#986: Déjà Vu All Over Again

We begin with a 1970 song by one of the rock world’s first “supergroups,” CSNY (Crosby, Stills, Nash Young). Entitled “Four Dead in Ohio,” it is a classic protest song Neil Young reportedly took less than an hour to compose. For those of a certain age, it embodies a wide-ranging panoply of a time long gone . . . and now, more than a half-century later, being born anew.

In the spring of 1968, a whole lot of American college students - yours truly included - were spending less and less time in class and far far more marching and protesting the war in Vietnam and the military draft. Those of a certain age will well remember the chant “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, N.L.F. (the National Liberation Front) is gonna win!” Protests were alive on College campuses from Columbia to Berkeley, and from Michigan and Chicago to Harvard, Yale and Duke. The spring was awash with sounds of Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Arlo Guthrie and Country Joe and the Fish, the smell of pot, the antics of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, long hair, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Tom Hayden and eventually, the trial of The “Chicago 7” (or 8).

This generation of political activists may well have been the most productive in all American history. Its fervency, activism, and memorable pranks (some will recall when Abbie Hoffman threw tons of money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange or when throngs of “Yippie” protestors nominated “Pigasus” [also known as “Pigasus the Immortal” and “Pigasus J. Pig”] for POTUS at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National

Convention). played a major in lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, forcing an American president (LBJ) to dramatically announce on nationwide TV that he would not run for reelection, and bred a generation of politically-minded parents and grandparents who to this day are still fighting the good fight for climate change, and the rights of women, voters and those of color. In 1970, the year that CSNY came out with “Four Dead in Ohio,” things had become grim. President Richard Nixon (who was elected POTUS by turning the college students into the focus of his call for “law and order”), launched a “secret” bombardment of Cambodia, in which U.S. forces dropped up to 540,000 tons of bombs, which in turn led to the deaths of an estimated 150,000 to 500,000 civilians. This time around, student protesters were livid times ten. It led to a massive march on Washington, the closing down of many universities, and death . . . the killings of students at Kent State in Ohio and Jacksonville State in Mississippi. The most poignant photo of the time was that of young Mary Vecchio kneeling in agony over the body of student Jeffrey Miller, killed by the Ohio National Guard.

Eventually, the music grew dark (“The Eve of Destruction”), some of the protest leaders went into business (Jerry Rubin became a multimillion dollar stockbroker, and Drummond M. Pike founded the Tides Foundation, a “passthrough” for funding progressive political causes). Others went in to mainstream politics (SDS founder Tom Hayden was elected to both the California Assembly and Senate, and Berkeley’s Ron Dellums served 13 terms in the United States Congress where he eventually rose to become Chair of the House Armed Services Committee). Many, like Columbia University SDS leader Mark Rudd, became professors. Crosby, Stills and Nash (minus Neil Young) continued turning out hit songs “Teach Your Children,” “Southern Cross,” “Love the One Your With”) record albums (“After the Storm,” :Live it Up,” "Looking Forward”) and touring for the next half century. In 2023, David Crosby passed away at age 81; Stills and Nash are pretty much retired at, respectively, ages 79 and 82. In 2010, Graham Nash was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to music and to charity; in 2021, Neil Young sold 50% of his of the rights to his back catalog to a British investment company for an estimated $150 million. The “baby” of the group, the now 78-year old Young still does an occasional concert. . .

Many, many pages have been turned since the anti-war, anti-draft protests of the 1960s and early 1970s. Today, even though protests are once again being carried out mostly on the same college campuses as in an earlier time - Columbia to Yale, Michigan to Ohio, and Berkeley to UCLA - the issues, the underlying narrative, the look, and the sound are radically different. In the earlier era, mostly long-haired college-age students were protesting an optional, America-based war, they believed represented a miscarriage of justice and international law. The earlier student leaders were, to a great extent, both literate and knowledgeable about the sides, and history of the conflict. Their protests were memorialized in tense lyrics accompanied by twanging guitars and tight harmonies. Today, their grandchildren are hiding faces under keffiyehs, chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Globalize the Intifada” and calling for the utter destruction of Israel - America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East. Unlike their grandparents, they show an appalling lack of knowledge about history and Middle-Eastern realpolitik - of understanding the how, when and why of Israel’s creation, let alone the simultaneous "creation” of the "Palestinian people.” And as for their musical memorialization? Sorry, but rap and/or hip-hop just won’t cut it; for me its simply too atonal . . . full of sound and fury, signifying G-d only knows what. Comparing hip-hop to CSNY is like holding Gravity’s Rainbow in one hand, The Great Gatsby in the other.

While I, an American Jew, cannot support and certainly do not condone the Netanyahu government’s overwhelmingly lethal response to the deadly October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas militants, I - unlike many of the student protestors who liken Israel to the Third Reich - understand the enormity of the loss Israel suffered. With a population of about 9.73 million, Israel is about one-34th the size of the United States, which has about 335.55 million people. This means that the reported death toll of more than 1,400 Israelis from the Hamas terrorist attacks is proportional to about 48,300 Americans. The official U.S. count of Americans who died on Sept. 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center was “a mere” 2,977. These facts and statistics (which Twain referred to, respectively, as first, “stubborn things,” and then “pliable”) are either totally unknown or totally unimportant to the today’s protesters.

