Tag: vietnam war

By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, censorship, Customer Service as Marketing, Democracy, Environment, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“The Post” lives up to the hype. It takes a very cerebral story and builds it into high drama, spurred by strong performances from Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham) and Tom Hanks (editor Ben Bradlee).Trailers for "The Post are widely available

The overall message, about the power of the free press, and the need for the press to defend its Fist Amendment freedom, despite the whims of a paranoid and dictatorial president (Nixon, in this case—a different example today).

It tracks Daniel Ellsberg’s smuggling out massive quantities of classified documents from the Rand Corporation, where he worked, and releasing them first to the New York Times, and then to the Washington Post. The movie also dramatizes the frenetic effort throughout the newsroom to absorb the information and turn it into stories on very tight deadlines, not even knowing if the presses would run, while the Times suffered under the first pre-publication censorship of journalism in the history of the United States. Known as “The Pentagon Papers,” these documents proved that US high officials knew by the early 1960s that the war was unwinnable, and that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all lied to the American people about it.

And it covers the legal battle: the government’s attempt to shut them down and the papers going all the way to the Supreme Court to secure their rights. The timing of these events happened to threaten The Post’s long-awaited IPO, which adds to the drama and the sense of what’s at stake for Graham, Bradlee, and their journalists.

BTW, just as the movie gives lessons on how to survive a paranoid, media-hating president facing serious doubts about his honesty, the Nixon link above focuses on some very interesting parallels between his presidency and that of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. However, let’s remember the differences. Nixon had a very impressive record on the environment—I describe him as the president with America’s second-most environmentalist track record (behind Obama but ahead of both Jimmy Carter and Teddy Roosevelt) also, despite the Vietnam war, did much to break down the barriers between the US and both the Soviet Union and China.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are big protests a waste of time unless they’re part of an overall strategic plan? Nonviolent social change theorist George Lakey and I have been discussing this.

After my February post about Lakey’s idea that DT is creating enormous opportunities for social change workers, I got an interesting response from George (which I only just saw, thanks to a quirk in the WordPress interface). Please go read the original post and his response.

I believe my settings close comments after two weeks, and I couldn’t find a way to turn that off temporarily for this one post). So just to make sure there’s a way to keep the dialogue going, I’m posting my response here, as a new post, starting just below:

Marching at the Women's March on Washington with my wife and children
Marching at the Women’s March on Washington with my wife and children (from left: son-in-law Bobby, daughter Alana, wife Dina, me, son Rafael)

I agree with most of what you’d laid out here, George and certainly the key kernel that mass action makes the most sense as part of a well-thought-out and multidimensional campaign. And yet, I’m more optimistic than you about the power of a one-off mass action to build momentum for change. It has to be sustained, of course—but it can play a key role.

  • My own involvement with the Movement began because I attended a mass rally about Vietnam, at age 12 (1969). One of the speakers said something that was life-changing for me. But it was not until I was in high school that I began to realize that the real work of social change happened in the meetings to plan those marches, more than the marches themselves—and to participate as other than a drone showing up to other people’s events.
  • The reason all those no-nuke Alliances sprang up was because of what we did at Seabrook, a mass action.We inspired many other groups around the country to borrow our strategy, process, tactics, and even nomenclature, to organize affinity groups as we did, to educate about the issues around nuclear power and the safe-energy alternatives, and to be trained in nonviolent civil disobedience. And the reason we heard about Three Mile Island in the news two years later when we hadn’t heard about the earlier accidents at Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, and elsewhere was because of this national/international mass movement that started at Seabrook. It was having thousands at the site and 1414 arrested that pushed the issue into America’s consciousness. The first two Seabrook occupations almost a year earlier, much tinier, had almost no impact outside the local area.
  • Occupy could have been much stronger with leadership and goals, I agree. But still the movement had a great deal of impact. Like Clam, some of its process innovations have become part of the Movement. You talk about those turned off by Occupy, but what I saw was a generation of young people who moved from inaction, maybe even apathy, to deep, personal, and highly inconvenient action. They made sacrifices for social change. And I think a lot of them moved into actual organizing after the camps closed.
  • The recent Women’s March had very little strategy behind it but sparked the immediate and clear message that resistance is mainstream, that DT does not represent normal, and that oh yes, there was something we could do. And of course, it provided yet another opportunity for DT to make a fool of himself saying ridiculous things about the protests. I don’t remember another time when nonviolent protests unscrewed the legs of legitimacy from a government less than one day old. And again, a lot of folks who had never done anything political went from the march to the meetings. The thousands of hives of the resistance were enormously strengthened by that unstrategic mass event.

