The Kopkind Blog

‘Our End Is in Our Beginning’

Hearts and Minds with director Peter Davis, Saturday, October 13, 4 pm
The Latchis Theater, 50 Main Street, Brattleboro

Left Alive? with Alexander Cockburn and JoAnn Wypijewski, Sunday, October 14, 2 pm Late Brunch Tapas Feast at the Organ Barn at Guilford, 158 Kopkind Road

Ten years ago, loved ones of the late great radical writer and Guilford resident Andrew Kopkind embarked on creating a living memorial that would bring together independent journalists and activists, emphasizing critical political analysis and a vivid spirit of inquiry, community and joy in the struggle. A year of preparation was capped by the first annual fundraising Harvest Late Brunch, and since then Kopkind, the project, has held 13 summer sessions in Guilford, with 123 participants in residence from across the country and the world; it has put on 45 events, most of them free to the public, featuring a total of 48 nationally recognized speakers and filmmakers. This October, Kopkind launches its tenth programming year with a Harvest Festival featuring journalists whom Andy loved and respected, and whose work is a beacon for anyone striving to make sense of our world.

On Saturday, October 13, at 4 pm, Peter Davis will present his classic film of the Vietnam War, “Hearts and Minds”, a searing documentary of imperial hubris, which won the Oscar for 1974, has inspired countless filmmakers and remains strikingly relevant. When the film was released Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it “an extraordinary movie”, one less about the generals, presidents and advisers who prosecuted the war than “about the generations of attitudes, wishes and beliefs that these men represented. It’s about the power the country inherited” and the damage that power inflicts. As Davis wrote recently regarding the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, “We flew into both wars on the wings of lies [and] we have failed to understand those very elements – geography, ethnicity, religion, history – that we also got very wrong in Vietnam. When I reported from Iraq in 2003, these truths were so self-evident that a fully rational response would have had to include both laughter and tears.” The screening, at the Latchis Theater on Main Street in Brattleboro, will be followed by a discussion on Vietnam and Iraq, lessons learned and forgotten.

On Sunday, October 14, at 2 pm, Alexander Cockburn, “the most gifted polemicist writing in English”, says the London Times Literary Supplement , co-editor of CounterPunch and a speaker who has been dazzling audiences from Portland to Paris to Mumbai, will appear at The Organ Barn at Guilford as the featured guest at the Harvest Late Brunch tapas feast. He will be in conversation with JoAnn Wypijewski, president of the Kopkind board, who was Cockburn and Kopkind’s colleague for many years at The Nation (where Cockburn writes a regular column) and who edited the posthumous anthology of Andy’s work, The Thirty Years’ Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994. The title of the talk, “Left Alive?”, reflects the political phenomenon of the day: the ruling groups having lost legitimacy to provide social security in the broadest sense; the people contemptuous of authority but largely unrebellious; the old movements tired, the new ones tentative or waiting to be born. And yet everywhere people measure the world as it is against a world of their desires and dream of making their own histories. Where are those being written today? As the empire heads for the rocks, where do we find the vital centers of political energy, of rage and perhaps then of a bracing hope?

“Andy liked to say, ‘Our end is in our beginning’, meaning first causes and history and intentions, what you imagine or fail to imagine, all these things matter – whether in politics or writing or … cooking a great meal”, said John Scagliotti, Andy Kopkind’s longtime companion and the administrator of Kopkind. “We started this project because we wanted to keep Andy’s spirit alive, and in our small way to keep the progressive community alive too, because people need the freedom to imagine a better world, and they need the time to think and debate and risk an idea. So this is our tenth Harvest festival, and we’re celebrating where we’ve come from and where we’re heading, and we’re thrilled to have with us Andy’s dear friends, Peter Davis, Alexander Cockburn and JoAnn Wypijewski, who are brilliant and daring.”

Tickets for “Hearts and Minds” are $12 and may be reserved in advance. Tickets for the Harvest Late Brunch are $30 and must be reserved. The event on Sunday will begin with a short tribute to Grace Paley, who was the Harvest speaker in 2002 and died earlier this year. For reservations or for more information, contact John Scagliotti at john@afterstonewall.com or 802.254.4859.

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We at Kopkind are mourning the loss of author and peace activist Grace Paley. We were proud to have had Grace as a friend and supporter of the Kopkind Colony. Grace was our featured speaker at our 5th annual Kopkind Harvest Late Brunch, just before the lead up to the Iraq war, in October 2002.

At the time, Kopkind Board President, JoAnn Wypijewski, praised Grace in a press release announcing the talk: “Ms. Paley, with a long history in feminist and antiwar movements, calls herself a ‘somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.’ We are thrilled to have her as our guest. At this time when all the talk is of war, revenge and blind allegiance, Paley’s sane, deep voice of the heart is so vital.”

