Labour Tribune, London

 

Letter from Woodstock

 

Days of Remembrance and Rumors of War and Resistance.

September 30^th, 2002

John Mason

 

Autumn has come early to the Catskills and our forests are already showing signs of the brilliant reds and oranges that will follow in the month to come. But the conversation around Woodstock hasn’t focused much on the foliage. These past weeks have been devoted to days of remembrance and to talk of war and resistance. 

The first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks struck us hard up here.  Woodstock, after all, is peopled by ex-New Yorkers – many of them “City transplants” who only arrived in the past year. So everyone seems to know of someone who lost someone on the morning when the towers fell.  One year to the day, on September 11^th, one hundred and fifty of us gathered on the town square by the white Dutch Reformed Church for an inter-faith memorial service. The church bells tolled at 10:29 AM, (the moment that the North Tower finally came down), accompanied by the shrill call of a shofar sounded by the local rabbi and the long, low moan of gigantic brass horns blown by two Tibetan monks come down from the Lamasery on Overlook mountain. It was a sober occasion marked not only by a shared sense of loss, but also by our lack of any real closure on the event itself.

The attack on The World Trade Center has been many things to many people over the past year - a mass killing field, a terrible crime scene, or a monument to collective memory. But this September’s commemorations elevated it into something else  - a “hallowed battlefield” - something between a sanctified ground and an opportune rallying cry. The Twin Towers have entered our national mythology to become another Alamo, another Pearl Harbor - as well as a ubiquitous patriotic logo for “our corporate sponsors.” For Bush & Co. the day of remembrance was the occasion to “renew our national resolve to finish the war that began here a year ago...”

Our moment of grief, in other words, was another chance for the administration to “spin” the campaign to get “Saddam.” The remarkable thing about this is that Osman Bin Laden has apparently disappeared from the active enemy list. It’s as though we’re being asked to forget about tracking down the Al Queda who did the actual deed - even though the jihadi are still hard at work in parts unknown preparing fresh outrages against us.

Not surprisingly, I found myself unable to feel the appropriate patriotic twinge - only a growing sense of dread about what carnage Al Queda might visit on us or that my government might inflict upon the civilians of Baghdad. In my foreboding, I am not entirely alone. The other day I looked up at the bulletin board of my Laundromat, I saw this note by one of our local poets. It read:

“Woodstock! We are the Country!

We are in Control! You will comply!

Resistance is futile!

Woodstock! You will be assimilated…”

In wartime, even in a phony war, the future for democratic politics can seem bleak.

Yet the tradition of resistance to militarism and oppression is not extinguished in our upstate “colony of the arts.” Film enthusiasts came by the thousands this month to the third Woodstock Film Festival – an event that describes itself as “fiercely independent,” and which has adopted a modified version of the old CND peace sign for its logo. In its own way, this weekend long festival was another kind of remembrance - this time of the years of rebellion in the 1930’s, 60’s and 70’s. Running across the hundred or so independent films, documentaries and shorts were themes that remembered and celebrated America’s rebels and mavericks and the great protest movements of the last century. From Arlo Guthrie’s concert which introduced the documentary on his father’s life, Bound for Glory, to the documentary Strange Fruit exploring Billy Holiday’s dark ballad about lynching in the South; to the closing night Maverick award for the most significant social documentary, the Art of Dissent was the red thread that bound the whole event together.

In its diversity Woodstock can remind us that beyond the cliché images of obese people, conservative bullies and heavy bombers, Bush’s America remains a very complicated place. Contradictory currents of opinion run just beneath its surface unity.

In past weeks, some of those currents have broken through the media blanket to make themselves heard, even as the Iraq debate finally broke wide open. Anti war demonstrators by the hundreds have been arrested in Washington and Al Gore – long absent without leave – has suddenly reappeared on the national scene to give a sensible speech challenging the illogic of adding another war to the one against the Al Queda that we have left unfinished in Afghanistan.

By addressing the President’s war policy head-on, Gore also challenged the rest of the Democratic leadership to stop acting like bystanders at the President’s war dance. Senators Byrd and Kennedy have already seconded Gore’s dissent.  It now remains to be seen whether this reemergence of an active peace bloc within the Democratic Party and in the streets is the breath of fresh air that it seems, or merely an internal break that will divide the democratic coalition and seal the President’s victory in the November mid-term elections. Much rides on this, and not only for us.