OLD SONG RINGS TRUE TODAY

These are the opening lyrics of an old song, for what it’s worth:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
A-telling me I got to beware

 

That’s the name of the song, For What It’s Worth.

Click the link for the live video.

It was recorded in late 1966, and broke out in 1967.

 

There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Are getting so much resistance from behind

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and a-carrying signs
Mostly say hooray for our side

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away

 

The Times They’re A Changing Back? 

Patricia Cambell Hearst, Patty Hearst, in her jail shot.

From a young woman my own age, to gangster, and back.

Was she a real gangster?

 

 

During her 1975 arrest, after participating in two bank robberies (the second of which resulted in the death of Myrna Opsahl), a shoot-out (that she started while trying to rescue one of her captor-comrades), and a number of car thefts, Hearst told the arresting officer that her profession was “urban guerrilla.”

This was after she gave a clenched-fist salute to awaiting photographers from the back of a police car.

Six out of eight of Hearst’s kidnappers died in a fiery gun battle with the LAPD, but she remained on the run for a full 16 months after that, until her capture.

 

Real Gangster?

It’s a testament to Hearst’s ability to play both sides that a woman who used her wealth and connections to get out of a prison sentence remains a potent symbol for a multitude of activists and rebels.

In far-left corners, Hearst is still held up as a symbol of hope; an example that demonstrates that, with the right dissemination of information, you can turn even the wealthiest of debutantes into a fighter for the most vulnerable corners of society.

Hearst returning to a life of opulence the second she got out of prison barely even registers. Neither does her current status as a Westminster Dog Show champion.

In the end, Patricia Hearst is a chameleon.

She is a good girl, and a rebel, and a victim, and the ultimate survivor. She is down-to-earth, and a socialite.

Her life is in kitsch counterculture, and it is in suburbia, as a mom of two.

And, somehow, she makes all of it look perfectly natural. Somehow, she seems to have an uncanny knack of reflecting back whatever, and whomever, is in front of her — and charming all of them.

 

Charming My Horse Roxy 1974

This is me in 1974.

My revolution was dropping out of college, joining the Army, and riding horses in my wrestling letterman jacket from Southern Oregon.

I got lots of riding time in San Antonio on Fort Sam Houston.

Instead of taking the road most traveled by those in my cohort, going from high school graduation, to college graduation, to job, marriage, kids, I did what most tried to avoid five years earlier and signed up to serve.

You could say I wanted an excuse, needed a reason, to change things. So that’s what I did.

Was my choice a set-back? Yes. Did I catch up? I did.

Would I advise anyone taking the same path today?

No. No I wouldn’t. And here’s why: (Warning, extra salty)

By the time I went in, the fuck-ups who decided a body count meant winning, were gone.

The morons were phased out.

 

McNamara’s Morons was a government program for filling the enlisted ranks during the Vietnam War.

But, that wasn’t the official name of the program.

In 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lowered military recruiting standards as part of a program called Project 100,000.

Doesn’t Project 100,000 sound better than McNamara’s Morons.

Its goal, as the name suggests, was to recruit 100,000 men each year who were otherwise mentally, physically or psychologically underqualified for service. These men all had IQs below 91, and nearly half had IQs below 71.

I served with guys I wondered about, guys who couldn’t do things normally, like pulling themselves across a wide, deep, ditch on a rope stretched from side to side, like climbing up and down a cargo net hanging over a platform three stories high.

 

 

Thirty-five years later this came out of a fuck-ups mouth: You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want.

No one in any army from any historical period sends out under-protected personnel?

Yes they do.

Every army from every period has heard these orders: Go do that and don’t come back until it’s done, or don’t come back. If you can’t cut the mustard I’ll find someone who can.

Guys in my Vietnam Era weren’t going anywhere near there.

Imminent war threat was so weak we had an old drag-assed First Sergeant come out and warn us during morning formations that we’d better train as hard as we can because we might be fighting Cubans in Angola.

Luckily those days are behind us, right.

Right?

 

PS:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
A-telling me I got to beware

PSS

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away

 

More Patty:

The Symbionese Liberation Army, a 1970s radical group back in the news because four of its graying members have just pleaded guilty to a long-ago murder, was a violent, revolutionary gang that had almost no political message and was known chiefly for kidnapping Patty Hearst.

 

The surviving people put their youthful behavior behind them until, like the prosecutions in Germany after WWII, they were finally found.

This is the path we strive to follow after all is said and done, calming down and paying attention to loved ones in our communities.

Don’t be a fuck-up on someone else’s path.

Following fucked-up orders from fuck-ups is not so much the golden ticket to happiness as it sounds.