We are pleased to have preserved Grace’s “sane, deep voice of the heart” and we present two poems from her talk at the Organ Barn here in Guilford Vermont on Kopkind’s You Tube Channel. The link is at the bottom of this post.

We will also have a small video tribute for Grace at our 10th annual Brunch on October 14th at 2PM. It will be followed by our guests speakers for this annual event. On this special occasion, Noam Chomsky, an old friend of Andy Kopkind, had planned to be here in a conversation about the state of the present Left in America with another close friend Alexander Cockburn, the dynamite co-editor of CounterPunch and columnist for The Nation. But sadly due to illnes in his family, he will not be able to take part at this time. Noam sends his regrets. However we are pleased to tell you that we are reviving the 1995 “Left Alive” tour, by bringing in JoAnn Wypijewski, the editor of Andy's book “The Thirty Years’ Wars” and will join Alexander, who also took part in the ’95 tour. However this time they have added a question mark “Left Alive?” It should be a grand talk.

Please join us at the Organ Barn in Guilford Vermont for the 10th annual Harvest Late Brunch on October 14 at 2pm. A wonderful homemade Tapas spread will be part of the afternoon.

The day before, Sat. Oct 13th, Kopkind is proud to present Peter Davis who will screen his Oscar-winning film “Hearts and Minds” in Brattleboro at the Latchis Theater, at 4pm ( see post below)

For more information and directions to the Organ Barn in Guilford or the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro, please contact John Scagliotti, administrator of Kopkind john@afterstonewall.com

To Link to the Kopkind You Tube with Grace Paley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7yjRYXFmxU

Please tell others about this piece and our screening in October. Thank you. John Scagliotti, Kopkind Administrator and JoAnn Wypijewski, President of the Board.

