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BE HISTORIC

Be strong, be true, be historic.

RICHARD GROSSMAN,

LETTER TO CHELLIS GLENDINNING, 2011

WHY SHOULD WE BOTHER learning about other generations’ attempts to bring justice, peace, and beauty into this tattered world—particularly in these times when, for so many, the urgency of immediate survival demands our attention? Why in this razor-edge age of rising flood waters, rising cancers, and rising right-wing lockstep should anyone care about what pre-dated the burning Now?

I admit that, when I was filled with the hubris of youth, I had little interest in what went before. The subject as presented in academia was too often viewed as a big bore, and despite my mother’s attempts to awaken me to our ancestors’ journeys into the collective timeline, I hadn’t yet grasped why anyone would give a hoot. Besides, being young appears to be a time for bursting upon the moment, all the while believing that one is inventing a storyline that has never been thought of before.

While marching in an anti-war demonstration in Berkeley, I caught a glimpse of a familiar campus figure. Bob Mandel was a red diaper baby, student activist, and member of the Oakland Seven who had been charged with conspiracy for organizing Stop the Draft Week in 1967. He was marching alongside his father, Bill Mandel, who had been a staunch Communist in the 1930s, had boldly defied Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the ‘50s, and was a noted expert on the Soviet Union. While a sense of fascination did buzz through my bones at seeing the elder among us, I was too timid to pursue my attraction, and so I discounted it.

But lo these many political winters later, when I hit the age of sixty and suddenly could see the decades of history I had lived through, I experienced a dazzling awakening. What can I say? History rocks.

Indeed, in today’s climate you and I are witnesses to some crucial moments in human history—one of which, without a doubt, is the flailing exploits of this latest embodiment of state/corporate economics in the U.S. presidency. And yet it comes as little surprise that those benefitting from the marriage of corporate capitalism cum government facilitation would finally catapult the most flamingly blatant version of their own into the hotseat of power.

But truly we have to admit that, in its basic template, the contemporary world is really not much different from other periods of history. Like the Neolithic era, when the storing/hoarding of food launched humanity’s first Haves and Have-Nots. Or when, three millennia before Christ, kings forcibly cowed their citizens into assembly-line crews to sweat out the construction of the pyramids. Or the era of sixteen-hour days of low-paid/no-breaks toil in the dank factories of the Industrial Revolution; throughout most of history there have been owners and there have been slaves, cognac-sipping generals and human fodder in muddy trenches, the 99 percent and the 1 percent. The difference now is that the technological “advances” that make it possible to reach higher, lower, deeper, and more far-flung have become so expansive, colossal, complex, and out of control that the crisis exists on every inch of planetary soil and within the cells of every living being. As we used to say during the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s: “There’s Nowhere to Hide.”

Naomi Wolf’s brave 2007 book The End of America brought attention to a sometimes-latent/sometimes-blatant proclivity festering in the U.S. psyche: the tendency toward despotism. It was once again unleashed into full-blown reality during the George W. Bush administration with its barefaced lunge toward dismissal of democratic rights and the erection of an authoritarian state that enacts whatever it deems necessary to maintain money and power. Wolf’s documentation of the tried-and-true methods of controlling whole societies that both elected and non-elected leaders have employed, and are employing, is worth our while to review—and update. As Wolf so clearly demonstrates, things are dire. On top of everything else, we are up against the global emergence of a reworked form of populism—some would call it fascism. If we care about justice, equality, caring, and ultimately our planet’s survival, and if we dare to rise to the occasion, both old and young must take seriously the analyses, strategies, and tactics developed in the past—and, perhaps more to the point, take inspiration from the courage, creativity, and clarity of its activists, intellectuals, and artists.

I am taken with Chris Hedges’s portrait of the rebel personality in his Wages of Rebellion. Hedges describes the rebel as “possessed of ‘sublime madness’” á la Reinhold Niebuhr. The dissenter is the one who speaks the truth no matter the consequences. She is the prophet, the poet, the visionary, the defiant one, burning with urgency. He does what is right for its own sake. The rebel refuses to sit on the sidelines of injustice. It is as if paralysis in the face of abuse would constitute spiritual/moral suicide.

