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Columns

Alexander Cockburn

Bread, Coffee and Beer
May 29, 2002

I always try to sell the Left on optimism because of the Left's regrettable tendency to think everything's for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. We just saw East Timor celebrate independence. As I told a celebration party put on by East Timor Action Network in Seattle, "Who would have bet in 1976, that after ghastly suffering and tremendous heroism, East Timor would, in 2002, be hoisting its flag?"

Let's remember triumphs as well as defeats. I like to remind the younger crowd of some of the less-trumpeted legacies of the Sixties. Better food. Better bread. The visionary radical hippies had a lot to do with that, touting organic food and the grains that now find their way into the health pages of the Sunday papers.

Good coffee was promoted by radicals like my friends and neighbors, the Paffs, who began by roasting beans on their kitchen stove for friends and neighbors and because the local town sold only Folgers. They now run Humboldt's very successful Goldrush Coffee (call 707-629-3460 for mail orders. Right now, Joe says the Dark Sumatra is terrific.)

Beer, too. The back lot brewers who began Sierra Nevada beer in Chico, Calif., who ultimately beat back Budweiser's efforts to destroy them and thus sealed the victory of the microbrews, came out of the Sixties' alternative culture.

Bread, coffee and beer. It's up there with the old revolutionary slogan of Peace, Land and Bread. When I got back home from a speaking trip around the Pacific Northwest, I got this e-mail from Natalie, a woman who was at a Spokane, Wash., event I'd spoken at on behalf of the Greens. She told me that in an earlier incarnation she'd lived on a hippie commune in Loleta, which is just south of Eureka and some 50 miles from where I live in Humboldt county, northern California.

"Alexander (This is from the person you met in Spokane, Wash., who lived on the commune in Loleta, Calif.), I've been thinking about the comments you made about the things that HAVE changed over the years -- you mentioned that organic food has gotten bigger, coffee is better, beer is better, that the Living Wage movement has gained momentum, etc. Your point being that people have made a difference, and things have changed for the better due to people having vision and holding fast.

"A few things struck me about your comments. One was (and this relates to my Humboldt County years) that birth practices are another thing that have changed incredibly over the past 20 years. When I lived in Eureka, I attended the People's School of Medicine in Arcata, Calif., which was a long-haired, long-skirted bunch of hippie girls (and a few guys) who were learning to be lay midwives. We all had our babies at home and helped one another deliver. It's so accepted now that men can be in the delivery room, women can labor without being restrained, etc., that I think people forget that these things were absolutely not the standard back then. You had to deliver at home in order to avoid relinquishing power and being subjected to established practices.

"On the other hand ... as much as these changes have been important -- the better food, better birth -- it also strikes me that they have been changes that affect, for the most part, those of us who have been given the opportunities that lead to making a decent living. We are eating better, exercising more, living more vital lives at older ages, but the poor are more obese, eating more unhealthy, and suffering from debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases at higher rates. We are having healthier babies and enjoying more choice, but poor people and more uninformed people are having more C-sections and unnecessary procedures. Not to mention those who are still forced to relax with a can of Bud Lite and wake up to Folgers. I work with homeless women and children, and I'm constantly reminded of how their third-class status keeps them isolated from so many things that we take for granted. Natalie."

Well, Natalie, you have a point, but lifestyles and preferences trickle sideways and down, and you can't order people at gunpoint not to eat crap. Working people order Sierra Nevada, drive through the Paffs' espresso stands, look for good food. C-sections aren't always a bad thing, either.

Joe Paff tells me that when he grew up in the late Thirties in a steel town on the edge of Pittsburgh, "as long as my father was unemployed and we were dirt poor, we ate very well. My father made his own beer. My mother baked bread and canned her stewed tomatoes, and my brothers brought home rabbit, pheasant and other game. As soon as my brothers and my father got jobs in the booming steel mills, we were now well off. My father had a new car. We ate Wonder Bread, store-canned tomatoes, and my father drank Iron City Beer. Moral: The victory of these debauched foods was the product of American prosperity and TV advertising that made my mother and father think that's what they ought to eat to emulate the middle class they saw on TV shows. My mother finally denied having actually baked bread."

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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