For the Record: Hippies Corner

 

Left to right, Tommy Smothers, John Lennon, Timothy Leary, and Yoko Ono, at a 1969 Bed-In, via Wikipedia.

Some thoughts on civilian casualties in World War II lead, improbably, to a wan little glimmer of hope.

Re Gaza,there are lots of people with very bad moral sensibilities who are just on the wrong side for very stupid reasons. But there are some who acknowledge that Israel is on the "right" side, but just have a fantasy that there is some way of beating a determined, immoral enemy…

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

But I’m not talking about fire, bombing cities, or intentionally targeting civilians, these were just people who died in the course of urban warfare, or the Normandy invasion. Maybe more care could’ve reduced civilian casualties somewhat, but only that

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

Fifth of July

Blythe Danner as Martha Jefferson with William Daniels (Adams) and Howard da Silva (Franklin), from Barb Spangler's Pinterest.

Found myself watching the 1972 movie musical 1776 (based on the Broadway show, with music and lyrics by Sherman Hunt, book by Peter Stone, directed by Peter H. Hunt) on the teevee at the end of the day, a dramatization of the Continental Congress activity in Philadelphia over the two or three months leading up to that first Fourth of July. Not a very plausible subject for a musical comedy, with dozens of male characters and basically no women (the female lead, Abigail Adams, is hundreds of miles away in Quincy the entire time and appears on stage only in John Adams's daydreams, or staged reconstructions of their very extensive correspondence, depending on how you look at it), and there really aren't enough songs in fact, or too many words (it's almost three hours).

What they really did right dramatically, I thought, and it feeds into the way we should think about the history, is to present it in terms of a series of conflicts among the delegates, in which everything could go wrong at any moment, principally between a startlingly obnoxious, pushy Adams (we like him, and know he's right, but we see why Franklin is the only one of the characters who does) and more or less everybody else, simultaneously or in sequence, beginning with his rage at them all for their preoccupation with trivia and refusal to understand the colonists' need to separate themselves from the empire that's trying to kill them all.

Ill-educated But Well-off White Sexagenarians are the Real Hippies

Mungo Thomson, "Levitating Pentagon", colored pencil on paper, 2004, via Kenneth Pobo.

But before I get to David F. Brooks, in breaking news, the Senate just did something: confirmed Trump's second nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, corporate lawyer William Emanuel, giving it a Republican majority which is expected to take away some of the gains achieved by workers during the past three or so years (for most of Obama's two terms, Senate Republicans wouldn't allow him to have a functioning National Labor Relations Board at all). Or at least that's what Senators Warren and Murray are worried about (I'm quoting from Fortune):

that he would favor industry over workers on a board they view as tasked with protecting fair working conditions and the right to collective bargaining.

However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said the board should act as a neutral party in the resolution of labor disputes, rather than explicitly protecting workers as his Democratic colleagues suggested. He said the board had become too activist under Obama and expressed hope that Emanuel could return it to impartiality.

For their part, industry groups said they welcomed the addition and hoped Emanuel would soon lead the board to undo Obama-era policies, including allowing employees to organize in “micro-unions” and holding franchisors responsible for franchisees’ violations of labor law.

Love how McConnell objects to fairness because that's not neutral and feels the Board needs to be more passive (its official mission is to enforce the 1935 National Labor Relations Act protecting the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively, not to beam equally on the parties to a dispute and ask them to get along).

Anyway I guess that must be what Brooks is getting at with his lede this morning:

The voice of that woman

Re Medea Benjamin:

Mr. Obama then departed from his text and said: “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to. Obviously I do not agree with much of what she said, and obviously she wasn’t listening to me in much of what I said. But these are tough issues, and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong.”

Folks, I do believe that's the first time in my life a US President has gone so far even as to acknowledge the humanity of the hippie resistance—let alone suggesting that it could somehow make a contribution to the national discourse. The speech would have had me on the Obot end of the pendulum swing anyhow, but this one beats all: My gob, it is smacked.

Image via Robert Sietsema, Village Voice.