Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

To encourage Joan Baez to be “political” is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue “feeling” things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, “all vague.” Her approach is instinctive, pragmatic, not too far from that of any League of Women Voters member. “Frankly, I’m down on Communism,” is her latest word on that subject. On recent events in the pacifist movement, she has this to say: “Burning draft cards doesn’t make sense, and burning themselves makes even less.” When she was at Palo Alto High School and refused to leave the building during a bomb drill, she was not motivated by theory; she did it because “it was the practical thing to do, I mean it seemed to me this drill was impractical, all these people thinking they could get into some kind of little shelter and be saved with canned water.” She has made appearances for Democratic administrations, and is frequently quoted as saying: “There’s never been a good Republican folksinger”; it is scarcely the diction of the new radicalism. Her concert program includes some of her thoughts about “waiting on the eve of destruction,” and her thoughts are these:

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But its really God — playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven — shattering stained glass — playing a gigantic organ — thundering on the keys — perfect harmony — perfect joy.

Although Miss Baez does not actually talk this way when she is kept from the typewriter, she does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone’s adolescence. This openness, this vulnerability, is of course precisely the reason why she is so able to “come through” to all the young and lonely and inarticulate, to all those who suspect that no one else in the world understands about beauty and hurt and love and brotherhood. Perhaps because she is older now, Miss Baez is sometimes troubled that she means, to a great many of her admirers, everything that is beautiful and true.

“I’m not very happy with my thinking about it,” she says. “Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Come on, Baez, you’re just like everybody else, ’ but then I’m not happy with that either.”

“Not everybody else has the voice,” Ira Sandperl interrupts dotingly.

“Oh, it’s all right to have the voice, the voice is all right…”

She breaks off and concentrates for a long while on the buckle of her shoe.

So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences. “One day we went around the room and told a little about ourselves,” she confides, “and I discovered that boy, I’d had it pretty easy.” The late afternoon sun streaks the clean wooden floor and the birds sing in the scrub oaks and the beautiful children sit in their coats on the floor and listen to Ira Sandperl.

“Are you a vegetarian, Ira?” someone asks idly.

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Tell them, Ira,” Joan Baez says. “It’s nice.”

He leans back and looks toward the ceiling. “I was in the Sierra once.” He pauses, and Joan Baez smiles approvingly. “I saw this magnificent tree growing out of bare rock, thrusting itself…and I thought all right, tree, if you want to live that much, all right! All right! OK! I won’t chop you! I won’t eat you! The one thing we all have in common is that we all want to liver

“But what about vegetables,” a girl murmurs.

“Well, I realized, of course, that as long as I was in this flesh and this blood I couldn’t be perfectly nonviolent.”

It is getting late. Fifty cents apiece is collected for the next day’s lunch, and someone reads a request from the Monterey County Board of Supervisors that citizens fly American flags to show that “Kooks, Commies, and Cowards do not represent our County,” and someone else brings up the Vietnam Day Committee, and a dissident member who had visited Carmel.

“Marv’s an honest-to-God nonviolenter,” Ira Sandperl declares. “A man of honesty and love.”

“He said he’s an anarchist,” someone interjects doubtfully.

“Right,” Ira Sandperl agrees. “Absolutely.”

“Would the V. D. C. call Gandhi bourgeois?”

“Oh, they must know better, but they lead such bourgeois lives themselves…”

“That’s so true,” says the dreamy blond boy with the violet marble. “You walk into their office, they’re so unfriendly, so unfriendly and cold…”

Everyone smiles lovingly at him. By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm.

1966

michael laski, also known as M. I. Laski, is a relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California. With his striking appearance and his relentlessly ideological diction, he looks and talks precisely like the popular image of a professional revolutionary, which in fact he is. He was born twenty-six years ago in Brooklyn, moved as a child to Los Angeles, dropped out of U. C. L. A. his sophomore year to organize for the Retail Clerks, and now, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U. S. A. (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group of Stalinist-Maoists who divide their energies between Watts and Harlem, he is rigidly committed to an immutable complex of doctrine, including the notions that the traditional American Communist Party is a “revisionist bourgeois clique,” that the Progressive Labor Party, the Trotskyites, and “the revisionist clique headed by Gus Hall” prove themselves opportunistic bourgeois lackeys by making their peace appeal not to the “workers” but to the liberal imperialists; and that H. Rap Brown is the tool, if not the conscious agent, of the ruling imperialist class.

Not long ago I spent some time with Michael Laski, down at the Workers’ International Bookstore in Watts, the West Coast headquarters of the C. P. U. S. A. (M. -L.). We sat at a kitchen table beneath the hammer-and-sickle flag and the portraits of Marx, Engels, Mao Tse-tung, Lenin, and Stalin (Mao in the favored center position), and we discussed the revolution necessary to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary. He had with him a small red book of Mao’s poems, and as he talked he squared it on the table, aligned it with the table edge first vertically and then horizontally. To understand who Michael Laski is you must have a feeling for that kind of compulsion. One does not think of him eating, or in bed. He has nothing in common with the passionate personalities who tend to turn up on the New Left. Michael Laski scorns deviationist reformers. He believes with Mao that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, a point he insists upon with blazing and self-defeating candor. His place in the geography of the American Left is, in short, an almost impossibly lonely and quixotic one, unpopular, unpragmatic. He believes that there are “workers” in the United States, and that, when the time comes, they will “arise,” not in anarchy but in conscious concert, and he also believes that “the ruling class” is self-conscious, and possessed of demonic powers. He is in all ways an idealist.