The Seed and I a Murfin Memoir—Intersecting Existences 1969

Seed covers from the first three years--psychedelic to counter cultural revolution. 

After my first encounter with actual Chicago Seed staffers on a stifling hot early summer evening in 1968 on an assignment from radical historian Staughton Lynn to seek out the Yippies, the summer rolled along to its inevitable epic climax—the protests associated with Democratic National Convention and the resultant police riots and armed National Guard intervention—all of it written about and participated in by Seed staffers.  I have chronicled my own misadventures that summer in a memoir series called Chicago Summer of ’68 that ran successively in 11 posts in this blog beginning with Chicago Summer of ’68 Memoir—I Go to a Party on August 1, 2015.

After it was all over I returned to Shimer College in Mt. Carroll, Illinois for what turned out to be unexpectedly my last semester there.  For various reasons I dropped out to transfer to the very different Columbia College in Chicago, a communications and arts school then located on the upper floors of a commercial building fronting the Inner Drive between Grand Avenue and Ohio Streets just across from Navy Pier.  I enrolled in the Story Workshop creative writing program run by John Schultz, who wrote one of the best accounts of Convention week, No One Was Killed.  I had delusions of becoming the next Great American Novelist.

I moved into my first Chicago place—a six room garden apartment a/k/a basement—in a seedy three flat on Howe Street west of Old Town and about a long block north of Armitage.  It was a tough neighborhood of mixed Appalachian Whites and Puerto Ricans with whom they had a tense and testy relationship.  I split the $78 a month rent with a black street kid who I connected with in a personal ad in the Seed and a 56 year old Mexican who I had worked with at a Skokie air conditioning factory and who had lost everything when his adult son was shot while waiting in line at a Kentucky Fried Chicken store and took a long, expensive time to die. 

I was too stupid to realize what a red flag my roommates were to the neighborhood street gang, the Howe Street Boys.  And I represented yet another threat—the gentrification represented by Old Town pushing west. 

It turned out the Seed staff were experiencing somewhat similar problems at their offices which were then located on Sedgewick just south of North Avenue which was on the western fringes of Old Town but also in the literal shadow of the massive virtually all Black Cabrini Green housing complex.  It was also just a few short blocks south of my new place.  It turned out that Black gang members from the Projects did not look on the hippie newspaper staff as friends and allies but as White interlopers and the nose-of-the-camel under the tent for White gentrification and eventual displacement of Blacks.  It was no secret that the developers of Old Town’s Carl Sandburg Village high rise apartments and others hoped to take over Cabrini Green for middle class condos and had support form powerful Democrats. 

So the local gangs literally besieged the office, pelting it with bricks and rocks and threatening staffers as they came and went.  The editors issued a tone deaf and defiant statement in the paper which denounced the attackers as “Black storm troopers” vowed not to “leave Old Town until we are ready.”  It turned out that they were immediately ready and fled the offices locating them further north and an insulating distance from Cabrini.

A Chicago Police sharp shooter takes aim at an upper window in the Cabrini Green housing complex during the riots on the one year anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination.  That evening just blocks away a mini-riot broke out in front of my Howe Street apartment.

I stupidly planned a huge party inviting all of my old Shimer pals, folks I knew from High School at Niles West and new acquaintances at Columbia.  Word spread and scores showed up despite the fact that I had forgotten that the date corresponded to the first anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.  Cabrini Green and much of Black Chicago was rioting just blocks away.  You could hear gunfire and see Chicago Police cars screaming to the scene with their windows taped up for protection from rocks and bottles.

The Howe Street Boys realized that the cops had bigger fish to fry and gathered in front of my rowdy party.  Pretty soon guests were assaulted and I was pretty badly roughed up when I went out to try to rescue them.  I had my own personal mini-riot.  We were besieged all night.  I recounted the whole evening in some detail in a post called April 1969—Now That Was A Party.

Like the Seed, I soon fled for digs further north in the first of many moves over the next few years.  It is clear that neither I or the Hippie/Yippies at the Seed yet had a clear understanding of the class and racial dynamics of the city.

That summer I joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who I had first encountered during the Democratic Convention.  In the time since that contact the Chicago Branch had sprung to new life with scores of active young members.  I was astonished to find more than 50 in attendance at my first Branch Meeting.  I plunged right in to activity.

The Chicago People's Park Project got some ink in the Sun Times.

