DATE LINES
Johansen, Bruce E. & Judge, Mark G. & Swaim, Will & Bettencourt, Michael
DATE LINES Unafraid of the S-Word PITTSBURGH Billy Bragg isn't afraid of the "S-word." The thirty-year-old British folk singer has just completed a spring concert tour of the United States armed...
...Bragg welcomes such comparisons and sees his string-bashing, polemical performances as an amalgam of the best of folk and punk...
...In the end, you have to explain to people that what you feel is more than just hate...
...His newest album, Help Save the Youth of America, with its sarcastic jibes at the egocentrism of young Americans, is a compilation of live dates from Moscow, London, and Washington, D.C...
...there was even an appearance by the commander for Army recruitment in New Hampshire, dressed in full regalia, to affirm that military training does not degrade people...
...He's made no endorsement, though, in the Presidential campaign...
...Military recruiters visited constantly and called on students at home and on the phone...
...Before the arrests, Agran spoke to the 300 people gathered at the test-site gates...
...But they hit a wall of public opinion here that may have scotched those plans...
...MEPP has to meet requirements the military recruiters do not have to worry about...
...The only difference between me and them is that I'm British and I saw the Clash when I was nineteen years old...
...Thomas became determined to get information to students that would counter to some degree the military's hard sell in the schools...
...Crist's idea was variously called "a very hateful brew" (by The Seattle Times), "the Klan in a can" (by William B. Cate, speaking for the Church Council of Greater Seattle), "a dreadful, sick joke" (Seattle Times again), and "a particular brand of toxic waste" (by the Washington Environmental Council...
...Government's treaties with various tribes confer special rights on American Indians and constitute a form of racism against non-Indians...
...West High School ran a Naval Junior ROTC program as part of its regular curriculum, and Memorial High School sported a weapons display in the school cafeteria—albeit without trigger assemblies...
...These people," said the reporter, with a nod toward the city officials speaking from a plywood bandstand and preparing for their own arrests, "represent small-town or, at least, mainstream America...
...Bragg admires Eugene V. Debs, the Wobblies, and other American labor movements of the early Twentieth Century...
...I'm not a Stalinist...
...Billy Bragg isn't afraid of the S-word...
...But this one was different...
...The pamphlet says non-registration is an option, but one fraught with consequences...
...But I'll tell you this: I think the election of George Bush is going to make this country a lot worse than anything Reagan has ever done...
...The Pacific Northwest does not need Crist's troublemaking...
...If this movement was born in the cities, it came of age in the desert...
...About 100 cities have divested themselves of investments in South Africa, and seventy or eighty have established formal relationships with cities in Nicaragua, supplying them with material and moral support...
...Crist says his plans to market Treaty Beer have merely been put on hold by the outpouring of opposition in Washington...
...I'm a socialist in the sense that, you know, Christ said it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven," Bragg says...
...Because socialism is about loving people...
...Government spends as much as $1 billion a year trying to persuade young people that joining the Armed Forces is the way to achieve it...
...Evans and Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who chairs the committee, recently urged the Federal Government to release David So-happy, who had been arrested and jailed for fishing in areas protected by treaty...
...Crist and his group, Stop Treaty Abuse, Inc., had plans to go national and market their beer in all forty states that have Indian treaties...
...The brew was first marketed in Wisconsin by Dean Crist, an activist who contends that the U.S...
...And when a corporate landowner unveiled plans to pave over the area's generations-old orange groves, local environmental activists turned instinctively to the mayor...
...Thomas and the other teachers, having formed a group called the Manchester Educators Peace Project (MEPP), had displays set up featuring pamphlets from the Central Committee for Conscientious Objection called Selective Service Registration and You and the Draft...
...In election-year England, it's all ideological position...
...Whatever this slogan means, the U.S...
...The singer's political song-writing and ideology mirror the philosophy of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci...
...If he can, his opponents promise a boycott and a complaint to the State Liquor Control Board...
...But the recruiters' activities are seen as legitimate interventions by the military into the lives of adolescents...
...When homelessness cropped up in this upper-middle-class Los Angeles suburb, Agran led the fight to establish a city shelter...
...During his recent U.S...
...Other schools in the area were subject to the same sorts of efforts...
...If Woody had seen the Clash when he was nineteen years old, he would have played the electric guitar...
...It doesn't matter if one of the candidates has a model sitting on his lap on a boat...
...If the pamphlet had been "issue-neutral," he wouldn't have been forced to remove it, says Jim Finnegan, director of the editorial page of The Manchester Union Leader...
...City halls all over are getting the message...
