Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine carried an interview with Arlo Guthrie.
Arlo Guthrie spoke of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 and the young people who attended, speaking about how absurd it was that as students they were asked to hide under their desks in the event of nuclear attack. Kids were trained to go under their desks while viewing “a mushroom cloud” Arlo Guthrie said that Woodstock concert-goers felt the nuclear weapons stockpile was madness.
That’s how I felt about it (although, at age 12 in 1969, I was not present at Woodstock, though one of my junior high school classmates swore she saw me nude in the movie, “Woodstock”. Nope. Not me. I didn't really even care for rock music back then -- upon first hearing a rock band, at my high school, I said, "enunciate you damn fools," but of course they could not hear me.)
Skeptical of bomb builders as ethically impaired, in 1981, I found myself editor of a little weekly newspaper in East Tennessee (Appalachian Observer). Our newspaper, located in the county where Oak Ridge is located, did not take kindly to the robotic response of the U.S. Department of Energy and Union Carbide – that information on their mercury pollution of East Fork Poplar Creek was “classified.”
My publisher (Ernie Phillips) and I requested that the U.S. Department of Energy declassify the documents on the mercury pollution. Some 182 days later, the world learned that 4.2 million pounds of mercury (largest mercury pollution event in the history of this planet) was dumped into creeks and groundwaters (and workers’ lungs and brains) without so much as a word to the President, Congress, OSHA or the Tennessee Valley Authority (into whose rivers the mercury ran).
Friends who were fans of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” -- each rejected by the government for a security clearance not being “moral enough” to make nuclear weapons –were amazed at what we got declassified. The “technology” that led to it – skepticism and critical thinking – is what we learn from our Founding Fathers and from our parents. It is essential to pass that on to future generations.
Truth is, the mercury pollution crimes would never have been revealed if it hadn’t been for Vietnam, Watergate, Woodstock, Stonewall and a generation of ideas – people rejecting government authoritarianism.
Question authority.
Vietnam, Watergate, Woodstock, Stonewall -- all of those events helped to change the Nation’s Weltanschauung and Zeitgeist. IN 1983, our small weekly newspaper (“Appalachian Observer”) felt empowered to stand up to the National Security State (and win), using one of those “truths” that we hold to be “self-evident” – the Right to Know.
And the National Security State would never quite be the same again, its denizens always looking over their shoulders for pesky reporters, even in small towns (the places where America hid its “dark satanic mills,” the nuclear weapons plants that polluted eleven states in places chosen for their remoteness and their docile labor forces.
J. Edgar Hoover (a/k/a J. Edna Hoover) said during “Operation Cointelpro” that he wanted citizens to fear an FBI Agent behind every mailbox.
After the Oak Ridge mercury declassification, government and corporate polluters fear something else – activists behind every mailbox. They fear accountability, even by small publications (or even “a personal blog” as the City Clerk diminutively put it last week).
So the presence in St. Augustine of so many members of the Woodstock, Vietnam, Watergate and Stonewall Generations must make the KKK-style leadership in the City of St. Augustine scared right down to their socks. They can't even dump solid waste in our Old City Reservoir any longer without local activists finding out, reporting them and making them stop.
By the way, I was also intrigued to learn from Arlo Guthrie’s NYT interview that (gasp) Arlo Guthrie is a Republican. Read his logic for yourself.
What do you reckon?
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