http://www.explorehoward.com/blog/artform/157/of-woodstock-and-tea-parties/
By John Harding
July 16, 2010
When singer Arlo Guthrie appeared at the Columbia Festival of the
Arts last month, he steered clear of politics. So what he told Gene
Weingarten of The Washington Post came like a bolt from the blue:
He's now a registered Republican.
Hey, this is Arlo Guthrie we're talking about son of famed Dust
Bowl protest singer Woody Guthrie and himself a long-haired icon of
the draft-dodging '60s . … "Flying into Los Angeles, bringing in a
couple of keys." You know? That Arlo Guthrie … a reconstituted conservative?
Weingarten was clearly dumbstruck by the revelation as, no doubt,
were many of his colleagues in the national media.
But not me.
Arlo and I are about the same age, and while no one asked me to sing
at Woodstock, I probably would have. I made a lot of odd lifestyle
choices in those days. To me and my friends, "grass roots" meant
something other than a populist uprising.
Still, we were aghast at the idea of Big Brother, and were against
most state intrusions into private lives. When I saw how the
government was harassing and intimidating students against the
Vietnam war, I threw myself into George McGovern's presidential
campaign because his platform included stopping the draft and reining
in an out-of-control central government.
Arlo Guthrie's famous anthem about "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree"
was nothing if not a parable about private citizens standing up
against the hydra-headed authority of an overzealous power structure.
It's not hard to understand Arlo gravitating toward the only party
now paying lip service to a limited Federal government. That's the GOP.
Of course, as time has passed, neither party has been too mindful of
its primary mission, which is to look out for our interests. NAFTA?
No threat there to American jobs. The border? Good as sealed. A
Social Security lock box? No one's going to rob that baby.
These days, we're at the mercy of legislators who sign bills without
reading them, rack up trillion dollar debts without explanation, and
bet our children's future on impractical energy fixes and economic
theories still not proven to work in the real world.
It's no wonder that everyday people rose up and began mailing empty
tea bags to their elected officials a reminder of the tea tax
rebellion that motivated our nation's founders. We've learned that
King George can be a nanny as well as a bully, and where is
the counterculture ready to oppose that more benign tyranny?
I'm wondering if Arlo hasn't also been thinking, like me, that these
tea party folks could be the hippies of today. They have no leaders,
no lobbyists in Washington, no financial backers telling them what to do next.
But they do have powerful media critics. The mainstream newspapers
and news outlets have spent a lot of time and energy trying to
demonize and marginalize the tea party movement.
I'm sure Arlo remembers how the establishment treated hippies in the
1960s, when even tossing Frisbees in the park was suddenly deemed a
subversive activity.
Hippies were mocked as outcasts by late night comedians then, too.
They were called rowdy and disrespectful and ill-groomed. Rather than
rebut the ideas of a peace activist like Joan Baez, she was
rechristened "Phony Joanie" in the funny pages of the so-called
"straight" press.
Those tactics would be familiar to anyone who has bothered to meet
the real Sarah Palin.
All I'm saying is, don't be surprised if Arlo Guthrie shows up at a
tea party rally some day. I know he'll agree to sing to the crowd,
and when he does, I can't think of a better choice for him to sing
than a little ditty his daddy wrote called "This Land Is Your Land."
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment