This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful that young people—in the streets and otherwise—are, openly and with persistence, questioning authority.

Volumes have already been written and uttered by the chattering classes. What are they about? What are they after?

“We, the young people, whom you so rightly fear, say that the society is sick and you and your capitalism are the sickness. You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism.”

“No longer are the weak to be manipulated by the strong, whose revivifying worth is the property they have amassed. They are now open to scrutiny. It is clear that there is a real and legitimate basis for the seizure and redistribution of property to rechannel it into the service of human needs.”

“The underlying idea of this project is that everyone participating is going to get an opportunity to weigh in and give their opinion…We are attempting to create a new paradigm where decisions are being made from the bottom up.”

These statements were not made at the foot of Wall Street in late October, nor in Berkeley over the weekend. They were made during or after “The Battle of Morningside Heights,” a student-led uprising at ivy-league Columbia University in upper Manhattan, bordering Harlem, in the Spring of 1968. The first quotation is from Mark Rudd, a factional leader of the school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and the face and personality the media fashioned into its icon, in his Open Letter to President Kirk. The second is taken from the conclusion of Who Rules Columbia? Original Strike Edition, published by strike organizers that September to catalog and document what, to them, it was really about—the distorting effect of money, property, and power on the culture and ideals of both academe and society. The last statement was made by Eleanor Raskin, in A Time to Stir, Paul Cronin’s epic 2008 documentary about that student revolt. She was a Columbia graduate student and SDS member at that time, later joined Weatherman, and is now a law professor who teaches about climate change. (Please forgive my liberty in changing tenses in the latter two—you get the point; plus ça change and all that.)

Against the background of two years of growing radicalism in both the civil rights movement and in on-campus antiwar and anti-draft activity, Morningside Heights was one of many galvanizing events that led to a summer of rage among the young and the racially dispossessed. Three weeks earlier, President Lyndon Baines Johnson—a legislative and political colossus and talisman of hope to citizens of color, now mortally wounded by an intractable foreign war—announced he would not seek a second full term. Six days after that, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who galvanized my generation around the issues of racial and social justice, bled out on a motel balcony in Memphis. Six weeks after the Columbia confrontation, Senator Robert Kennedy’s bid to become the Democratic Party’s “youth candidate” in August, bolstered by his June 4 California Primary victory, ended with his murder in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. During that convention, the youthful New Left clashed with Mayor Daley the Elder’s police in Chicago’s streets, a stark exercise in theatrical confrontation that deepened and solidified the politics of division. Fear and frustration were everywhere.

Richard Nixon's campaign theme was "restoring law and order" and was entirely reactionary, built on those fears and frustrations—a toxic brew of the war; civil unrest; and white, working class antipathy toward civil rights gains. (No, Virginia, Cheney and Rove didn’t invent those tactics; they merely refined them. Johnson had played both building antiwar sentiment and the nuclear card to perfection against Goldwater four years before.)

I wrote in greater detail two years ago about that Fall’s electoral denouement. Nixon beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey by a half-million votes out of 73 million cast—00.007%. George Wallace, the pro-segregation former Governor of Alabama, actively campaigned in the South and Rust Belt for the American Independent Party. He pulled more than 9 million votes and carried five southern states with 46 electoral votes. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the write-in "Peace" candidate and the darling of too many in my general cohort who were 21 and who could vote—I couldn’t—didn’t move the needle. (Then and now, I shudder to imagine how many of my peers—particularly those who got involved primarily to score drugs and get laid—no, kids, you didn’t invent that at college, either—indulged in the hubristic "meaningful protest" of writing in "Clean Gene," the Yippies' "Pigasus," or other fanciful creatures. I’m fairly certain J. R. R. Tolkien and Timothy Leary earned goodly shares, too. I salve myself with the realization that they probably didn’t bother to show up.) Combined, these factors provided the Republican a comfortable electoral college margin of 301-91.

Contrary to popular opinion, those choices had consequences; they always do. Unless and until we devise or borrow (European socialism!) a better system that truly takes money out of politics by eliminating the marketing/media profit motive, Presidential elections are by definition a “winner takes all” proposition. One guy wins, one guy loses (sorry, Hillary), often depending on how many votes that season’s Don Quixote—take a bow, Ross, Ralph, and Ron—steals from one or the other. If more people my age had been mature enough to vote for Humphrey, I’m persuaded that, among other things:

• The GOP's vaunted "Southern strategy" would have been wounded, very likely mortally.
• Thirteen kids wouldn’t have been shot by their rifle-toting, draft-dodging classmates in a panic at Kent State University on May, 3 1970.
  The Vietnam war would have ended much sooner—if only because McNamara and Ellsberg would have had a sympathetic, inside audience—sparing our parents and society the burdens of tens of thousands of additional casualties and additional damage to our international reputation.
• There would have been no Watergate and no impeachment proceedings. (In hindsight, one of Nixon’s chiefs of staff pegged Kent State as the event that
  began that Administration’s downward slide into Watergate.)
• The entire realm of public discourse would have been different—at a minimum more progressive (generic meaning, label-makers) than reactionary.

There are obvious parallels in the Morningside Heights/Wall Street metaphors—war; gender, class, and ethnic divides; persistent poverty and economic inequality—but there are key differences. The biggest difference, I think, is that “Occupy Wall/Main Street” is decidedly more proletarian—even though we geezers liked to impress ourselves with the frequent use of the word back in the day. Look closely; despite the media’s efforts to the contrary, they are of every color, sexual orientation, size, and temperament. Unlike most of us were, they are not led by the children of the privileged, sheltered in academia by social position—that is, wealth or skin color, or both—and still blissfully ignorant of the true depths and dimension of the struggles of others. (Go back to A Time to Stir and focus on the divisions in purpose between SDS and Students for African-American Studies—or, for that matter, between males and females in SDS.) These kids have had three generations to know and get used to one another at the most visceral levels; they have a fundamental, common comfort that we never did. Theirs is a strike against the status quo, to be sure, but it’s largely unburdened by those types of xenophobic considerations. Their unifying theme is more purely distilled and what we were searching for: social and economic justice. We used those words but, like Mark Rudd, too many of our leaders congratulated ourselves as a new intellectual and social force, demanding the abandonment of everything with which we disagreed, human or institutional. It was a blinding arrogance that, in retrospect and however well-intentioned, was appalling. OW-MS isn’t printing manifestos so much as asking a simple question:

“You’ve made us a lot of promises and we’ve played by your rules. You’ve got yours, and more. Where’s ours?”

In doing so, they’re speaking for many more of us than they’re being given credit for. What we—former Flower Children and Generation Millenium—have in common are the same worries and doubts, about where we are and where we going. We insisted we spoke truth to power, but we were merely railing against authority. They are pointed at the true source of power today: wealth, as applied to our institutions to serve its acquisition and retention, rather than us.

So, kids: there are among the cotton-tops those of us who are listening, and remember what it’s like to trade personal safety for speaking up. We see beyond efforts to typify you and diminish your message. You’ve already got a stronger grip on what’s at stake than we did, because you’re living now what most of us were merely witnessing in our time. We had education; you have that but, like our Depression and wartime-era parents, you also have the daily confrontation of bitter experience. Let us listen to one another, combine our time and talent, and pursue solutions together.

Don’t do what we did, though. Don’t abandon the possible to pursue the perfect—and allow the Brahmins to steal another election.

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Based on some of the reactions I received to last week's Rant, it may be worse out there than even I expected.

I led with Mike Nofgren's quotations, and I choose to believe that those folks who took swift and decisive action to banish me from their planet didn't bother to read what lay beyond. They didn't get far enough into it to challenge the hasty assumption that here was another liberal"/"socialist"/"atheist"/"empathetic" [check as many pointless labels as apply] Democrat, dogging randomly on Republicans.

See, the point was that the entire working environment in the Congress has become so paralyzed by zealots in the thrall of their own rigid ideologies that the one factor that is essential to effective governance--compromise--has been suffocated, causing highly trained and experienced staff on both sides to throw up their hands in disgust and walk away, at a time when their skills are desperately needed. What I wanted to say was that, based on my own experience, it was not always thus, and that politics and governance are not only not conflicting concepts, they are also wholly interdependent.

Politics, defined as arguing for the plausible and agreeing upon the possible, is as much a part of us upper primates as basic problem-solving. Practiced at its highest, it is the art, as Paul Gaugin observed, of slicing the cake so everyone believes he got the largest piece. Thirty years of slander in the 24-hour news cycle has reduced it, and those who aspire to practice it, to its current perception as a contemptible carbunkle on the ass of progress. (I stole that from Peter Ustinov's character in Topkapi.) Now, the apparent highest qualification to run for elective office is to have little to no prior governing experience and a snarling contempt for all "politicians," but especially "career" politicians and the processes in which they dirty themselves. It's been a time-tested and honored principle for 35 years to run against Washington to get elected to go there and participate; it's beyond irony. The logical result: refuse to negotiate and compromise; otherwise, you might be branded a politician.

Suffer me my favorite analogy to illustrate how noxious this notion is. Very early on in my career, I had the privilege of working with Representative Barbara Jordan, a Texas Democrat. (If you don't know who she is, here's all you need to really know; if you need more, check this out. She had many conservative friends among her colleagues, most of whom hungered to sound like her.) In the throes of the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment deliberations, I happened to be standing nearby as she was questions by the ubiquitous gaggle of reporters. One asked her: "Do you consider yourself a politician?" Without hesitation, she said, "No." After some consternation, the followup question: "Why not?" She fixed her interrogator with that absorbing gaze of hers. "I'm a professional politician; there's a difference, you see. Everyone's a politician."

Today’s case example comes from an old friend. Chris Hooper and I got to know each other well in my home (“Red”) state of Idaho in 1979. I’d come home from Hollywood-on-the-Potomac to represent hospitals and physicians before the Legislature, and he’d been elected to serve in the House the year before. His peers in the Republican majority chose him to chair the Health and Welfare Committee, where he remained for 10 years. (A little background: as you’ll read below, he considers himself a true conservative, while by indigenous standards I was a liberal Democrat. At that time, anywhere else I would have been considered to be a moderate Republican who also believed labor unions, private and public, had as least as much a right to exist as corporate management.)

Chris and I did a lot of business together over four years before I checked out for D.C. again. I remember that we accomplished a lot, mostly because most all of us understood that honoring the rules, principles, and integrity of the process in which we were engaged—the art of the deal—trumped any individual’s or faction’s beliefs. His training (insurance and the law), intellect, and sense of humor made life wry and interesting most all the time and, at its lowest, tolerable. My two favorite examples (that likely occurred during working hours, since I can remember them):

Anyone who’s represented Medical Doctors knows that some subspecialists in medicine are more insecure than others, a reflection of their perception of their position in the godly pecking order. Dermatology is one of those. I don’t know if it’s still true, but Idaho had a pretty progressive rule: in order to even introduce a bill, one had to convince a majority of the members of the policy committee to which it would be referred. In the Third House, it was considered unwise, and sometimes unchivalrous, to oppose introduction unless absolutely necessary. (“There, but for the grace of God, go I.”) Well, some among my plucky skin-keepers decided a minor cosmetologists’ bill didn’t deserve to live, so I reluctantly squired their ringleader to the Capitol to testify in opposition. After 10 minutes of listening to my man’s dark assessment of this latest threat to patient safety and seeing his peers rolling their eyes, Chris gave me that look. He leaned forward, and the following exchange occurred, in exaggerated stage whisper:

“Tim—where did you find this turkey?”

“Mr. Chairman: he volunteered.”