[Note: For those who would like to come to Vermont for this special ocassion, one should make reservations now as most hotels fill up during the leaves in color in Vermont. We have a few rooms left at Kopkind too so contact john@afterstonewall.com]
HEARTS AND MINDS REDUX
By Peter Davis
To frame Hearts and Minds in an historical context, we in the United States commenced to re-live the experience of Vietnam, this time with Great Britain at our side, in March 2003. Differences in geography, ethnicity, religion and history make the wars in Vietnam and Iraq very different. The political and economic stakes, of course, are so grossly, dramatically different as to bring on indigestion for either those who support or those who oppose the war in Iraq.
The similarities are only these: First, we flew into both wars on the wings of lies (the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incidents’ in 1964 versus the non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally non-existent alliance between the secular Saddam Hussein and the fervent Muslim Osama bin Laden in 2003). Second, we have failed to understand those very elements – geography, ethnicity, religion, history – that we also got very wrong in Vietnam. When I reported from Iraq in 2003, these truths were so self-evident that a fully rational response would have had to include both laughter and tears. The ghost of the philosopher Santayana might have been heard droning across the Mesopotamian desert: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
The past then. At the time I began making Hearts and Minds in 1972, Vietnam had already surpassed the 18th Century rebellion against Great Britain – our ‘revolution’ – as America’s longest war. Few in the United States any longer wanted the war to continue, and President Nixon had reduced American troops from over half a million under President Johnson to less than 100,000. Bombing continued unabated. The idea was to turn the ground war over to the South Vietnamese who were fighting their compatriots from what was then North Vietnam as well as the Viet Cong in South Vietnam itself. Vietnamisation, as it was called, similar to the present Iraqisation, was the doctrine encapsulated in the ancient adage, ‘Let’s you and him fight.’
For several months my colleagues and I did research that involved reading, looking at footage from this most filmed of all wars, and traveling around the U.S. in the hope of taking the moral temperature of the country in terms of patriotism, national identity, and how people felt about the war itself. At length I winnowed all this down to three questions I wanted the film to address. They were these: Why did we go to Vietnam in the first place? What was it we actually did there? And what did this doing in turn do to us?
Hearts and Minds neither asks nor answers these questions. They are never mentioned in the film itself. Nothing dates so quickly, nor so distances the audience from the scene itself, as the narration of most documentaries. I wanted to make an experiential film, not an explanatory one. Yet each sequence in Hearts and Minds is inspired by those three questions and attempts to address one or more of them. Though I now knew these questions, I still didn’t know how to make the film.
My first day in Vietnam I was taken by our researcher to a bombed village not far from what was then Saigon. I was only looking around; we were not filming yet. The villagers were trying to gather their belongings into the few homes that had not been destroyed. In a bomb crater perhaps 25 or 30 feet across I saw a bicycle wrapped around the remains of a tree. A large cooking bowl, glazed in bright colors, lay in several cracked pieces near the bicycle. Then I saw an arm, a leg, another leg, a torso, the other arm, and finally the head of a child’s doll scattered around the crater. I’d seen no wounded human being, not even a dead animal. Yet somehow those objects – the bent bicycle, the shards of a cooking pot, and the child’s doll – all told a war story to me, and in that moment I felt completely de-politicized, un-opinionated, about the rights or wrongs of either side in the war. If I had been a praying person I have asked God to let the Americans win, or let the North Vietnamese win, or let there be an agreed stalemate, but please let it happen now. Let there be no more bomb craters nor the things that bomb craters make you imagine.
In the next moment I also recognized something about war coverage in general and about the way I wanted to make the film. American television networks were showing craters like the one I was looking at, and far worse. The horrors of war were not hidden from the American public. The way television covered the war was to begin the scene just as it had hit me. The camera focuses on the bicycle twisted around the tree. It pulls back to reveal the broken cooking bowl and goes on with its reverse zoom to show the severed limbs of the doll and the entire bomb crater. The camera continues to pull back until, in the foreground, a reporter stands. As he begins to speak – it was almost always a ‘he’ in Vietnam – the television audience no longer experiences the war’s actual effects.
At this point the audience hears the reporter explain how the village was bombed because there were Communists in it, or was bombed perhaps by mistake, or the Communists were killed here or they ran away. The more eloquent his explanation, the more we are in his capable hands as we take in facts and form opinions. Whoever has been killed and whatever has been destroyed in this village, the reporter himself is well put together, nicely turned out in pressed fatigues, and we can safely identify with him, the true experience of the war now mercifully removed from our presence. Before we saw the reporter, we had actually seen something of the war itself for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, the length of time it took the camera to pull back from the close-up of the bicycle wrapped around the tree. This fifteen seconds is what American television executives call ‘dead air,’ and they hate it. They want that reporter front and center before the audience attention has a chance to wander, to click perhaps to another channel where the news is cheerier.
But that long moment while the camera seemed to be by itself, educational but unaccompanied by pedantry, meant everything to me in terms of experience and feelings. I decided that day I’d make a complete film about those fifteen seconds of ‘dead air.’ Hearts and Minds, for better or worse, is the result.
Back to the present. When I was in Iraq it was hard to find ordinary citizens, regardless of how much they had suffered under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, who did not despise the sight of Coalition troops patrolling their streets and riding around their homes in tanks. A group of villagers in northern Iraq, who welcomed American troops at first, had turned bitter and hostile after their neighborhood had been shot up, their homes searched and several of them beaten one night by American soldiers suspecting them of being members of Saddam’s Baath Party. “We thought it was a joke at first until they broke down the door,” one man told me. “No American ever was tortured by Saddam’s thugs like I was. I hated the bastard, and now I hate the bastards who replaced him.”
Leaving a mosque in Baghdad one day after hearing the supposedly moderate imam preach that it was the duty of every Iraqi to oppose Coalition forces with violence, I asked an Iraqi who had become a friend if he thought the entire war had been a mistake. “Not exactly,” said this man who had a Shia father and a Sunni mother. “Saddam Hussein was like cancer and the invasion by the Americans and the British was chemotherapy.” Did that mean he saw us, now that Saddam was gone, as liberators? “Absolutely not,” he said. “You are occupiers who have done everything wrong since chasing Saddam out of his palace. When the cancer is gone, chemotherapy only makes us sicker. The sooner you are out of here the better.”
My friend angrily criticized midnight bombings of homes containing only grandparents and their grandchildren after someone had fired a grenade down the block. The Anglo-American policy I observed in Iraq appeared aimed less toward peace than pacification, and the Iraqis are demonstrably less pacified this year than last, and last year than the year before.
Reflections of our current position in Iraq can be found both in Vietnam, where American soldiers could never be certain if villagers were friends or foes, and in Iraq itself. Following World War I, T. E. Lawrence filed a dispatch to the Sunday Times of London describing British policy in what is today Iraq. “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap,” Lawrence wrote, “from which it will be difficult to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”
Let us pause for the naming of places. When we hear Basra, Najaf, Samarra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, along with the daily dispatch from Baghdad, are we not reminded of Danang, Hue, Pleiku, Cam Ranh Bay, Bien Hoa, Hanoi, Haiphong, and wartime Saigon? The names return as insistent echoes in the recesses of our inner ear, old melodies, as if they were our auditory madeleines. But Iraqis have made their own judgment. A thoroughfare in Sadr City, Baghdad’s huge slum, has been renamed Vietnam Street.
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EVENTS during our session on “Looking South: in the US and across borders.”

