Radical

In a recent trip to Oakland, I stand on a side street with three other queer women.  On this corner is a café nobody seems to know the name of but they know where it is and go there.  On the sidewalk all along the front and side of the café are tables and chairs, every single one full.  Among these people within and without the café there is a good number of old seventies Berkeley radical literati.  It has been oh… thirty years since I have seen them.

The seventies is a time of the Black Power, Gay Liberation and Women's Liberation movements.  This is a time of the Berkeley Barb, Black Panthers, Shameless Hussy Press, COINTELPRO.  This is a time when I choose to write sports for PLEXUS which is a small press newspaper of radical notions: producing a women's feminist newspaper, writing about women's sports. 

I am required to go to the news collective meetings which is responsible for reporting a great upsurge of urban political activism.  In the early seventies on occasion in places like New York City or Philadelphia some underground radicals have an accident with the production of explosives.  The resultant explosion takes out them and a tenement block.  There are robberies of large sums of money.  A rich heiress is kidnapped and turned into an urban guerilla (what's known as terrorist and looter in 2004 terminology).

The guerillas are few.  The rest of us are caught up in a high wind of creativity, activity, productivity.  There is an urgency to get it done.  We spend hours talking about what "it" is: feminist presses, women's coffee houses and bookstores, newspapers and magazines, and women's land.   We talk about woman hating, gynocide, music production companies, birth control, sexuality.  We are rushing to dream a new world.  We think we will get "it" done soon.

It is a time when we become aware that the federal government isn't benevolent.  Dissent is not a right, it is a threatening bother.  So the government moves to squelch even the hint of a threat.  It is a time when the government sends provocateurs to blend in with the restless, to stir up trouble where there is none.  It is a time when informants are rampant; if they don't get a good story, they create one.  The government initiates COINTELPRO.  Phones are tapped, people followed, groups infiltrated.

The tactics are aggressive, divisive, destructive, effective.  The social, political movements are set back by pressures from within and without the groups.  The intent is to divide and destroy lawful political dissent.  People lose their jobs; some people lose their sanity, faith, courage; and the lives of many people are unnecessarily shattered.  Not one CIA or FBI detention, action or list is lawful.  Still it happens all over the country.

The nineties are the sixties upside down.  We are suppressed and tricked by the smiley good will of Clinton.  The millennium is the seventies unmasked.  There is no Tricky Dicky (Nixon); we have Master George and Darth Dick.  What happens in the seventies illegally, is now made legal.  The government can spy at will on the citizens of this country and with the blessing of congress.

This is a dangerous moment.  The pretenses have fallen.  We see what we are looking at.  This is a delightful moment.  The reality has risen.  I have seen this before.  I  see what I am looking at.  We have an opportunity now to make this our world, not theirs.  Carpe diem: seize the day, seize the god.  Now is the time to set intention, pick a work, do it, and hold to knowing that it is "dark before dawn".

In this moment I work without fear of Master and Darth because what I know from the seventies is that it is they who are afraid.  In Star Wars the rebels have a long journey of struggle.  There are many scary moments and some unsavory villains.  In the end, the rebels, the Jedi, the Wookies, the robots, the Ewoks are all gathered around.  They are at peace in a great forest.  They drum, sing, chant, feast and speak sweetly with each other.  May it be so for us.

Big House

Some time ago one of the Kulture Klatch writings talks about gay marriage.  That writing could leave the impression that I encourage gay marriage.  I do and I don't.  I do because it's a choice, and I encourage the right to choose.  I don't because it's complicity with structures that continue to institutionalize oppression.  Whatever truth is manifested by my life, the same has not ever been legitimized by the Big House.  I am not welcome there.

I remember the night of a fundraising dinner for a foundation that consists of the children of very wealthy massas who live in very big houses.  These children have broken from the strictures of their class and use their money to fund a wide variety of community organizations, the kind that scrap for every dollar and over and over make the miracle of the fishes and loaves.  The speakers include people from the neighborhoods who do everything they can where they live to save lives, create change, manifest dreams.  There are also luminaries such as Joan Baez and Alice Walker.

Surprisingly Harry Belafonte is there.  I first hear him in the sixties and this lesbian is sitting there in the eighties listening to him again.  In the first moments I'm adjusting myself in a time warp.  When we are all one in the sixties seems like a long time ago.  In the seventies separate groups partition into various branches of the liberation movements such as Student Liberation, Black Liberation, Black Power, Black Panther, Women's Liberation, Gay Liberation, and Lesbian Nation.  These all evolve from the Civil Rights Movement in which "Freedom" is the power word.

Harry Belafonte is a radical man of the sixties Civil Rights Movement.  He begins his speech by recounting the changes that have occurred since then:  how many Black mayors, government representatives, fire chiefs there are now.  I have no idea where he's going with this statistical accounting.  I'm looking for the fire, some glimmer of the radical.  He drifts into a story from the Civil Rights Movement.

There's a night when Martin Luther King, Harry and some others eat supper together.  Martin is quiet all through the meal.  Afterwards a group of them remain and gather to drink cognac and smoke cigars.  Harry makes note of King's quiet and inquires as to the reason for it.  The Reverend Dr. King responds that there's a disturbing thought that sticks with him.  He considers all the work they're doing to get into the big house, and the thought occurs now that they're running into a house that's burning down.

I think of the houses that do burn down in the seventies with the bodies of radical groups buried in the ashes.  Houses are surrounded by scores of SWAT cops and federal agents who enter shooting.  Showing warrants, knocking on the door are unused formalities. These days are the beginning of the police tactic to shoot so many tear gas canisters into a building that it's set on fire.  It's easier.  The inhabitants will either come out and often be shot, or burn to death in the fire.

The power of the message rises as Harry chants a litany of causes, freedoms, rights and failure, massacre, genocide.  Each one is followed by the same refrain: we go to them for… and they don't get it done; we go to them for… and they don't get it done.  They don't get it done; why do we still keep going to them.

In the year 2006, it still is not done.  We go to the churches for our dignity and they do not get it done.  We go to the legislatures for our rights, they do not get it done.  We go to the nations for our lives and they do not get it done.  We go to the White House for our invitation and they do not get it done.  We still keep going into a house that is burning down.  It is still not done.  There is nothing inside worth saving.  Freedom is already out on the lawn and it stands inside each one of us.  Let the house burn down to the ground.  As we build anew, Freedom will sing.