What Are We Fighting For
In August, 1969 I was fifteen and living in Rome, Italy getting ready to enter my junior year at Notre Dame International Prep. As we all know, junior year is the critical transcript year for a kid wanting to go to college. For a kid living overseas and wanting to finally go back to the states to do what he had always expected to do, it was not lost on me that I needed to be in the zone. In 1969 the only source of news we had (Italian TV at the time consisted of two nationalized channels that showed sports and news, all in Italian, and hence we had no TV) was from either the International Herald Tribune or The Daily American. Where the IHT was independently published from Paris for over a hundred years, it was eventually taken over by the New York Times. It was a serious paper, but too serious for daily consumption by a fifteen-year-old. The Daily American, on the other hand was far less serious in the sense that it had a couple of cartoon strips including Peanuts, so it was my choice for news. It was a broadsheet but felt more like a tabloid with only a half dozen pages. The biggest advantage (besides the Peanuts) was that it was published in Rome and did not take a day or two to arrive like the IHT. That’s hard to imagine in today’s instantaneous news cycle with smartphone technology. What I didn’t know at the time was that The Daily American was the progeny of the post-war Stars & Stripes and was surreptitiously owned 40% by none other than the CIA. But that’s where I learned, after the fact, about this gathering that got out of hand and rained-out. It was called Woodstock. And it had very quickly come to be one of the defining moment of the Sixties, along with The Apollo 11 moon landing, which had occurred several weeks before.
I was not the devotee of rock music that my sister Barbara was in those days (she was dating the lead singer of the European rock bank, The Free Love) and I was not in the collegiate flow like my oldest sister, Kathy, who was at Washington University in St. Louis. I was busy riding my Ducati motorcycle (soon to be replaced by a Gilera motorcycle) and camping out with friends on the beach near Ostia. We had the Iron Butterly album with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, all seventeen minutes of it (the beat still resounds in my head when I let it). The live album of Woodstock was released in May, 1970, just in time for my last footloose and fancy-free summer in Italy/Europe. The cover of that album screamed of the hippie culture epitomized by Woodstock. The hillside was a mess, but the guy and girl were standing hugging under a filthy quilt. I quickly had the album memorized.
There was plenty of rock history in the album with Jimmy, Janice, Joan, Arlo (I can still recite the words for Coming Into Los Angeles) and Country Joe (MacDonald) and the Fish and his historic performance of What Are We Fighting For. For some reason, those two songs meant something special to me. It could not have been that I related to the lyrics since I neither took drugs nor ever brought drugs in from Europe (“Bringin’ in a couple of keys”) and I had not, nor would I ever go to Vietnam and wonder for what I was fighting. The lines in Country Joe’s song that jump out at me include:
• This isn’t a game yeah
• I’m praying for peace now
• Somehow there’s got to be a change
• No one wins when people die
• Doesn’t matter which side
• What are we fighting for
• Money, religion, or power all the time
• We’re looking for hope what will it take
• What are we fighting for
• I don’t dive a damn….
Well, that is not the case today. Today I know what I am fighting for when I fight for the forces of blue to prevail in the November election. I do not need the Daily American or IHT or even Charles Shultz to keep me informed. It is all around me these days and is moment-by-moment. So, I understand that I fight for my children and their children, so that they can have the America that I came home to in 1971 (perhaps more accurately the America that came to be in November, 1976). I will settle for the America that came to be in August, 1974 when the country had a bi-partisan epiphany and recognized the evil and wrongdoing that was power unchecked and run amok perpetrated by Richard M. Nixon. He flaunted the rule of law for his own purposes and got called on it by none other than the Supreme Court. It took a small price of a unilateral pardon that sent him on his way.
I am going to guess that I am in a majority of people in America that feel that our current Commander-in-Chief has far exceeded the wrongdoings of Richard M. Nixon at this point. What used to be a rallying cry that we were facing another Watergate scandal, is now a matter of public record that were it not for a gross dereliction of duty in favor of partisan support, the Senate should have found Donald J. Trump guilty of both abuse of power and obstruction of Congress (and ergo, justice). Furthermore, had Mitch McConnell not obstructed due process in the nomination of one Supreme Court Justice and rammed through the nominations of two others, we might have had a justice bench that would have cut through the legal chicanery protecting Trump from the full disclosure of his personal financial information and the further disclosure of incriminating evidence generated by Mueller and others in the service of investigation of the Executive Office. The fabric of the nation is in so much worse shape at this moment versus the moment forty-five years ago when the partisanship of the Republican Party had not been so corrupted by a combination of Donald J. Trump and what can only be described as sheer desperation in an at-all-costs bid to retain power before losing it forever (their prediction in the event of proper unobstructed voting, not mine). The cornered beast should never be underestimated for its bravado and lack of any conscience.
The next five months are, by any standard, a fight for the soul of America, as Jon Meachum would say. The term The Daily American, each and every day and in every way, keeps ringing in my ears. I do not think any of us can predict the depths to which the battle might rage. So many of the norms have been abandoned by the Trump Administration that the Democrats have been chastised into considering the same no-hold-barred tactics. It remains to be seen if they will travel that low road, but most of us hope that victory can be achieved without it. The much harder question that is too hard to answer is whether any of us would advocate for the low blows to bring the result we so fervently want. In days gone by I imagine far fewer would have ever considered it, but at this point it has been made abundantly clear what we are all fighting for and the possible winner-take-all nature of that beast.