Sunday, August 12, our Movie Evening pot-luck cookout (salads, side dishes, deserts) , 5:30 pm
screening, 7 pm
The Sixth Section (and other films on hidden worlds in transnational space)

With filmmaker Alex Rivera.
The Sixth Section uses humor, visual effects, animation and traditional documentary techniques to tell the story of Mexicans who left their village of Bouqueron to find work in the blasted postindustrial environs of Newburgh, New York, and from there created an association, Grupo Union, through which they maintain an active life in their hometown a thousand miles away. Reviewers call it a work of "cinematic bounty", "conceptually sophisticated" and also "jaw-dropping." Also two shorts by Rivera: Why Cybraceros? and The Borders Trilogy

Friday, August 17, at 7:30pm, our Speaker Evening
"Two Years After Katrina: Disaster, Race & American Politics"

Featuring Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton, and author of the award-winning Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. On the cusp of the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Harris-Lacewell, who has spent much of the past two years examining the storm’s aftermath in New Orleans, will consider a question that was almost unimaginable before the disaster in August 2005: how could a grand, storied city be destroyed, its people flung to the far corners, and, past the news cycle, America wouldn’t really care? A brilliant, vivacious speaker, she will explore the politics of race, survival, migration and resistance. While the event is free of charge, if you would like to bring a desert to share with others after the talk, please do so.

Those who are interested in attending the Kopkind Public Events and need directions to the Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford, Vermont, should contact the administrator of Kopkind, John Scagliotti at john@afterstonewall.com

“Lights, Camera, Take Action!”The Brattleboro Reformer headline last year.

At the Organ Barn at Treefrog Farm, Guilford, VT
Aug 2nd to 4th open to the public, screenings begin at 7pm

Co-Sponsored by The Center for Independent Documentary
http://www.documentaries.org/index.html

SCHEDULE:

Thursday, August 2nd 7pm

Haiti’s Piggy Bank and Black Dawn

Robin Lloyd and Doreen Kraft will be here to present two films from Green Valley Media. HAITI’S PIGGY BANK, THE STORY OF THE LOSS AND RECOVERY OF THE HATIAN CREOLE PIG tells the powerful story of an American non-profit development organization, Grassroots International, joining forces with the National Peasant Movement of Papaye, to reintroduce the Creole pig to the Haitian Countryside after being eradicated with US government pressure in the 1980’s due to fears of swine flu being spread to the American Pig Industry. The other film for the evening is called BLACK DAWN, where paintings spring to life in this animated folktale. Black Dawn not only explores Haiti’s early history, but also offers a captivating introduction to its culture, rich folklore and religion. The filmmakers transform paintings by prominent Haitian artists into a visually exquisite tribute. Green Valley Media is a non-profit production and distribution group located in Burlington, Vermont, and was founded in 1974 to promote awareness of social issues and bring unheard voices into the mainstream. More information at http://www.greenvalleymedia.org/haiti.php3?ticket=

Friday, August 3rd, 7PM

Man of Two Havanas

We are pleased to present Vivien Lesnick Weisman’s documentary MAN OF TWO HAVANAS, which recently screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The story of Cuban journalist Max Lesnick as told by his daughter, whose childhood was filled with bombings and assassination attempts on her father. A childhood friend of Fidel Castro, this film explores Lesnick’s involvement with the Cuban Revolution, his eventual move to Little Havana, Miami, where he launched the Spanish publication of Replica, and follows his return to Cuba to help end the embargo. It delves deep into the story behind the embargo and why it still holds today, including the US Government’s involvement in using Cuban nationals to commit acts of violence against their own people. Using top-secret CIA audiotapes, Vivien also reveals the fascinating history of Cuban American relations. Our special guest for the evening will Sandy Levinson, long time director of the Center For Cuban Studies, who will discuss how films have held a special place in presenting Cuba to the world and how Americans, like Michael Moore continue to draw on the Cuban experience while making films.

Saturday, August 4th, 7PM

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin
(Music to follow after film)

Five years in the making and winner of more than 20 awards and honors in the U.S. and abroad, BROTHER OUTSIDER illuminates the life and work of Bayard Rustin, a visionary activist and strategist who have been called “the invisible man” of the civil rights movement. A tireless crusader for social and economic justice, a disciple of Gandhi, and a mentor to Marin Luther King Jr., Rustin dared to live as an openly gay man during the fiercely homophobic 40’s though 60’s. The film reveals the price that Rustin paid for this openness. The film has been described as “beautifully crafted” (Boston Globe), “rich in humanity” (africana.com) and “a potent and persuasive piece of historical rediscovery” (Los Angeles Times). The directors of the film, Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer will be in attendance and will take questions following the screening.
http://www.rustin.org/

Following the Q&A the festival closes with the JAZZ IN THE BARN with the Shakers n’ Bakers. The band is made up of leading improvisers of the New York jazz/new music scene who perform reinterpretations of Shaker “vision” songs, received in states of inspiration by young women of the Shaker religious community during the years 1837-50

Those who are interested in attending the Kopkind Grassroots Film Festival and need directions to the Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford, Vermont, should contact the administrator of Kopkind, John Scagliotti at john@afterstonewall.com