Hearts & minds.
There’s a story Utah Phillips tells on one of the CDs he’s done with Ani DiFranco, about a shingle-weavers’ strike up in Everett, Washington. The Wobblies and the cops traded some gunfire and some people died on both sides and when the Wobblies got back to Seattle they were arrested and chucked into the brand new Snohomish County jail—a jail they broke, quite literally, by jumping up and down all at the same time and hollering and singing until they cracked the steel south wall. “‘Thus proving,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘everlastingly what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can’t get done alone.’”
Which is a beautiful moral and it’s something to tuck into the cockles of your heart these days so you can try to fight off the chill whether it’s unions or protest marches or the sacred and profane business of government its own damn self we’re talking about, but it’s not the moral Utah draws, and it’s not why I’m telling you in turn.
“‘Now,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘we didn’t have any intellectual life. We lived in our emotions. We were a passionate people and we were comfortable in our emotions. We made commitments to struggle, emotionally—commitments for which there are no words. But those commitments carried us through fifty, sixty years of struggle.’ Now,” says Utah, “he says, ‘You show me people who make the same commitments intellectually, and I don’t know where they’ll be next week.’”
And Utah pauses a moment, Ani’s gutbucket guitar twanging along behind him, and then he says, quietly, “Kinda stern, isn’t it.”
That’s the first thing to keep in mind. The second is this:
There was this debunker. His name escapes me. He had a shtick like Randi’s: an accomplished stage magician, he’d do the same things psychics do (only better; his cold readings put John Edward to shame, and he did some scary shit with subliminal cues) and, though he wouldn’t give away all his secrets, he’d make it clear how easy it is to pull this stuff off with trickery and sleight-of-mind and a heaping helping of the all-too-willing madness of crowds. But no magic. No psychic frippery. No hints and intimations of the paranormal at all. —He also did some stuff on the side with cult-busting and deprogramming and the like, debunking some specific flim-flammers and helping cops and psychologists pick up the pieces and I don’t know, maybe he saw one too many things; maybe he had that one bad day. Maybe that explains it.
Because between the time he did a show at Oberlin, the one Sarah saw, and the one he did at UMass, the one we all saw together, he’d converted to a rather insistent brand of Christianity. The show he’d done at Oberlin, he’d just done his debunking magic tricks. The show he’d do at UMass, he’d be spending a good half of it proselytizing. —Still, Sarah said we ought to go. He was good. Spooky good. It’d be worth it.
So we went, and he was. He did cold readings and tricks with subliminals (“queenofspades”) and this thing where people on stage wrote secrets on slips of paper that were folded up and then he was on the other side of the stage with a nurse holding his wrist so she could announce that his heart had stopped which would happen whenever the folded-up slip of paper with the right secret was held up. And he assured us all that it was trickery and fast talking, and he told us how someone could use these tricks and an audience’s credulity, its cheerful suspension of disbelief, to make her- or himself look impressive, powerful, connected, in the Know; to exploit and extort and bamboozle; he told us all how important it is to be skeptical, to be rational, to think. And then he told us how the facts recorded within the various Gospels prove the literal truth of the Resurrection—that stone, for instance, rolled in front of Jesus’s tomb, would have taken the effort of several people—people who could not have been there, that first Easter Sunday—to roll back.
He seemed—tired, as he told us this. Resigned, maybe. No: relieved. (I also seem to recall a charmingly idiosyncratic—if alarmist—interpretation of some Cure lyrics, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Anyway. That’s the second thing.
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Good, though
I admit, I don't understand this post from Long Story Short Pier, it's good, though. (Dad, if you're reading this, you ought to click on this link. You'll be glad to know that another human being has written about Utah
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Long story mentions that Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco have worked together. Which I think is pretty cool.