MAGA Killed Phil Ochs
Phil Ochs was a socialist. He believed in a fairer society with greater equality. He believed in freedom and justice and opposed fascism. He ‘fought’ for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. He wrote his songs and campaigned to make the world a better place.
That dream came crashing to a halt on August 28th and 29th 1968.
Phil had been involved with the Yippies organising the mass anti-war protest at the Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago. They chose to protest as the Democrats were looking to put forward Hubert Humphrey as their candidate and he was very pro-war. They intended to attract hundreds of thousands of protestors to a take part in days of marches, street theatre, music and frolics. They called it ‘The Festival of Life’. In the event Mayor Daley organised a massive police presence and brought in the National Guard. Not so many turned up as hoped and the police brutality was extreme. Heads were broken.
It all started well. An enthusiastic Phil, full of optimism, helped the purchase of a pig, which they named Pigasus, to put forward as a Presidential candidate. Despite the aura of violence and great intimidation Phil performed a rousing set to an enthusiastic crowd in Lincoln Park prior to them going off to march on the Democratic Convention. Phil was buoyed up and actually told people it was the pinnacle of his career.
Mayor Daley was determined to stop them and the ensuing battles were extreme. As protestors were savagely beaten the crowd were chanting ‘The Whole World Is Watching.’
In amongst the blood and tear gas Phil had his epiphany.
He realised that the rest of America was watching and they were on the side of Daley and his thugs; they wanted heads broken, teeth smashed out and all the long-haired, socialist, anti-war protestors beaten and driven out. They saw them as un-American.
It was a startling awakening. Phil had spent his entire adult life working towards a dream, involving himself in civil rights and anti-war protest, taking up the cudgel for social justice from the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. He had aligned himself with the youth protest movement of the sixties. They had believed that the movement would grow and grow and force change on the country. He had believed that civil rights were achievable and that the country could be turned from a death machine into something much more positive. Now the scales had dropped.
As the violence erupted Phil saw that he had been living in a bubble. He, and the other protestors, had been fooling themselves. They thought their numbers were growing but in actual fact they were tiny. They were an inconsequential minority compared to what they were up against. The apathy of the majority and the organised brutality of the right-wing authorities were insurmountable. They had no chance.
Then the killer realisation.
Instead of changing public opinion the protests were actually counterproductive. His songs and actions, far from helping bring about change, were alienating the majority. They were creating an even more extreme backlash.
Phil realised that there were millions of people out in the hinterland of America steeped in what they saw as good old American values – God, Country and apple pie. They saw the anti-war protestors and hippies as communist agitators who needed putting down. Middle America was also shocked and disgusted by them. They saw them as long-haired, dirty, licentious, drug-taking, permissive hedonists who were a threat to the middle class way of life.
Phil realised that the sixties protest movement was spawning the opposite of what it was hoping to achieve. The millions tuning in to the riots on their sets wanted the police to kick the shit out of the protestors. They were turning people into supporting war and reinforcing their prejudices. They were reawakening a patriotic fervour.
It sent Phil’s head spinning. Everything he had ever fought for was shown to be not just a waste of time but dangerously detrimental to the cause. He was left standing on air.
Deeply dispirited Phil left Chicago to reassess his life and what he should do. He knew he had a loyal audience. He had a career. He could make a living singing his songs to the faithful – but that is not what he was about. That was pointless.
Phil’s whole sense of purpose had evaporated.
Chicago was an epiphany.
He tried analysing what was going on and attempting to understand what the right-wing opposition thought and felt. He saw that right-wing singers like Merle Haggard were articulating the situation in their songs –
We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don’t take no trips on LSD
We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street
We like livin’ right, bein’ free
And we don’t make no party out of lovin’
We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo
We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do
And I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse
And white lightning’s still the biggest thrill of all
There were millions of people who far from identifying with the youth movement were completely turned off by it.
Then there were the authorities. He had witnessed how brutal they could be. He suspected that there were no limits. If pushed they would respond with even greater force. Right-wingers believed in violence. Guns and war were their patriotic duty. Phil is reported as saying on more than one occasion that it wasn’t beyond possibility that they could have rounded up everyone at Woodstock and machine gunned the lot of them. He believed that. Things could become that extreme. Civil war was possible and liberal values crushed.
The realisation of this made Phil extremely depressed. He dropped out of political involvement and began trying to think of a way of drawing the disenfranchised right-wingers into the social cause. His idea was to create a persona that amalgamated the political fervour of Che Guevara with the iconic power of Elvis Presley. He thought that blue-collar white s could be seduced by such a vision.
That led to his abortive gold lame image and concerts. The change confused his followers and failed to attract in the disgruntled young working class. Nobody understood.
Phil could not conceive of a way forward. He saw the country trundling into a fascist future. He saw a sizeable minority adopting an extreme conservative attitude. He saw a chunk of more liberal Middle America who were sitting on the fence. What Phil was seeing back in 1968 was the birth of MAGA and it appalled him.
What was worse was that he could see no way to counter it. He realised that this tide was rising. The highly conservative extreme was aligning with the religious right. America was heading for out and out fascism.
Having tried out the Che/Elvis experiment and realising that it was doomed to failure all Phil could do was drink and sink into deeper and deeper depression. In the depths of this despair he took his own life.