I’m glad you brought up the business community. This is where I have very strategically placed most of my own organizing in recent years: showing that business can create meaningful social change, not out of guilt and shame but out of enlightened self-interest: the profit motive. This is the subject of my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, as well as my “Impossible is a Dare” talks. It’s the opposite of mass organizing: small groups and even one-to-one conversations.

So yes, let’s incorporate big protests into a wider strategic view, as the Civil Rights organizers did. Let’s read Alinsky and Gene Sharp, MLK and Gandhi, Barbara Deming and Dorothy Day, and of course, George Lakey. Let’s study the successes AND weaknesses of all these movements including Occupy, BLM, and the current resistance. And lets create strategies that keep the needle moving, both publicly and behind the scenes, toward the world we want. Outside of my social change work through my business, I’ve been focusing my own parts of the resistance on the amazing opportunity to get people who haven’t been talking to each other not just talking but supporting and acting in solidarity. I see this work—and especially the chances for Jews and Muslims to work together in solidarity—as deeply strategic based on seizing the moment where a conversation is much easier to have under the lens of both groups being under threat.

PS: George, I apologize for the late reply. WordPress only showed me your waiting comment last night. I approved it immediately but wanted to bring my much clearer early-morning thinking to my response. [end of my quoted response]

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics, poverty, privacy, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is a rare occurrence: Three of my heroes made separate local appearances this week—two from the generation older than me, and one from the generation that follows me.

George McGovern
George McGovern, 89, former Senator, Democratic nominee for President in 1972, and stalwart of the ’70s-era peace movement spoke Saturday to support his new book, What It Means To Be A Democrat, to bring attention to hunger causes—and to support Rep. James McGovern’s (no relation) re-election campaign. (I’m looking forward to having the younger McGovern, one of the most progressive voices in Congress, represent me; our town just got moved into his district.)

Born in 1956, I was too young to cast my vote for McGovern in 1972—but not too young to campaign for him, which I did. I also met the candidate at a campaign rally in the north Bronx (NYC) neighborhood where I was living (not a place that typically attracted national political figures). He impressed me with his decency, although not his speaking skills (charisma was not one of his big qualities). Listening to him on a local radio station this week, I was glad he’s become a better speaker—and glad, too, that he’s still willing to buck the system and oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq…stand for positivity and discourse in politics…and be a voice for the voiceless whose safety net continues to be slashed by both parties.

McGovern, the elder, is a reminder of the days when the Democratic Party actually supported democratic values of peace, an anti-poverty agenda, and civil liberties—values that seem hard-to-find in today’s party, where the Dennis Kuciniches and Barbara Lees, Alan Graysons, and James McGoverns of the world are a tiny isolated minority at the far-left edge of a party filled with “centrists” who are less willing to back a progressive agenda than Richard Nixon was during his presidency. How can you take seriously a party that claims to be progressive and lets people like Ben Nelson and Steny Hoyer define it?

Where are the towering figures like Barbara Jordan, Birch Bayh, Bela Abzug, Shirley Chisolm, Tom Harkin, James Abourezk and so many others—all of whom served with George McGovern in Congress? Where is even a figure like Lyndon Johnson, able to grow past his southern segregationist heritage and shepherd through a series of civil rights bills? These were Democrats who were not afraid to speak their mind, not afraid to fight for justice, and willing to do what they could to steer the US toward a better path. They didn’t turn tail and start mumbling apologies any time someone called them a liberal as if it were some kind of curse word instead of a badge of honor—a disgraceful path embraced by Michael Dukakis during his 1988 Presidential run, and by far too many Democrats since.

Daniel Ellsberg
Another of my pantheon of childhood heroes, Daniel Ellsberg, 80, spoke on a panel of whistleblowers Thursday evening at Mt.Holyoke College. Ellsberg risked life in prison to release the Pentagon Papers, a massive set of documents that utterly discredited any plausible justification for the Vietnam war.

