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VOL. 9 NO. 4 • y S WINTER 1987 ■11; •V kX-'-H ^✓o-Editors David Milholland Lenny Dee Associate Editors Jim Blashfield, Paul Loeb Art Director David Milholland Designers Candace Bieneman, Tim Braun, Reed Darmon Proofreader Walt Curtis Contributing Artists Craig Bartlett, Jessica Dodge, Stephen Leflar, Carel Moisiewltsch, Musicmaster, Mark Neumann, Isaac Shamsud-Din, Melinda Thorsnes Contributing Photographer Theresa Marquez Account Representative—Oregon Rhonda Kennedy Ad Production Stacey Fletcher, Qualltype, Lisa Springer, Robert Williamson Washington State Coordinator Judy Hines Bevis Account Representative— Washington Cameron Hopkins, Philip Minehan Typesetting Harrison typesetting, Inc., Luria Dickson, Lee Emmett, Marmilmar, Qualltype Camerawork Laura DI Trapani, Craftsman Lithoplate, Inc. Cover Photographer Bill Bachhuber Cover Separations Portland Prep Center, Inc. Printing Tualatin-Yamhill Press Editorial Assistant Margaret M. Dunn Thanks Judy & Stew Albert, Dave Ball, Randy Clark, Helen DeMichiel, Dru Dunlway, Jeannine Edelblut, Anne Hughes, KOAP, Marla Kahn, Craig Karp, Lawrence Gallery, Deborah Levin, Peggy Lindquist, Klmbark MacColl, David Madson, Julie Mancini, Theresa Marquez, Melissa Marsland, Doug Milholland, Kevin Mulligan, Julie Phillips, Sherry Prowda, Jeremy Rice, Julie Rlstau, Norman Solomon, Missy Stewart, Sandy Wallsmith, John Wanberg, The Clinton 500 Ji'?.” V rM i .5 & hi M U tin >ui Rm hH :♦< •H ASZif; MV & % •< •SVi Wl ■h * e* :w £a£>£ 1 v'i'Ji'ri : ^ ; De-Euphemizing the Sixties— John Bennett P j A journey through the “Summer of Love” in 5 decades of our century— from Guam to Eugene, from Frank Sinatra to the Grateful Dead. A Call for Economic Justice For All—Rev. Jesse Jackson Opening the “progressive coalition” to all those Americans who wonder why they’re falling behind during our nat io n ’s longest period of economic recovery. Diet for a Change—Peter Carroll Francis Moore Lapp&, known for her Diet for a Small Planet, reveals her sources and her recipe for democracy. •W £ See America— / ¥ Musicmaster / A roadmap for the open-mindei ai turer. Why leave home when so many things are up in the air. r t f s f t / Ben Linder: In Memoriam—R Sullivan A few words on one of our best*** Letter to Hammond—Richard Alishio A bitter-sweet missive to the industrial heartland from a native son. “ 7 Judgement—John Frank White punks on dope before’a'ltiry of their peers—what’ll happen to Lauri’s baby? 3T? 5 The Motorcycle Accident^ : Walt Curtis (J A Christmas story of life pulled from the i abyss. Organ Trail—Craig Bartlett Organ sets out on the heels of his do- gooder brother Mark, who is spreading the word for Don Hodel and the Reagan Revolution. $ Max—Rick Mitchell jS Max Gordon, owner of the world’s great >4 est jazz club, the Village Vanguard Si fondly reminisces on youth in the North- west and success in the Big Apple < •M let, FL Cover image: “Sunday at the Alibi.” Art- 1st Melinda Thorsnes, a native and resi- dent of Portland, studied at the Pacific S&g Northwest College of Art. She’s had re- cent one-person shows in Philadelphia a n d Portland. She’s represented in Port- land by the Lawrence Gallery. This is a 5 ^ 1 self-portrait. $ 1^4? The Clinton St. Quarterly is published in J j Oregon, Washington and National edi- s J tions by CSQ—A Project of Out of the G Ashes Press. Oregon address: P.O. Box S I 3588 , Po rtland , OR 97208 —(503) [ 222-6039. Washington address: 1520 j ’ Western Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101— J j (206) 682-2404 . Unless otherw ise j noted, all contents copyright ®1987 ’ Clinton St. Quarterly. As the winter rains settle into the Pacific Northwest, erasing all v memory of the drought, a siege mentality seeps into our bones. In many cases people become distinctly para- n o id . In o th e r s , the o p p o s i te emerges—a need to settle accounts, smite the devil and expose villains. With the greyness filling our souls, i t ’s u n d e rs ta n d a b le , bu t i t can be irresponsible. A surprising case emerged a few weeks ago. Willamette Week, a Portland newspaper of generally liberal disposition, unveiled a heavy attack on Michael Stoops, who has worked for years with the down and out, and created something of a one-man empire of the poor. In years previous he has been deeply involved in anti-draft counseling. In short, he’s been a very effective activist. He spent this past winter in Washington D.C., living outside in protest of federal policies toward the homeless. On his return, having moved Congress, he was treated as a conquering hero. Heroes are never perfect. None of us are. Few of us rise to prominence, however. This past year has seen a series of revelations exposing to public scrutiny the private lives of such national figures as Senators Hart and Biden, judges Bork and Ginsberg and TVangelist Bakker. Gary Hart even had the affrontery to ask the media to find him out. It’s become a field day for the press, with the Miami Herald, the NY Times and your hometown rag competing face up with the gutter tabloids. So when Willamette Week unveiled Mr. Stoops’ “ pedophilia,” a charge largely based on claims of disgruntled ex-employees, every local TV station and even i t ’s slow-moving competitor, the Oregonian, rushed into the fray with claws bared. The serious underlying charge, abuse of authority, is of course deserving of scrutiny. In this period, however, with the AIDS epidemic bringing homophobia out of the closet, the timing is suspicious. Now, apparently, homosexual behavior is fa ir game. “ Good people” are of course sympathetic to the plight of AIDS victims, but with rare exceptions, public policy has remained dormant as the disease ravaged the gay community. In Portland, no less than any U.S. city, hundreds of young men survive by going to “ The Wall,” but no family newspaper has seen fit to exam- ine the p l igh