The Back of the Bus

Going on 40 years of demonstrations. What a difference a few decades make. Or do they?

Here's a photograph taken during a protest for the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley in December of 1964.

Nearly 40 years ago. I suppose that if it was taken on the right day in December at the right time, I'm floating around somewhere nearby just outside the frame. I'm probably trying to make a sign that's anywhere as cool as, "STRIKE AGAINST THE PATRIARCHAL DESPOTISM AND MARTIAL LAW USED IN DEFENSE OF PERSONAL MORAL WEAKNESS," but I've really got no chance. That guy is just too, too SDS for me. I'd have never come up with it. Still, you have to admire his foresight. He's got "patriarchal" up there a full decade before it was even a gleam in Andrea Dworkin's eye.

I've been looking at a lot of old photographs of late and I always wonder where the people in the picture are today. I know where I am and it is much more than 40 years . I like to imagine it is the same for the sign-toting student in the shot. But you just can't know.

The other thing that strikes me is how, as my father would have said, "clean-cut" everybody is. Suits, ties, "ivy-league" haircuts, polished shoes. Nobody wears things like that to demonstrations today, not even the FBI Agents.

Of course the slightly scruffy couple harmonizing folk songs over a guitar in the background near the middle of the shot are still around. They don't seem to ever age, do they? I wonder what their secret is?

Last summer I had to take my car in for repair at one of the Mercedes repair shops that line one side of the road up Laguna Canyon from the ocean to the interior of Orange county. Dropping it off I took a little stroll around the automobile graveyard that forms a part of this mechanic's lot. And there it was: my past come back to haunt me like a Maoist version of Marley's Ghost.

I'm not saying I owned this vehicle, but a lot of my friends did. I'm not saying this was one of theirs, but it sure could have been. And I'm not asserting that

what was on the back of the bus told the tale of the last 40 years of increasingly insane protest, but it certainly could. Here's the back with the slogans broken out below in case you can't quite make them out.

• Millennium Schmillennium
  Green Party
  The Nation
  Nader/LaDuke
  90.7 FM
  EMANCIPATE YOURSELF FROM MENTAL SLAVERY. NONE BUT OURSELVES CAN FREE OUR MINDS.
  Live Simply That Others May Simply Live

  Visualize Industrial Collapse
  Darwin
  KPFK
  DARE TO THINK FOR YOURSELF
  I'D RATHER BE SMASHING IMPERIALISM
  TEACH PEACE
  SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM
  I BELIEVE IN LIFE BEFORE DEATH
  PRACTICE ORGANIZED RESISTANCE IN CONSCIOUS ACTS OF SOLIDARITY
  DIE YUPPIE SCUM
  ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS

There it is, a major American mind-set, in no particular order. Over 40 years of increasing political dementia. If the van hadn't collapsed it would have probably collectedHalliburton = Overfishing the Oceans added to it along with Bush Lied And He/She/It Died, If I Believed in Jesus, Jimmy Carter Would Be A Saint and It's All About the Oil on Mars! It would have been kept up-to-date. It would have been a sacred trust.

In a very real sense, the existence of this bus and the accretion of over 40 years of loopy political ideas is a testament to the deep strength of the core values of this country. It is not difficult to know what the life expectancy of the bus and the driver of it would be should it have been driven across the Iran border. But no matter how stupid the drivers of this bus have been over the decades, none of them would have been that stupid.

The test of freedom across the long term is, as has been said before, how well the society tolerates the ideas that seek to undo it. From my own experience and observation I'd say this little exhibit confirms that it has been going very well for freedom in the United States for well over 40 years. There's a lot of other places, even today, and places beloved by the drivers of this van and their friends and family, where none of them would last for 40 hours.

If I had to show someone from another world one thing that would prove this country was the last best hope of Earth, I'd make them land the mothership in Laguna Canyon and take in the back of the bus.

Posted by Vanderleun at October 2, 2004 5:22 PM