“For What It’s Worth” is the first “snippet” introducing Mitchel Cohen’s new book, “The Rubber Stamp Man: Poems & Snippets”.

THE YEAR WAS 1979. Genevieve – the nom de guerre I’m assigning to this member of our Red Balloon Collective and Poetry Conspiracy (she did after all look like Genevieve Bujold) – returned trembling to our rented collective house in Port Jefferson Station from her Physics for Beginners class at SUNY Stony Brook, half-way across Long Island toward Montauk. “Dr. Mould said the sun will burn off all its hy­dro­gen in 5 billion years and go dark. We are half-way to the end. What’s it all worth?”

Genevieve was in the throes of an existential grief as profound to her as the terror generated in younger people by today’s planetary emergencies, and Israel’s infliction of genocide on the Palestinian people. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Hershey Pennsylvania was in the process of melting down; the barely fictional Hollywood film “The China Syndrome” miraculously hit theaters around this same time, and it revealed the lies and apocalyptic upshot of the nuclear corporate madness that ruled our lives.

Thousands of anti-nuke protesters – Gen­evieve, myself, and our mutual friend Bonita among them – marched repeatedly against the horrors and immorality of those who would hold the world hostage to their techno-fantasies and lust for profits. Barron’s Weekly, that capitalist paragon, summed up their socio­pathology: “In the generation of nuclear energy, manmade hazards seem unavoidable, but bankruptcy strikes us as a needless risk.”

Dr. Richard Mould, physics teacher extraordinaire, saw his goal – at least one of them – as unraveling the politics and stultified thinking hidden in the way physics was generally taught. Dr. Mould had already become the faculty advisor for the Stony Brook chapter of Students for a Democratic Society when it formed on the campus in 1966; he joined his students in their desperate fight against the U.S. government’s war on Vietnam. He helped guide them in battling for social justice especially for Black people trying to survive in America, and in trying to make sense of their corporeal and emotional existence in this vast but finite universe.

Our Red Balloon Collective grew out of the wreckage of SDS and its independent caucus. Nineteen and twenty-year-olds were thrown into debates that had perplexed philosophers from time immemorial. Would people come to revolutionary consciousness on their own, or would they – and we – need what amounted to a Leninist vanguard organization to intercede and provide Aesopian “morals” – the “correct line” – to lead them? The same debate wracked the hundreds of similar collectives sprouting on campuses across the country, and indeed throughout the world.

Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t a-Marching Anymore” became the Red Balloon Collective’s first theme song:

It’s always the old to lead us to the wars
Always the young to fall
Now look at all we’ve won
With a sabre and a gun
Tell me is it worth it all

– and so too did the Fugs’ nihilistic song “Nothing,” which tugged in a different direc­tion. Pretty much every­thing seemed irrational and absurd; we felt it was imperative to fight to bring the warmongers to justice.

Che Guevara famously (and wisely) said: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Everyone had pinned that poster to their kitchen walls.

Che inspired me greatly, but I also wondered about the first part of that quote: Why would it be ridiculous to say that true revolutionaries are guided by great feelings of love? Why would we fear being ridiculed? The Jefferson Airplane sang a rejoinder of sorts: “We are forces of chaos and anarchy / everything they say we are, we are / And we’re very proud of ourselves.”

Indeed, why not embrace the Absurd, the Irrational, the Alienation, the Ridiculous?

The Talking Heads made it explicit in the 80s with their album, “Stop Making Sense.” It replayed over and over again as Arielle and I – we’d met at the No Easy Answers Left conference in New York City – clutched onto each other to keep from separately flying off into the cosmos as we tripped in Mt. Kisco on some of the finest LSD I’d ever taken, each drop in its own organ­ic honeycomb section, compliments of a member of the Jefferson Starship for helping him salvage his relationship with his girlfriend – my “ex”, a member of the Red Balloon Collective.

*   *   *

FORTY-THREE YEARS LATER, I’m just another old white guy dozing on the subway in and out of what some call reality. I wake to see several Black teenagers finding a few dollars that had fallen out of a sleeping homeless man’s pocket. I ask myself a version of the question that comes up so frequently, “Should I intervene?” or, should I wait to see if the kids themselves resolve it? My poem, “School’s Out!,” unfolds that dilemma and tells that story. Kudos to the big-hearted teens at John Dewey High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn – and to the cops for not showing up.

