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TechnoratiRemembering When the US Government Was at Least Approachable
We've come a long way towards imperial government in the US - towards a view of the relationship between the federal government, and especially the administration, and the citizenry that has more of a ruler-subjects than a democratic feel to it.
Now I know it is easy to gloss over the way things were, and since I spent a few days in federal prison for protesting the Indochina War at the Pentagon in 1967, after being beaten by federal marshals for doing nothing more than exercising my constitional right to protest on public ground, I am well aware that 40 years ago we were also often treated like serfs. But that said, there was something different back then-a sense that you could deal with powerful officials as an equal.
Back in the summer of 1968, I spent one of several summers on the road (something more young people should do today). I had hitch-hiked across the country from Connecticut to Washington state with Allen Baker, a college buddy, and then, towards the end of that summer break, had bought an old pick-up truck for $100, which we were driving home via the West Coast and the central route. Not having much cash, we were stopping at cities along the way, where I would play guitar for gas money.
This was the late ‘60s, and there was a major and sometimes violent culture war underway between the long-hairs like me and the clean-cut American "Silent Majority," and my travel companion, Allen, and I were concerned that it would be tough scaring up much cash in the vast Republican stretches of desert, mountains and prairie that lay between Nevada and Missouri. So when we passed through Yosemite National Park, we decided to spend a day in the valley's main parking lot, raising donations from tourists.
While Allen dozed in the back of the truck, I opened my guitar case and put up the "Gas Money" sign, and then, sitting on the running board of the old Dodge, started to play.
The money poured in-over a hundred dollars in a fairly short amount of time. It was really astounding. People walking by really enjoyed the music and wanted to help us out.
Then a park ranger, an older fellow with a friendly smile, drove up. "I'm sorry," he said apologetically, "but I have been told to arrest you."
"What for?" I asked, genuinely shocked.
"There's no panhandling allowed in the park," he responded.
"What's panhandling?" I asked him, genuinely unaware of the meaning of the term, which I, an Easterner, thought must have to do with cooking with a skittle on an open fire.
"It's what you're doing right now," the ranger said.
By that point, Allen had woken up and sat up in the truck bed, rubbing his eyes.
"You'll have to come in too," the ranger told him.
We followed him back to the ranger station, where he proceeded to write up our tickets. I noticed that there were two actual jail cells in the station. Thankfully, at least we weren't going to be locked up. Then there was a loud bang outside. Suddenly, a younger ranger, looking like a recent Marine veteran, muscled and crewcut, ran in. "Where's the first aid kit," he yelled. " I was just bringing in a kid on a marijuana charge and he tried to run. I shot him in the leg."
Whoa! I thought. This is Dodge City!
The older ranger told his partner where to get the kit, and then turned his attention back to us. "Here are your tickets," he said. "And don't skip out on them. This is a federal offense, and the FBI will come after you if you don't pay it."
We left the building, and only then did I look at my ticket closely. The fine: $500! It was a fortune back then. Even today it is a big whopper-especially as a penalty for being poor.
I was pretty upset. That was about how much I had earned towards college that whole summer.
Well, the $100 I'd earned panhandling in the park got us back across the country, at least.
When I got home to Connecticut, though, my fine was rankling. Angry at the injustice of it all, I typed up a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, who at the time was Stewart Udall. I wrote about the shooting incident, saying that I thought it was an outrage that an unarmed young man arrested on a minor charge like marijuana possession would be shot in a national park, and I also wrote that it was unfair to fine someone $500 for simply playing music in a park parking lot. "I wasn't bothering people," I wrote. "In fact, they were coming up to me to hear the music, and the $100 they tossed into my guitar case is testimony to the fact that they liked what I was doing. That isn't panhandling, and in any case, it's pretty nasty to fine someone $500 when he's doing something because he needs money."
About two weeks later, I got my letter back from the Department of Interior. On it, in red ink, Udall himself had written, "I agree. Forget your ticket. It's been taken care of. Stewart Udall."