My first project would bring me back to the issues of urban renewal/urban removal that had been at the heart of the troubles on Howe Street.  City demolition under the guise of slum removal was gobbling up block after block of slightly rundown but serviceable working class housing, much of it in classic brick and gray stone two and three flat buildings.  The razing of Larabee Street from Armitage to North Avenues just east of Howe Street had been completed while I was still there.  Middle class town homes were slated to replace a once stable immigrant Italian and German neighborhood.

Then, leapfrogging a few blocks west, most of a block on Halsted north of Armitage was leveled.  When the City announced that the land was not going to be developed as affordable housing as originally promised but as a private tennis club a mini-riot broke out at a community meeting held at nearby Waller High School.  The next day organized by the Young Comancheros, a radicalized Chicano and multi-ethnic gang and the more well known and established Puerto Rican Young Lords hundreds of community members descended on the vacant property and began removing rubble.  Inspired by events in Berkley, California they declared that the land had been seized by the People and a People’s Park would be built.

I had been at the Waller meeting and had a passing acquaintance with the leaders of both the Comancheros and the Lords.  The Chicago Branch conveniently met the first night of the occupation.  I reported what I had experienced at the scene that day and they voted overwhelmingly to lend the union’s full support to the project.  I was credentialed as official IWW liaison.  I threw myself into the project with enthusiasm.  After consulting with the nightly people’s council held on the site, I was asked to try and arrange some trucks and heavy equipment to help with clearing the rubble which was being done by hand.  They perhaps had an exaggerated idea of who the members of our union actually were—at this point mostly now retired veterans and young radicals, none of whom to my knowledge were construction workers.

None-the-less I started working the phone cold calling places out of the phone book.  I quickly discovered that there were companies glad to haul away the rubble for construction landfill and were not particularly choosey about the perfect legality of taking it.  I was told later they were probably mob connected and had a certain impunity that did not come from us.  Then I got a guy on the line in a paving company yard after the office staff had left for the day.  He was thrilled about the project because family members had lost their homes to urban removal.  He said, “I don’t care what the company says, I’ll be there.”  The next evening after his shift he arrived on a road grader and made short work of leveling the ground.

Needless to say the folks at the park were impressed and my Fellow Workers were astonished.  I was too clueless to realize that I had done anything unusual at all.  After spending a few nights quasi-camping at the park to keep the Police from seizing it when the hundreds of community volunteers were gone, I was interviewed by reporters.  They felt safer talking to me than to scary Young Comancheros and Young Lords.  It was agreed that I would act as a press liaison for the Park.  One night Studs Terkel hauled his huge, heavy powered tape recorder and sat with several Comancheros and me around a fire as quarts of Meisterbrau were passed around and the young dudes huffed typewriter solvent from brown paper bags.  We talked for two or more hours and established a relationship that would last for years.

For the Seed the connection to the iconic Berkley People’s Park project made our local effort especially interesting.  It was my first encounter with staffers since stumbling in on a lay-out session on LaSalle Street.  From then on I would encounter them at all sorts of community events, at demonstrations, at social occasions, and at cheap saloons like Johnny Weiss’s on Lincoln Avenue.

Most of August of ’69 was taken up by the People’ Park project.  To our astonishment the city never tried to deploy the Police to remove us.  Plans for the tennis club were publicly scrapped.  The community managed to put up some makeshift playground equipment, install a few benches, and even plant some shrubs.  The land was left undeveloped for more than a decade, long after the Park had deteriorated by not being maintained.  But at that moment, it was a stunning victory.

A poster promoting the protest on the first night of the Chicago 8 trial.  The march from Lincoln Park to the Federal Building turned into a running battle.

That fall the opening of the Conspiracy 8—soon to be Conspiracy 7—Trial on September 24 riveted all of our attentions.  The Seed, following on its deep involvement with the Yippies and the Convention protests, made coverage of the trial a top priority and featuring some of its most memorable covers.  Via the Underground Press Syndicate free exchange the paper’s coverage was picked up by the radical press all over the country.  There was plenty to write about—Judge Julius Hoffman’s obvious bias, the bounding and gagging of Bobby Seals and his eventual severance from the trial,  the almost complete shutdown of the planned defense, and, of course, the antics of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

The evening the trial opened I was joined by Shimer college pals Bill Delaney, a former Vietnam Marine, and Sarah (Sally) MacMurrough, former unrequited love, for a March from Lincoln Park to the Federal Building in the Loop.  To our surprise the march had only gone a few blocks when some demonstrators began to break windows in storefronts and attempted to overturn some cars.  For once the Chicago Police seemed taken unaware.  A kind of a rolling brawl erupted between the Cops and the most aggressive demonstrators.  Rocks and bottles were thrown and the Police responded with tear gas. 