SCHOOL’S OUT

Raucous teens explode
onto the D train at Bay 50th
from John Dewey High School.
Half a century past
my friends and I, too, would fly wild
like that station’s pigeons
clamoring in the rafters.

Subway screeches. Steel girders sway.
A homeless man, exhausted,
reeks from urine, sleeps through the ruckus.
At his feet, a plastic dish
filled with gruel.
By its side, a dollar and change.

One teen snatches the bill
holds it high: “My lucky day!”
What to do?
I sit quietly, waiting for the world to turn.
Hey,” his chum glares,
that’s the guy’s lunch money.”
I hold my breath. A second passes.
And another.
Then, “snap” – just like that,
the way Derek Jeter
fielded ground balls and threw
to first all in one motion –
consciousness stirs, decision seamless.

“Wake up!,” he says,
shakes the sleeper,
does not wake.
He stuffs the dollar and 63 cents
into the homeless guy’s pocket. It falls out,
he picks it up, stuffs it back in.
Careful,” he warns –
someone might steal this!”

*  *   *

Through the windows, story after story rattles with me across Brooklyn. The D train – the ride to Coney Island that Bob Dylan found so interminable in visiting Woody Guthrie at his apart­ment on Mermaid Avenue – bounces me back and forth between the decades and key landscapes jolting the three-quarters-of-a-century of non-stop experiences and memories.

Here is the asphalt field, a triangle across from Lafayette High School, where my dad — invited to join a game with me and my friends one weekend morning — whacked a softball over the fence. The ball didn’t just clear the fence; it sailed over the train tracks and then carried over another fence to the park across the street – a gargantuan shot. The kids in the neighborhood followed the ball’s flight with mouths agape and jaws dropping. My best friend Lloyd reluctantly told me it was my responsibility to inform my father that hitting the ball over the fence – to say nothing of his hitting it over the train and over the second fence across the street – was, absurd as it sounds, an automatic out by our ground rules, though, looking back, it was worth trading an out for all the glorious memories-to-be!

Across the Stillwell Avenue el is the Marlboro housing project where I grew up after my family had moved from Brigh­ton Beach. Down the block, L&B Pizza and Spu­moni Gardens still thrive. And here is John Dewey High School which my dad – elected to the school board to fill the last of nine slots – fought to set up as a “magnet” school in the belief that children in the Projects and not just the elites should have access to quality education.

One day on the D train I overhear a teen from John Dewey announce that he’d just been diagnosed with lead poisoning, epidemic am­ong Black children in New York City. His friend responds as only a New Yorker can: “Well at least the lead will block the radiation from the bombs and power plants.” Yea, dad!

Genevieve tore herself apart over the meaninglessness of it all, as the world would be coming to an end in 5 billion years. The meaninglessness in this world smacked us around as well. Having no witty words for her – we’re back again in the late 1970s, remember – I slid the Buffalo Springfield record, For What It’s Worth, from its sleeve and placed the vinyl onto the turntable careful to match the hole with the metal spindle, and cranked up the volume. (I write about those mechanisms for my grandkids Zaya’s and Nova’s benefit!) Blast the darkness away with music, absurdity, bales of sar­casic laughter and protests!

FLASH FORWARD FORTY YEAR. I was excited to discover the Pandora App on my lover’s computer. She was six years older than me, already in her mid-70s and people on the street often smiled when we’d walk by entangled in each other’s arms. “Are you dating” some would ask and I would answer, “Yes, we’re carbon dating.” Using Pandora, needing no bent spindle to misalign the record (the new technologies do have some ben­efits!), I began blasting 60-year-old For What It’s Worth over her wireless speakers.

There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
A-telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

The moment she said “turn it down” I knew we were star-crossed lovers. Her parallel universe held no memory or recognition of the very loud Stony Brook where our music rebounded in every corner of the campus and stitched together the multiple threads of our movements! True, I tried to prolong our doomed relationship, and when she couldn’t bear it any longer she fled to Cuba.