I have tried to imagine that same situation happening today. First of all, the unfortunate hippie who got shot that time long ago would probably have been killed, because the ranger would have been carrying a more high-powered weapon, and wouldn't have even been aiming to disable. Second, Allen and I would probably have been put on some database at the Pentagon, the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration, and would have been barred from flying or entering any national parks. More importantly, though, I tried to imagine the response I would have gotten writing to current Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to complain about an arrest for panhandling. Or to his predecessor, Gale Norton. This is, after all, a department that has instructed its rangers at the Grand Canyon and other parks not to talk about evolution, and those at the Everglades National Park not to talk about global warming and the inevitability that rising ocean levels will swallow that sea-level park in this generation. Under both secretaries, the Interior Department has played a key role in the Bush administration's efforts to alter and to selectively censor government scientific reports on evidence of climate change.
I'm not saying it was all sweetness and light back in the ‘60s, or even that Stu Udall was representative of all government officials in the Johnson years, but there clearly was a different sense back then that ordinary citizens had a right to communicate directly with their leaders and to expect some kind of response.
Nixon began the end of all that, with his Imperial Presidency. It wasn't just his penchant for secrecy, though that was legendary. It was his desire to make the government something more remote and feared, something imposing and awesome, rather than down-to- earth and accessible. President Carter, to his credit, went a long way towards reversing that trend, but over the years it has continued, with Bush and Cheney taking it to an extreme. Today the White House is a bunker. Federal police carry assault weapons. Snipers man the roof of the White House. People who write letters of complaint to minor federal officials can end up being strip-searched and arrested.
And from the looks of things, it may not be much better even if Obama takes over the White House. The first day of the Democratic Convention in Denver saw anti-war protesters penned into the same kinds of "free-speech zones" that the Bush/Cheney administration has made into standard features of any "public" appearance they put in, while AT&T, the company that brought us the convention, kept even credentialed reporters away from a private party the company threw for those Democrats in Congress who obligingly passed immunity legislation to protect the company from lawsuits by those whose communications were spied on by Bush's National Security Agency. (Obama supported the immunity legislation.)
So even as we are all being reduced to a nation of panhandlers, it may be a long time before we can expect a handwritten letter from the secretary of the Interior Department or of federal department, or for help in getting off an unfair ticket.
25 Comments so far
Show All"Back in the summer of 1968, I spent one of several summers on the road (something more young people should do today)"
Not a bad idea............
The most important poit to me was his note from Udall, because that is what our government should be like. I admit we have added a lot more people since then, but there isn't any reason why this response shouldn't be duplicated today....if the people responsible were paying attention to their jobs.
Dear TruthTeller,
It all depends on who is submitting the information. Throughout our country there is a patchwork system of jurisdictions run by different people. Some of these people make their judgements about what gets in databases according to sound criteria, others may not. They are all being tied together into a total information awareness system. Unfortunately, this system is dumb. It contains the names of dead people. It contains mistakes. It is a mistake.
Ah yes, a nostalgic look back to the tumult of the 60's, a time when despite the culture wars and COINTEL repression, bermuda shorts clad middle American family tourists would still toss a few coins into a long haired hippie busker's cap in the parking lot, as a token of appreciation for the free guitar music.
I think the watershed moment was Kent State and Jackson State. Before those shootings, many public officials (like Udall) held some measure of grudging respect for the counter-culture, and the threat to the established order of things that those raucus stirrings in the streets and on college campuses represented. It was mostly all downhill from Kent State on, except of course for the delicious historical moment when the looming threat of impeachment at last took Nixon down.
Today, the fact that nearly half the American electorate believes Bush/Cheney should be impeached for lying the country into a needless bloody war is simply ignored by the media, the elected Congressional leadership, and (most especially) by the criminal office holders themselves.
Lindorff is right. Our rulers no longer fear or respect popular grassroots unrest.
They have no shame, they view the rule of law as a joke, and so they smugly act with impunity.