t o f those inv is ib le victims. S im ila r a llega t ions aga inst Mr. Stoops were dismissed three years ago, but no media outlet saw f it to bring the case forth then. It does seem odd that the story appears just as Baloney Joe’s, Mr. Stoops’ most visible project, has put down i t ’s first payment on a building that would bring that home of the homeless back into the downtown core area. What better time to sully if not destroy the reputation of the project’s figurehead and principal fundraiser. This kind of attack threatens us all. It effectively eliminates not only homosexuals but anyone who has ever used illicit substances, had an abortion, or ever taken an unsafe political position, from the public forum. It encourages only the most circumspect, and thus the blandest, to speak out or run for office. It virtually guarantees mediocrity in our political process, something we can at no time afford. In the meantime, my cousin, a lovely young woman in her mid-thirties, is ravaged with the Elephant Man’s disease, neurofibromatosis. She’s had literally dozens of operations to remove tumors, two of which involved major brain surgery. She’s one of the thousands of young people who grew । up in the Hanford area. Only now, 40 years after radioactivity began pouring into the sky and water, is the plight of her peers, who are suffering from cancer and other life-destroying diseases at rates far beyond the national norm, a concern of the media. There are dozens of similar situations to be exposed and explored, far more compelling than the private behavior of public individuals. We reap what we sow. It is a critical time to plant the seeds of hope, to struggle actively for a better world. Happy holidays. DM Clinton St. Q u a r t e r l y -Winter, 1987 3
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I f you really want a second opinion... PORTLAND NATUROPATHIC CLINIC 255-7355 112 31 SE MARKET PORTLAND, OREGON The Teaching Clinic of the National College of Naturopathic Medicine. . ALANCOSTLEY GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE Save on Entire Stock Nothing Held Back! Save 20% to 60% on every item* in the store including new arrivals *G i f t and A ccesso ry Dep t. excl. Sale Starts Saturday, November 21,9 AM ALAN COSTLEY 816 SW 10th Ave. • Portland 97205 • (503) 222-2577 CONTEMPORARY ART GLASS The Oregon Historical Society 1230 S.W. Park Ave. — Broadway Hall Oct. 1-Dec. 31 Multnomah Co. Library, Main Branch Mid Jan.-Mid Feb. Indian Education Project, 531 SE 14th. March & April Mayors Office, June & July Colorful, Functional, HandblownWork bySome of America’s Best Glass Studios. Vase sandblasted (10" high) bvVitrixGlass D I S C O V E R T H E F I N E A R T O F A M E R I C A N C R A F T The Real Mother Goose AShop Washington Square S.W. 9th & Yamhill and Gallery 620-2243 223-9510 ______________________ _ ______________ . : ■ THE RIVER PEOPLE Portraits of the Wanapums Photographs by Jackie Moreau THE IMAGE GALLERY Folk Christmas Tree Celebration, Wassail & Talk by Beverly Shoemaker, 6:30 p.m., Thursday, December 3rd. Holiday hours: Open 7 days a week: Monday - Saturday 10:30 - 5:30, later on Thursday and OPEN ON SUNDAY 12:00 - 5:00 p.m. until Christmas. 1026 SW Morrison Portland, OR 97205 (503) 224-9629 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 5
Section K of the Seattle Times, July 19, 1987, the day of the Dead-Dylan concert in Eugene: a two-page retrospective on By John Bennett Photos courtesy John Bennett « o fh ’e ®- S unun American turns on the TV for an evening of relaxation, index finger tapping out electronic impulses on the magic box—remote control, our specialty. The images flicker by. Ice hockey in Montreal. Raw sex on the Playboy channel. Regan, Schultz and Poindexter on CNN, saying this about that and less about each other. A laser-colored western on channel four. Bill Cosby saying “ It’s my money” for I.F. Hutton. News flashes on uprisings in South Korea, Panama and some place called Oceania. The mind grows bored and the finger does the walking. POWER OFF makes the world go away. The Summer of Love, its twenty-year resurrection vying with the Iran-Contra hearings for prime time. Colonel North pulling rank on Sergeant Pepper. Sergeant Pepper’s band dubbed over with oom-pa-pa. the Summer of Love—a shotgun blast of graphics and letters responding to the T im e s ’ re q u e s t fo r Penny Lane memories. In the graphics department, a collage of paraphernalia: a photo of a Vietnam private juxtaposed with a photo of the Fillmore marquee promoting a soon-to- self-destruct Jimi Hendrix; a repro of the Zigzag Man; a Grateful Dead calling card; the Haight-Ashbury street sign. Implied meaning and significance, slicked over an abyss of incomprehension. And the letters. Star billing is given to an anonymous letter that sets the tone for the entire coverage: that was then and this is now; then was an aberration, a time that bred a profusion of prodigal sons and daughters, and now is a time when these prodigals have been absorbed back into the mainstream of America’s high-tech, corporate democracy, feeling a little foolish about their wayward caper, but willing, at last, to do their part. This anonymous woman left hat kind of force is capable of drawing ■k 50,000 people from northern California IkHv and the entire Northwest to a single foot- ■ ball stadium in western Oregon? What kind of force can bring Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead together on the same stage? The answer is simple: The Sum- F ^^F mer of Love. The media has it implanted in our collective ticky-tack brain that the y Summer of Love was a phenomenon, a force, and the media should know, the media created the Summer of Love. Let me rephrase the question: What were the dynamics involved in the Haight-Ashbury-hippy-counter-culture phenomenon of twenty years ago? What was the force the media cannibalized when it conjured its phenomenon?
