OWLs, rise up and be heard! (Or not)

by David Benjamin

“Call it peace or call it treason/ Call it love or call it reason/ But I ain’t marchin’ any more.”
— Phil Ochs

MADISON, Wis. — At my age, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “movement” is Metamucil.

However, as I’ve watched the crowds in the streets of Minnesota — milling and hollering, rattling a chain-link cage full of cringing cops, winging (petroleum-based, ecologically destructive) plastic water bottles hither and yon— all because of the tragicomic shooting of Daunte Wright, well, I feel a pang of movement envy.

At a moment that seems to be oversupplied with movements, from BLM to QAnon, from the Proud Boys to the Lincoln Project, I’m left alone and palely loitering.

But then… the other day, I looked around and realized that I typify a huge demographic of old white liberals (OWLs) who — if we ever took the trouble to organize — have the makings of a kickass national movement. Seriously, we know this protest gag inside-out. We’ve been there and done that to the point where we’re downright blasé when we see outbreaks of fist-shaking, sign-waving, slogan-shouting, brick-flinging, car-burning, cop-baiting and running wild in the streets.

Actually we’re sort of responsible for a lot of this mishigoss. At this stage, our youthful indiscretions and excesses have given us the sort of perspective that could lend a calming, even unifying tone to the current trend in tribal vituperation. Many of us go all the way back to the granddaddy of all three-word slogans. A half-century before “Black lives matter” and “Lock her up!”, we had “Ban the Bomb,” whose symbol, a B-52 bomber circumscribed by a black ring, later came to be known as the “peace sign.” We were around for other memorable and unfortunate three-word mantras like “Burn, baby, burn,” “Off the pig” and “Eat the rich.”

(“Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”)

We all had copies of The Whole Earth Catalog and most of us learned, from The Anarchist Cookbook how to make a Molotov cocktail that wouldn’t blow up in your hand. Our unholy trinity was “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” We were more or less present at the creation of all three — after which we didn’t manage them all that deftly. Let’s review (with grades).

On sex: We learned eventually that many people before us had done sex, but we applied ourselves to it more indiscriminately and openly — if not skillfully — than our more circumspect forebears. I often suspect that the feminist uprising diverged from the “sexual revolution” as a protest to the carnal incompetence of your typical twenty-something male hippie. Grade: C-minus

On drugs: We were the hedonist cult who migrated illicit drugs from the grainy mythology of reefer madness and Nelson Algren’s bleak junkie underworld to the “recreational” Haight-Ashbury delusion of tune-in, turn-on, drop-out — all of which reverted back to Nelson Algren’s bleak junkie underworld. Grade: F

On rock ’n’ roll, purely by chance and the Grace of Jefferson Airplane, we wailed, danced and rocked on. Nudged toward the blues by Elvis, we embraced — before we knew what we were doing — a “crossover” into multi-racial, rampantly eclectic pop music. Willy-nilly, we bought 45 rpm two-sides by Bo Diddley and Dean Martin, Patti Page and Janis Joplin. We fell in love with Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke not knowing that they were Black voices sneaking onto white radio — and we didn’t care. At a million school dances, rock clubs and stage shows, from the Winter Dance Party to Woodstock, we rode the evolution of rock ’n’ roll from the jungle beat of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters to Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” to the Beatles and Hendrix to Big Pink and the jazz-flavored harmonies of Crosby Stills & Nash. We could probably justify the creation of the OWL movement just as a fan club for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Aretha Franklin and “Alice’s Restaurant.” Grade: A

All this fun and games was possible because we were the most middle-class generation in history. We had Beach Party movies because, before we were born, poorer, tougher folks had the New Deal and the UAW. Our grandparents had survived the Depression. Our dads and uncles had come back alive from World War II and Korea. Every boy in America expected that he would either enter “the service” or find a way to dodge the draft. Every kid in America knew we would all die before age thirty in a rain of H-bombs and nuclear winter.

Today, the right wing is a fever swamp of conspiracy theories. But, for a while — after Joe McCarthy flamed out — white liberals cornered the paranoia market. Eclipsing the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, we spun the Great American Conspiracy Theory, the one mythic enigma that will never die, thanks to the grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, the ghost of Jack Ruby and the disappearing second gunman.

We had icons before any newscaster had ever uttered the word “iconic.” We knew JFK not as a picture next to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on our Irish grandmother’s kitchen wall, but as an actual guy who lived and died before our eyes. We’ve watched a parade of “icons” as they passed for review, at first with wonder and adulation, more recently with a knowing smirk and a touch of ennui. When we see Lady Gaga today, we think, ah! Madonna. But when we saw Madonna, we thought Ethel Merman, or maybe Martha Raye — or even Eartha Kitt purring “I want to be bad…” We see Juston Bieber and we think Sean Cassidy. We saw Sean and we thought Fabian. We saw Fabian and… well, you know who.

We paid homage to “icons” so pervasive and persistent that society hasn’t been able to bury them despite the passage of generations. Foremost among them, of course, are the Duke, Marilyn and Jack Kennedy. Still today, we’re haunted almost palpably by Khrushchev, Guevara and de Gaulle, Sophia Loren, Cassius Clay, Malcolm, Martin and Bobby, James Dean, James Bond, Audrey Hepburn, Walt Disney, Godzilla, Ed Sullivan, Walter Cronkite, Hugh Hefner, George Wallace, Sidney Poitier, Neil Armstrong, Bugs Bunny, Lenny Bruce, Lucy Ricardo, Beaver Cleaver and Annette Funicello, Madame Nhu and Ho Chi Minh…

That’s right. We had Vietnam.

We had the first war America lost, where all of us lost someone as young and promising, every bit as fierce and impetuous as all the rest of us, someone whose name we can trace, etched in marble on a black wall in Washington that slopes gently downward ’til it’s as deep in the green ground as a grave.

Because we’ve shared so much, fought so many battles (and lost just about every one), and looked at clouds from both sides ’round, it seems as though old white liberals could slap together a hell of a movement just by making a few calls and gathering at a coffee house in the Village. Our new president, a fellow OWL, has proven that most of us still have our wits about us after all 400 blows.

It’s not competence or even energy that might sideline this movement. It’s more a matter of irony. I look at the throngs in Brooklyn Center, all in a rage and bristling with righteous intensity. And I remember the same scene, the same passion, the same crust of protective ignorance that kept us safe from the crushing grind of advocacy, compromise, attrition, co-optation and, finally, two cents on the dollar. I remember the words of Phil Ochs, who — before I was old enough to follow in his footsteps — said he was finished with marching. I remind myself of what I learned in my brief memberships in the Cub Scouts, 4-H and Junior Achievement. I’ve never been a joiner.

Finally, decisively, I recall the words of Detective Murtaugh, wearied by a lifetime of trying to dam an endless flow of bad guys and bitter coffee:

“I’m getting too old for this shit.”