...To suggest the usual bullshit—that Joseph Stalin is the only acceptable form of socialism—is like saying that the Spanish Inquisition is the only acceptable form of Christianity...
...Today, almost 150 cities have declared themselves nuclear-free zones...
...He began reaching out to like-minded city officials five years ago, when he realized the arms race "was systematically looting the nation's cities...
...Because he's not stupid...
...In August, the board approved the placement of pamphlets but disallowed the speakers...
...Agran calls it "a wide-ranging, grass-roots response to Federal foreign policies that are secretive, duplicitous, and murderous...
...In 1986, with manager Peter Jen-ner, he formed Red Wedge, a coalition of artists and musicians supporting the Labour Party and various progressive causes in Great Britain...
...We don't want any part of this garbage...
...Since then, about a thousand local officials and 4,000 activists have joined the Local Elected Officials Project and become adherents of Agran's vision of municipal foreign policy...
...But he's working in an area which isn't necessarily ideological...
...Recorded in three days, it went to number one on the independent charts, and critics described him as an undeniable talent, a cross between Bob Dylan and the Clash...
...In fact, municipal foreign policies defy conspiracies...
...In private, Ross has admitted that he acted hastily and that a better process could have been followed...
...Displays of Armed Services literature covered the tops of two large bookcases in the guidance counselor's office...
...There are too many of them for one group to control...
...JoAnn Kauffman, speaking for the Seattle Indian Health Board, says Stop Treaty Abuse "has brought nothing but hatred and violence wherever they go...
...The thirty-year-old British folk singer has just completed a spring concert tour of the United States armed only with his electric guitar, to encourage voter registration and support the tenets of that word he refers to with mock fear—socialism...
...tour, he offered to let the Democratic Socialists of America set up tables to encourage voter registration...
...Now Agran is at the head of a movement to empower the nation's city halls by transforming them into provincial departments of state...
...No one seems to be concerned about the constitutional issues raised by Ross's actions...
...After a year of playing any gigs he could find, Bragg recorded his first album, Life's a Riot with Spy vs...
...I realized after three months that I looked really stupid in green," he says...
...In the early 1980s, Agran is fond of pointing out, the Reagan Administration dropped its simple-minded plans for civil defense in the event of nuclear war when 120 cities refused to cooperate...
...Critics on the Right see such efforts as left-wing attempts to subvert Federal policy...
...Agran greeted the Nicaraguan national baseball team at city hall and has turned up at trials in support of arrested anti-contra demonstrators...
...There's no conspiracy in this," he says...
...So the simple act of making the pamphlets available to the students for their voluntary reading is seen as propagan-distic—"ideological indoctrination," to borrow a phrase from Finnegan...
...Making Foreign Policy at City Hail IRVINE, CALIFORNIA If Orange County, California, is America's primordial political soup, Larry Agran is its first fish to flop ashore...
...Afterward, he began to notice how pervasive the military presence was in his own school...
...Bragg was born in Barking, a working-class suburb of London...
...He is now faced with the difficult task of finding a distributor for a product few people want to buy...
...He found the pamphlet "offensive" and said, "It shouldn't be our place to promote" unlawful behavior...
...But the price of twisted Federal priorities shows up first and most profoundly in America's communities, where our streets and bridges crumble...
...The Indians gave up much of the state's land when they made treaties in the 1850s but retained their fishing rights...
...where our factories rust, where our schoolchildren lapse into ignorance, and where homelessness, hunger, and poverty are on the rise...
...Gramsci said—and this is the phrase I base my entire political and song-writing ideas on, and I'm paraphrasing—unless you love someone with all your heart, someone other than your immediate family, a total stranger,' unless you love someone with all your heart, then you can't be a socialist...
...The things that happened in this country between the 1890s and the 1930s were much more socialist, revolutionary, political, than anything that's happened in my country in the last 200 years...
...Most copies—the property of MEPP—have disappeared, and a special committee has been set up to review all material submitted by MEPP in the future...
...I feel a deep affinity with Guthrie and Dylan and people like Phil Ochs," he says...
...One reporter at the demonstration said she .had stopped coming out for the test-site actions years ago— "They've become so mechanical," she said...
...item on the municipal foreign policy agenda is an effort to challenge, impede, or block one or another policy of the present Administration...
...After more than a century of treaty conflicts, public opinion in Washington, as analyzed by Cate, now favors "cooperation by all interested parties" to save the salmon resource...
...Surveying the tide of public opinion against the beer, Crist's distributor backed out...
...Washington has been fertile ground for conflict over treaty rights to land, forest, and mineral resources, as well as fish...