The three of us tried to keep our distance from the fighting, mostly by staying on the sidewalk and maneuvering to keep upwind of the gas.  We did make it to the Federal Building where a noisy but peaceful rally was finally held.

But clearly, something had radically changed.  During the Convention protestors were mostly peaceful and on the defense to police and National Guard attacks.  Scuffling was extremely limited and occurred only after strong provocations, as when Michael James of SDS and later Rising Up Angry and friends were famously photographed trying to push over a Police Squadrol after phalanxes of cops attacked the crowd outside the Conrad Hilton on Wednesday night.  But here at least some protestors had planned to go on a rampage—many sporting helmets.

                                Skip Williamson stuck it to the Man in a series of Seed 

The Flower Power era seemed dead.  The Seed staff took note and although divided on the wisdom of taking it to the streets in this new way, reflected it, especially in a series of memorable covers by Skip Williamson and others. 

Most of the rioters on that march were from the new RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement) faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that had “expelled” the far larger WSA (Worker Student Alliance) faction—the community organizing focused group—and the Maoist PL (Progressive Labor) factions as a summer convention in Chicago.  WSA members and the so-called libertarians—anti-authoritarian leftists—had convened a rump session at the IWW General Headquarters on Halstead Street during the turmoil. 

Within months most campus chapters had fallen apart and RYM had split again with the sub-faction lead by Bernadine Dorn advocating immediate armed insurrection.  These were the Weathermen, noisy but widely militant. 

The Seed staff was unaffiliated with any faction but had individuals with ties to all of them.

                                                Bring the War Home Weatherman Days of Rage poster.

Then there were the Days of Rage that October.  The emerging Weathermen were singing I’m Dreaming of a White Riot.  They planned to Bring the War Home in three days of demonstrations.  Despite ambitious attempts to recruit protestors nationally only about 800 hard core showed up to battle more than 2000 Chicago police in full riot gear ready to meet them. On October 8th the action started with an attempted late night dash from Lincoln Park to the Drake Hotel at Oak Street where Conspiracy Trial Judge Julius Hoffman lived.

I was riding my bicycle home to my Lincoln Park digs from a late class at Columbia College when I stumbled into the melee.  A guy in a motorcycle helmet and leather jacket spotted me and yelled “If you aren’t with us, you’re against us!” and came at me swinging a three foot two by four.  I narrowly evaded him and made my escape.  The incident did not endear the Weathermen to me.  The cops easily won the battle when it reached the Drake.  Six Weathermen were shot and dozens injured, some badly but most avoided hospitals for fear of arrest.  68 were arrested. 

The next day an attempt by Bernadine Dorn to lead a foray out of Grant Park with a Women’s Militia was easily foiled.  That night Fred Hampton disassociated the Illinois Black Panther Party from Weatherman, saying, “We do not support people who are anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic.”  That summed up my positions as well.

On the October 11 300 Weathermen pulled a surprise march through the Loop smashing store windows and cars.  Half of the rioters were quickly arrested but Assistant States Attorney Richard Elrod broke his neck and was paralyzed when he tried to tackle Brian Flanagan.  As a revolutionary action it was a total failure and did not spark any other White Riots. 

The Weathermen famously doubled down, went underground and began plotting bombing campaigns.  Over the next years they launched several attacks and on March 6, 1970 Ted Gold, Dianne Oughton, and Terry Robbins were killed when the bomb factory in the Manhattan town house exploded.  I had known Gould and Oughton from the movement center for high school students I worked out of during the Democratic Convention.  They did not seem crazy or deranged at the time.

                                    The Seed's Fred Hampton memorial cover.

Then in December of 1969 the assassinations of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark during a Chicago police attack on their apartment as they slept was a real kick in the gut.  The popular Hampton had launched a series of community projects including a breakfast program for children and had both hammered out a gang truce and forged a new Rainbow Alliance that included the Young Lords, and the Appalachian White Young Patriots.  At just 21 he was widely considered the best and brightest star of a new multi-ethnic left movement.  His death was like a declaration of war.  More white leftists, including Seed staffers were now ready to “fight the pigs.”