When we weren’t at war with plaintiffs’ attorneys, it fell to us to sponsor legislation to improve the delivery of health care services in mostly mundane ways. One exception was when fertility departments and clinics encountered a problem. Idaho was and is not a populous state, so it was not unusual to look outside its borders to find desirable sperm donors. (Insert your own “hick” joke here.) Their contributions would be collected there, frozen, and packed for transport to the requesting hospital or clinic. On too many occasions, enforcement of existing and often conflicting shipping requirements for biologicals resulted in delay and, well, decay. The afternoon I presented our bill, I settled into an environment where the potential for hazing was not only anticipated but appreciated by those on the other side of the dais. Chairman Hooper started things off—“Mr. Hart, would you say this is a seminal piece of legislation?”—and all Hell broke loose; everyone took a turn. Toward the end, a northern Idaho Democratic member (schoolteacher, as I recall) passed a note to Chris. He read it and convulsed to the point that he almost fell over backward in his chair. Right after the bill went out, I rushed the chair and demanded to see the scrip. It read: “Dear Chris: Just as I always suspected—‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’ Lou.”

I learned a valuable lesson that day: It’s almost impossible to vote “No” when you’re laughing. Over the years, the opportunities to invoke this principle have been fewer and farther between, another symptom of the larger problem.

Chris left the Idaho Legislature in 1988, for reasons to which he’ll allude. He moved to Reno, where he joined a law firm and spent another decade immersed in legislative and regulatory issues for clients. On August 19, 2003, his son, Rick, a 1985 U.C. Santa Cruz grad and a multilingual, seasoned Middle East expert who was serving as the special assistant to the UN undersecretary-general for political affairs, was killed in al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, one of Abu Musab Zarqawi’s earliest post-occupation crimes. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq had headquartered there just five days earlier.) One of his professors, with whom he stayed in contact, remembered Rick this way: “For a person who learned Arabic as a UCSC student, spent years in the West Bank and Gaza, and ended his career as one of the UN's chief experts on Arab affairs, Hooper died doing what he loved: He was trying to make a difference in the Middle East.”

At that point, Chris decided to retire to a mountaintop in the Stanley Basin, one of the crown jewels of God’s creation in his adopted state. (Ironically, he’s a Californian by birth; I spent all my formative years in Boise and will likely die here.)

He read what I wrote last week and sent me the following letter he’d penned just before the 2008 elections. (See my Xenodu for what I wrote at that time.)

"Editor
Idaho Mountain Express
P.O. Box 1013
Ketchum, Idaho 83340

"Re: It (was) my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.

"Dear Editor:

"My working class parents were Republicans. My mother worked as a retail clerk in a pharmacy so that my brother and I could attend Stanford. Some of my relatives referred to Roosevelt as “that man.”

"I stuffed envelopes for Ike in 1952 and 1956. In my first election in which I could vote, I was a precinct committeeman for Goldwater in a downtown Oakland, California, precinct.

"I was fortunate to be elected to the Idaho House of Representatives in 1978, as a Republican, and served for ten years. My philosophy was simple and, according to my roots, Republican: 1) decisions should be made at the most local level possible; 2) spend the tax money wisely; 3) balance the budget; 4) if a bill were not enforceable, do not vote for it. I did not want the government telling the family what decisions the family must make.

"I thought that I was a 'conservative.' After all, keeping the government out of our lives and balancing the budget were conservative values. But things changed. The Republican party, including in Idaho, began to be taken over by what I called, and still call, the “authoritarians.” In Idaho, they opposed local option tax authority because 'they' knew best, and 'they' did not trust the people to make the 'right' decisions. The authoritarians want to get into those most intimate of family decisions, and they want to control what we say and what we do. Any who disagree are 'cowards' or 'unpatriotic.' My Republican party would not destroy the Bill of Rights.

Internationally, my 'conservative' Republican party did not attack a country until it attacked us, and if that happened, we would respond ferociously. Remember Ike’s warning of the 'military industrial complex' and the 'Powell Doctrine.' My Republican party would not be proud of a budget deficit of 'only' 250 billion dollars, not counting the Iraq war expenses that are 'off budget.'

"In short, my Republican party left me. I did not leave it. I do not know what to do. The Democrats do not have great alternatives. I wish that we had a third party that believed in fiscal responsibility and promoted individual liberty. Unfortunately we do not, and I am too old to promote such a party. I do know that I cannot support those who blindly support our current administration. I am not yet sure whether I can vote for all Democrats. I do not know what to do but I do know that my Republican party abandoned me. I feel a great loss.

"Very truly yours,

Chris Hooper"

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