I’d been thinking about it the last couple days or so, since seeing the horrific video of Neda getting gunned down in Tehran, than seeing the stills of the heartbreakingly beautiful girl, Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, who “enjoyed music and was looking forward to learning how to play the piano,” according to one caption.
The pictures sear the mind as did The Picture from Kent State, as its called on one web site. The picture taken by one John Filo, “a young undergraduate working in the Kent State photo lab,” was taken when he took a break on May 4, 1970—right in the middle of the latest round of nationwide campus anti-war protests, this time following President Nixon’s April 30 announcement that the US military had invaded Cambodia and 150,000 more troops would soon be drafted.
After rioting in downtown Kent, Ohio, on the evening of May 1, the Ohio National Guard had been called in to maintain order. A protest rally was scheduled for noon at the University on Monday, May 4, and Filo took his camera to see if he could come up with an interesting shot. What he came up with—a picture of a young girl kneeling in augnuish over the body of one of the four students slain in a fusillade of National Guard rifle fire—won a Pulitzer Prize and is forever embedded in much of my generation’s collective memory.
Lest they be forgotten, the girl was Mary Vecchio. The dead student was Jeffrey Miller. The others who were killed were Sandra Scheuer, William Knox and Allison Krause (being a close friend of the great bluegrass artist Alison Krauss, who would be born just over a year later, I sometimes refer to Allison Krause as “the other Alison Krauss”).
I was a senior in high school in May, 1970, at James Madison Memorial in Madison, Wisconsin. I used to march in all the big demonstrations downtown at the University of Wisconsin campus, often coming home at night with my clothes reeking of tear gas. I’d jump in the shower and the gas would seep out of my long hair and into my eyes.
One night I ran right into an exploding can of pepper gas and I had to be treated at a nearby First Aid facility. Another time I hid in the bushes along the campus banks of Lake Mendota, a National Guard chopper hovering above and shining floodlights on protesters for on-ground Guardsmen to kick the shit out of.
The day after the Kent State shootings—or massacre, as it was also called, linking it with the Boston Massacre of Revolutionary War times—I and 100 others were suspended from school for protesting. The Memorial 101, they called us—the one group I’ll always be proud of being a part of.
And now that another young student is slain by her state’s agents of repression as she protested its repressive policies, I hear the righteous outcry by our politicans against that state—and against our president for trying to exercise caution and restraint in his remarks so as not to further incite those forces of repression. And I wonder, Where were they in 1970?
Among the most vocal is John McCain, who was a POW in North Vietnam after being shot down while bombing Hanoi—the type of action that engendered the anti-war protest movement to begin with. I don’t know what his thoughts are on Kent State or if he senses the same connection between Neda and Allison as I do. But I happened to attend Fox News Channel’s “Huckabee” show taping Saturday afternoon, and heard its host (and McCain’s vanquished Republican presidential rival) Mike Huckabee’s disturbing link of Neda’s murder and “the massacre of Tehran” with the Boston Massacre.
The Boston Massacre had occurred in 1770–200 years before Kent State–when five people died after British troops fired into a large crowd of civilians, some of whom were hurling snowballs at them. Huckabee termed these and the Tehran fatalities as “pathetic victims,” and surmised that they might not have been so victimized had they enjoyed the right to bear arms—as Americans do today.
By extension, of course, had the Kent State students been as well-armed as the Ohio Guardsmen, they might not have been so pathetically victimized—though I very much doubt that this is what Huck, a very nice guy, had in mind.
Like the Iranian demonstrators, some of the Kent State students threw rocks at their opposing heavily armed and willing enforcers of the state (the Bostonians threw small objects at the Brits, too, in addition to snowballs). And like the Iranians (and the Bostonians before them), they were no match for firemans.
“When dissent turns to violence, it invited tragedy,” rationalized Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler after the Kent State killings, which led to the closing of some 450 colleges in the U.S. due to the campus protests they engendered. For Ziegler and Nixon and those who sided with them, the kids brought it on themselves. And now Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is calling Neda’s killing “suspicious,” with the country’s ambassador to Mexico Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri suggesting that it was carried out by U.S. intelligence.
Back in my day, the political establishment blamed it on “outside agitators,” generally meaning communists and/or Jews from out-of-state. But back in my day, too, there was Johnny Cash.
I was at “Huckabee” as a guest of Larry Gatlin, who performed his new hit “Johnny Cash is Dead and His House Burned Down”—an ironically-titled but terrific tribute to his friend and mentor Cash and his immortal music.
Cash had gone to Vietnam at the height of the war to entertain the troops and came back with “Singin’ in Vietnam Talkin’ Blues,” his horrific take on “that little trip into livin’ hell.” Then in 1970 he had a Top 20 pop hit with “What is Truth,” in which a father explains to his three-year-old son that war is simply a place “where people fight and die,” before Cash himself asks, “Can you blame the voice of youth for asking ‘What is truth?’”
It was the same year as Kent State. I very much doubt that country music fan Huck, or anyone else of his ilk, confronted the Man in Black then on moral grounds–or any other. Whether or not they recognize the lonely voice of Tehran youth as descendents of Kent State is another thing.