Bill from Saginaw
Right, they behave this way now, and yet we continue electing them to high office so they can grind their bootheels into our faces. As Lindorff says about Pelosi, forget about even getting her to respond to your queries; her majesty has better things to do, such as keeping impeachment permanently off the table. She's the worst of the worst, and yet her countless millions will get her reelected, since the highest offices are available only to the highest bidder. Cindy Sheehan won't stand a chance against Pelosi's gilded coffers.
I recall the sixties just as Lindorff does, and had many similar experiences, including the $100 pickup I drove across country. We weren't afraid then of authority the way we all are now, because "police state" only seemed like a warning of what we might become if the Nixonites took power permanently. Well, now they have. Pelosi, Obama, the Clintons--they're all hiding from public scrutiny and confrontation behind the tasers, tear gas and weapons of the cops and military. Without that threatening buffer to protect them, they know they'd go down like a pack of cards. Jokers every one. Our leaders are nothing but thugs now, and if we don't do what they tell us to do, they'll kill us.
Be sure to go to the polls and vote!
maybe its the reverse, when the government was approachable they did not fear popular unrest as much as they do today.
One reason we can't approach our elected government officials anymore is because corporations are considered citizens, very rich citizens, who can help place and keep someone in their office in D.C. We proletariats don't have the money to get the ear of those who are supposed to be representing us. The Constitution has been sold to corporate America who now uses it to try and prop up our rapidly declining empire.
Hoa binh
So very obvious on the streets of Denver this week. The streets are full of limos and SUVs taking the Democrats to meet with their corporate sponsers and contributors at fancy parties. While any ordinary citizens who want to approach are met with razor wire, machine guns, pepper spray and riot police.
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"It is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be" -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
Dave Lindorff raises an important point. IT used to feel like OUR country and now it feels like we ARE serfs who must not rabble rouse too much to bother THE MASTER, our nobel landowners. To other nations America is such an outright parody of itself, all its talk of "freedom" especially as the jackboots of the likes of Bush pound down on small, largely defenseless nations, is meaningless.
Tasers, the no-fly lists, the list of the 100 most dangerous professors, the data base with over a million (?) on it, the merging of environmentalist and terrorist (as categories of "undesirables" meld), the reach of the surveillance state, the private (Blackwater and its cousins) army, the FACT that the administration has been caught in over 300 lies, its "signing statements" to evade the joint power sharing of 3 co-equal branches, the RAPE of our treasury, the inevitable karmic blowback from war, the bloated waste on military adventurism that burns the very oil needed to offset its deficit or more intelligently invest in green alternatives. Can anyone on CD think of even ONE thing this administration has done to make America better for anyone but a small elite that like vultures dines on the flesh of the dead or dying?
Just a little note. When I sit and play my guitar, one of the songs I'll jump into is Woody Guthries "This land is your land". I guess I'm a little younger than Mr. Lindorff, because when he was getting his ticket I was still in elementary school.
I mention that because "This land is your land" used to be one of the patriotic songs they taught us back in that east Tennessee school. It was about co-equal with "God Bless America" back then.
These days, you almost never hear "This land is your land."
Its a great song. Nothing like belting out at the top of your voice "this land is your land, this land is my land ..."
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"It is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be" -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
in their arrogance they have tipped their hand. most of this has been coming down the pipe for more than eight years, and the civic blowback is greater now than if the situation had been on simmer rather than boil. nevermind, its no good... i had to give it a try, what a challenge.
There's been a noticeable decrease in reasonableness and approachability since I was a child. Look at all the government buildings today. When you enter it's like entering a maximum security prison. Look at the quickness to taser people. I recall a friend telling me that back in the 1970s a cop actually suggested he remove a pot plant from his window so it could not be seen! Can you imagine that happening today?
Dave
http://daveeriqat.wordpress.com/
Good old Stewart Udall - things moves slower in the `60s and some people still remembered their youthful roadtrips. Has that world gone forever?
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” declared Frederick Douglass in 1857, in response to those who suggested that the great abolitionist was pushing too hard for an end to human bondage. “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Part of why we are in this mess, a government that is less and less responsive to the general public, is because we, the general public, willingly give up our power and rights without demanding anything in return (oh yeah, we are more secure, I forgot).
