GEORGE S. McGOVERN is, in some sense, the reason I exist. My parents met as radical community organizers in their early 20s, an idealistic honey-haired student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a scraggly wannabe farm boy from Brown University, knocking on doors for the now defunct Acorn.
It's a typical 1975 story, except that they were pounding the pavement in Sioux Falls, S.D., a provincial little city at the edge of the upper Midwest and the Great Plains. Stranger still, they stayed in the state — my dad for nearly 40 years, my mom for 15.
It's astonishing to think now, but South Dakota made sense as a destination for idealistic young liberals in the mid-1970s. Senator McGovern, who died Sunday at the age of 90, had run an inspiring but catastrophic campaign for the presidency three years earlier, bravely opposing the Vietnam War. The state's junior senator, James Abourezk, was another liberal Democrat and the first Arab-American elected to the upper chamber. And Red Power activism was roiling the state's Indian reservations; the Wounded Knee standoff on the Pine Ridge Reservation even captured the nation's attention for several months in 1973.
I was born a few years later, in 1980, just months before Mr. McGovern lost his race for a fourth term in the Senate. It wasn't yet clear that the Plains political winds were shifting to the right. My parents ran a record store, Prairie Dog Records, and we lived in a small house with a low-tech "solar collector," a box that trapped the bright prairie sun under glass and blew its warmth into the house on frigid winter days. In summer, we tended an organic garden fertilized with sheep manure from my godparents' farm. By the time I was 3, I had formulated (or parroted) the crowd-pleasing stump speech, "Ronald Reagan is mean; he gives money to rich people."
We found a place amid a Plains liberalism whose patron saint was Mr. McGovern: Christian, populist, antiwar. Mr. McGovern, the son of a Methodist minister, had become horrified with war as a bomber pilot in World War II and studied theology when he returned home.
Our domestic world of "Free to Be... You and Me" songs fell apart a few years after President Ronald Reagan tore the solar panels off the White House. My parents divorced, and I lived with my mom for three years until she moved to Oregon with a lesbian partner, at which point my dad won custody of me. Perhaps that's why I feel such nostalgia for the age of McGovern and my happy early years.
Our home always displayed a giant sheet of burlap on one wall with hundreds of political buttons, including "Teachers for McGovern," "Nurses for McGovern," and even the collector's item "McGovern-Eagleton — Come Home America." (Nearby, there were big 19th-century portraits of earlier Plains political leaders, like the Sioux chief Red Cloud.) These relics entertained me in a way that a television would have in a normal house.
I grew up rolling my eyes at my dad's endless phone conversations recruiting South Dakota Democratic candidates (by the 1990s, virtually all of them were doomed). At the time, I preferred the cultural politics of abrasive music and weird haircuts. But I inherited my dad's admiration for the anti-corporate farmers with manure-caked boots and the Lakota activists who camped out for months to protest yet another federal taking of their land.
I associated Mr. McGovern's name with sitting through Quonset-hut political gatherings that democratically dragged on and on, with my numb fingers at Easter sunrise vigils protesting the Minuteman missiles embedded in the prairie, with our turntable playing Red Willow Band's song "You Can't Get There From Here."
Mr. McGovern had descended from a proud Plains tradition: the antiwar populism of William Jennings Bryan and the redistributive politics of the Nonpartisan League. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on labor militancy during the Colorado Coalfield War of 1913-14.
Yet as I came of age, so did a new political tradition in South Dakota. Senator Larry Pressler, who replaced Senator Abourezk in 1979, attacked Big Bird and PBS long before Mitt Romney found it useful to do so. (Mr. Pressler, a Vietnam veteran, recently endorsed Mr. Obama over Mr. Romney, citing the president's positions on veterans' issues.) The old prairie populism faded as family farmers loosened their alliance with union labor. I felt increasingly out of place in South Dakota, and steadfastly hid the secret of my mom's sexual orientation.
Today, the old liberal Plains folk are tending a thinning row of populist Christian liberalism. Their social gospel has lost ground to anti-abortion and antigay politics. Today the State Senate has 30 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Pundits even suggested our Republican senator, John Thune, as a running mate for Mr. Romney.
On a recent visit home, I watched my dad on the phone once more, futilely trying to persuade President Obama's Sioux Falls office to send a small sign and a few stickers to the Democratic Party storefront in Rapid City, S.D. It turns out Obama for America keeps an office in Sioux Falls largely to recruit volunteers to canvass Sioux City, Iowa, 90 miles away. This is a sensible strategy, I suppose. After all, South Dakota is not "in play."
But perhaps my dad isn't merely quixotic as he recruits candidates in impossible legislative districts. He, like Mr. Bryan and Mr. McGovern, is a man of faith, and it was faith in the promise of justice that sustained those earlier prairie progressives against seemingly hopeless odds. Like farmers, they had to believe the drought would eventually break.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Op-Ed Contributor: The Lost World of George McGovern
Dengan url
http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2012/10/op-ed-contributor-lost-world-of-george.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Op-Ed Contributor: The Lost World of George McGovern
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Op-Ed Contributor: The Lost World of George McGovern
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar