A FIFTH FOR THE FOURTH
I'm drinking to Joe Hill this 4th and all that he fought for and all that we have let fail
Executed Labor activist Joe Hill said his grave was to be the heart of every worker. So many of my heroes hoped we’d be extant memorials for them, a great chain of continuous, inextinguishable being.
But with fascism hogging the fast lane of current history, Joe Hill and his ilk face extinction as living inspirations. Non-being corrodes their legacy. The family of the mankind he lived and died for now must be traced in scrapbook and ancestry DNA. We must skip backwards and miss the intervening generations they were to lead in living deeds and imperishable ideals. The continuity they counted on is now a discontinuity.
A metaphysics of indeterminacy leaves us stranded in black holes and blank spaces where torchlight is invisible or a faint flicker. Try to come closer and blow on the flame. Try to shrink the distance between us and our mentors. Memory is not a walkable road. Inspiration can ignite continuation and replication. It sure did with Charles Ives, two of whose songs appropriate to memory and memorial begin this medley.
This is the saddest and most troubling July 4th of my lifetime. Unlike Ives, memory and memories provide me only light to read and write by. The penultimate songs by Richard Farina and Leonard Cohen sum up the apocalyptic gloom which often turns this room into a tomb for my dremas as much as a field for them.
It’s all second-hand now. My dad beckons me to remember Sacco and Vanzetti. I can feel his wishful but wavering bravery to join the Lincoln Brigades and fight in Spain. My French wife’s father, a platoon leader in Morocco, is sent to fight in Spain on Franco’s side until his Mulsim troops refuse to fight when the generalissimo orders them to kill their Kurdish Arab brothers. Later, when his platoon is ordered to round up Jews for deportation, Morocco’s king will join DeGaulle and they will fight against the Fascists, many of them pro-Nazi Frenchmen. This is a far as my lifetime’s continuum of noble resistance goes. My country’s genocides in Vietnam and Iraq erase all trace of admirable national valor. And France is the verge of becoming a second Vichy.
I can’t think of any meaningful defense of humna rights since 1965 for which my country can be proud. The labor movement has been destroyed. There is no meaningful anti-war movement. And just when our racist history stands must exposed, the forces of regression try to block, even prohibit, its dissemination. A war on “woke” has been declared throughout much of our country.
So July 4, 2024 is for me an occasion for lamentation. And if you’re a flag-waver, I suggest you bypass the music if am offering in advance of this grim Thursday. This music is meant to make you weep for what this century has cost us as a people.
Susan Narucki & Donald Berman, Songs My Mother Taught Me (Charles Ives, 1895) 2008
Ensemble for New Music Zurich, The Things Our Fathers Loved (Charles Ives, 1905). 2012
Ry Cooder, Rally Round the Flag, 1972
The Peerless Quartette, I Didn’t Rasie My Boy to a Soldier, 1915
Gray Gordon (Dick Robertson as Art Perry, voc.)), Oh! They’re Making Me All Over in the Army, 1940
Horace Heidt (Ronnier Kemper & Donna Wood, voc.), Good bye Dear, I’ll Be Back in a Year, 1941
Paul Robeson, Joe Hill, 1942
Anne Feeney, We Just Come to Work Here, We Don’t Come to Die, 2006
Marlena Shaw, I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel to be Free), 1969
Irma Thomas, I wish I Knew How It would Feel to be Free, 2006
Nina Simone, Feelin’ Good, 1965
Morten Gunnar Larsen, Solace (Scott Joplin), 1999
Richard & Mimi Farina, Children of Darkness (Richard Farina), 1965
Mimi Farina, The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood (Richard Farina), 1985
Leonard Cohen, It Seemed the Better Way, 2016
Leonard Cohen, It’s Torn, (released posthumously in 2019)
Morton Gould conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”), 1966