Ellsberg didn’t go to prison, though—because the government’s case was dismissed after it was discovered that the feds had way overstepped their bounds in investigating him. Unfortunately, under laws championed by and passed under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, what they did to him would be legal today. That is a travesty, and part of what I mean when I say the Democrats have abandoned a progressive agenda. Despite whistleblower protection laws and even payment passed since the 1970s, the government is not nice when the whistleblowers go after government fraud. Whistleblowers still risk severe punishment (just look at Bradley Manning).

If you ask me, those who expose corruption at great personal risk are heroes, not criminals.

Rachel Maddow
Local weekend resident Rachel Maddow speaks tonight, also at Mount Holyoke. Maddow, who turns 39 tomorrow, has been a refreshing progressive, articulate, and intelligent voice in a generally desolate mainstream-media landscape. I’ve been a fan of hers since she made her radio debut as a morning-show newscaster on WRNX here in the Valley.

It’s great that there are people like Maddow to catch the torch as my generation, and my parents’ generation, starts passing it. We need more like her.

[Disclosure: I was not able to attend any of the events in person. This post is based on hearing McGovern and Ellsberg in separate appearances on Bill Newman’s radio show on WHMP, and on coverage in the Northampton, MA newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette.]

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Democracy, General Commentary, Peace and War, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For the last 28 years, I’ve lived in or just outside Northampton, Massachusetts. About ten years ago, Northampton established the position of City Poet Laureate, with a two-year term. Until two years ago, the post was mostly ceremonial. The official poet would occasionally show up and read a poem to mark some event or other, but kept a low profile.

Then Lesléa Newman was chosen for the post. She used her entire two years to work as a catalyst to bring poetry to the people–and the people to poetry. She organized event after event, and brought formidable community organizing skills into the task of making poetry relevant to every generation.

Among her accomplishments:

  • Filling an 800-seat theater with a poetry reading involving readers from the community as well as cities within a few hours drive (none of them superstars)
  • Getting poets to agree to write a poem a day for a month and get sponsors to pledge contributions, raing over $11,000 to benefit a literacy program that helps new immigrants
  • Putting together an anthology of local poets
  • Taking poetry programs into the schools
  • Providing exposure to local poets in a newspaper column

    • The list could go on and on. Newman has been a dynamo and an inspiration. Perhaps this is not surprising from a woman whose 57 published books (!) have included such groundbreaking material as Heather Has Two Mommies (possibly the first lesbian-friendly children’s book to get wide circulation, Letter to Harvey Milk, and one of the first novels about bulemia.

    In the United States, we tend to be uncomfortable with intellectuals. People who pride themselves on their lack of knowledge of the world around them actually do grow up to be President (GW Bush) and run for Vice President (Palin). When we do elect a leader who’s an intellectual, like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, it’s because they disguise it well, and we see pictures of them doing “man of the people” activities like chowing down burgers at McDonald’s (Clinton) or taking his kids to the bumper cars at a fair (Obama). I think the last prominent US leader who was not afraid to show himself as an intellectual may have been Franklin Roosevelt.

    Other countries treasure their artists, and especially their dissident artists. The first president of free Senegal was the poet Leopold Senghor; in the Czech Republic, it was the playwright Václav Havel. In the United States, yes, we’ve had a number of Presidents who’d written books before taking the office, including both JFK and Nixon as well as Obama (and his former opponent Hillary Clinton)–but these people were already in public life when they wrote their books. Outside of the movies, which gave us Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and even former Carmel, California mayor Clint Eastwood, it’s hard to think of major US policy makers who really came up out of the arts.

    We’ve had plenty of dissident artists, some of them even pretty famous (Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Ani DiFranco). But while art can shape people’s movements, as protest folk and protest rock helped to solidify protests against segregation, the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons, it doesn’t seem to shape policy. And in many cases, we find that the dissidents who achieve fame are quieter about their dissent, at least until they’ve already achieved fame (classic example: John Lennon, who did become quite visible in the peace movement after moving to New York). Not too many people stop to analyze the working-class-hero lyrics of Bruce Springsteen and find the progressive values underneath, because it’s cloaked in something that looks superficially like a right-wing version of patriotism. But get down-and-dirty with the lyrics of “Born in the USA”, and you’ll see it’s about a Vietnam vet who went into the army because he grew up in a depressed town, couldn’t find work, and got into trouble–and then after his hitch still can’t find a job.

    Hey, Bruce, ever thought about running for office?

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