefrontal lobes. In American culture we have been led to believe that people are by nature obsessed with wealth and ego. The fact is that such inevitably frustrating goals are culturally constructed. In the end, the human mind is moved by love and aggression – both will always exist in the psyche and in life, but the question is on which to put your chips for a better future. Surely only one answer is possible. I not only don’t hesitate myself; I honestly have difficulty understanding how anyone could consciously prefer the alternative.

March in Cicero

     By the summer of 1966 many Americans, moved by the moral clarity of the photos in Life magazine, were sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement’s struggle for voting rights and against Jim Crow. But that year Martin Luther King came north, and, with a grand rally in Chicago’s Soldiers Field, launched a series of open housing marches that provoked a fierce racist reaction, forcing many to recognize that the legacy of slavery was not peculiar to the South.
     At the same time, the movement was itself evolving. Earlier that year in Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) raised the cry of Black Power. That same summer he sent his white progressive allies out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and into their own communities, and the righteous old liberal-radical-religious coalition against racism was shaken.
     After marchers were attacked on Chicago’s west and southwest sides, King decided not to venture into Cicero, where a black man had been killed when he stopped to make a telephone call. Bob Lucas, the local leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (at that time still a genuine civil rights organization) led the march. The National Guard was called out to protect the small group of demonstrators.
     The marchers included black ministers and long-time activists singing “Eyes on the Prize,” but there were also restless members of Chicago’s powerful youth gangs, as well as at least two college students from an affluent, all-white suburb. The roar of the mob of counterdemonstrators was audible long before we passed under the rail line that marks the city’s western boundary. As soon as we emerged in Cicero we saw the twisted faces of the white working-class youth screaming insults. The minuscule band of cranks in the local branch of the American Nazi Party had seized their opportunity and had distributed racist posters with huge swastikas and slogans like White Power. Some of the Cicero residents folded the posters to obscure the Nazi symbol their fathers had fought to defeat in WWII, but others waved it unabashed.
     The National Guard looked frightened (and the students at South Carolina State and Kent State were to learn how dangerous a frightened Guardsman or cop with a gun can be). They were doing their best to hold the racists back under a barrage of rocks and firecrackers from the tops of buildings and the rear of the crowd. The more volatile marchers surged toward the sidelines, and macho challenges and obscene taunts went both ways.
     It would be difficult to claim that anything was settled that day, but history moved, perhaps, a bit of a step forward. We knew that civil rights had come north, and that the Black Liberation Movement was being born. And American racism was further unmasked: in Cicero it was potent enough that some people waved fascist emblems while others were mobilized, educated, and radicalized. The struggle continues.