her husband at the age of twenty-five, lived in a Berkeley crash pad with a bunch of kids, slept around and took drugs. Now she’s back. There’s another letter from a man who got caught up in a street riot and was appalled by the lack of respect for the “ sacredness of private property” that he saw all around him. “ . . .the most frightening exhibit of human behavior I have ever experienced,” his letter said. His sense of propriety was restored by the arrival of the riot police. There were letters from people who were five years old in 1967 and “ proud of it,” people who painted murals of Jim Morrison on their bedroom walls, people who lived in convents by day and prowled the Haight by night, people who remembered their “ groovy love beads,” and people whose dream was to drink Tang and get in on the Apollo space program. Seattle cracks her Sunday paper over hot cakes and coffee, shakes her head and chuckles. Ah, we’ve come a long way, baby. The drugs turned bad in the Haight in the summer of 1967 before the leaves began to change. The initial wave of love children was quickly followed by a tidal wave of hustlers and hipsters. There was sickness and disillusionment and a lot of victims. The Grateful Dead and other seasoned counter-culture people began moving out. To Morning Star Ranch, to the country, to places untouched by the media. They took with them the ember that smolders at the heart of a way of life. Not a movement, not a fad; a way of life. What is significant about the Summer of Love, about the entire period referred to as The Sixties, is that this ember, which is still passed from generation to generation, burst into flame. Back in the Fifties we used to race around through the night in ‘40 Ford cous pes. Whitewalls and teardrop skirts. We were ignorant as zoo monkeys. We were teenage barbarians. I remember the night I was scanning the air waves and hit upon the new music for the first time. It was Chuck Berry. Talk about your quantum leaps. From Frank Sinatra to Chuck Berry in one fell swoop. It was the most liberating thing that had ever happened to me, better than an unhooked bra in the back seat on a dark country road. That was a tough era in which to keep the fire burning. McCarthyism was a bad taste in every liberal’s mouth. I knew from nothin’ about McCarthyism. The skull and crossbones flew from my car antenna. I was a high school dropout in a New England mill town, a factory worker for minimum wage. A sensitive boy, but deeply troubled, is the way the principal put it when he handed my father my walking papers. My father told me, “ Get a job—you’ re through eating for free.” I worked in the factory by day and set pins in a bowling alley by night, just before technology replaced pin setters with machines. My friend Mert and I got into a discussion one night with the alley owner, a tough old Pole. “Two years,” he told us, “ two years, you punks, and your rock ‘n’ roll will be in ashes. Responsible people won’t tolerate that kind of noise for long.” «<C We loved him like a father, but he had no idea what the future held in store. We laughed, drained our cokes and walked out the door into the summer night. Fired up our Harleys and rode off in the direction of Woodstock. Summer of Love, 1957. By the time the Seventies rolled around I’d tried my hand at just about everything and was marking time for $3 an hour as a dishwasher in what would now be called a Yuppie joint on San Francisco’s Union Street. My first day I reported for work at 8 a. m. after being up all night on acid. I made it though the noon rush on Watney’s ale. It was a mystery to me why they treated me so well. I took extended lunch breaks and ate what I pleased and no one said boo. They just kept shoving the Watney’s through the bus-boy window. One day Joan Baez walked in and paid for a bowl of borscht with plastic. She’d just been to the hairdresser. If you didn’t know she was Joan Baez, you’d have sworn by her coiffure and the way she was dressed she was Miss Virginia Slim herself. I was a dishwashing force there on Union Street. It took about a month before I found out what was going on. Where lunch hour had been a nightmare of bus trays stacked all over the kitchen floor, now there was order. I was doing the work of three men. The other two dishwashers had failed to show up on my first day, and seeing what I could do, the management te rm ina ted them w ithou t notice. The management was getting better results at a third the cost. Realizing my worth, I asked for $5 an hour and got fired myself. It was a matter of principle, they said, not to pay any dishwasher more than $3 an hour. Diamonds and rust, my friends. The dynamics of a capitalist world. The dissonant note that gives our music its distinctive edge. The grit in the oyster that makes the pearl. Times are hard for the hardcore. False prophets have taken up residence in the Hotel California. As Jim Bakker put it so succinctly when he moved in: “Well, it’s great to have a place where Tammy can shop, shop, shop.” # # # So I open the Seattle Times one Sunday morning in June, and there’s a picture of The Grateful Dead gathered around Bob Dylan like a pack of grinning m on ke ys . “ O n ly N o r th w e s t A p pearance,” the caption reads. A month later Brenda and I are crossing the Columbia River at Biggs Junction in a ‘63 Ford van, sleeping bags in the back, headed .for Eugene. Brenda was eleven during the Summer of Love, living right here in this Washington desert valley where I now wash glass for a living. I was twenty-nine and working the bars in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Brenda was tuned in to gospel music, and I worked just around the corner from Preservation Hall. And now twenty years down the road, we’ re on the road heading for the same destination. We travel down the Columbia Gorge toward Portland under a stormy sky. Lightning flashes, howling winds, angels humming over Hanford irradiated waters. I glance over at Brenda. She’s got the earphones on and is smiling with her eyes closed, tapping out rhythm on the dash. A sign reads BRIDGE OF THE GODS. I glance to my left and see that I’m being passed by an old VW van covered with Dead insignia. The driver gives me thumbs up, and his lady smiles and waves. I grin and jam an Oreo cookie into my mouth. “ I’m here for the duration!” I yell. They give me the “ can’t hear you” head shake and f in ish the ir pass. 8 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 East Portland 32nd & E. Burnside 231-8926 m a y s ! MUSIC MILLENNIUM NW Portland N.W. 23rd &Johnson 248-0163
