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Sort-of Poetry.
Apr. 20th, 2009 12:55 amUtah Phillips quotes, just because.
... I have a good friend in the East. A good singer, and a good folksinger, a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot about the past. You always sing about the past; you can't live in the past, you know." And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot." Now, the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now - I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get 'em in serious trouble.
...
At the onset, those of you who may have heard me should probably turn to those who may have not and calmly reassure them that this is in fact what happens when I sit onstage. Not much more. This is about it. You'll notice no sudden or dramatic change in neither my instrumental or vocal attack, as it were.
This is nonetheless an American folk song. Did you recognize it as such? Of course you would, you're folkies. You don't hear 'em much anymore, don't hear 'em on your AM radio, huh? Folksingers hardly ever sing 'em. That's cause they're boring. Folk music is boring. "Black fall, the die doe, blow ye winds high ho," hell, that's boring, but! I am a folksinger; this is a folk music organization; you are ostensibly the folk, nest pas? That means we own this song together, right? We have thereby incurred certain social obligations
which we will faithfully discharge, right? We're gonna sing this damn song together, boring or not!
...
I'm open to all those things. If you live in California, you've got to be open; if you're not they pry you open.
...
We got narps, you got narps around here? New-age rural professionals? Out cruising the backroads in their old green carryalls with their car stereos, blaring meditation music out into the wilderness. It's a conscience. Whole place lightning-struck by the peripatetic ruminations of the Tibetan ruling class in exile, ahh. Lot of Buddhists around there.
...
Meanwhile this very minute, old Jesse McVay the welldigger - no one knows how old he is, lived in that county all of his life - is sitting at the bar of the national hotel this very minute, looking at the freaks out in the street, and muttering under his breath:
"No matter how new-age you get, old age gonna kick your ass."
...
I learned in Korea that I would never again in my life abdicate to somebody else my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is.
...
He said, "You got to be a pacifist." I said, "Why?" He said, "It'll save your life." And my behavior was very violent then. I said, "What is it?" And he said, "Well I can't give you a book by Gandhi - you wouldn't understand it. I can't give you a list of rules that if you sign
it you're a pacifist." He said, "You look at it like booze. You know, alcoholism will kill somebody, until they finally get the courage to sit in a circle of people like that and put their hand up in the air and say, 'Hi, my name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.' And then you can begin to deal with the behavior, you see, and have the people define it for you whose lives you've destroyed."
...
And Ritter'd say, "What's an anarchist, Hennessy?" and Ammon would say, "Why an anarchist is anybody who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do." Kind of a fundamentalist anarchist, huh? And Ritter'd say, "But Ammon, you broke the law, what about that?" and Ammon'd say, "Oh, Judge, your damn laws the good people don't need 'em and the bad people don't obey 'em so what use are they?"
Well I lived there for eight years, and I watched him, really watched him, and I discovered watching him that anarchy is not a noun, but an adjective. It describes the tension between moral autonomy and political authority, especially in the area of combinations, whether they're going to be voluntary or coercive. The most destructive, coercive combinations are arrived at through force.
Like Ammon said, "Force is the weapon of the weak."
...
[H]e said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work." ... He said, "I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"
...
Morrigan starts punching me in the side, and said - yelling at me! - she said, "Why can't you be normal?"
And old Miss Brownell rapped Morrigan on her shin - rudely - with her cane, and said: "He is normal - what you meant to say is 'average.'"
...
I was invited to the State Young Writers' Conference out at Cheney, which was a Eastern Washington university. And I didn't want to embarrass my son, you know, and I was gonna behave myself cause I had to live there then - it was a chore. But I got on the stage - it was an enormous auditorium; there were twenty-seven hundred young faces out there, none of them with any prospects
anybody could detect - and off to the side of the stage was the suit-and-tie crowd of people from the school district and the principals, and the, the main speaker following me was from the Chamber of Commerce.
Well something inside of me snapped.
And I got to the microphone, and I looked out over that multitude of faces and I said something to the effect of:
"You're about to be told one more time that you're America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen them strip mine? Have you seen a clear-cut in a forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're gonna strip mine your soul! They're gonna clear-cut your
best thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn to resist, cause the profit system follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked! Hmph!"
Well there was great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments - mine. I was borne to the door, screaming epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect of: "Make a break for it, kids!" "Flee to the wilderness!" The one within, if
you can find it.