I am emboldened as well by the Zapatistas’ indigenous/phenomeno-logical/postmodern notion of activism as the awareness of and acting upon every moment and every manifestation of injustice—whether a sexually explicit groping in the subway or a Presidential tantrum threatening to push the nuclear button. “Be a Zapatista, wherever you are,” they say. The system that now engulfs us has managed to infiltrate each level and every aspect of our earthly lives in what, it turns out, is not at all a “post”-colonial world.

With this purposefully constructed, post-truth/pro-propaganda, “liquid” reality infesting all social perception, the forces-that-be have forged a renewed form of colonialism—and the most recent subjects are all of us. And in that “us,” as Native peoples have always known, we can include all animals, plants, and microbes; all skies, lands, waters, planets, and stars; all words, images, icons, and idols; even all DNA—anything that can be turned into a profit-making commodity to boast of an economy in the black and boost the lifestyles of the already too wealthy.

The idea to write In the Company of Rebels came to me like a lightning bolt flung from a tear-gas-inflamed clash between student radicals and the Berkeley Police. It emerged from a Sunday morning in San Francisco’s Café Trieste while opera singers regaled the espresso drinkers; from a bowl of green chile pepper as northern New Mexico’s Latino radicals made plans to reclaim the land grants stolen by the U.S. government; from Plaza 14 de Septiembre, Cochabamba, where outraged campesinos burned down city hall.

It is possible that Gurdjieff penned one of the earliest of such appreciative tomes, Meetings with Remarkable Men, about a group of spiritual seekers that included his father, a priest, and a prince. Then there was Quentin Bell’s Bloomsbury Recalled, describing his subversive companions in London; followed by Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together on the artist-writer community of Paris in the 1920s. Twenty years later came Fritjof Capra’s Uncommon Wisdom, inspired by the mind-bending pioneers who forged holistic philosophies and practices to challenge old ways of perceiving. I had so recently finished reading Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties about his era’s fête of socialists, actors, writers, and artists in Greenwich Village.

I devoured them all.

But the bolt truly struck—and stuck—when I came upon Ramón Chao’s series of essays in Le Monde Diplomatique featuring the people he had met as a journalist in Paris in the ‘50s—folks like Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. I used to think of movements, events, and lives of the past as more solid and authentic, and therefore more historic, than those of my own era. At age 60, I came to see that my times have really been no different; we too have been sturdy, creative, courageous catalysts.

I believe it unlikely that anyone can accomplish historically important work without a cadre of fellow trekkers and angels stomping and winging about one’s ink well, one’s tea kettle, one’s canvas, one’s camera, one’s picket sign, one’s gas mask. I personally could not have thought up a single worthy idea without the aerial leaps provided by the rebels, Bohemians, and deep heads* of my day. Too, telling the story of individuals who have participated wholeheartedly in their time and place carries the potential of revealing the spirit—the alma, really—of an era.

And so I introduce to you a collection of the fine folk I have worked with and loved—who have enriched my being and that of many others—during a daring, raucous, perilous, and wide-open period of human history. You have in your hands an account of our times told through their lives.

*The term ‘deep head’ comes by way of the family of my political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Sheldon Wolin. He was a respected author; a champion of participatory democracy; the founder of the Berkeley school of political theory, where he was extremely popular with graduate and undergraduate students; and the inventor of the term “inverted totalitarianism,” meaning the increasing centralization/authoritarianism of the U.S. political system via non-military means. In 1985 his son Clifford lent me the family cabin on the Lost Coast of California to finish my first book. Sheldon’s office where he wrote while on vacation lay downstairs; word has it that, when he insisted upon slipping away to the lower depths to work, his family made hay and hilarity by dubbing him Deep Head.