eyd Thunder claps and roiling clouds. Summer of Love, 1987. South of Portland, in Albany, we pull in for gas. The attendant, young and bearded, fills the tank. “ Enjoy the concert!” he says. “ I’ ll bet I’ve filled ten rigs like yours since noon. I must be the only person in the world not going to Eugene. ” Truth be known, there were only a tenth as many people heading for Eugene as were at Woodstock when Arlo Guthrie climbed on stage and grinning his son-of- Woody grin proclaimed: “We’ve brought traffic to a standstill on the New York Throughway!” A heady moment. A flash of bright light before the big shutdown. Now, as we drive south some twenty years later, most of America is out three- wheeling it or sitting in front of the tube catching the latest Ollie North re-run. Life had pictures of him barbecuing in his back yard. I was sort of hoping they’d have pictures of him the time he sustained a back injury and spent an afternoon jumping off his roof—reinforcing his discipline by handling pain. Up the ladder and off the roof. Over and over again. Your average ranch-home daddy, passing on the values to his awestruck kids. Further down the road, traffic ties up and then comes to a standstill. Could it be happening again? Another Wood- stock? Are we ready for that? People begin rolling down their windows, the music spilling out into the falling rain, some Jimi Hendrix gaining the upper hand, Hendrix more listened to and better understood now than then. Hendrix, closing down Woodstock like a prophet with that bloodcurdling version of The Star Spangled Banner—Jesus! The man knew. You can’t go on knowing that intensely into the future and continue living in the present—Scotty beams you up. Next to us, a car with Montana plates and an Iron Maiden bumper sticker; young bloods, the driver beating a staccato rhythm on the steering wheel with a set of drumsticks. Clusters of people stand around in conversation. Then the traffic up front begins moving, and we’ re on the road again, riding a Woodstock n e Corning °Ut o f the U , J oojungle Wn Ofour b u s ^ t h their hands r°utine. momentum into a hair-trigger future. I t ’s after dark when we cross the Willamette and drop down into Eugene. We finally pull over to ask assistance from two college students, dyed-in-the- wool 1987 mainstream—i t ’s in their speech patterns and the places they’ re recommending. The Holiday Inn. Disco joints. “ No, man,” Brenda says, leaning across me to squint into the dark at their faces. “We want something funkier than that!" They smile vagueness at us across a gap wider than all the generations since Moses. “Guess we can’t help you then,” they say, and walk away. We wind up eating pizza in a walk-in place of 13th Street. Long-haired pizza wizards spinning dough discs over their heads, Sonny Boy Williamson blasting out of a cassette recorder propped cockeyed in the corner over the s ink. . . I flash on the first pizza I ever ate, East-Coast Italian, a carload of us racing over the back roads to Middletown, a rawboned Little Richard screeching through a static storm over the AM radio, Wolfman Jack urging us to be cooool, the skull and crossbones flapping in the seventy-mile- an-hour wind, the trees ablaze with the colors of autumn under a New England harvest moon. . . . It was nearly midnight by the time we got to the place the pizza wizards sent us. There was standing room only, a wall- to-wall and partially up-the-wall situation, the musicians pressed back into a far corner at crowd level. Curtis Salgado and the Stilettoes, pay-dirt blues. The musicians blew stereotypes to smithereens. Salgado himself looked like he ju s t stepped out of a skid-row flophouse at high noon at the end of a three-day drunk. His bass player looked like he’d left his ROTC uniform hanging in the dressing room. His lead guitar was a doe-eyed Rastafarian, and his keyboard man wore the unchanging smile of a bookworm psychotic. What they played was tapped into something deeper, something that negated appearances and eluded interpretation. The music penetrated the crowd and the crowd responded with body language and this is as good an explanation as any of the “ Summer of Love,” this unspoken togetherness, this green inner world thriving under the grey overcast of 1980s American, this cosmic, rhythmic, undulating force. We worked our way up front and found ourselves eyeball-to-eyeball with a reincarnated Lenny Bruce. The first time I heard jazz was long before I heard Chuck Berry. One night on Guam in a car loaded down with kids being chauffeured home from a movie, we heard Dixieland coming out of the car radio against a backdrop of dying snails. When the Japanese landed on Guam at the start of the Second World War, they turned loose a few million jumbo-sized snails—their answer to K-rations. The snails commenced multiplying and migrating back and forth across the island. The Japanese did not fare as well as their snails, and by the time I got to Guam as a military dependent in 1952, they’d all but disappeared, although one morning two tired Samurai slipped out of the jungle and sat down in front of our school bus with their hands on their heads. They’d been eating snails and papayas for seven years, and were sick of the routine. Our bus driver freaked and locked us in the bus. We sat there in silence, our lunch buckets in our laps. The military police finally showed up with vast firepower and took the enemy into custody. We went on our way. Sat down at our desks. Opened our history books. Though the Japanese were pretty much gone, the snails were thriving. They migrated by night, and we were rolling along pulverizing them, red-hot Dixieland blasting out of the radio. It was din to my young ears. I didn’t know jazz when I heard it. I'd been programmed not to hear it, raised in an atmosphere that made sure such things didn’t get through Gi m3 w Men V /f lW RODUC T IO NS TO BAJA EXICO) 1 -3 January 27 February 15 7 Days Spring Break - March 19 Kids with Single Parents April 1-8 $TBA Open Sundays again, 1-5p.m March 2 $500 (+ air fare) iBOOK MANANA! 288-8501 Group Inquiries Welcome Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 9 CONTEMPORARY C RAFTS GALLERY 3934 S.WCorbett Ave. Portland. Oregon 97201 503/223-2654 Gi 1 0 DAY WINTER ESCAPES Elegant Desert Camps
