Neil Young and the fall of the progressive movement

I rode my bike through Golden Gate Park yesterday, up from The Great Highway. The lady guarding one of the little roads I like to take once inside the park said I'd could take it "at my own risk." That they'd "be out of here by Thursday."

They were dissembling the Outside Lands music festival. It looked like a military operation. Huge trucks were loading huge bales of chain-link fencing. Hundreds of Porta-Potties were stacked on platform trucks. An acre of light standards huddled against one another. A row of leather sofas and chairs, fitted like Rubik's Cubes and bound with heavy rope, made me think of Neil Young.

Neil Young played Outside Lands (at least he was supposed to). I wondered if he'd played "Powderfinger", resting on one of the leather sofas before or after he went on. I wondered if he had any idea of the logisitical & operational scope of the festival or if he'd been helicoptered in, relaxed on one of the sofa's I'd seen, played his set and split.

I imagined that if Neil Young had political beliefs they'd be unimpeachably progressive. Just as Bruce Springsteen's political beliefs are populist/progressive to the degree that he can call Barack Obama a "friend" and allow Obama's re-election team to use a song of his at Presidential rally's.

I imagined too that the majority of the music fans who attended Outside Lands were progressive politically.

But maybe not. Mybe people who loved to make music and loved to hear it enough to pay big bucks and come together in a crowd in pretty crummy SF foggy summer weather just thought they were progressive, or imagined it, or were so into their art--music, literature, painting, sculpture, jewelry, pottery--they were apolitical.

I've been thinking a lot lately about why the progressive movement in this country hasn't stuck, hasn't resonated as much as The Tea Pary resonates on the Right. Why the Right fights so much harder, makes so much more noise. I think it's a case of people being more comfortable with old ideas than new ideas. At some point in American history--roughly post-Bolshevik--the Right branded itself into American political consciousness as the embodiment of everything good and right about America, and that the Left was the embodiment of everything that wasn't.

Progressives are for the most part nice people, with a value system that can be admired for its underpinning of liberal humanism. They sing and write poems, paint pictures or, if they don't, they listen and read and go to museums. If somebody who shouldn't should happen to become President or be elected to The Board of Supervisors, a better world can always be imagined or sung into shape or put on a canvas for other progressives to see.

I'd never fully understood Flaubert's statement that "hope is the great alleviator", but it's starting to come into focus. And his line that "the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of idiocy acheived by the bourgeoisie" continues to sting.