Subject: BS: Utah Phillips is going to vote!
From:
Mark Ross
Date: 20 Oct 04 - 04:05 PM
Just got this and figured it needed to be passed on to all of you Mudcatter's.
Mark Ross
"Voting for the First Time"
by Carolyn Crane
Utah Phillips is a folk singer who tours the United States,
delighting audiences with his outlandish stories and challenging them
with the ruthless honesty of his insights. A veteran of the US Army
who served in Korea, he rode the trains for years after coming home
in despair from what he'd witnessed overseas. He met Ammon Hennacy in
Utah at the Joe Hill House for Transients and Migrants and discovered
anarchy and pacifism.
These tenets have since shaped his life and work. Phillips and I live
in the same Northern California town, Nevada City, where he was one
of the founders of our thriving Peace Center of Nevada County. It was
from the community radio station there that he produced Loafer's
Glory, a collection of stories, poems and songs set to the
accompaniment of Woody Guthrie-influenced guitarist Mark Ross. And it
was to that radio station he went in late September to share with his
community an important political decision he'd made, which caused him
great difficulty and pain.
You surprised many people who are familiar with your work with your
announcement that you were going to register to vote for the first
time ever.
This is not easy for me. I'm an anarchist and I've been an anarchist
many, many years. The anarchy that I've followed and practiced all of
that time came to me through Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers,
through Ammon Hennacy, the great Catholic anarchist and pacifist.
Ammon taught me, as he did, to treat his body like a ballot. My body
is my ballot. And he said, "Cast that body ballot on behalf of the
people around you every day of your life, every day. And don't let
anybody ever tell you you haven't voted." You just didn't assign
responsibility to other people to do things. You accept
responsibility and see to it that something gets done. That's the way
he lived and that's the way the past forty, going on fifty, years
that I have lived. It's a way to vote without caving in to the civil
authority I'm committed to dissolving.
But, we are in a desperate situation here. And it's not just us in
the United States. There are people all over the world who are
affected by these people who have staged a coup on our government.
I can see a shopkeeper in Damascus who's threatened by being bombed
out. I can see a schoolgirl who's collaterally killed by the action
of these people. There are millions of people in the world who are
affected by the actions of this government, and they can't vote in
this election. I have no use for Kerry. I have no use for Bush. I
don't like either one of them, but these folks can't vote in this
election. They have to have people vote for them. And I intend to
be one of those. What's the best chance they've got to keep them
from being bombed and killed? I don't know. Kerry is an unknown
quantity. Bush is a known quantity. A crapshoot, isn't it? But I'm
going to stand in for one of these people. And if I'm wrong, I'm
wrong by myself.
When you made your announcement, you talked about women who have
inspired and influenced your decision. Can you talk a little
about that?
I learned a great deal from Judi Barry. I drove and talked with her
the day before her car got blown up in Oakland in 1990. She had come
around to the idea that direct action and political action are two
hands of the same body. I think as an anarchist and when you keep
company with other anarchists, as I have in the IWW, the Industrial
Workers of the World, and this is my fiftieth year in the IWW, you
develop a great antagonism toward the political process, toward
statism in any form. However, many of us have come to realize that
political action and direct action are two hands of the same body. We
have to learn how to work together: the street and the ballot box. In
places like Philadelphia or Boston, Massachusetts, when they put
freedom in jail, when they put freedom of assembly and freedom of
association and freedom of speech in a bullpen with razor wire around
it, they put freedom in jail. In the bullpen on Pier 57 in New York,
when my daughter [Morrigan Phillips] was jailed for trying to shut
down Wall Street in an act of nonviolence civil disobedience.
They're trying to tie that direct-action hand behind our back. If
they succeed in that, how long will it be, how long are we going to
hang on to the other hand, the political action hand? Every
significant social movement in this country--anti-slavery,
suffragette, labor movement, peace movement--all started on the
street. All of them began on the street. Don't give up the street.
The street's where we win. We vote with our feet. That's where it all
begins. Made a song about that. Bodhi Busick put a nice tune to it.
No, I won't give up the street. But in this instance, at this time,
at this place, I think the situation is so dire that yes, I have
registered to vote and I am prepared to stand in for one of the
victims of the kind of brutality that the people in Washington bring
to the world.
You've said that your choice to not vote, to not participate in the
system in that way, is one of the most sacred promises you've made. I
know what it means to you to make this decision. It's sobering,
because I think: Are things really that bad?
Yeah, it is that bad. Now, I am not putting myself forth as an
example. I'm not putting myself forth as a role model. Anarchists
don't make rules for other people. You make rules for yourself and
then people have got to learn how to trust you. And if you blow it
you have the courage to change, and you do change and an anarchist is
always something you're becoming. I don't need any congratulations
for what I'm doing at all. I feel lousy about it. I don't feel good
about it all. I'm simply going to do it. And if there are
consequences of my act, than I harvest those consequences. That too,
is anarchy.
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&s=crane
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sj