to me. But somewhere along the line something got through and that something was Chuck Berry. I had to hear Chuck Berry before I could hear Dixieland. Before I could move on to Miles Davis. Before I could take my “ Down in the Valley” harp and begin wailing blues. At two a.m. we’ re out in the rain again, walking into a 7-11 to buy some provisions for the next day. It’s as busy as a high-noon Safeway caught in a time warp, filled with ‘60s freaks stocking up on cheese, oranges and Twinkies. Outside again we’re greeted by three longhairs. .“ Headed for Autzen Stadium?” one of them drawls. We wind up on a large parcel of hard- packed ground that sweeps away from the back of the concert stadium to the edge of a wooded area. A woman in a yellow slicker takes our five dollars and directs us to where someone is waving a flashlight. I pull alongside and find myself looking into a face with an ear-to-ear grin, three days growth of beard, glasses about half an inch thick, and wild knotted hair. “Where have you been?” this apparition wants to know. “We’ve been waiting for you!” He laughs at the confusion he sees in his flash ligh t beam. I think “Whoa, where have I been?” He dances off, motioning us to follow him down a long row of cars, campers, brightly-colored out-to-pasture bread trucks and live- in school buses. He waves us into a spot between a Datsun pick-up and a small red Honda. We sit quietly in the dark. As our eyes adjust, we notice that the Datsun has a camper insert on its bed, and the Honda has a diminutive black man behind the wheel. That’s right where he is, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead. He’s still on I-5. Maybe he’s too far gone to get off the freeway. Next to him on the seat, a full-sized cardboard poster advertising a harlequin romance, a picture of a Jean Harlow look- alike holding the book nestled against her bountiful bosom. The two men in the Datsun radiate good-old-boy vibes—a dog on a leash that lunges and barks; a case of Schlitz in a cooler; that certain macho swagger. We’ve been placed between two psychotic pieces of wonder bread like sacrificial lunch meat. But it’s okay, there’s heavy magic out here in this mud-puddle haven behind the stadium, magic that has no trouble neutralizing a little mainstream psychosis. ’ # # # We wake up with the sun in our eyes, the camp coming slowly alive around us. Already at 7 a.m. lines are beginning to shape up behind people who’ve slept overnight in front of the entrance gates. There’s the aroma of coffee brewing on a Coleman stove, a group playing flute, guitar and bongos, a woman nursing her baby. Jugglers and clowns and a gaunt boy in wizard robes walking with his arm around the shoulder of the black man from the night before, whispering, “ Don’t you know it ain’t no good, you can’t let other people get your. . . kicks for you?” We fill a pot from the water truck and turn down some acid. Brew some tea, eat some fruit, brush our teeth, and we’ re ready for the day. Around eleven o’clock we put some carry-in items in a day-pack and approach the stadium. Words like “mellow” and “ vibes” have been beaten to a pulp over the years, but they apply here. The scene is mellow, the vibes are good, and the crowd is seasoned and diverse. There are people down from the hills, leather-skinned men with iron-grey beards and clear-eyed women in long gingham dresses whose very comportment tells you they churn their own butter, plow their own fields and birth their own children; they stand out among the camouflaged people, the ones trying to live alternative lifestyles within the lifestyle they’ re proposing an alternative to, people caught in a complicated web of finesse and nuance, appearing bohemian in the straight world and just a little straight in the asteroid belt that is beginning to spin an orbit around the stadium. Members of the Rainbow Family are here and scores of Dead Head camp followers, people who have tapes of every concert since Day One, the Dead Hotline in magic marker on their van visor, com pu te r read-ou ts on changes in Dead status-quo. And then there’s the Youth. They have more to deal with than the youth of twenty years ago, you won’t see any of these kids going to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. They’ve got a ‘50s edge I can identify with, that Blade Runner look in their eyes. We had that look back then, Mert and I and the crew, riding our Harleys into Hartford to our first concert. Maybe 1,000 raging kids in a movie theater, a stage full of sweat-soaked cross-over race-music blacks in polyester suits, toning their act down in their play for fame and fortune and blowing the lid right off ours. The whole thing was unadorned and drugless, the lighting white and bright. We tore the seat bolts right out of the concrete floor and stormed the stage. . . . You know what good vibes are? Good vibes are having Lana slip into line beside you after not having seen her for half a year. Lana was seven during the Summer of Love. Since then she’s been around. A year on the Dead Circuit, a year backpacking in Central America, freight trains from Miami to Montana. A wanderer to her marrow. She left to sail on the Golden Hinde, and the Hinde is anchored at Newport, e ighty miles across the mountains. “ There’s not a day goes by I don’t think about the world blowing up in my face,” she told me one day in the snow along the banks of the w " $ COME VISIT PORTLAND'S UNIQUE BOOKSHOP We have hard to find books in a variety of subjects Architecture / Design - Classical Music - The British Isles - Mysteries - Literature - Cookbooks - Wonderful cards and open daily 228-2747 THE NOR ’WESTER much, much more BOOKSHOP 5 N 8 e S w W M 2 a n rk d e A t v V e i . llage Portland, OR 97202 10 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 Yakima. I knew what she meant. I’d watched the nightmare be born. 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bomb detonating over Hiroshima. . . How do you tell these sorrows to a punch- drunk principal who believes in a war to end all wars? The gates finally open, and the frisk people take one look at us and wave us through. We settle on a blanket close to the stage which is set up between two walls of speakers at the far end of the stadium. The playing field fills up immediately, and then the bleachers begin to fill, until by two p.m. we’ re at the bottom of a great bowl of humanity. Then Jerry Garcia peeks out from stage right, and 50,000 people come to their feet with a roar. It was a long day. The Dead played for three and a half hours under a hot sun with heavy competition from a sky writer, a tiny dot of a plane that made peace signs and did fortune-telling feats which read the collective mind of the stadium: Writer John Bennett is a godfather of small- press publishing—the founder of Vagabond Press. He lives in Ellensburg, Washington. His last story in CSQ was “The Family House.” 