That Side Was Made for You and Me

Less than a year from his death, and just a few weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States, Lee Hays of the fabled folk group The Weavers proclaimed from the stage of Carnegie Hall that "this, too, shall pass -- I've had kidney stones and I know."

Over the course of the 28 years that have elapsed since that famous reunion concert, which was the penultimate public appearance by the four original members of The Weavers, it grew progressively more difficult to believe Lee Hays. But, today, you could almost start to wonder if maybe the old guy was right.

Who sitting in Carnegie Hall that night in November of 1980 (me not among them, alas, although I was there for the last Weavers gig the following June) could ever have imagined that, within their lifetimes, they would see Pete Seeger of The Weavers, standing shoulder to shoulder with Bruce Springsteen on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, singing "This Land is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie for the man who was about to become the first African American president of the United States?

All the more remarkable was the fact that Pete, with the aid of his grandson and singing partner Tao Rodriguez, belted out the whole damn song -- even the subversive verses that Guthrie wrote but that are usually leached right out of any public rendition:

There was a big high wall there

that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted,

it said private property;

But on the back side

it didn't say nothing;

That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple

I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry,

I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living

Can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

To quote President Obama on election night, "this victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change." There are more kidney stones ahead and, indeed, the nation inherited by the Obama Administration may be too sick to heal, so fully have these 28 years been given over to greed, expediency, hypocrisy and hubris. But we are unassailably at a remarkable moment in American history, when the kitsch of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" yields, if only for the moment, to the full expression of the song that Woody Guthrie wrote to rebut Berlin's jingoism.

My kids, ages seven and three, know who Barack Obama is. But they don't know how long their elders have waited for a time when the nation's leaders have even seemed to be worthy of the task of building democracy and tearing down authoritarianism. It is literally an occasion for dancing in the streets.

Fifteen years ago, my lovely spouse Jenny and I were in the Russian far east visiting the family of a classmate Jenny had befriended during some earlier studies in th e USSR. The matriarch of the family took us on an excursion to the seashore and, while we were there, asked us to sing an American folk song for her. We chose "Joe Hill," the anthem about a martyred union organizer that Joan Baez sang at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. (Pete Seeger has also been known to sing it; the tune dates from 1936 and is the work of Earl Robinson, using a poem by Alfred Hayes.) We got through as much of the song as we could remember, taking care to include the verse that went: From San Diego up to Maine . . . in every mine and mill . . . Where working men defend their rights . . . it's there you find Joe Hill . . ."

At the end of the song, our host smiled warmly at us and said, in Russian: "Ah, I love patriotic music!"

Which is exactly what I said to Jenny this evening, after showing her the You Tube version of Pete, Bruce and Tao singing Woody's song. We laughed as heartily as we did 15 years ago -- but not for the same reason.

Contrapuntal Comments on VPR's Vogelzang

A comedian once mused: "I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather . . . not screaming in terror -- like the passengers in his car."

Grandpa must have been listening to Vermont Public Radio.


Earlier this week, VPR announced that its longtime general manager, Mark Vogelzang, would be leaving the station "for a new venture to increase philanthropic giving to public radio on a natual scale." This will not, apparently, trigger a national search for a new leader for VPR; the station's trustees have already promoted its vice president for development, Robin Turnau.


"The end of an era, no doubt," proclaimed Philip Baruth on his blog Vermont Daily Briefing. "And an undeniably brilliant era it’s been."


Undeniably? Brilliant? I respectfully dissent.


Let's get one thing out of the way right off. Yes, where we stand depends on where we sit. Baruth has long used VPR's commentary series as his preferred outlet of self-promotion. I, on the other hand, am an occasional guest on the New Hampshire Public Radio program Word of Mouth, where I talk about architecture. So I suppose it is predictable that Baruth would hail his friend Vogelzang as a brillant programmer while I think NHPR and its leadership leave their Vermont counterparts in the dust.


But I have been keeping my ear on public radio in New England since there has been public radio in New England -- and I am here to testify that Vermont Public Radio has long pursued a cautious and soporific strategy in contrast to NHPR's bold an innovative approach. Back when NHPR did it nearly a decade ago, it was a bold move to scrap the perennial public radio mainstay of classical music and move to a news, culture and information format. VPR resisted the change for years and, even today, makes its separate classical music service a key element of its operation -- even though, in today's MP3/iPod era, there just isn't any real reason to clutter the public airwaves with yet another rendition of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Don't get me wrong -- I love Mozart as much as the next guy -- and, like the next guy, I have loaded approximately half the complete works of Mozart onto my iPod, with more to come. For stuff that isn't several centuries ago, I turn to my radio.