In fact an obsession with the police made it seem that the revolution was a war on the pigs almost forgetting that they were just the brutal face of greater and more powerful forces.

Tomorrow:  Out of Old Town, on to Lincoln Avenue.

Charlottesville On My Mind—Part 3

The American Black Block made its bow at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests--is today's Antifa movement just a cover for the same street fighting radicals?

Note: Once again my reflections on Charlottesville have taken long than anticipated.  In this last post I look at the relationship of the Antifas and the Black Block as well as other participants in the events, especially the clergy and religious contingent. I still failed to tag all bases.  Tomorrow I will re-visit my much reviled Free Speech absolutism in light of what we learned.  But that will be ancillary to this series which concludes today.

The “There” where Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville was with the Anti-fascists—broadly speaking—who Donald Trump famously tagged as one of the “many sides” guilty of violence.  He walked that back for a nanosecond and has since jumped back on the theme with both feet.  Although much of the media dutifully denounced moral equivalency, many seem to give it back handed credence in spates of articles, editorials, and yammering head commentary wringing hands and pointing fingers at the Antifa in particular as reckless and violent.

Much of that comes from identifying Antifa with Black Block Anarchists who have been smashing windows and street brawling—frequently piggy-backing on other much larger and non-violent demonstrations.  Their black clothing, masks, and banners have become familiar across the country.  With probably only a few hundred hard core participants and occasional I-wanna-do-that drop-ins the attention they receive is far greater than their actual influence on a far-wider movement of resistance and protest.

The Black Block first emerged in the 1999 protests to the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington which took local authorities by surprise resulting in millions of dollars in damage and over 500 arrests—most of them of people not associated at all by the estimated 200 Black Block anarchists that initiated the violence.  Since then the Black Block has been a controversial part of numerous demonstrations notably during the Occupy Movement in Oakland and other West Coast cities and on the fringes of anti-police protests following shootings or deaths in custody and Black Lives Matter actions.  In January a small group broke away from much larger anti-inauguration protests in Washington.  The Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pursuing heavy felony charges against more than 200 people arrested that day, most of them by-standers, non-Black Block protestors not directly involved, and journalists covering the event.

The Black Block that emerged from the WTO demonstrations was inspired by a long tradition of street brawling in Europe that goes back to the French Revolution.  Although the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and other late 19th Century featured pitched battles the American labor movement quickly learned that the armed power of the state easily crushed such rebellions and destroyed or eroded public support.  The labor union movement, including its most militant components like the IWW learned to organize strikes and other manifestations in ways that could maximize the economic power of workers while generally avoiding inviting violent repression as much as possible.  This was simply practical.

The Civil Rights Movement, which inspired subsequent liberation movements and mass protests, developed the ideas of passive resistance, civil disobedience, and non-violence into an effective model for protest.  While there were always those who chaffed under the restrictions and discipline of non-violence and advocated militant self-defense like the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, and others, few if any advocated planed street violence as a revolutionary tactic.  The great urban riots were seen as understandable outbursts of pent up rage that often ended up destroying Black communities and invited a permanent army-of-occupation stance and mind set by police. 

In the ‘60’s one group of White radicals, looked longingly at the riots and thought they could be a revolutionary model.  The Weatherman faction of SDS was made up mostly of the sons and daughters of America’s ruling elite—Bill Ayers, scion of Commonwealth Edison’s top honcho and Bernardine Dohrn being the prime examples.  I knew met some who became Weathermen at a movement center for high school students that we all helped operate during the Democratic Convention protests of 1968.  Ted Gold and Diana Oughton were killed when their bomb making factory in a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded 18 month later.

The Weathermen on the march in Chicago in 1969 during the Days of Rage right before all hell broke loose.  The Revolution as a temper tantrum was a dead end.

Radicalized by the Vietnam War, and the rise of the Black Panthers and Black Power movement, and filled with text book daddy issues and self-loathing fetishized the violence of the riots in Detroit, Newark, Chicago and other cities.  The envisioned themselves as a vanguard of a youth revolution sparked by their example.  They famously sang I’m Dreaming of a White Riot at a gathering and made that vision come true during the Days of Rage in Chicago in October 1969.  Point of disclosure—I was nearly pulled from a bicycle and beaten during that rampage when I accidentally rode into it while peddling to my North Side apartment from classes a Columbia College which may have tinged my opinion of them.  When that epic temper tantrum failed to spark uprisings around the country, the Weathermen went underground after a War Council in Flint, Michigan and undertook a campaign of arson and bombing.

