ONE THING I WILL NOT CONCEDE

“There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” – Vaclav Havel

We who believe in democracy and oppose MAGA must remind ourselves what matters - what is worth fighting for - even if we look around now and all seems futile and nothing matters.

When I came home from the war - perhaps the only person in the country outside the upper levels of the American government who knew the truth about the lie that began the War of Lies - I didn’t know what I was going to do about that, but I did know I wasn’t going to collaborate with the liars.

Little did I know that by making that small choice, I was stepping onto the path that has created the life I now have, and the way in which I would become the person I am.

Nine months later, I was ready to participate in my first antiwar demonstration. There were 165 of us, and around 4-500 of them - the people screaming at the “peaceniks” and threatening to beat the shit out of us. I had a sign that said simply “Stop The War.” As I was preparing it, I was speaking with a girl and it came out that I was a Vietnam veteran. “You should write that on your sign,” she said. I thought a moment, then flipped the poster over, took out my Magic Marker and wrote “I Am A Vietnam Veteran” in letters as big and black as I could fit on the poster. When we started marching, a strange thing happened - when the counter-demonstrators spotted me and my sign, they mostly shut up. I certainly didn’t expect the photo on the front page of the Denver Post, reporting our demonstration, would include me and my sign, but it did.

A month later, up at school, my life changed again, forever. It was a Thursday, I was writing the weekly column I was doing by then (the ancient precursor to TAFM), when the door to the student newspaper office opened and a dramatic-looking woman with dark hair, wearing a black dress, stepped inside, looked around, and asked in a Texas twang, “Is Tom Cleaver here?” Everyone else looked at me, and I identified myself. Alice Embree, by then well on the way to becoming “the legendary Alice Embree” she’s been among certain circles for the past 50-plus years, told me she and her friend - who I soon learned was Jeff Shero, National Vice President of Students for a Democratic Society - had come to Greeley to find me. Was there somewhere we could talk?

Down in the coffeeshop, I learned word had gotten around about the guy who had carried the “I Am A Vietnam Veteran” sign in that demonstration. By the time they left the following Monday, I was a member of SDS and had been given a lot of facts about the war to use, and ideas of how to speak on the other campuses in the region, about why I was a Vietnam veteran who opposed the war. (40 years later, when a young GI at Fort Hood who had discovered I was one of the people who had run The Oleo Strut coffeehouse, contaced me and wanted to know how he and his friends could do that for anti-Iraq War organizing, Alice and connected again as part of the group of older activists who did help organize the Under The Hood Coffeehouse).

Alice was the first of many memorable people I have known in my life as a result of my politics. One of them - my old comrade Carl Davidson - is a subscriber here.

When I was in eighth grade speech class, I froze when I tried to stand before the class and deliver my version of the Gettysburg Address. But I became a very effective public speaker against the war while dealing with harassers. I found the best trick was to ask the loudest one to defend his belief in the war. They never could, because they had none; they were just there for the thrill of bullying “commies” and “peaceniks.” It’s a lesson I carried forward dealing with Iraq War “patriots” and Trumpers. I almost look forward to the next one, since I have come to enjoy shooting some fish in their barrels.

The truest bit of political prognostication I ever heard was when I was driving Phil Ochs to the Denver airport after the finish of the three-college concert tour in Colorado I’d organized back in the fall of 1966. “The American Left will be over the day peace is declared in Vietnam.” That turned out to be so true, seven years later, since the left had coalesced around the Socialist Workers Party slogan “Bring The Troops Home Now!” and hadn’t really broadened the critique; at least not in any way that resonated among the majority of antiwar movement supporters.

One thing I didn’t expect to learn was how to live under a police state. When I went back to school, all my GI Bill paperwork always took forever to process, and my payments never came on time. When my wife got a new job with a pay increase, we used her income for all the “need-to’s” - rent, other bills, etc., while my checks got used for things on the “nice to have” list. This all became clear in 1978, when I got a letter from the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, advising me that “a review of the FBI COINTELPRO files had found a file with your name on it,” and asking if I would like to see it. Yes! What arrived was a package of 130 sheets of paper, with everything but dates “redacted.”

I really wanted to see that file.

A few years earlier, I had played a small role in the capture of Manson girl Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm, when she attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford in the Sacramento Capitol Park (I reached out my hand as she ran past, grabbed her ankle and tripped her). One of the FBI investigators had been surprised to discover my background (we anti-government people are supposed to never help the government ever). I contacted him, showed him what I’d received, and asked if there was a way he could help. He was noncommittal, but agreed to “have a look.” Three weeks later when I came home from work, I found a manila envelope with my name on it in my mailbox; no address, no stamps, just my name.

Inside was the unredacted report.

Here was what the US government did to someone who “made the mistake” of believing his First Amendment Rights were real. And I was not even a “Minor Name” out there; I have heard worse things happened to people like Paul Newman, who got audited three years running by the IRS for being Paul Newman, political activist.

I was on a list circulated to government agencies of people whose “official business” should be “throttled,” according to J. Edgar Hoover. More importantly, before that, when I was in Texas with the woman who later became my wife, running the Oleo Strut, the FBI’s San Antonio Field Office wrote letters to our parents, from a “concerned citizen” about how we were selling drugs to the soldiers at Fort Hood, and how Linda had been “possibly engaging in prostitution” with the GIs. Not only that, but while we were in Texas, our fathers received monthly visits from FBI investigation teams, at their place of work (my father was a government scientist; hers was a loan officer at the San Francisco Wells Fargo main branch), where they were asked if they knew anything about our “possibly treasonable” activities and asked why they didn’t exercise more control over their children - all within earshot of their fellow employees. In one of my last conversations with my father ten years later, after we had reconciled and become father and son, I told him about that report. He confirmed it had happened, and that it was the reason why he retired from government service after 30 years, rather than continue to age 65; doing that cost him a considerable part of his retirement.

I will not be surprised if stories similar to mine from 50 years ago don’t start circulating in coming years. That’s how a police state works. It’s the little things, the things that rob one of their sense of individual agency, of individual security, of the security of those we love. The feeling of being squashed like a bug.

Josh Marshall recently wrote, “ Any discussions of next steps in the battle against Trumpism or the preservation of civic democracy, any suggestions or strategies, are met with a chorus of, “Don’t you get how it worked under Hitler and Stalin!!?!” Or “Don’t you know rules don’t matter to Donald Trump!?!?!”

“Certain people, growing out of trauma and exhaustion which I fully understand, believe there’s some power or badassery or even a species of courage in saying, “yeah, since when does Donald Trump follow the law!?!?” or “Just admit that we have no power!!!”

“But it’s actually precisely the opposite.

“That’s the most pernicious form of anticipatory obedience. Deciding that all of this stuff has already happened is not only inaccurate but self-defeating. It’s amplifying threats Trump hasn’t been able or willing to make good on.”

As Charlie Sykes put it: “Each passing day reminds us that we are not the ones with brain worms or covering up underage sex parties; rationalizing sexual assaults; or wallowing in conspiracy theories, kakistocracy, and sedition.”

Reports of the demise of the resistance are greatly exaggerated.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. One word of truth outweighs the world.”

In the end, my plan for the immediate future is this: to try to live up to my own ideals by telling the truth and being a kind and decent person. In a world of shit, where being a person who knows right from wrong and isn’t for sale to the highest bidder is seen as “quaint,” committing to being that kind of person, regardless, is an act of total resistance and defiance.

There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

Somebody has to tilt at the windmills; at least I know how.

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