...In 1984, Bragg recorded his second LP, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, and the following year released Between the Wars in conjunction with the Jobs for Youth tour sponsored by Britain's Labour Party...
...Will Swaim (Will Swaim is a free-lance writer in Irvine, California...
...With Jackson," Bragg says, "he's that rare thing, an American mainstream politician willing to stick his neck out...
...Crist eyed Washington in part because it was the source of the 1974 Boldt decision which guaranteed Indian peoples the right to half of the har-vestable salmon returning to their usual and accustomed fishing grounds...
...Bruce E. Johansen (Bruce E. Johansen, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, also works with El Centro de la Raza of Seattle...
...The recruiters used mailing lists provided by the school, gave away free book covers, took out full-page ads in the school newspapers, and sponsored military rock bands...
...About the only group that supported Crist in Washington was the Puget Sound Gillnetters Association, which represents about half the state's non-Indian commercial-fishing interests...
...unemployed at age twenty-four, he joined the British army but bought himself out after ninety days...
...The prospect of cities getting involved in foreign policy is not universally welcomed, however...
...Much debate and many tabled motions followed...
...Contra enthusiast George Weigel, for instance, argues that municipal foreign policies are a cover for far more sinister deeds...
...We want to take foreign policy back from the Federal Government," Agran says, "and build for it a permanent home in the city halls of America...
...Michael Bettencourt (Michael Bettencourt is a freelance writer in Manchester...
...The progressive mayor of Irvine-a city of 100,000 in the heart of Reagan country— Agran has long used his position in the city to address issues which others fear to broach...
...And that makes him the Smokey Robinson of Marxism, as far as I'm concerned...
...And when they get pissed off, I know something's afoot...
...An Answer to the Military Pitch MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE Be All That You Can Be...
...Some of the people he has played for here are, though, and some resent hearing an English protest singer dabble in American politics...
...But a few high-school teachers here have tried to diminish the campaign's impact by distributing alternative information about military service to their students...
...I'm that kind of socialist...
...Weigel, the president of the James Madison Foundation, an off-shoot of the right-wing World Without War Council, contends that "virtually every...
...But when Crist launched his beer blitz, he was blown out of the state by an unlikely coalition that included native American groups, U.S...
...He says that's rubbish: "When you're a cultural and political colony of the United States, as England is, it matters who's emperor...
...But Agran insists, "There is no monolithic agenda...
...I feel a strong resonance in what Jackson says and how I feel, but I don't really know enough about Dukakis...
...He and several other teachers petitioned the school board in June 1987 to allow the presentation of alternative materials and speakers about the draft and military service...
...The Klan in a Can SEATTLE Treaty Beer seems to have lost its fizz in the state of Washington...
...Senator Dan Evans, Governor Booth Gardner, both of Seattle's daily newspapers, church groups, environmental activists—and, surprisingly, the state's normally anti-treaty Steelhead and Salmon Protection Association for Washington Now (S/SPAWN), a group made up mainly of sports-fishing enthusiasts...
...We're talking about foreign policy," Agran continues, "that is created locally by people who, using the legal, democratic instruments of local government—the powers of lobbying, policing, educating—seek to have impact...
...There are those," he said, "who will say that we local elected officials should confine ourselves to matters of narrow local concern, that we should limit ourselves to asphalting streets and enforcing fire codes...
...But the pamphlet never made it into the hands of students...
...After the release of two more albums— Talking to the Taxman about Poetry and Back to Basics—and a Tory victory in the British elections, Bragg toured in the Soviet Union and then in Nicaragua...
...Mark G. Judge (Mark G. Judge is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C...
...I am saddened to think that outside agitators see our state as fertile ground for their message of hate," said Senator Evans, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs...
...Among the thousand or more cities that have sister-city ties, an increasing number—now several dozen—are establishing permanent relations with Soviet communities...
...Announcing his plans to begin marketing Treaty Beer in and near Tacoma, Crist offended S/SPAWN by claiming its support without asking...
...It began in 1986, when Will Thomas, a teacher at Central High School, attended a workshop on the military draft...
...In January, Superintendent Eugene Ross had the pamphlet on registration pulled from the display at West High School...
...Last December, eleven local elected officials-mayors and council members from California, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Texas—were arrested with some 160 activist supporters when they trespassed symbolically on the Federal Government's nuclear-weapons test site near Las Vegas...
...Ellis Lind, speaking for S/SPAWN, told The Seattle Times that the claim of support was "an absolute lie...
Vol. 52 • July 1988 • No. 7