The Weathermen were a dead end in American radicalism.  No one followed it their footsteps—which were generally regarded as disastrous or adopted either their peculiar Marxist ideology or their methods.

The early Black Block people, two generations removed from the Weathermen, were probably only dimly aware of them.  Their inspiration came from the streets of Paris, Athens, and other European cities where anarchists broke from mass anti-austerity protests to smash windows, overturn and burn cars, and battle police.  Because they eschew recognizable public leaders and seek as much as possible to shroud their identities, we don’t know as much about who the Black Block is as we do about the Weathermen.    From those who have been arrested and charged we can see that they mostly are not drawn from the elite strata of society as the old SDS radicals.  Many were students, often drop outs, had ordinary middle or working class backgrounds.  Some were part of the downwardly mobile middle class faced with diminishing expectations—the same circumstances that may have led some of their parents and grandparents to become Tea Partiers and Trumpistas and some of their contemporaries to pick different demons and drift to the Alt-right.

We do know that they a mostly—sometimes overwhelmingly White.   That has been a particular sore point in many Black communities when they injected themselves into the spontaneous protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere after police shootings.  They also often broke away from large peaceful protests organized by both civil rights movement veterans and the younger leadership represented by the Black Lives Matter movement.  BLM has castigated the Black Block for not being good White allies and following the lead of Blacks organizing their own resistance.  Black Block members in turn have accused both traditional community leaders and BLM leadership of timidity and being complicit with their oppressors.

I have been critical of the Black Block for those reasons as well as their susceptibility by virtue of the very anonymity they adopt to provocateurs.  It was old Wobbly wisdom that when trying to sniff out a police or company spy, “look out for the first one to pick up a brick.”  The coordinated attack on the Occupy Movement by the FBI and other federal agencies in cooperation with local police was filled with just that and was used to squelch a popular and growing movement and clear out Occupy camps around the country.  BLM suspects the same.

Currently Alt-right trolls, with or without the aid of Justice Department dirty tricks, have established several phony Antifa Facebook pages and Twitter accounts filled with outrageous statements and threats of violence that both the conservative and mainstream media duly report as gospel.  Not only that, the faux posts inflame the naive and suck them into doomed acting out.

Variations of this flag and symbol are used by Antifa activists all over the world.

But are the Black Block and the Antifa on the streets of Charlottesville really identical?  Clearly there is some overlap and the cosmetics are similar—the use of black clothing, banners, and sometimes masks.  But the Antifa are clearly much broader and focused more directly on community self-defense and direct confrontation with racist thugs than on mindless rampage.  The IWW/GDC which has been among the most cohesive and visible elements of the Antifa movement has clearly made that distinction.  Many of those now joining the Antifa movement have no ties at all to the Black Block.

But the protests to the Alt-Right in Charlottesville were much wider than just the Antifa.  Who else was involved?

Largely led by young women Black Lives Matter was an important and disciplined part of the Charlottesville response to racism and White Nationalism.

Black Lives Matter, with its young, largely female leadership was front and center from the beginning of planning.  Eager to make a strong and united showing, they began careful organizing and planning weeks in advance, including training non-violence for community members and outreach to others, particularly potential White allies, to make sure everyone was on the same page.  They were very concerned that the Antifa contingent might disrupt their plans for aggressive but peaceful confrontation.  Many community members of all races responded to the BLM call and marched with their placards and t-shirts.  As we have seen, in chaos in the streets after Emancipation Park was closed both groups were often thrown together and, on the whole, made accommodation for each other.

Traditional Civil Rights leadership was, as traditionally been the case, represented by the local clergy which began organizing responses back in May when Richard Spencer organized the first White Nationalist protest to the proposed removal of the Robert E. Lee statue and again for the failed Klan rally in July.  Soon after that Congregate CVille, a new coalition of local Black congregations, mainstream Protestants, Jews, and others was formed to confront the Unite the Right call.  In the spirit of Martin Luther King at Selma the group sent out a nationwide call for religious leaders to come to Charlottesville. 

