Saturday, January 16, 2016

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (56)

On a musical level, I had pretty much remained a fan and admirer of Joan Baez artistically between 1965 and the end of the 1970's. And insofar as I ever had any musical career goal or ambition or "dream" since 1965, it's always just been to become one of Joan Baez's protest folk song writers.

Yet on a political and philosophical level, I think it was only in the 1965 to early 1967 period that my politics and philosophical views were pretty much completely identical to Joan Baez's political and philosophical views. Once Baez became involved with David Harris in funding and promoting the politics of the Resist! anti-war group and I became involved in campus organization with Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and Richmond College SDS in the late 1960's, my political and philosophical  views began to diverge from Baez's views; although we both were anti-war, both favored a pacifist U.S. foreign policy, both thought a non-commercial motivation was what determined whether or not a performer of folk songs should be categorized as an authentic folk singer (rather than as just a professional entertainer/rip-off artist who primarily sang folk songs for personal commercial gain), and both favored a radical or revolutionary transformation of militarized, U.S. capitalist society in the 1960's.

Baez's view, however, was that Resist!'s strategy and its emphasis on philosophical non-violence and Gandhi's philosophy made more sense than the kind of non-violent confrontational strategy and political emphasis that Columbia SDS and National SDS was promoting in the late 1960's. Also, when Baez, initially, made what I thought were unfair criticisms of certain aspects of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960's that emerged from the New Left anti-war and civil rights movements of the mid-1960's, I felt our politics and philosophical views were diverging even more.

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