1967 before the change. The quickly followed h a tidal wave o f hustlers and hipsters. There wnment teas sickness and lot IMPEACH REAGAN!, the sky pilot wrote against the blue sky, and the thunderous approval drowned out the music. People were a little rummy from the sun by the time Dylan came on stage. Sans harmonica, he launched into a series of new renditions of old songs, once bringing the entire stadium to its feet to sing along on “ Everybody Must Get Stoned.” But what struck me as the afternoon wore on was that something bigger than the music was happening, as if the music were merely a touchstone. We w e ren ’ t the re fo r mus ic, we were The drugs turned bad m the Haight in the summer o f initial wave o f ^ove children was gathered for ritual. # # # Ah, the meat ax of semantics. Are you proud to be part of the counter-culture? The counter-culture isn’t the counterculture, if you stop and think about it, it’s the culture, and what’s called the culture has cancer of the blood. Do you believe in going with the flow? Both shit and water flow downhill if the grade is steep enough. Do you believe in gravity? Now we’re getting someplace. Do you believe in a mixed bag? Albert Einstein was a mixed bag. He said he wanted to know the thoughts of God, and then he took a boat to America and gave Roosevelt the atom bomb. After the little incident at Hiroshima, he began writing long letters of explanation to Japanese school children. It’s rumored that Marilyn Monroe had a picture of Einstein on her vanity. It’s rumored that John Fitzgerald Kennedy unhooked Marilyn Monroe’s bra. Do you see how it all hangs together? Not like they tell you it does. It’s a fact that Einstein refused open-heart surgery. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go, Einstein said, showing that much understanding of the thoughts of God. After giving us the bomb, Einstein said: “ Eve ry th ing ’s changed now but the way we think.” “ Forward Ever, Backward Never,” the signs all over my high school read. “A sensitive but troubled boy,” the principal said. “ No more free lunch,” my father said. The squeeze was on. I liked that principal. He’d been a boxer in college and his nose was all over his face. “Why are you doing this?” he asked me just before calling in my father to deliver the coup de gr7ace. What could I say? I was seventeen and following my heart. Now I’d say, “ The signs are all wrong! They should read ‘Back and forth, back and forth, like a mine sweeper, forever and ever!’ ” My friend Mert and I walked out of that high school, got on our Harleys and tore up the soccer field. We were on the streets. AM barbarians riding the backroads of Connecticut before the days of stereophonic sound, looking for the thoughts of God on the air waves. The concert ended as nonchalantly as it began. The stage crew began breaking things down, and the stadium emptied without incident. Some scuttlebutt had it that Ken Kesey was having a bash for Dylan and the Dead on his Springfield farm, and I’d half a mind to drive my van right up Kesey’s rural route driveway with no more credentials than my heart beating in my chest. But we let that one slide. Kesey’s thing would be for patriarchs and matriarchs and we were hard-core rank- and-file. Lana, Brenda and I walked back to the campground arm-in-arm, a forged unit beyond media definition, strands of the DNA of human potential, part of the seamless continuity that smooths out Time itself. The Summer of Love is a hard place to do time in, but we sing our song and carry on, and when all is said and done, we opt to love. O’CONNOR’S Serving Downtown Portland Since 1934 TASTE THE DIFFERENCE! Hand-Milled, Hand-Made 100% Whole Wheat Breads Miss the taste o f home baked bread? 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hroughout his two terms of office, President Reagan has ignored the rising incidents of racial violence and expressed no sensitivity to the economic violence which has driven scores of farmers to suicide and dislocated and disrupted the lives of millions of American families. He urged our children to pursue education with excellence, while cutting their educational options and scholarships. He urged Americans to say no to drugs, while he said no to drug education even louder. Look at the President’s 1988 Budget proposal. His campaign promise was to balance the budget by ’84, and reduce the size of government. Instead he has doubled it, accumulating a debt in five years that took 40 Presidents to accumulate. When he assumed o ffice the Federal budget was 23 percent of the GNP. His goal was to reduce it to 19 percent. It has hovered around 25 percent for these seven years. For the first time in our nation’s history we have a trillion dollar budget. He has increasd military spending by 22.4 billion dollars while decreasing domestic spending by 18.7 billion dollars. And he still proposes to cut spending to help the poor by 31/z billion dollars. He wants to spend more money on Star Wars, nuclear warhead production, Midgetman missiles, Tomahawk Cruise missiles, start-up costs for a new aircraft carrier, satellite weapons, cargo planes, MX missiles and aid to the Contras. At the same time he proposes to cut Medicare and Medicaid, cut subsidizing housing for low and middle-income families, cut educational aid to needy students, cut child nutrition programs, cut community development block grants, cut aid to families with dependent children, terminate legal services, terminate their urban development action grants, terminate the work incentive program for poor mothers and te rm ina te tempora ry food assistance—these are his priorities. In the tradition of Herod, Mr. Reagan would have denied Mary and Joseph access to the inn, and they could not even have sued for discrimination, because they did not have the right to vote. Mary could not have gotten prenatal care on Reagan’s budget, Joseph could not have gotten re-trained, could not have gotten a Union job. Jesus could not have gotten preschool or a Head Start education, there would have been no heat in the stable, and the Star of Bethlehem would have been blown out of the sky with Star Wars. . . . President Reagan is a dream buster. In 1984 the Rainbow Coalition embarked on an historic mission to alter the course of our nation. We went to fore- saken places—the cotton and fruit fields, Indian reservations. We slept alongside the urban rejected, family farmers, disa f fe c ted and d is lo ca te d wo rke rs , apartheid, peace and freeze activists. We created a group made up of many patches and pieces and colors and sizes bound by a common thread. Not a spread of one hue