My Dad recently moved to the Phillipines to work on a farm with his girlfriend. Before he left, we sat down and had a few beers while I asked him about what it was like to evade the Vietnam draft. As always, he made it seem like no big deal, but his refusal to obey the order to kill people was one of the most profound lessons of my childhood, and I’ll always be proud of him for it. He also talked about growing up on the road, hanging out with California’s Digger communities, and freight hopping. Here’s part one of our conversation.
Part 2:
I recently saw a documentary called “Commune”, about a group of people that inhabit a piece of land in a remote spot in California, called Black Bear Ranch. The community was (and is) a radical collective of misfits, complete with activists on the run from the FBI, nudists, poets, farmers, and children. In part two of my conversation with my Dad about evading the Vietnam draft, I asked him if he had ever heard of Black Bear. It turns out that he had lived there in the 1960s for a while and knew a bunch of those people, including the actor Peter Coyote. The bravery and tenacity of a bunch of friends that tried to live without selling their labor, without the barriers of the nuclear family structure, and without the drudgery and meaninglessness of consumer society is inspiring, especially since they all mostly came from traditional American middle class value systems. Of course, the inertia of bourgeois mediocrity could not be stopped, and eventually sixties radicalism was co-opted, re-integrated, packaged and turned into an MP3 file, and all I have left are my Dad’s stories.
