May 4, 2007
Reliving the Sixties Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:20 AM EST Last Friday the rock singer John Mellencamp performed for wounded servicemen at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. According to the Washington Post, it was a rousing concert. Though Mellencamp has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War, as he explained to MSNBC News, the appearance was purely apolitical; he was simply “going down there and showing support for these kids who really don’t make any policies and who basically are following orders.” Politics, however, has reared its ugly head. Several days before his visit to Walter Reed, Mellencamp invited his friend, the folk singer Joan Baez, to join him on one or two numbers. Baez agreed, but the Army flatly denied her entrance to the hospital, effectively squelching the plan. The official rationale behind this decision was the late timing of the request, though Mellencamp has claimed—not implausibly—that the Army simply doesn’t like Joan Baez, whose outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War placed her on the outer margins of respectable activism some forty years ago. In addition to the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, the linguist Noam Chomsky, the folksinger Pete Seeger, and—most famously—the actress Jane Fonda, Baez was one of several prominent Americans who paid visits to North Vietnam during the war. (See Richard Snow’s reflections on Jane Fonda in the pages of American Heritage Magazine.) She also refused to pay the portion of her income taxes—which, given her considerable earning power, must have amounted to a pretty penny that corresponded to the military’s portion of the federal budget, and she married a prominent draft resister, David Harris, who later served prison time for refusing induction. A few things stand out here. In an editorial criticizing the Army’s decision, the New York Times marvelled that “somebody apparently could not get past the image of willowy Joan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ nearly 40 years ago and thought troops so young they wouldn’t know Mimi Fariña from Cream of Wheat couldn’t or wouldn’t abide her presence.” Mimi Fariña, for those not in the know, was Joan Baez’s younger sister and a popular folksinger in her own right. She died almost six years ago. Insomuch as one can probably count on one hand the number of 20-something-year-old soldiers at Walter Reed who’ve heard of Fariña I’ll guess that maybe it would take two hands to count those who actually know who Baez is the NYT is absolutely right. Though I grew up on Baez’s music and am still very much a fan, I can’t believe that she remains relevant enough to merit an invitation let alone to be denied entry to the hospital. Yet as much as I admire Baez’s music, I’m not sure the NYT has it right. I’m reminded of an anti-war poster, popular in the day, that featured a picture of the Baez sisters—Joan, Mimi and Pauline—seated next to each other on a sofa, clad in miniskirts, all legs and jet-black long hair, above a caption that read: “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.” Consider that roughly 25 percent of all enlisted men who served in Vietnam were from poor families, and 55 percent from working-class families. In an era when half of all college-aged Americans claimed at least some post-secondary education, only 20 percent of Vietnam War servicemen had been to college, while a staggering 19 percent had not completed twelfth grade. To the grunt who either got drafted and sent to Vietnam, or enlisted in order to pre-empt the draft or send a paycheck back to his wife or parents, that poster must have inspired pure disgust. Its message, not terribly subtle, was that successful, attractive women like the Baez sisters only slept with middle-class men who had the social capital and economic wherewithal to resist the draft. To her credit, last week Baez told the Washington Post, “I have always been an advocate for nonviolence, and I have stood as firmly against the Iraq war as I did the Vietnam War 40 years ago. . . . I realize now that I might have contributed to a better welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.” She’s absolutely right that her conduct forty years ago was elitist and arguably counter-productive, and she’s a big person for admitting it. On the other hand, according to Baez, when Mellencamp called her after last week’s concert to make sure that she wasn’t angry with him for agreeing performing solo, she replied, “Of course not. It’s an honor to be turned down by the Army.” Despite her genuine attempt to do things differently this time around—to oppose the war without opposing the people who are fighting it—Baez fell back instinctively on the kind of rhetoric that still makes her persona non grata at Walter Reed. In fairness to her, Baez is undoubtedly a very sincere pacifist, and when it came time to put her body on the line in the 1960s, she did so willingly. She was not one of those performers who got airlifted into the occasional rally and airlifted safely out two hours later. In Grenada County, Mississippi, she spent several days with Andrew Young, Martin Luther King, Jr., and local residents, escorting black children past rows of menacing state policemen and angry white parents so that they could enjoy their court-mandated right to attend previously all-white schools. She also served two weeks in prison for leading nonviolent sit-ins against the draft. If one can be judged by the company she keeps, it’s worth noting that during Baez’s stay at the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center in Oakland, King and Young (no strangers to political imprisonment) paid her a visit. Forty years ago the anti-war movement faltered on its own inability to transcend the petty prejudices of class, region and culture. This time around, the protesters seem to have it right, for the most part. They have been supportive of American servicemen while opposing the war—two aims that needn’t be mutually exclusive and which, in fact, are often complementary. But as last week’s hullabaloo over Joan Baez reminds us, we’re still living in the shadow of the Sixties.
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