Here you are in Ithaca, looking for some kind of door back into the '60s. You're like Alice in Wonderland trying to get back in your head to the place you've been before. You want to make a revolution. The song keeps playing in your head. Got to make a revolution, got to make a revolution. You still believe it's possible to make a difference. The drugs, the booze, the lost years of making a living in sterile places like Poughkeepsie and Vestal, NY haven't quite succeeded in killing off your original youthful idealism. It clings to the side of the ceramic basin no matter how many times you flush. The minute you walk down the Commons you start experiencing flashbacks. Wow, man. Hippies, head shops, beautiful people fading gracefully, kids who look like you used to look. You think you've found the passage back.
Wrong! What you've found is the Potemkin Village of radicalism, the nook where those ghosts of Leftism Past come to sip a nut brown and talk about the grand old days of SDS, Bernadette Devlin, the Panthers. They aren't real, dude. It's all window dressing. Like someone had come up with the idea of developing a '60s theme park.
There's a retirement village somewhere in the Midwest for lefties in their 80's and '90s. They even have their own wesbite. Wizened commies , who still remember who the Scottsboro Boys, William Z Foster, Jay Lovestone, A.J. Muste were, gently rock on the porch, reminiscing about the United Front and rent strikes.
Ithaca is different. You discover that most people around Ithaca were never radicals in the first place. Except perhaps in their own minds. Did you ever see the movie
Zabrieski Point? Zefferelli captures this precious vignette of a bunch of campus radicals huddled around a room discussing revolutionary tactics in an endless badminton game of words. Disgusted, the hero leaves the room, later walks into a campus demonstration that turns into a savage California Kent State, shoots a cop, treks into the desert, has sex in the sand with the most beautiful girl on the planet, flies back in a Piper Cub to LA to turn himself in only to be mowed down by police sharpshooters as he lands at the airport.
There is no sex in the sand here in Ithaca unless you sneak into a playground. Brrrr! (Ezra advises that you wait until August.)
But Ithaca does bring to mind many of the worst aspects of the '60s without preserving the best. You might want to call it 'ambience' as they do in the retail and restaurant industries. The faux hippiness adds a little distinct charm. But nowhere do you find any trace of that essential '60s idealism or innocence that drove people to insert their bodies into the gears of the Machine in Mario Savio's words. Some would argue that this in itself is a good thing. The '60s being the dream that died, the lie that delivered us to the doorstep of disco, ending in some kind of glittering, hallucinatory Michael Jackson world of nightmares, facelifts and Frankenstein. What a long strange trip it's been, eh?
Is Ithaca the land where time never changed? A reverse Sleepy Hollow of sorts where Rip goes back and finds everyone dressed the same way they did 40 years earlier?
Ithaca begs the whole question of progress. Not to say that it isn't trying to play catch-up on big box stores, strip malls, and development. Mayor Cohen has fast-tracked us into the 21st Century in 5 short years. But, as an incubator for progressive ideas, Ithaca sucks. The best it can offer is EcoVillage, a gated intentional community for middle class granola heads who want a photo opportunity while planting organic rhubarb in their designer coveralls and installing solar panels on their $150,000 plus condos.
Make it a point this year to visit the Progressive street fair held on the Commons. It happens some time in early Fall. Last year's event was an eye opener. Sandwiched in between 150 outdoor massage booths is someone's rickety table where he hands out literature on sustainable energy. Now, if you've driven around Ithaca, you know that there is just as much use of solar and alternative energy as Grand Rapids, Michigan. In fact, the water power that Ezra Cornell harnessed to drive Ithaca's expansion into a real dynamo of commerce back in the 1840's is now used merely to flush bodies out of Cornell. Ok, so that wasn't nice. Apologia mea.
But Ithaca practically styles itself as the alternative energy capital of the United States. They just haven't gotten around to erecting the windmills yet.
The next place you need to look to take Ithaca's progressive pulse is its IndyMedia website. Even a place in the Pacific named Aotearoa has a better IndyMedia webpage than Ithaca's. Check it out if you don't believe Ezra. Start at http://www.indymedia.org. Ezra has done his homework here. Ithaca's IMC has the only feature on animal tracking.
You know what really happened? Sometime back in the late 70's, the Age of Aquarius jumped into bed with what was left of the SDS crowd at CU and their offspring grew up in Ithaca, New York. Who's can blame them? It's a small town, nothing to do, the winters are long. Now that child is slouching towards Newfield, taking on different shapes - now hippie, now new-ager, now Green Party progressive -always alternative.
Ezra is looking for an alternative to the alternatives.
It's not that he's tired of folk music even though he recognizes that this scene was a trilobite preserved in amber here in Ithaca. He's not tired of hearing about solar energy. He'd prefer if someone figured out to install a couple of panels cheaply on his chateau. Rather he's tired of the bullshit, picking up a copy of the Ithaca Uproar, flipping through the pages and discovering again what he knew all along -Ithaca's progressive community is the hamster that roared.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:30 AM