I found the Wiki­pedia entry to be a revelation. I had a mistaken idea of the song’s actual origins. So I’ll offer an excerpt here:

Although For What It’s Worth is often considered an anti-war anthem of sorts, Stephen Stills was inspired to write the song [not about Chicago 1968, which many assume, but] because of the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles in November 1966 …

“On Saturday, November 12, 1966, fliers were distributed on the Sunset Strip inviting people to join demonstrations later that day. Several Los Angeles rock radio stations also announced a rally outside the Pandora’s Box club on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights. That evening, as many as 1,000 young demonstrators, including future celebrities Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda (who was handcuffed by police) gathered to protest against the curfew’s enforcement.

“Although the rallies began peacefully, trouble eventually broke out. The unrest continued the next night, and periodically throughout the rest of November and December, forcing some clubs to shut down within weeks. It was against the background of these civil disturbances that Stills recorded For What It’s Worth on December 5, 1966.

“Stills said in an interview that the name of the song came about when he presented it to the record company executive Ahmet Ertegun (who signed Buffalo Springfield to the Atlantic Records’ ATCO label). Stills said: ‘I have this song here, for what it’s worth, if you want it.’” That throw-away phrase stuck.

There’s battle lines being drawn
nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Gettin’ so much resistance from behind
It’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

As usual, things happen sideways – for what it’s worth. I still can’t console Genev­i­eve’s existential despair, or definitively resolve my Collective’s political dilemma – intervene by brand­ish­ing Aesopian moral lectures, or trust in the creative human spirit to find its own way? Does doing the one damage the possibility of achieving the other? Is there a correct answer? As a child I loved the maroon-covered book of Aesop’s Fables my mom read to me. I’d twist my brain every which way trying to understand the “moral” of each story. These days, I remind myself of the motto from my own Zen-Marxism writings: If there’s only one answer the question is wrong.

Are stories and poems meaningful today in the face of Covid, genocide, climate collapse, and pending nuclear war? Bob Dylan sang: “Without freedom of speech I might be in the swamp.” Should a writer of any color or creed squander time on joyful word-plays and personal and even fanciful tales, when drivers, if Black, are systematically pulled over by police and face the crapshoot reality of summary execution with every encounter? Leonard Peltier, Mumia abu-Jamal remain locked up in prison. Julian Assange was finally allowed to return to Australia after many years in prison, though without being pardoned. Mumia, Julian, Leonard Peltier, Chel­sea Manning, Edward Snowden, and dozens more) have been tortured and punished, many for their hubris in publishing exposés of government violence, terror and insanity.

NO FLY ZONE

As little kids in Brighton Beach

little Odessa, today

we wore outfits

knit by my grandmother, Gertrude,

that had no “Lekhereh” –

no opening through which to pee.

It’s been 75 years

yet every time some politician today

talks about a “No Fly” zone

I remember Granny

and have to pee.

 

EMMA GOLDMAN – America’s infamous anarchist and radical feminist agitator in the late 1800s and all the way up through her death in 1940 – wrote in her autobiography Living My Life of returning to the apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side she sometimes shared with her lover Al­exander Berkman. Berkman berated her for hav­ing gone to the movies with another lover. Berkman fumed, roaring, jealous. But jealousy is not cool for good anarchists, so he turned it into a political tirade against Emma, ranting that Hollywood films are bourgeois and that she’d squandered money needed for their new anarchist publication (all of 10 cents). Berkman then bummed a few dollars and went down to the local pub; he ordered a steak, again rationalizing it by saying “revolutionaries need to eat well to keep up their strength”.

Emma could have looked into the future and retorted with: “Stop providing phony political excuses for your personal desires; stop justifying your unacceptable behavior! Instead of spending our money eating steak, maybe you should practice shooting a revolver so next time you won’t miss when shooting capitalists like Frick, and not just wounding them.” Frick was the head of Car­negie Steel in Homestead, near Pittsburgh and had deployed hundreds of Pinkerton thugs to kill striking workers, crushing the 1892 steelworkers’ strike. Berkman spent the next 14 years in prison.

