Who says you can’t go home again? Hair is playing at a theater downtown, there’s a big article about growing pot in the Post, and I’m just back from if not a protest march certainly a giant rally on the National Mall. I’m 22 again and taking it to the streets. Sticking it to the man. Or not.
Yea – I was there, trying to restore sanity (though truth to tell I was there to Keep Fear Alive; my wife and daughter were restoring sanity). I was ready; I had my McCarthy button on. We all did, as I have three and was able to share. Hey – I Cleaned For Gene; I earned my stripes. Buttons. Of course, riding down on the metro I was hoping somebody would notice the button and say something. But they never did.
We were ass to elbow in the metro cars; people were getting separated from their friends, and it was impossible to move. Not to worry though, as everyone was texting and phoning and globally positioning themselves so that no groups really got separated for long. I think I like the old days, where you early on lost your friends, but immediately hooked up with some strangers, with whom you spent the day, sharing…turkey sandwiches. Then later, when everything was over and you found your friends again you would all share stories of who had the best turkey sandwiches.
Now, I have to say – I was never at too many of those huge marches; people in Minneapolis were just not that pissed off. We weren’t protesting Nixon or Kissinger, for the most part; they never made it to Minnesota. We were there showing Secretary of Commerce Frederick B. Dent, say, what we thought. That’s not a man to draw a huge crowd, though. So when I got to the Mall and saw the people I panicked. I tried; I even climbed a fence to get in, saving myself all of two blocks walk and really sticking it to the man then. (It was a really low fence.) But I couldn’t stay. There were too many people. The music (Music? Hah!) was too loud. I lasted all of 20 minutes, then told my family I’d pick them up at the Metro and I left.
On the way back to the metro station I took off my McCarthy button. What really made me sad, though, was what I learned later. Now, I’m a guy who saw Janis, right up front, three times. I saw Cream, Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore West, the Doors; Jimi Hendrix bummed a cigarette from me. But when I was driving them home, both my wife and daughter said they were both wishing I had stayed, they knew I would have wanted to: “Tony Bennett sang America the Beautiful; you missed Tony Bennett!” They know I like Tony Bennett. It makes me sad to say this but they were right; I would have liked to have seen Tony Bennett. Tony damn Bennett. Don’t tell the Weather Underground.
Ben Kessler said,
December 27, 2010 @ 3:45 am
- Ha! I was up a holly tree with a bunch of punks from North Carolina when I heard someone who might have been Tony Bennett singing what might have been ‘America the Beautiful’, but it was difficult to tell due to the reverb. Though this rally certainly wasn’t much for effective social change, it was an awfully pleasant atmosphere for a big to-do- something of a novelty for this town. I remember huddling in the freezing rain at some protest or another years ago, riot police closing in on all sides, helicopters circling low overhead. Tom Silfen, of all people, popped out of the crowd near the gaggle of us kids and said something like, “this is an important learning experience; let’s go talk to a policeman.” So we did, and the fellow behind the club snarled something official in our direction and gestured threateningly, and that was the end of more than a few youthful democratic illusions. Anyway, it was nice not to be gassed, or charged by angry men on horseback, or beaten, or yelled at this time. Hell, even a terribly reverberated Tony Bennett, or whoever it actually was, was loads better to listen to than ‘No Blood for Oil’ as bawled by the Black Bloc. Also: a holly tree is a great place for turkey sandwiches.