Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Very Improper Questions




Sitting now in the same Shanghai Starbucks that I wrote the introduction to my Seven Deadly Starbuck’s manuscript.  It was a rainy spring then.  Middle of winter now.  There is the languid, opiated wood cut like window by Li Shoubai that irked me so much at that time.  I was annoyed by yet another representation of the city’s style as quintessentially 1920s. 

I’m sitting across from a finely wrought photo of tropical Yunnan with mists rolling down the mountain to the farmland below.  Beside it is a wood cut map of China and a plaque that says “Starbucks and Yunnan” in English, but only “Yunnan” in Chinese.   It’s 5:45PM but the morning rush hasn’t yet abated.  I’m lucky to have found a seat.  Nearly everything is taken. 

Characteristically, even in the dead of winter Shanghai is presently much more moist than Beijing.  Leaves are still notable on trees.  I don’t know when the last time there was precipitation, but it doesn’t feel as though four months ago, as it does in the north.  Dust is not ubiquitous. 



I met some old and even older friends together for lunch in the former French Concession.  They described the adjacent street as having a bouquet of prewar architecture and two of us made off along it for a while afterwards.  I wanted to snap some photos.  Outside of the second ring road, one simply doesn’t walk around in Beijing.  The civic planning is designed to inspire awe at every turn.  Sometimes these efforts are laughable, sometimes they succeed, but there is little to see between this building and the next, it is rarely on a human scale and so one only walks if one has to. 

And walking around a city, noting brick or Deco architecture from the 20s, flashes the mind back to Manhattan and to the time I first fell in love with this city adoring the same evocations homeward.  In the right mood, it can be wonderful to be here. 

Speaking of home, it looks like we lost a towering New Yorker today.  I had a quick look at the Washington Post to see what the day’s news was.  The VPN I recently purchased seems unable of tunneling out of China with this fragile Starbucks WiFi connection, so I am prohibited from viewing the New York Times.  Flashed across the front page of my alternate, unfiltered default is the news that Pete Seeger has passed. 

He was such a constant for so many years; it is hard to believe that this tall tree has finally fallen.  My parents would have, played his music for me when I was young.  We’d have sang him in grade school, I’m sure.  My mother’s dear friend, our neighbor, was involved early with Pete in the Clearwater effort to save and revitalize the Hudson River.  And as kids we’d go to the Clearwater Revival and Pete would always be on one of the stages, his presence somehow, everywhere.  In high school I made a lifelong friendship with Pete’s niece who was a year ahead of me in school.  And in her honor and I suppose in honor of the school as well, Pete performed at her graduation.  And, even as a jaded, hardcore punk kid, it was lovely. 

We were at the Oakwood School, a Quaker School, there in Poughkeepsie, New York.  Oakwood had a proud tradition of conscientious objection and when Pete was blacklisted in 50’s Oakwood still allowed him to play.  This was all explained to us at the time.  And I remember when he performed he said something that was simple and yes “folksy”, wise and easy to remember, as he talked to the eighteen year olds preparing to graduate and the rest of us who were there in attendance.  “Remember, that money is like air.  You need it to live, but having too much of it, is pointless.”



I should revisit and learn more about the people who were actually summoned to speak in front of the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee.  On Dusty Brine I have already written about I. M. Finley who wrote “The Age of Odysseus" and compared him to the sinologist Owen Latimore.  Both of those gentleman fled to England and continued with successful careers there.  But Pete stuck in out in the U.S. despite the black list and managed to survive, in part perhaps, because simple places like Oakwood were brave enough to welcome him. 

I somehow imagine that time as a comparatively brief aberration cotemporaneous with the insanity of the Korean War.  I really must learn more.  I quote at length below from the Post article about Pete’s time before the Committee two years after the Korean War was over in 1955.   What a sorry, sad, frightened time if this sort of fear-mongering was the norm.  What presence of mind and depth of conviction would have been required to remain disarmingly friendly and大庸弱且[1] 

“I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody,” he told the committee. “I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature. ... I love my country very deeply.”

In 1955, the House Un-American Activities Committee began an investigation of Communist influence in professional entertainment and subpoenaed Mr. Seeger. He volunteered to discuss his music at length with the committee, and he offered to sing his songs. But he declined to answer questions about political associations or whether certain songs were sung at Communist gatherings, and he declined to invoke his constitutional right of protection from self-incrimination.

“I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this,” he said.

Convicted of contempt of Congress, he was sentenced to a year in jail. After a prolonged appeal process, the conviction was overturned in 1962 because of a technical flaw in the indictment. The government never retried him.

A different sort of hero than the ones I discussed with my daughters over the weekend, MLK and Malcolm X.  But certainly another brave American, who never veered from conviction and who similarly would not have been allowed to continue publically, despite all the spiteful restrictions he endured, had he been a singer, here in this world that I and my daughters live in.  I have him singing "I Ain't Scared of Your Jail" live, right now, where he which he sings about Dr. King and the civil rights marchers in the south at that time. I look forward to discussing Pete with them when I’m back home tomorrow and continuing the juxtaposition and the consideration of the heroes China has and needs.  Certainly this safe, caffeinated Starbucks, with people anonymously coming and going could use a little sing along to warm it.  Rest in Peace, Pete Seeger. 




[1] dàyǒngruòqiè:  a great hero may appear timid (idiom); the really brave person remains level-headed

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