...
Like old Campbell said, freedom is something you assume; then you wait for somebody to try to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
...
Well, they surrounded the boat, and when they lowered the gangplank, Sheriff McGray walked to the end of it and said, "Who are your leaders here?" And they shouted back with one voice: "We are all leaders here."
Well that scared the tar out of the law, you know, and they began shooting; those deputies began shooting. A lot of those Wobblies were killed. Some of the deputies were killed in the crossfire, though, so when the Wobblies - those that survived - made it back to Seattle, they were arrested, and they were thrown in the [local] County Jail on the charge of murder. Whole bunch of 'em.
Well, that jail was an all-steel jail - it was the newest affair, all made out of steel. It had just barely opened, so the heat wasn't on and there was no blankets and you couldn't get any smokes. So, those Wobblies, they passed a note from one cell block to the other, and then by common consent, the next day, they were all gathered in the middle of each cell block. And when the noon whistle blew, they began to jump up and down simultaneously; up and down, up and down, singing all the time, and finally they hit the resonating frequency of that jail and cracked the south wall. They broke the jail.
And Jack Miller said, "Thus proving, everlastingly, what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can't get done alone."
"Armed only with our sense of degradation as human beings, we came together and organized, and changed the condition of our lives."
...
[I]f I wanted a true history of where I came from, as a member of the working class, I had to go to my elders. Many of them, their best working years before pensions or Social Security, gave their whole lives to the mines, to the wheat harvest, to the logging camps, to the railroad. Got nothing for it, just fetched up on the skids living on short money, mostly drunk all the time. But
they led those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again, and in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful than the best damn
history book I ever read.
...
One time I said over the phone, "Tom, I'm in a debate over here at the Unitarian Church on bringing back the military draft; they're going to try to bring back the military draft so I'm debating it. Now, you tell me what you think."
Well, there was a long pause. Then the voice come back at me over the wires. "Nnuh. When I started in the forest, most of my workmates was Scandahoovians: Norwegians, Danes, Fins, Swedes. Most of 'em left the old country fleeing conscription to fight another dumb European war. Yeah, the wealth of the West was built on the backs of draft dodgers. It's an American institution -
deserves to be honored."
... I have a good friend in the East. A good singer, and a good folksinger, a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot about the past. You always sing about the past; you can't live in the past, you know." And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot." Now, the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now - I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get 'em in serious trouble.
...
At the onset, those of you who may have heard me should probably turn to those who may have not and calmly reassure them that this is in fact what happens when I sit onstage. Not much more. This is about it. You'll notice no sudden or dramatic change in neither my instrumental or vocal attack, as it were.
This is nonetheless an American folk song. Did you recognize it as such? Of course you would, you're folkies. You don't hear 'em much anymore, don't hear 'em on your AM radio, huh? Folksingers hardly ever sing 'em. That's cause they're boring. Folk music is boring. "Black fall, the die doe, blow ye winds high ho," hell, that's boring, but! I am a folksinger; this is a folk music organization; you are ostensibly the folk, nest pas? That means we own this song together, right? We have thereby incurred certain social obligations
which we will faithfully discharge, right? We're gonna sing this damn song together, boring or not!
...
I'm open to all those things. If you live in California, you've got to be open; if you're not they pry you open.
...
We got narps, you got narps around here? New-age rural professionals? Out cruising the backroads in their old green carryalls with their car stereos, blaring meditation music out into the wilderness. It's a conscience. Whole place lightning-struck by the peripatetic ruminations of the Tibetan ruling class in exile, ahh. Lot of Buddhists around there.
...
Meanwhile this very minute, old Jesse McVay the welldigger - no one knows how old he is, lived in that county all of his life - is sitting at the bar of the national hotel this very minute, looking at the freaks out in the street, and muttering under his breath:
"No matter how new-age you get, old age gonna kick your ass."
...
I learned in Korea that I would never again in my life abdicate to somebody else my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is.
...
He said, "You got to be a pacifist." I said, "Why?" He said, "It'll save your life." And my behavior was very violent then. I said, "What is it?" And he said, "Well I can't give you a book by Gandhi - you wouldn't understand it. I can't give you a list of rules that if you sign
it you're a pacifist." He said, "You look at it like booze. You know, alcoholism will kill somebody, until they finally get the courage to sit in a circle of people like that and put their hand up in the air and say, 'Hi, my name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.' And then you can begin to deal with the behavior, you see, and have the people define it for you whose lives you've destroyed."
