Over a Candle

Last year started off with several deaths. It was a sad beginning. This year has been relatively quiet, though. Until now…

I was looking around the web for a quote from a song by Utah Phillips. A quick Google search revealed the following story from Anarchist news dot org…

Utah Phillips has passed away:

Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.

Utah Phillips was a great folk singer, story-teller, and social commentator. I discovered Phillips’ work very late. He put out a few albums in the 90′s with Ani DiFranco. But for those albums, I might never have heard Phillips. One more reason to be grateful for DiFranco.

Several of the tracks off their first collaboration really resonated with me. I had already had plenty of anarchist ideas, but hearing him express ideas about pacifism and anarchy were incredibly influential.

His death is a sad event. He will be missed. In his honor, here are some of his words off of the past didn’t go anywhere (the first album with Ani DiFranco).

“Anarchy” (talking about Ammon Hennacy)

You know you love the country, you just can’t stand the governemnt, get it straight… He quoted Mark Twain to me… “Loyalty to the country always; loyalty to government when it deserves it”

…

And then he had to reach out and grapple with the violence… he did that with all the people around him… 2nd World War vets, you know… On medical disability and all drugged up… the house was filled with violence, which Ammon, as a pacifist, dealt with every moment and every day of his life… he said, “you got to be a pacifist”… and I said, “why?”… he said, “it’ll save your life”… my behavior was very violent then… I said, “what is it?”… and he said, “I can’t give you a book by Gandhi, you wouldn’t understand it; I can’t give you a list rules that if you sign it, you’re a pacifist… and he said, “look at it kinda like booze, you know, alcoholism’ll kill somebody, until they finally get the courage to sit in a circle of people like that and put their hand up in the air and say ‘hi, my name is Utah, and I’m an alcoholic’ and then you can begin to deal with the behavior, and have the people define it for you whose lives you’ve destroyed… and it’s not going to go away… it’s the same with violence, an alcoholic, you know, they can be dry for twenty years, and they’re never going to sit in that circle and put their hand up and say ‘I’m not an alcoholic anymore’, no they’re still going to put their hand up and say ‘my name is Utah and I’m an alcoholic’… it’s the same with violence… you got to be able to put your hand in the air and acknowledge your capacity for violence and then deal with the behavior and then have the people whose lives you’ve messed with define that behavior for you… and it’s not going to go away, you’re going to be dealing with it in every moment in every situation for the rest of your life… and I said, “Okay, I’ll try that”… and Ammon said “It’s not enough”… And I said “Oh”… He said, “You were born a white man in mid-20th century industrial America… you came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons… the weapons of privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege, economic privilege… you want to be a pacifist, it’s not just giving up guns and knives and clubs and fists and angry words, but giving up the weapons of privilege and going into the world completely disarmed… try that”… that old man’s been gone now 20 years, and I’m still at it… but I figure if there’s a worthwhile struggle in my own life, that’s probably the one…

…

Anarchist in the best sense of the word… Oh so many times he stood up in front of Federal District Judge Ritter, that old fart, and he’d be picked up for picketing illegally and he never pled innocent or guilty; he pled anarchy… And Ritter’d say, “What’s an anarchist, Hennacy?”… And Ammon would say, “Why an anarchist is anybody who doesn’t need a cop to tell him what to do?”… Kind of a fundamentalist anarchist… And Ritter’d say, “But Ammon, you broke the law, what about that?”… and Ammon’d say, “Ah, judge, your damn laws… the good people don’t need ‘em, and the bad people don’t obey ‘em, so what use are they?”…

“Candidacy”

Mark Twain said, “Those of you who are inclined to worry have the widest selection in history”… Why complain, try to do something about it… You know, it’s going on nine months now since I decided that I was going to declare that I am a candidate for the presidency of the United States… Oh yes, I’m going to run…

Shopped around for a party… Well, I looked at the Republicans… Decided that talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator… You know, the light goes on, the light goes off; it’s not going to do anything that isn’t built into it… And I’m not going to talk to a conservative anymore than I talk to my damn refrigerator… Working for the Democratic Party now that’s kind of like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…

So I created my own party… It’s called the Sloth and Indolence Party… And I’m running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word… I’ve studied the presidency carefully… I have seen that our best presidents were the do-nothing presidents… Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding… When you have a president who does things, we are all in serious trouble… If he does anything at all, if he gets up at night to go the bathroom, somehow, mystically, trouble will ensue… I guarantee, that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass, and not do a damn thing… Which is to say, if you want something done, don’t come to me to do it for you; you got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves… Is that a deal?

“Enormously Wealthy”

We the American people are enormously wealthy, you know that?… Who owns all of those trees in the national forests? This is not a rhetorical question… We do… Who owns all of that off-shore oil you read about in the newspaper? We do… Who owns all of those minerals under the federal lands? We do… It’s public property, you know… But we elect people to go to Washington… Who are those assholes?

What have we gotten ourselves into now? They go to Washington, they lease off what we own, public property, to private companies to sell us back our own stuff for the sake of a greasy buck… That’s dumb…

Utah, wherever you are now… I just want you to know… I would have voted for you, man… Thank you for giving us so much good music, so much laughter, and so much to think about… Peace…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Music, News Items, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.