The situation then, the situation now:

Writer Patricia Hampl says, of the impact of the Vietnam War: “We had lost the national connections and were heartsick in a cultural way.” I learned this from reading an interview in the current Writer’s Chronicle.
It’s worse now, she says, “the problems have leached into a much larger part of the society. Not just the culture, but also the economy.” And she adds, “I mean, think about it. Guantanamo?”
I think how it’s become difficult, lately, to pay attention to the news, how economics and politics have become interlaced, and it’s too easy to become incensed at the Corporatocracy (or the Republicans). I don’t want to be incensed, not all the time. Fury prevents thought.
Hampl says, “The draft in some ways made it easier for us to protest the Vietnam War. I sometimes have thought of Iraq as the credit card and Walmart war because a lot of the people joined the National Guard in order to improve their lot in life. … There’s a quality of life that they wanted to achieve, and they bet on the odds.”

Patricia Hampl makes more sense to me than articles about the political scene or “the economy” (where does it end? Not at the U.S. border.) Hample cares about language, saying, for example, “mercenaries” rather than “independent defense contractors.” All this is from page 22 of the Chronicle. On page 23 she says, “Remembering is a political act.” Then she takes the thought further: “Is an act of the imagination not the real resouce for one’s ethics? The imagination is where empathy happens. If I can imagine that you might be pained, wounded, harmed, by something I would do or say, and if that has meaning for me, then that’s the beginning of empathy.”
Good reading. Patricia Hampl’s words fill in the blanks and the cloudy wordless spots in my mind – about language, about empathy, about why I think certain kinds of literature and film get too much attention, even in the Think Magazines, and about why I wrote a book about 1968.

Report from Cleveland Heights Oct. 6th

A bookstore-sponsored reading! Two small independents, Macs Backs and Apple Tree, combined for a session with cider and ginger snaps at the Coventry branch of the public library, a wonderful old-and-strong place of dark wood shelves and big windows. With its books, it’s been there for longer than I’ve been alive and could stay just as long into the future. There was a “discussant,” Joyce Kessler (a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art), who teaches a course on novels of the sixties.
Had no one else shown up, Joyce and I could have talked for a long time, but people came – including a contingent of Cleveland Movement people who remember the historical events in my book. The conversation veered into what had been accomplished by the Movement, lasting contributions such as a Food Co-op, a Free Clinic, and the Welfare Rights Handbook published and used well into the seventies(in Riders on the Storm, Jane is working on it). In comparison to the work of these people, which continues, anything I may have done was small.
The next morning I woke at 5:00, remembering questions I should have asked, comments I should have made. A reason to write the book was the deeply disturbing SDS split of '68 and '69. The organization imploded with the Weatherman expulsion of Progressive Labor in July '69, but in Cleveland we saw the beginning with a paper named after a Bob Dylan song shortly after Chicago. Distrust built, along with the sense of violence as both seductive and terrifying. Decades later I was still in anguish as violence encroached from within as well as outside, but even more as language increasingly corrupted thought. So I wrote about the Movement with mixed feelings, and was very glad to see good folks keeping up the struggle uncorrupted.
Next reading Thursday, at the University of Findlay. Who knows what new concerns will rise?