Power to the People

#595

The counterculture, 50 years on

There’s no shortage of material for this weekly editorial, only the occasional deficit in thinking and writing time. Three days in Melbourne and regular visits to the Sydney Film Festival have put a dent in my schedules, so this week’s postings will be a little more scattered than usual. As it happens, the first film I caught at the SFF was Kevin Macdonald & Sam Rice-Edwards’s documentary, One to One: John & Yoko. Rather than write a conventional review, I’m going to weave the film column into the editorial, looking at this movie in relation to the unfolding disaster that is present day America.

The film takes its title from a benefit concert John Lennon and Yoko Ono held in New York City in August 1972, to raise funds for disabled children at the mental institution, Willowbrook State School, Staten Island. The initial spark came from a report by Geraldo Rivera, who would later became known as an opinion monger on Fox News.

John and Yoko had moved to NYC in August 1971 and settled into a modest apartment in Greenwich Village. By John’s own account they spent much of their time sitting in bed, watching TV, where they saw the segment called Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, which showed thousands of disabled children living in horrifying conditions – scenes that would have been at home in London’s infamous Bedlam, or perhaps the Middle Ages.

It was the reverse side of what was usually shown on American TV – celebrities, game shows, razzle dazzle commercials selling all kinds of trash. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards dispense with ‘talking head’ memoirs and voiceover narration, creating a rapid montage of TV snippets that recur like advertisements throughout the film, alternating with extracts from the One to One concert, and other newsreel and interview footage.

It was the heyday of the Counterculture, of Flower Power, and the protests against the Vietnam War. Youth was in revolt, led by figures such as Jerry Rubin, the man behind the Yippies, who makes frequent appearances as the archetypal 60s radical. No-one watching this film would imagine he’d later become a stockbroker.

It was also a boom time for President Richard Nixon, who won the 1972 federal election by a landslide, taking 49 out of 50 states, and carrying the popular vote by 60.7%. This was despite popular opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the Watergate scandal, which had broken in June that year. It would be August 1974 when Nixon finally resigned the Presidency, his popularity in tatters.

John and Yoko embraced the radical poiltics of the day, appearing on platforms with Rubin and Allen Ginsberg, supporting humanitarian causes through public statements and their music. Attica State looked at the prison riot of September 1971 which turned into a bloodbath when the authorities reasserted control. Woman is the Nigger of the World, was the couple’s most prominent attempt at a feminist statement. Released as a single, it was rejected by many radio stations because of the notorious ‘n’ word.

While they plunged ever deeper into the politics of the day, John and Yoko were also involved with the avant-garde art scene. We eavesdrop on repeated phone calls in which Yoko is sourcing flies for her film, Fly (1970). It shows a fly crawling all over the naked body of a model, who remains motionless while the insect explores the corporeal landscape with great thoroughness. If you think that sounds weird, try listening to Yoko’s 22 minute ‘soundtrack’, in which she mimics all her favourite fly sounds.

If One to One confirms anything, it’s Yoko’s inability to distinguish art and self-indulgence. She shrieks, taps on drums and plonks fingers on a keyboard, in a vague simulation of musical performance. She is obsessed with getting access to Kyoko, her daughter from a previous marriage, but the filmmakers – without saying a word – show us an earlier time when the little girl was dragged through all of John and Yoko’s pop star-lifestyle engagements. It’s hardly surprising the father, Anthony Cox, decided to break off contact. To make matters worse he would soon become involved in a Christian cult.

Today, at 92, Yoko is probably more famous than ever, and just as eccentric. She’s still singing – if that’s what it may be called, and recording. She and her daughter have reconciled. Thankfully, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards’s film never ventures far beyond 1972.

During that time this documentary does not find much to celebrate in the marriage of art and politics. Not only does Yoko seem like a visitor from another planet, one cringes listening to Rubin and Ginsberg with their “revolutionary” waffle. The TV news excerpts speak far more eloquently about the state of the nation. Despite all the nostalgia this period invokes, the counterculture failed in all of its grand ambitions. One could say that it led to an overall liberalisation of atttudes and a greater awareness of issues, from racial discrimination to feminism, to environmental protection – but the re-election of Trump shows how skin-deep those things have been for millions of Americans, apparently for decades!