or texture. Our adversaries called us special interest. We know ourselves to be a family. A majority American constituency. Let’s reflect on the record of the Rainbow Coalition. We registered two million new voters who voted progressive, for the most part Democratic. It was a net gain of black, Hispanic and female participation, and new office holders. Four new black Congresspersons in ’86 came out of the congressional districts that we won in 1984. We were a major factor in changing the makeup of the U.S. Senate. Senator Sanford of North Carolina won 53 percent of the vote: 44 percent of white vote, 94 percent of the black vote. In California Senator Cranston obtained 51 percent of the overall vote: 44 percent of the white vote, 96 percent of the black vote. In Georgia Senator Fowler won with 51 percent of the vote, 39 percent of the white vote, 85 percent of the black vote. That new coalition of interest, with a broad base of people shifting their politics from the gutter of racial battleground to economic and political common ground and a moral higher ground, has changed options in our nation. Voting franchisement was the key to these changes; it has opened up new । ft the tnodition o^ 'Phenod, "Mtn. ^eo^on wou ldU w denied "Mtany an d tyoccfih accede to- the inn, tyedud could not hove gotten ct ^ e a d S tun t education, an d the S tan o^ Bethlehem w ou ld have been Clown out o^ the chy with S tan 'Wane. doors. The Progressive Coalition need not stand on the outside any longer with just picket signs. We can now be part of our nation’s central nervous system, because we now can vote. We can think and feel and direct and choose. If we can elect representatives and governors and senators—who return phone calls—we can elect presidents as well. And we must. Dr. King put forth his dream outside the Lincoln Monument. Our generation cannot linger in that spot, we must take the dream inside the White House and implement it by appointing justices and cabinet members and having access to the entire U.S. Congress. We must go higher in pursuit of that dream. Unlike previous generations we have the ability as a Progressive Coalition to mass ten million votes. That’s enough to win the primaries, th a t ’s enough to change the course of American politics. Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 13
14 We must accept that challenge. We owe it to the nation, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world. cn co O s Qz 3 cn 2S M Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 tjirn r. 'De^ininy Oaa t in ted ecen tly at the C itade l in Charleston, South Carolina, a black freshman student was asleep. Five young jun io r clansmen put on their sheets and hoods and walked in his room with a burning cross to intimidate him. He was driven out of school as a result of this terrorist attack. At Howard Beach in New York, three blacks stopped at a pizza parlor and were beaten. One was run over and killed. In Forsyth County, Georgia, some 50 clansmen threw rocks at peaceful marchers. . We must not allow the symbols of Howard Beach, New York and Forsyth County, Georgia to define this period for us. They do not represent a majority trend in our country. Is a new Georgia 50 clansmen throwing rocks, or is it a black man, John Lewis, winning a congressional seat with a majority of white votes, and Fowler being elected to the Senate with a majority of black votes? We must define our times. Racial violence is illegal. That is the result of our struggle for the past 20 years. But economic violence is far greater than racial violence and economic violence is not illegal. Driving 600,000 farmers from their land with no place to go is legal. Twenty-five b illionaires at the top and five million homeless at the bottom is legal. Driving brilliant young minds out of school because they cannot pay tuition is legal. Schools down and jail rolls up, legal. Four years in a good college on a full academic scholarship cost less than $25,000. Those same four years on a penitentiary scholarship would cost more than a $110,000. It costs nearly five times more to incarcerate our children than educate them. Let’s choose schools over jails, and give our youth a chance. I could not let these incidents define our times. Last summer 6000 farmers in v i te d me to speak to them at Chillicothe, Missouri. When the state police would not make themselves available, they drove 300 tractors from six counties. A tractorcade of security. When the farmers and ranchers had a congress in St. Louis, Missouri, they asked me to be their keynote speaker. Willie Nelson sponsored Farm Aid in Austin, Texas on July 4th last year. I was his special guest with great acceptance. Farmers were reaching out across lines of race, and sex and religion, something they never realized they would do. Our best minds were turning to each other, and not on each other. Our fight is not blacks fighting whites. The people trapped must march together, not in confrontation on a beach or a lonesome road in the rural south. If we must march, let’s choose the site of our fight, and make the site a plant that closed on workers without notice. Make the site a missile site. Let us define our times. The fact is there is something misleading about putting all the focus on Howard Beach and Forsyth County, Georgia. The reality is that whites in Howard Beach and Forsyth County are not investing in South Africa. They are not foreclosing farms, they are not closing plants on workers without notice, they have not cut back on black, Hispanic, and female enrollment in colleges. They have been used as symbols and substitutes for the source, where we’ re really locked out. Where has this acid rain of race come from? Who seeded the clouds? scious signals designed to divide us have come from the top down, not the bottom up. We would do well to stay together. We are more locked out of the White House than we are Howard Beach. We are more locked out of A/ew York Times editorial board room, CBS, ABC, NBC, Wall Street law firms and investment firms than Howard Beach. Let us not view symbols as substitutes for the source. We must challenge this White House, challenge this Justice Department, challenge the speculators and the greedy on Wall Street to do justice and care about all of the American people. Money to the economic system is like blood to the human body. If all the blood is in one extremity and clots, you will die. Unless the blood flows, you will die. Twenty-five billionaires up top, overheated; five million people at the bottom, freezing. The top 40 percent of our society make 68 percent