Emma, who had fled St. Petersberg in Russia for New York City (by way of Roch­ester) described the first time (1889) she met Berkman when she was twenty-years-old: “While the four of us were having dinner … I suddenly heard a powerful voice call: ‘Extra-large steak! Extra cup of coffee!’ My own capital was so small and the need for economy so great that I was startled by such apparent extravagance. … I wondered who that reckless person could be and how he could afford such food. ‘Who is that glutton?’ I asked. Solataroff laughed aloud. ‘That is Alexander Berkman. He can eat for three. But he rarely has enough money for food. … I’ll introduce you.’”

“Several people came to our table to talk to Solotaroff. The man of the extra-large steak was still packing it away as if he had gone hungry for weeks.” And then she relays the incident that changed her life: “Berkman remarked to me: ‘Johann Most is speaking tonight. Do you want to come hear him?’

“How extraordinary, I thought, that on my very first day in New York I should have the chance to behold with my own eyes and hear this fiery man whom the Rochester press used to portray as the personification of the devil, a criminal, a bloodthirsty demon! I had planned to visit Most in the office of his newspaper some time later, but that the opportunity should present itself in such an unexpected manner gave me the feeling that something wonderful was about to happen, something that would decide the whole course of my life.”

Quite the historic first date!

So when Berkman scolded Emma years later for wasting money on a movie, their whole encounter came full circle, as it began with Emma griping about Berkman spending their money on his beloved steaks! “Why should one not love beauty?” Emma asked. The future Phil Ochs joins the debate: “Ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.”

“I did not say one should not enjoy or appreciate beauty,” Berkman replied; “I said it was wrong to spend money on such things when the movement is so much in need of it. It is inconsistent for an anarchist to enjoy luxuries when people live in poverty.”

“Beautiful things are not luxuries,” Emma insisted. “They are necessaries. Life would be unbearable without them.” Yet, at heart Emma felt that Berkman was right. Revolutionists gave up even their lives – why not also beauty?

I was thinking of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Johann Most, whose great grand­daughter was a member of the Brooklyn Greens, as I stood perplexed watching the line of tour­ists outside Katz’s deli anticipating biting into its 3-inch thick pastrami sandwich – total heart attack material. In prior years, the line wrapped all the way ’round the block and across the street; it would be greeted by a statue of V.I. Lenin atop a condo overlooking E. Houston St. known as Red Square, in front of a giant clock whose numbers were scrambled and spun backwards.

The statue was removed a few years ago; everyone apparently now comes to Katz’s not to visit Lenin but to practice their orgasm vocalizations, following upon that famous scene in Katz’s from the film When Harry Met Sally! Rent for a tiny apartment in the 6-story walk-up on E. 13 St. near third avenue that replaced the dilapidated tenement where Emma lived from 1903 to 1913, today rents for $6,000 per month.

TIME IS NOT SEQUENTIAL IT OVERLAPS. Human beings make their own history, true, but not just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances they’ve chosen freely, but under conditions already existing that they’re born into, rituals handed down and transmitted from the past.

Dilemma afer dilemma from yesteryear re-emerges in the fierce urgency of now. Karl Marx waxed poetic in 1851: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just when they are occupied with revolutionizing themselves and social conditions, creating some­thing that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

So it was when one day I, having hitchhiked into the city disheveled, hungry and craving a Lower East Side slice of Challah, stumbled into the no-longer-existing famous Jewish res­tau­rant Ratner’s, a few blocks from Katz’s Deli in the Lower East Side. There was no line, and no tourists. That statue of Lenin would appear like Hamlet’s father’s ghost as soon as one turned off Delancey and onto the parallel Houston Street. (That’s “How-stun” in New Yorkese.) The waiters at Ratner’s were already eyeing me with suspicion. So I innocently asked (hoping they’d give me a free slice) “How much does that Hallah cost?” (say it fast.)

Dead silence.

History has long fingers; they claw upward through ancient dust, scraping through obscure folds of consciousness. Life is as complex and as confusing today as it was generations ago. Human emotions are as fraught with profound uncertainties as ever. Still, humor, compassion and Love dare to risk the ridicule Che Guevara fretted over as he reached across the chasm of existential fears and panic proposing to create a new socialist human being. Songs and memories arising out of the steam of social conflict and personal experiences almost 60 years ago, let alone radical anecdotes like Red Emma’s from 130 years ago, burst upon us today raising the same issues, as they are rediscovered by new generations and social movements.