NHPR has invested considerable resources in developing unique programming of real depth, the two most notable examples being the aforementioned Word of Mouth and the venerable Exchange interview program hosted by former NPR newscaster Laura Knoy. Both programs are highly produced. VPR, by contrast, has done two things: used its commentary series as a means of airing a bunch of local voices on the cheap, and offering Vermont Edition, which isn't anywhere near as well-produced as its New Hampshire counterpart. For example, a recent week of downloads -- oops, there I go, iPodding again -- consisted of show after show about Vermont's budget crisis. An important subject, of course, but by now you would think these people would have have risen above their 1950s "educational broadcasting" roots to understand the programming has to be interesting to do any real good for the world. And tedious prattle about budget cuts is enough to send even the most dyed-in-the-wool, Susan Stamberg-loving public radio fan surfing the XM/Sirius channels.


For me, the paradigmatic VPR moment came in late 1998, when the impeachment of President Clinton was in full swing. National Public Radio was offering gavel-to-gavel coverage of the hearings, recalling its similar and laudable treatment of the Iran-Contra hearings in the 1980s. Given the subject matter -- stained dresses, what the definition of "is" is, all that stuff -- the hearings made for great radio. Except that VPR kept preempting the hearings because it had produced and then scheduled for broadcast this series of mini-documentaries about the Ticonderoga, an old steamboat that now sits like a great beached whale on the back lawn of the Shelburne Museum in South Burlington. So this great, historic live radio kept yielding to vignette after vignette of old people talking about shoveling coal into the Ticonderoga's boiler (invariably pronounced "boy-luh.")


That, to me, is Mark Vogelzang. iI it is cute and well-tested, if it tends to reinforce the image of Vermont as an agrarian theme park, it gets on VPR. If it is edgy and interesting, you hear it on NHPR. You want a brilliant public radio station executive? Try Mark Handley, the now-retired CEO of NHPR who built that station into the terrific service he turned over to his able successor, Betsy Gardella. Handley was not afraid to take on the Mozart Mafiosi because he foresaw that in the coming era of multimedia, doing public radio the old way was a ticket to oblivion.


And another thing: Why is it always the development people who get all the laurels in the public radio world? The development person who figures out how public radio can raise money without resort to those intermindable pledge drives, which make their stations totally unlistenable -- now there is someone who deserves radio sainthood. Meanwhile, here among us mortals, what about promoting a visionary programmer instead of a fundraiser? It is altogether too easy, even when listening to a great public radio station, to begin wondering whether the fundraising supports the programming or the programming exists to enable the fundraising.


Thanks for the memories, Mark Vogelzang. As the results of your stewardship of such a vital public resource, the sheep may safely graze.

Tolstoi Meets Mary Daly: The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

At about this time a year ago, a guilty and nearly boundless pleasure was reading the new translation of Tolstoi’s War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This year’s equivalent is the encyclopaedic page turner The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel.

Fans of alternative newsweeklies like me – I worked at a legendary exemplar, Maine Times, for four years in the 80s – could not help but notice Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip since its advent in 1987. But, in candor, I never paid it much mind. Perhaps the lesbian culture that Bechdel chronicles was just a bit too unsettling, because of the possibilities it raises, for those of us males whose emotional well-being turns in significant part on the kind intimate regard of women. Maybe I was too busy reading the classifieds that surrounded the strip. Whatever.

Bechdel officially became an author to watch out for when her autobiography in the form of a graphic novel – Fun Home – was named by The New York Times and other opinionmakers as one of the best books of 2006. The laurels were well-deserved. But it was a compelling review a few weeks ago of Essential Dykes in Vermont’s alternative newsweekly Seven Days, by Bechdel’s former assistant, Cathy Resmer – that caused me to run right out to my local independent bookseller (the Norwich Bookstore) and acquire a copy.

