A Long Story Short

Abstract

Chicago: where these our actors, extras aU, gather to enact the old American vaudev?le, violence and ideaUsm, wh?e the orchestra tunes up (reedy cries, brass oaths, nightstick percussion) and the audience is restless, unready for what w?l happen here. The thick yeUow curtain of gas is about to rise on an August stage. The '68 Cantata: the Democratic Convention in Chicago. For aU the atonal chords, the symbol-clash of violence and ideaUsm, history was not here to repeat itself. This was not Governor WaUace in 1957 calling troops to bar black students from schools, nor Governor Altgeld in 1884 calling in troops to halt union men in the Pullman Strike. These, our actors, were not WobbUes beaten senseless, nor suspected Reds dragged from their beds. This was not Wounded Knee, nor the Little Bighorn. This was more Uke Gettysburg, where We are met on a great battlefield of that war, z new battlefield: television, without which the world will little note nor long remember any of this. And Uke Gettysburg, the impUcations are vast, historically com plex. But the immediate questions are strategic, and in that regard, simple: who shaU gain this field? Who shaU hold it? The battlefield became the battle. Television would make victors of the losers and legends of the few. In Chicago, The '68 Cantata chords open with Janis Joplin wringing Gershwin's Summertime dry, counterpoint to hot damn, Summer in the City, but this summer, in this city, a chorus of extras performs The Battle Hymn of the New Republic, a civ? war concerto. And what could you caU it but civ? war? A nation divided, Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure the continuation of the war in South east Asia. We wore our passions on our persons, Uke uniforms In Chicago, where faith of our fathers' V for Victory?two fingers punched against the sky?becomes Peace signs, salutes, symbols carbonating across America. Oh Say Can You See Star Spangled Banners everywhere inappropri ate, unimaginable: on our backs and our butts, on blue jeans, T-shirts. Oh, It's A Grand Old Flag, but it means something entirely else in the rage and surge, the streets of Chicago where the rag-tag all-volunteer army carries the flag upside crazy down: banner to the new battlefield, television which w?l ask in images, O Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to cinders in the ashes of