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I’ve always had a hunch that Clinton was a lot more “radical” than he let on, having to play politics the way he did. It might be something he could use his ex-president status for, to say and do things like this. I meant to ask when we talked today, was there something about this that upset you? I got confused if you were talking about this or something else.
I wasn’t surprised Clinton was lambasted. In a way, that will just help to publicize his statement. I hope he’s found a new identity for himself — it will be very cool for an ex president to be reverting back to his counter-culture youth and saying a lot of verboten things (we all know are true). It grieved me to see him discredit himself with his scandals, and maybe he can redeem himself with this new role to play.
That’s a very interesting point — that the tighter anti-terrorism laws will come to haunt us in this arena.
I understand what you’re saying about the lack of media and the apathy, but there’s one element in this that mystifies me. On another forum I frequent there’s a ten page thread, that’s still going on — the endless discussion of those wicked new age wannabes desecrating Indian culture.
I finally got a close look at some of these reported miscreants and all I saw were some middle aged hippie dippie types who’d tripped out on native american drumming, while some of their buds are tripped out on African drumming, and being the cultural creatives that they are, they’ve whipped up this whole new subculture filled with little bits of that and this in one of those all american stews that can be awful or fabulous depending on the talents and tastes involved.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that there are a lot of people, black, white, whatever who’ve turned to their Native roots, whether biological or sociological, and become oftentimes quite mesmerized with it. What’s always seemed obvious to me is that this is a big, politically active, politically CREATIVE group of people that’s readily a new force in the game and I sometimes get the feeling hardly anybody else can see what to me, is the obvious potentiality.
These are the people Clinton went to college with, burned draft cards with . . . They were a few years ahead of me and I remember all the things they brought into the culture that were so despised then, but are now accepted parts of the mainstream we don’t even think about.
They were instrumental in the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, our lifestyles are permanently altered by them, we’ll never go marching off to war as unthinkingly as we once did, because of them. We’ll forever by freer in our exercise of free speech because of them. Now there’s a whole crop of youngsters dressing up as neo-hippies, and I imagine the brighter of them are realizing what it all means.
Yet, any conversation about them I see is about how to silence and discredit them. Seems to me like some people just don’t have their strategy hats on.
Yeah, we’ll have to talk more about this. I think, to me, the media problem has to do with there being a diffused kind of situation. No clear sound bytes, distinct personalities, dramatic crises. I guess I believe the media is entertainment and the people who get in the news are putting on the best show. Who knows how many newsworthy things have happened in the last two months we never heard about because they got upstaged by 9/11?
You know that incident you posted about the teenage girls? I read something last year similar. It was in an article in the Saturday Evening Post. A high school girl was on a basketball team I believe at Pine Ridge, and they started catcalling the team, doing the war whoops and all that, and the mood was getting ugly. right in the middle of the game. And she just “took” the stage, used a towel for a shawl and did this mesmerizing shawl dance that stopped this whole hostile crowd cold. She just had a commanding presence, all anyone could do was applaud her. Everyone was looking towards her for the future, but tragically, she was killed in a car crash the next year.
There’s enough energy out there to produce someone like that, who can take center stage and focus issues, and it will happen. We just can’t know when or how. That’s what I believe.
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