Peter
Dale Scott
Making
History,
Unfolding
World
The question is why
to a seminar of senior citizens
mostly younger than myself
I narrated as comedy
my thoughts on the first ever
assault from the air
on a U.S. city — Berkeley
attacked in 1969
by an Army helicopter
dropping CS gas
incapacitant spray
over Lower Sproul Plaza
New York Times,
5/21/69
which all of us protesting
the occupation of People’s Park
by the National Guard
had been told was the only place
where a rally would be permitted
I did not attend
but had a good view from the Wheeler Hall
steps
as the helicopter came in low
over the Student Union building
and dropped its white cargo
just as I had already seen
one year earlier
on the front page of the New York Times
except that those hippies
fleeing in all directions
from the helicopter’s path
were actually soldiers
dressed up for a rehearsal
on a U.S. Army base.
This day I was well positioned
to watch the white cloudlet float away
as the breeze through the Golden Gate
blew it sideways up the hill
to where scholars in the Library
patients in the U.C. hospital
and the rich folks up on Grizzly Peak
were all incapacitated.
The question is why
I recalled this as a tale
of endearing inefficiency
completely ignoring the perspective
of those trapped in the Plaza
how lawmen and Guardsmen
pitched tear gas into the crowd
and with the threat of their bayonets
prevented demonstrators from getting out
Rolling
Stone, 6/14/69
(just as in Mexico
at the Tlatelolco massacre
only eight months earlier
Oct. 2, 1968
officers in civilian clothes
were to prevent the entrance
or exit of anyone to the plaza)
Proceso, 10/1/06
as well as the earlier rally
when shots fired by Sheriff’s deputies
killed bystander James Rector
and wounded about 75 others
San
Francisco Chronicle, 4/20/99
in the streets outside Cody’s Books
while the next invocation of martial law
under OPERATION GARDEN PLOT
Covert
Action Quarterly, Spr-Su 2000
left four students dead at Kent State
and completely ignoring the hopeful
teenage girls hanging flowers
on the Guardsmen’s bayonets
along the nonviolent march
(which Dohrn of the Weathermen
urged vainly to convert
into a bloody confrontation)
to the stretch of Dwight Way
turfed over by John Reed
where we danced barefoot all afternoon
while Lauren writhed half-naked
on a flatbed truck
in front of the wide-eyed youngsters
from the Central Valley
rigidly “at ease” with their guns
inside Peoples’ Park.
Perhaps I lapsed into comedy
as the best way to compose the past
from unconscious conviction
that history’s deepest pattern
is not the sickness but the healing
a Pascalian wager
like Dante’s and Milton’s
that to live in hope
we must let go of our torments.
Or it could have been cowardice
my reluctance to accept
how unlikely were the chances
of any successful healing
in this hatred-nursing nation
mired in fear and debt.
Or it could have been denial
from a repressed sense of guilt
of having by my enthusiastic
opposition to nightsticks and tear gas
helped create the death scene
where a young man was killed
Or it could have just been biology
my dispassion about the helicopter
(which had once aroused in me
an embarrassing urge to shoot it down)
deriving less from wisdom
than from loss of testosterone
Or perhaps it was from all of these
the recognition of past
shortcomings on everyone’s part
yielding in the end
a little forgiveness and humility —
the right relation
to help time unfold.
Peter Dale Scott is the author of the acclaimed poem Coming to Jakarta.
His poem A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11
appeared in FlashPoint #8 and part of Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 appeared in FlashPoint #3.
Prof. Scott’s website can be found at
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/
|