Like accepting the Patriot Act, the recent FISA bill, Obama is going along selling out the general public. There is no rabbit that will be pulled out later to correct all this. It will continue downward until enough people say, 'enough.'
Meanwhile the corporate mercenaries, which are payed from our tax dollars, is growing in force and acceptance.
Just like Common Dreams and MoveOn.org support the 'winnable' corporate millionaire democratic candidates (Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary) without demanding any concession that would actually provide an actual change from the corporate controlled agenda. Look back and see how few articles there were on Kucinich, Gravel, Nader. And many of them were marginalizing them as candidates.
Recently there seems to be a few articles on CD about 'issues' with Obama and his militarism. But it is too late now to object or demand that he pursue a different path.
Well, Obama is pursuing a different path, one that leads to Pakistan and Iran.
I was being a bit over-the-top with the stuff about being put on a watch list for panhandling, though only a little bit. For example, these days if you put up a fuss about the ticket, you could easily end up being tagged as a trouble-maker. Sassing back to a ranger, who is now an armed cop, could get you over-charged with "resisting arrest" and then you could end up on a list.
My more important point was the accessibility of our leaders. In the intervening 40 years, they have come to view themselves as a separate, higher class of people. Take Nancy Pelosi, supposedly the highest-ranking Democrat in America and clearly a national figure. Try to send her office an email. You get a message saying that she only accepts mail from constituents who have zip codes in her district!
Try to ask her a legitimate question about her job at a Q&A during her book tour. If it's about impeachment, you get hustled out of the venue, and sometimes even booked.
And Pelosi does nothing to stand up for you and your right to speak.
Dave Lindorff
www.thiscantbehappening.net
The activists who've been denied entry to Canada were denied it precisely because it was this sort of ticket that was stored next to their names in a database. During their activism, they'd committed minor offenses like 'blocking a sidewalk'. Normally that's a ticket probably even less serious than 'panhandling'. But when they tried to cross the border into Canada, they were denied entry precisely because it was stored in a database.
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"It is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be" -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
Samson,
Exactly correct, i'm banned from Canada because my name is in a database for precisely the sort of innocuous offenses Samson - and Lindorff - refer to. Including "offenses" for which i was never charged, or for which charges were dropped, or for which charges were thrown out "with prejudice" by judges who were angry that such frivolous charges had been brought - even though i was not convicted, or even charged, the arrests remain in the database without correction. Including the WTO arrest, for which i (and five hundred other citizens) received payment from the City of Seattle when we won court victories that determined wrongful arrest - still i am banned from Canada.
"Truth Teller" - why are you here? Is it to engage in dialog and learn? Learn from this.
Of course, the irony of the piece is that its Mark Udall who's the Democratic candidate for Senate in Colorado.
The relative of the Interior secretary who had enough decency and sense to kill that ticket is now part of the Democratic machine who's local Democratic mayor is sending the cops out to knock down Code Pink ladies with their batons.
Too bad we can't have the old Democrats back.
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"It is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be" -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
In overpopulation experiments, rats and monkeys would attack and kill each other.
What makes us different?
Beasts are greedy and reactionary.
In us we call it "conservative".
In Denver these days, we call it "Democrat".
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"It is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be" -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
Wake up, TruthTeller. It all depends on why you get a ticket. In 1968 there was no nationwide database collecting personal information on our citizens. We are living in a country that is a hybrid between the movies "1984" and "Brazil". Most Americans are unaware of what is coming down. But if they start to object to being screwed they will find out. As of now, they're just starting to notice they're being screwed. Microwave mob control, anyone?
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
"Second, Allen and I would probably have been put on some database at the Pentagon, the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration, and would have been barred from flying or entering any national parks."
I suppose even paranoids have enemies, but sheesh. Getting a ticket does not get you put on any enemies list, people.
And you know this how?
Because of a bullsh!t ticket I got for having a fire in a no fire area in a park in California. I have not yet been hauled off to a camp, either.
Try the "no fire" zone in Denver,
and then get back to us about your ability to fly …
Namaste