Rooster Crows at Light from the Bombing: Echoes from the Gulf War. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Jan, 1993 by Matthew Rothschild

Here's a small grab bag of good books I neglected to mention last month, along with a farewell to a great pioneer.

Abbie Hoffman, a compassionate but critical biography, traces Hoffman's frenetic life--his youth in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a middle-class street tough and closet intellectual; his political awakenings at Brandeis and Berkeley; his work as a civil-rights activist in Worcester; his meteoric rise to fame as an antiwar protester and Yippie leader; the police riots at the Chicago Convention; the Chicago Seven trial; anti-Nixon activities; his cocaine bust; his years underground as Barry Freed, organizer of Save the River, an environmental group on the St. Lawrence; his resurfacing; his protests against Reagan's policies in Central America; his efforts to rebuild a student movement, and his struggle with manic depression, which he ultimately lost in 1989 when he committed suicide.

The author, Marty Jezer, has ideal credentials for this biography, and he brings an intimacy and depth of knowledge to the task. Jezer participated with Hoffman in several demonstrations in the 1960s, edited WIN, a radical pacifist underground magazine, and has remained engaged in politics ever since.

He is not content merely to chronicle Hoffman's life. Instead, Jezer uses his own political experience and reflection to make judgments not only about Hoffman himself but about the style of late-1960s protest that Hoffman came to typify.

Hoffman, the Yippies, the Black Panthers, and the Weather Underground went astray, Jezer argues, when they became dismissive and disdainful of the American people and their culture. What's more, the radicals' outrageous language, style, and tactics--calling police "pigs," saying that kids should "kill their parents," embracing violence as useful and legitimate--doomed them politically at a time when millions of Americans could have been won over, Jezer contends. Hoffman was as much to blame as anyone.

"When he stopped believing that people were listening, as he did at times in the late 1960s and early 1970s," writes Jezer, "he lost his grounding in the American culture, and his politics took a reckless, churlish, and self-defeating turn."

I have only one major disagreement with Jezer's critique--his argument that Hoffman, the Yippies, and much of the peace movement "misjudged the 1968 election." Jezer says they should have rallied behind Hubert Humphrey in 1968, despite his faults, to defeat Nixon and bring the war to an earlier end.

It seems to me, though, that Hoffman was right to oppose Humphrey, who was a staunch supporter of the war, as Jezer acknowledges.

And 1968 could have been an ideal time to forge a viable left-wing third party in America--had Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern chosen to go that route. But that's my schtick; Jezer believes in working within the two-party system.

Jezer also rebukes Hoffman for using homophobic language in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he should have known better, and he finds Hoffman less than a committed feminist man. As Jezer examines Hoffman's politics, so too does he analyze his character, and he finds plenty of flaws--chief among them Hoffman's egomania, his domineering personality, and his macho style.

At the same time, Jezer recognizes Hoffman's strong qualities--his genius at organizing, his knack for using the media, his ability to relate to all kinds of people, his infectious sense of humor, and his lifelong commitment to peace and social justice.

"He was a showman and an entertainer," Jezer writes. "He thought of himself not only as a community organizer but as a political artist. Without doubt he was the funniest activist in the history of the American Left, if not in the history of American politics. He cared deeply about people, and his passion for justice inspired his creativity."

Rooster Crows at Light from the Bombing is a collection of protest poetry and prose about the Gulf War that brings home the ghastliness of being an American spectator at a massacre of our own making. In one of the poems, "New York Honors Troops," Anthony Signorelli expresses the disgust many of us felt at the homecoming parades "paying homage to those who do our killing." The wonderfully haunting title of this book is a bit of found poetry--a comment by CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, who said from Baghdad after the U.S. air war commenced, "the strangest sound was a rooster crowing at light from the bombing."

This little book contains poetry from, among others: Anya Achtenberg, Robert Bly, and William Stafford. The prose comes from magazine pieces by such writers as Wendell Berry (from The Progressive) and Michael Ventura of L.A. Weekly. Ventura's piece, "Possessed by War," is a must-read. He begins by noting the discomfort and disquiet he felt at being asked by his editors (who were also his friends) to go cover the war. He ponders the pros and cons of going and ultimately decides not to because he does not wish to become implicated in the war's immorality.

"If I go there, even as a writer, my stakes change," he explains. "If I'm with a combat outfit on the ground in Saudi Arabia, I want them very much to win. I suddenly have an enormous stake in the success of the policies of George Bush. If he can save me and these soldiers by bombing Iraq senseless, I'm not going to have mixed feelings about that, at least not right then.... Allowing oneself to be in that position, no matter who you are or what your function may be, is either tragically stupid or deeply immoral, depending on whether or not you knew what you were getting into. It is a forgetting of one's soul. And that's further than I'm willing to for my country or my profession."