More than 1000 responded.  Dozens of Unitarian Universalists including newly elected UUA President Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray; Rev. Jeanne Pupke, Sr. Minister at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond and recently another candidate for UUA President;  Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, an organizer, strategist, and musician;  Rev. Carlton Elliott Smith, the UUA Southern Region Congregational Field Staff person; and local ministers of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church, Rev. Erik ‘Wik’ Wikstrom Lead Minister and Rev. Alex McGee, Assistant Minister.  

Rev. Carlton Elliot Smith, second from left, and UUA President Susan Fredrick-Gray, third from right joined scholar activist Cornell West in the black suit in the front ranks of religious leaders linking arms in Charlottesville.

The UUA with the leadership and prodding of  Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism has been undergoing extensive soul searching, self-reflection, and education on White privilege and is committed to being a strong and respectful ally.  Under the familiar yellow banner of the Standing on the Side of Love campaign, UUs have been prominent in many protests and demonstrations including Black Lives Matter protests and the new Civil Rights movement represented by the Moral Monday campaigns.  In Charlottesville UU ministers could be identified by their yellow stoles or yellow clergy shirts.

Similar movements are afoot in mainstream Protestant denominations, especially the United Church of Christ (UCC), Episcopal Church, and United Methodists, all of whom sent large contingents to Virginia as did Jewish organizations, the Muslim community, and Catholics.  Except for those influenced by the liberal Sojourner group, most Evangelical churches were notable for their absence.

Local and visiting clergy were provided special training in non-violence, with extra attention for those who were willing to be arrested for defying police orders not to block access to Emancipation Park by the Neo-Nazis.  In the end the civil disobedience training was not employed—instead of arresting the ministers, the police withdrew and exposed them to attack by the armed and enraged racists.

See my first post in this series for a detailed account of what the ministers experienced in Charlottesville.

As a Unitarian Universalist layman and social justice activist I would have been with the religious contingent if I had been able to go to Charlottesville despite my old connections to the IWW.  I am not a pacifist but am generally committed to non-violence as an effective form a protest.   But then, we have never been faced with the possible rise of a real fascist movement with the powerful backing and approval of the President of the United States and a major political party before.  That changes everything.  Old assumptions have to be examined and weighed by alarming reality.

But in the days following Charlottesville UUs at Tree of Life Congregation in McHenry organized a vigil against hate and fascism.  It was one of thousands of similar actions across the country largely organized by religious communities.  In other cities folks joined massive street marches and occasionally confronted other Alt-Right events.

As in Charlottesville Antif, Black Lives Matter, and other activists will continue to share confrontations with a growing Neo-Nazi/White Nationalist/KKK movement and the administration that empowers it.

Last weekend in Boston as many as 40,000 mobilized in the streets against a few dozen Ku Klux Klansmen and this week when Trump staged a pathetic mini-Nuremburg rally in Phoenix ordinary community members, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and religious groups were thrown together.  And we will be in the future.  It may be a sometimes uneasy alliance, but it is not going away.

In a report of our McHenry vigil, I shared a new poem that reflected on this.  Ordinarily I would not repeat verse so quickly in this blog, but it is more germane here than where it was originally posted. 

Reds break up a Nazi beer hall rally in 1930.

Munich and Charlottesville

August 13, 2017

So is this how it felt on the streets of Munich

            when the strutting Brown Shirts

            in their polished jackboots,

            Sam Browne, and scarlet arm bands

            faced the scruffy Commies

            in their cloth caps

            and shirtsleeves rolled up

            and battled in the beerhalls,

            parks and streets.

All of the good people, the nice people

            cowered behind closed doors

            and wished it would go away—

                        all of the liberals, the Catholics,

                        the new-bred pacifists of the Great War,

                        the professors and doctors,

                        editors and intellectuals,

                        the Social Democrats,

                        even—my God!—the Jews

                        who had not gone Red—

            a pox on both your houses they solemnly intoned.

Hey, buddy, in retrospect those damn Bolshies

            look pretty good,

            like heroes even.

           

Things look a little different in Charlottesville,

            in brilliant color not grainy black and white

            and the Fascists can’t agree on a

            Boy Scout uniform and array themselves

            golf shirts and khakis, rainbow Klan hoods,

            biker black and studs and strutting camo.

But the smell, you know, that stench,

            is just the same.

The question is—do you dare be a Red today

            or will you close your doors

            and go back to your game consoles

            and cat videos.

Which will it be, buddy?

—Patrick Murfin