Resmer praises her mentor as an “obsessive documentarian” of the world Bechdel inhabits. The reviewer first credits Bechdel with giving gazillions of lonely young women like herself their first reassuring glimpse of the real lives of non-heterosexuals – a reality that Bechdel confronts with deep ambivalence, grippingly rendered in the unprecedented graphic preface to the collection – and then the reviewer documents a few examples of how those around Bechdel influenced the course of the stip.

This was endearing enough to get me and my wallet into the bookstore. But then I got home and found I couldn’t put down the anthology. I kept thinking about reading Tolstoi 12 months previously.

The analogy is not as labored as it might seem. Like Tolstoi, Bechdel is both an emphatic social commentator and a person with a genuinely humble appreciation for the shortcomings of the individual people who actually make history. The main character of Dykes to Watch out for is Mo – who, in addition to her physical resemblance to Bechdel, is fond of distancing herself from the emotional reality of her love life by resorting to articulate tirades about the latest social outrages (of which there have been many, in a socially enlightened strip that began in the era of Iran-Contra and concludes, apparently, with the authoritarian regime of Cheney-Bush). In her earnest fallibility, Mo is not unlike Tolstoi’s proxy in War and Peace, Pierre Bolkonsky.

Pierre’s wealth is thrust upon him as a confusion-inducing birthright, much as Mo is born a lesbian. He stumbles, earnestly and heroically, through Napoleon’s siege of Moscow, much as Mo is both a victim of and a hero within the globalization siege that destroys the lesbian bookstore that had been her workplace and spiritual home. And the funny drama of Mo, her series of intimate partnerships (starting with the somewhat frumpy Harriet, and culminating with the loquacious professor Sydney, whose utterly endearing approach to seduction consists largely of arguing with and infuriating the object of her desire) and the life struggles her friends (my favorite of which, naturally, is Clarissa, since her legal career is roughly contemporaneous with mine) all play out in juxtaposition to historic battles, just as the lives of the characters in War and Peace did. Make no mistake: American history since 1987 has been every bit as violent, unsettling and morally outrageous as the Napoleonic war between Russia and France was. Nobody got waterboarded during that horrible Moscow winter.

And, finally, there is this parallel between Tolstoi and Bechdel. Just as a new translation offered an excuse to take a look at War and Peace and, indeed, made it newly accessible to folks who had previously ignored it, so too does the publication of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For offer a compelling reason to consider a body of work previously overlooked by people like me (i.e., the non-lesbians among us). What seemed inconsequential, the grand scheme of things, when rendered piecemeal suddenly becomes a magnum opus of Tolstoian significance when assembled as a coherent whole. Characters develop. Lives change. People err, triumph, reproduce, cope, and evolve. Sydney gets cancer. Bechdel toys artfully with reader sympathy for her; post-cancer, Sydney appears to be cheating cyber-sexually on Mo, until Bechdel reveals, deliciously, that she and Mo truly have a sexual union for the 21st Century. Sydney has integrity after all, to the delight of me and her other secret admirers.

And, indeed, here is where Bechdel leaves Tolstoi in the dust. Dykes to Watch Out For has a sexual explicitness about it that might mark the biggest breakthrough in literary depiction of the subject since D.H. Lawrence. If you are not a lesbian, and don’t really know what lesbians actually do with each other when making love, all is revealed here, no holds (literally) barred. But it is neither the centerpiece of the lives of these women, nor is it trivial. They’re doing it, they’re talking about doing it, they’re enjoying it, they’re not enjoying it, they’re making it an act of political defiance, they’re proving how comical it is. They’re giving sex, and argument, and moral outrage, an even better name than these things had previously.

I miss Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and Hobbes, inter alia, was so beautifully drawn. What is so offensive about virtually all comic strips today is how devoid of talent their creators are; that guy who draws Dilbert not only has nothing of any significance to say but also has no more facility as an illustrator than does the kid who bags my groceries at the Co-op. Bechdel draws as beautifully as Watterson does -- in her own style of course – and, while Calvin is trapped for all time in the body of a six-year-old, the dykes in Dykes to Watch Out For are evolving reassuringly.

Finally, “the co-op” is part of the everyday scenery in Dykes to Watch Out For. Brava! Watch out for them if only to find out where they live. Then move there.

Oh . . . one more thing. First mention of "global warming" in the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For? It was in 1987. Twenty-two years ago! This might be a good book to take with you if you are ever exiled to a desert island -- like, say, Florida, circa 2050 . . .?