...
And Ritter'd say, "What's an anarchist, Hennessy?" and Ammon would say, "Why an anarchist is anybody who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do." Kind of a fundamentalist anarchist, huh? And Ritter'd say, "But Ammon, you broke the law, what about that?" and Ammon'd say, "Oh, Judge, your damn laws the good people don't need 'em and the bad people don't obey 'em so what use are they?"
Well I lived there for eight years, and I watched him, really watched him, and I discovered watching him that anarchy is not a noun, but an adjective. It describes the tension between moral autonomy and political authority, especially in the area of combinations, whether they're going to be voluntary or coercive. The most destructive, coercive combinations are arrived at through force.
Like Ammon said, "Force is the weapon of the weak."
...
[H]e said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work." ... He said, "I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"
...
Morrigan starts punching me in the side, and said - yelling at me! - she said, "Why can't you be normal?"
And old Miss Brownell rapped Morrigan on her shin - rudely - with her cane, and said: "He is normal - what you meant to say is 'average.'"
...
I was invited to the State Young Writers' Conference out at Cheney, which was a Eastern Washington university. And I didn't want to embarrass my son, you know, and I was gonna behave myself cause I had to live there then - it was a chore. But I got on the stage - it was an enormous auditorium; there were twenty-seven hundred young faces out there, none of them with any prospects
anybody could detect - and off to the side of the stage was the suit-and-tie crowd of people from the school district and the principals, and the, the main speaker following me was from the Chamber of Commerce.
Well something inside of me snapped.
And I got to the microphone, and I looked out over that multitude of faces and I said something to the effect of:
"You're about to be told one more time that you're America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen them strip mine? Have you seen a clear-cut in a forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're gonna strip mine your soul! They're gonna clear-cut your
best thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn to resist, cause the profit system follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked! Hmph!"
Well there was great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments - mine. I was borne to the door, screaming epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect of: "Make a break for it, kids!" "Flee to the wilderness!" The one within, if
you can find it.
...
Like old Campbell said, freedom is something you assume; then you wait for somebody to try to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
...
Well, they surrounded the boat, and when they lowered the gangplank, Sheriff McGray walked to the end of it and said, "Who are your leaders here?" And they shouted back with one voice: "We are all leaders here."
Well that scared the tar out of the law, you know, and they began shooting; those deputies began shooting. A lot of those Wobblies were killed. Some of the deputies were killed in the crossfire, though, so when the Wobblies - those that survived - made it back to Seattle, they were arrested, and they were thrown in the [local] County Jail on the charge of murder. Whole bunch of 'em.
Well, that jail was an all-steel jail - it was the newest affair, all made out of steel. It had just barely opened, so the heat wasn't on and there was no blankets and you couldn't get any smokes. So, those Wobblies, they passed a note from one cell block to the other, and then by common consent, the next day, they were all gathered in the middle of each cell block. And when the noon whistle blew, they began to jump up and down simultaneously; up and down, up and down, singing all the time, and finally they hit the resonating frequency of that jail and cracked the south wall. They broke the jail.
And Jack Miller said, "Thus proving, everlastingly, what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can't get done alone."
"Armed only with our sense of degradation as human beings, we came together and organized, and changed the condition of our lives."
...
[I]f I wanted a true history of where I came from, as a member of the working class, I had to go to my elders. Many of them, their best working years before pensions or Social Security, gave their whole lives to the mines, to the wheat harvest, to the logging camps, to the railroad. Got nothing for it, just fetched up on the skids living on short money, mostly drunk all the time. But
they led those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again, and in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful than the best damn
history book I ever read.
...
One time I said over the phone, "Tom, I'm in a debate over here at the Unitarian Church on bringing back the military draft; they're going to try to bring back the military draft so I'm debating it. Now, you tell me what you think."
Well, there was a long pause. Then the voice come back at me over the wires. "Nnuh. When I started in the forest, most of my workmates was Scandahoovians: Norwegians, Danes, Fins, Swedes. Most of 'em left the old country fleeing conscription to fight another dumb European war. Yeah, the wealth of the West was built on the backs of draft dodgers. It's an American institution -
deserves to be honored."