of the income and they get a tax cut. The bottom 40 percent make 15 percent and they get a wage cut and a plant closing. It’s dangerous, it’s immoral and ought to be made illegal. There are two myths that must be destroyed. Most poor people in the U.S. are not black or brown. (Of the 41 million in poverty, 29 million are white; most of the poor are white and female and young. Whether white, black or brown, hunger hurts. Secondly, most poor people are not on welfare, and don’t want to be. Most poor people work everyday. Why aren’t they in the polls. Because they are in the bus before the poll takers get up. And they come back at night when the poll takers have gone home. Most poor people work everyday. They drive cabs. They buff floors at hotels. They raise other people’s children. They cook other people’s food. They farm. They teach. They work in hospitals, changing the beds and the clothes of the feverishly sick, and when they get sick and can’t afford to lie in the bed they have made up everyday, they die in emergency rooms, because they don’t have a green or a yellow card to go upstairs. So the bed is empty waiting for the rich to get sick. My friend, that is economic violence. We must end economic violence. bail out Europe and Israel and Japan, we can bail out the American farmer. “D inty ^tandd and a ^ tean merica is a great nation, a nation blessed by God. But we are a nation unto ourselves, not a world unto ourselves. Our foreign policy has failed. In part because our vision of the world is too limited. A world too vast, a vision too small. America is six percent of the world’s population. When Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev met in Geneva and Iceland, they represented only one-eighth of the human race—it was a minority meeting. There are 500 million people between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In India alone live 700 million people. Most people in the world are yellow- or brown or black, non-Cliristian, poor, female, young and don’t speak English. It is that real world that we must address and not Fantasy Island. The nuclear race is too dangerous, it’s too costly and too likely to explode. It is beyond human verifiability. Our whole world could be destroyed by computer malfunction, Our danger is that we have guided missiles and misguided leadership. We must go another way. We must end apartheid. We had to end Hitler and the Nazi reign of terror. When unbridled greed and fascism were unleashed, America and Russia—capitalist and communist, had to coalesce because fascism threatened both systems. How can we now condemn the ANSC, for it does not lock anybody out who is against fascism, Hitler’s historical successor, Nazi South Africa? We must end apartheid in our day. The war in Central America is so ungodly. One hundred seventy-five thousand Salvadorans have been killed in five years. Three times more than this country lost in the entire Vietnam War. They 7fa d e ^aantead defttaue acct meaccy ao w e t t a e new afttiono. "7Cecy one not aeCiny ^oa a Candoat, tCeey one aoCincy fan. a Cait oat, an d tedtnaetaninq. a^ tCein deCte. we can Cait oa t Sanofte and ^onaet an d ^aftan, we can Cait oa t tCe These farmers deserve help because all of us who eat are involved in agriculture. We save ourselves if we save them. These farmers deserve our help. They fed the nation and fed the world. It doesn’t say much about your character when you turn you back on the hand that fed you. They need more than management. They need mercy and understanding. They are victims of a government- induced crisis. If 40 or 50 farmers were driven out of business, you could say they misread the market. They planted late, it was a bad season, a drought or flood. But if 80,000 families are driven from their land, in Oregon and Mississippi, Missouri and California, that is an epidemic, that is systemic. If one person drowns or two or three, you can say they caught leg cramps, they couldn’t swim. If a whole city is under water, it’s a flood. At some times we can be so merciless in dealing with human problems. If a mother has five children and two pork chops, she will not run to a computer and ^Onetf to- tCe CMnOOtie eifdtent id (i^e Ctaod to- tCe Canton Codey. Ttntedd tCe Mood ^ w o , a t i t t die. * v "Iwentcy-^iue Cittionained aft toft, ouenCeated; f a e ntittion fteoftte a t tCe Cottam.. C^ee^in<^. Mr. Reagan has not met with the Congressional Black Caucus one time in seven years. He has not met with women fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment on pay equity in seven years. He suggested Dr. King was a communist 18 years after his death. He vetoed sanctions on South Africa. These race conconclude that she has three excess children. She’ ll cut up two pork chops into five pieces and make gravy because she is a merciful mother with common sense. These farmers deserve dur mercy as well as new options. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for a bail out, and restructuring of their debts. If we can too are God’s children. Our government is openly planning to overthrow a government, trying to assassinate the head of state. How would you feel tomorrow morning if the CIA succeeded in killing Ortega? How would the world view us? In these past few years I have been blessed to travel around the world. I have met with friends and foes of our country. I have been to South Africa, East, West and Central Africa. The Caribbean, Central America, Europe and Asia. I met with Peres, Arafat and Hussein. I met with Gorbachev. Sat heads up and argued about human rights with him. I met with Ortega, Castro, and Duarte—the Pope, M it te rand , and the Queen of the Netherlands—Nakasone and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I have tried to get a sense of this world and its leadership. Those whose hands are clean, whose heart pumps forth purity, whose heads are empty, can’t lead us to higher ground. Many in leadership brag about having clean hands. You have got to have dirty hands if you work; have dirty hands and a clean heart. If we turn to each other, our land will be healed, our jobs will be restored, our national honor will be restored. We’ ll feel good about ourselves again and we will be the generation who ushers in peace on earth and good will to everybody. We have a chance to lead, a choice to make and a charge to keep. This story is edited from remarks delivered by Rev. Jackson earlier this year in Portland. It is used with permission. Artist Isaac Shamsud-Din, a long-time contributor to CSQ, lives in Portland.
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