Today I revel in stories for their own sake (forgive me, Berkman!), the wordplays of poems, nonlinear connections, the joy of learning about our forebears. I am fascinated by how such stories can explode into meaning, rage, and joy, with or without the teaching of moral les­sons, in this jumble of greater and lesser holocausts.

The scene: Bonnie’s Grill on 5th Avenue in Park Slope. Out of the blue, I hear the almost never publicly uttered Fugs’ song, “Nothing.” I catch my breath, look up; at the next table sits a family with three kids all being led in the song by the dad and mom.

Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing,
Wednesday and Thursday nothing,
Friday for a change a little more nothing,
Saturday once more nothing.

I stare, barely recognizing the dad, Steve Becker, one of the important poets in The Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy half-a-century ago. I join in singing, of course – as I said, Tuli Kup­fer­berg’s and Ed Sanders’ musical absurdity had become one of my Collective’s theme songs!

The kids look over to my table amazed that this old guy (me!) actually knows the words to the song they’d known as their own private mantra since they’d been born. When we come to the verse, “Carlos Marx, nothing, Engels, nothing, Bakunin and Kro­pot­kin, nothing, Leon Trotsky, lots of nothing,” we all are enthusiastically pounding our separate tables, anticipating the next line, which we shout out just as the Red Balloon Collective had always done: “Stalin, less than nothing.” To the young ones the names we are all singing are just loony-sounding chants devoid of meaning, the way my brothers and I would “pray” before bed every night, Shaday, Ishmoraini, Mot­z­alaini, McColoroo. What could each of us know of the insanities and struggles that dominated our existences, propelling us into some dys­topian version of a shared future?

In 2018, after Steve Becker had succumbed to pancreatic cancer, I happened upon an old friend while on line to use the bathroom at a croissant café in New York City during the giant rally for women’s rights. Stunned and unsure, her name barely made it through my lips. “Bonita?” I stuttered. She stared at me, “Yes,” and then “Who are you?”

In 1978, Bonita had driven to West Virginia – our collective’s second trip there – to support the coal miners’ wildcat strike. “We don’t need no Jews or Commie food,” the union officials muttered. So Red Balloon collected three large truckloads of food at Stony Brook and sent them to the independent groups of miners we’d met who’s organized an autonomous distribution network, bypassing the union honchos. We distributed hundreds of copies of our newspaper. The strikers’ pictures and stories in Beckley and Bluefield leapt from those pages. The smell of the still-fresh ink mixed for me with the exciting smells of Bonita’s body as we drove all over a section of West Virginia, slept in the same bed, and hoped to change the world. The excitement carried by those smells more than anything else had staggered through four dec­ades frayed, but olfactorily intact!

One doesn’t often get the chance to touch-up the frescoes of an old romance. It took Michelangelo four years to complete the Sistine Chapel and you (I write to myself in the third-person) – poor delusional boy – think you can just say, paintbrush in hand, “oops, missed a couple of spots!” There are reasons – there are always reasons – for why people believe what they do. “Where are your horns,” a North Carolinian asked my not-yet parents in 1945, as they drove back to New York from the war. Dad and his 19-year-old bride-to-be were the first Jews they’d met; they didn’t have horns, of course – a mistranslation of “Halo” from the Hebrew bible by Michel­angelo.

So Bonita and I tried; perhaps someday we’ll try again.

With my poetry muse (and roman­ticism) finally returning after a pandemic’s hiatus, I think back to Genevieve’s existential anguish regarding the future burn-out of the sun and the trove of philosophical questions she raised. I may no longer shoot for the Aesopian moral lessons at the end of each story, but those smells from yesteryear linger like tattered antiwar posters peeling from the crumbled walls of time’s elaborate maze. I clutch at one or two, pressing them to my nose, and – odors being the most elusive of our senses and yet the key to remembering – I let them unlock those memories and carry me off.

I may not have the answers, still, but along the way I have at least accumulated a helluva lot of good stories …. for what it’s worth.

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
Stop. Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down