Terrorists Fighting Under the Banner of Hamas

Have tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of Muslims died at the hands of annihilators over the past decades? Yes, of course. But another truth unknown to the protesters who liken Israel to the Storm Troopers of World War II is this: that far, far more Arabs men, women and children (whether they be Iranian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Syrian, Libyan, Sudanese, or what today we term “Palestinian”) have been plundered, raped, tortured and murdered by fellow Muslims going to war under banners bearing the names حماس (Hamas), حزب الله (Hezbollah), الشباب (Al-Shabab) or الفلسطينيحركة الجهاد الإسلامي (harakat aljihad al'iislamii alfilastinii - Palestinian Islamic Jihad) among others. Have these students even thought about the fact that stockpiling weapons of death and destruction in, around and under schools, hospitals and mosques have virtually nothing to do with creating a Palestinian State and everything to do with the total annihilation and dismemberment of the Jewish State . . . not to mention growing rich in the process? Oh, if only were like low-hanging fruit . . . ripe and ready for the picking.

In many regards, the protesters of the Viet Nam era and those of post-October 7 are similar: in their fervor, their anger and utter certainty that they are on the right side of history. Both, according to those who find solace in conspiracy theories are - and were - accused of being brainwashed, useful idiots and dupes funded by immoral international cabals; Marxists (or Leninists, Stalinists, Maoist or Viet Minh) in the case of the 1960s and 70s) or billionaire backers of mayhem and disunion (most notably the omnipresent George Soros as well as President Joe Biden’s wealthiest backers) today. And while it is likely true that “outside agitators” - as they used to be known - play an important role in the campus protests of two different eras, it seems to me that today’s crop have swallowed far more bilge and blather than their grandparents. Case in point: the demand that America’s colleges and universities punish the “Jews and Zionists” by divesting their endowments of any and all Israel-related holdings. Here, the students are doing the bidding of the “BDS Movement” (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction) which “works to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.” To listen to the students, one would imagine that Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, Duke, Stanford and Berkeley (among many others) have extensive holdings in Israeli companies - most notably those that manufacture weapons of war. Truth to tell, this assumption is, as Grannie Annie would have it, “full of canal water.” According to a densely researched, fully-vetted piece in last Friday’s Washington Post, University endowments show few signs of direct Israel, defense holdings. From the little I know about the subject, the lion’s share of any holdings in Israeli businesses are likely to be in the area of pharmaceutical/medical high-tech. I wonder how many protestors’ parents and grandparents are alive because of medicines and/or medical devices that were created in Israel . . . ?

There is one ”Déjà Vu All Over Again” that is already causing me sleepless nights: the upcoming Democratic National Convention. As mentioned, as in 1968, it will once again be held in Chicago. Some will remember the opening lyrics from CSNY’s “Chicago”

Though your brother's bound and gagged
And they've chained him to a chair
Won't you please come to Chicago
Just to sing

In a land that's known as freedom
How can such a thing be fair
Won't you please come to Chicago
For the help that we can bring

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It's dying ... to get better

Yes, as ever, CSNY provided a tuneful harmony for a historic event . . . which ultimately became an utter debacle. Outside the International Amphitheatre, thousands of students, deeply aggrieved and in angry mourning for the deaths of Dr. Martin Luthor King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, took to the streets, only to be met by Mayor Richard Daily’s armed police force (we called them “Storm Troopers”). Inside the Hall, Democratic regulars waved placards proclaiming fealty for both Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Mayor Daily. What got the lion’s share of the media coverage wasn’t the goings-on inside the building; it was the urban warfare that Walter Cronkite (CBS), David Brinkley (NBC), and Frank Reynolds (ABC) gave near round-the-clock coverage to. It turned enough Americans against the Democrats that Republican nominee Richard Nixon (who had lost a presidential race to JFK in 1962) beat Humphrey 43.4%-42.7%. Had it not been for 3rd party candidate George Wallace (who captured nearly 10 million popular and 46 electoral votes), Nixon’s “law and order” would have swept him to a landslide victory. Nixon, of course, would then go on to oversee a ramping up of the war in Vietnam, the bombing of Cambodia and eventually the most corrupt and unlawful administration in all American history. Both he and his Vice President (Spiro Agnew) would resign their respective offices in order to avoid being imprisoned. Arguably, the students who descended upon Chicago played a large role in that election.

The Déjà Vu All Over Again is, of course, what role our modern-day protestors might have on the outcome of the 2024 election. If they come to Chicago loaded for bear, shouting, screaming and enacting scenes of urban theatre in front of not a mere 3, but a thousand-and-one social media outlets, some proclaiming RFK, Jr. to be their champion, we could well see Donald Trump’s “law and order” campaign be swept into office by the thinnest of margins . . . ultimately leading to an administration so corrupt, so anarchic and autocratic as to make what happened during the Nixon years seem like a lawful paradise. And if, G-d forbid, this occurs, it will once again be the victory of the craven and corrupt over America’s youth.

I began this piece with Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young in their role as the musical chroniclers of generational angst. I end with CSNY (with an assist from the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar) in their role as prophets of hope and understanding:

Teach, your children well

You, who are on the road
Must have a code you try to live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a goodbye

Teach your children well
Their father's hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by

Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

And you, of tender years
Can't know the fears your elders grew by
Help them with your youth
They seek the truth before they can die

Teach your parents well
Their children's hell will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by

Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

Ooh, and know they love you
And know they love you, yeah
And know they love you.