In 1972, the Nixon administration began proceedings to deport John Lennon, leading to a legal wrangle that would continue for four years until Lennon won the right to remain in the US.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s a warning for us not to imagine that the Trump era represents a radical rearrangement of American life and politics. The craziness we’re watching every day with growing stupefaction was already there in 1971, and much earlier. We can see Trump as a logical extension of attitudes that were already prevalent under Nixon.

Trump, an old-fashioned kinda guy, has shown a unique willingness to take America back to a time before the 1970s, even undoing some of the reforms that occurred under Nixon. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade case, the Supreme Court overturned state abortion bans. Nowadays, a stacked Supreme Court has thrown out this judgement.

In 1975 the horrors of state-run Willowbrook would bring about a major overhaul in the way people with disabilities were treated. Under Trump, with a little assistance from Elon Musk’s DOGE, social welfare and disability services are being scaled back, potentially consigning a huge number of people to poverty while disability is once again swept under the carpet. The catastrophe of Willowbrook was caused by chronic underfunding, so there’s every reason to believe those days will soon be returning.

Nixon initiated a relationship with China, making an historic visit in 1972, Trump has sparked a trade war with a far more powerful China.

Perhaps the most revealing – and scary – scenes in the documentary, show Nixon being greeted by crowds of people waving and shouting in adulation. These crowds are bigger than Trump’s MAGA hooplas, but no less enthusiastic. We realise that the noisy student protesters, the anti-war lobby, the womens libbers, the Black Power advocates, constituted only a small percentage of the United States population. When 49/50 states would vote for Nixon in 1972, it’s easy to see how the voters of today could elect Trump.

It may be the choice of clips, but every time Nixon appears in front of the camera, he looks devious and shifty – not the guy to sell you a used car.

Many Aussies find it incomprehensible that so many Americans could vote for Trump, but are today’s Americans much different from the ones who voted for Nixon? This time around, social media and cable TV have enabled all those scattered misfits to unite under the banner of the MAGA cult, where they pursue an alternative reality with the passion of true believers.

We all know what brought Nixon’s reign to an inglorious end, but Trump has already survived a series of even greater scandals. The big question is whether history repeats itself, and a President’s criminal behaviour finally brings him down, or whether all of America dances to a new tune, with the rule of law and the Constitution being overriden by the will of a supreme leader.

In the 1970s, despite what we might want to believe, a very large percentage of Americans seemed to be so unconcerned by Nixon’s brutal actions during the Vietnam War that they voted for him in overwhelming numbers. Today, amid plummeting opinion polls, Trump’s efforts at border protection and deportation still rate favourably with the public.

It's to be seen whether the riots in Los Angeles sparked by the over-zealous actions of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will force a different reaction. Until recently, it seemed middle America was OK with these commando raids, just so long as decent white folks were not touched. The danger for Trump is that by fulfilling his long-held fantasy of calling out the National Guard and the Marines, he may inflame the situation in LA and provoke copycat riots all over the country.

It would give him the excuse he craves for declaring martial law, a state he’d like to continue up until the mid-terms, which would naturally be suspended. The recklessness of Trump’s policies suggests this has been his intention all along. It didn’t matter if people hated what he was doing, or if the economy was tanking, because he never expected to test these measures in an election. But as the mid-terms are not due until November next year, this is an awfully long time to think of protesters facing off against the National Guard. It sounds more like the dreaded civil war many have prophesised.

Even if LA proves to be only a skirmish, the actions of ICE, driven by the White House’s answer to Nosferatu, Stephen Miller, will need to be managed carefully if the same kind of protests don’t erupt all over again. This suggests a bumpy ride for the following year, or however long it takes for even the Republicans to realise the reign of King Donald needs to be cut short. What will it take? Blood on the streets? More likely, a huge economic nosedive as retail and finance take a hit, with or without the whacko tariffs. Certain defeat at the ballot box might be a concern, but most of today’s Republicans would probably be relaxed about life under a dictatorship or an oligarchy, so long as their privileges were guaranteed. Trump’s isolationist policies have found him withdrawing American aid and influence from around the world, only to squander everything on civil strife and dysfunction.

Tricky Dicky leant on his sword when it became clear that his own Party was disgusted by his criminality and ready to impeach him. Trump has been blessed with a far more pliable, amoral and cowardly group of lackies - yet even these pathetic paper cutouts must have their limits. Trump has tested those limits far beyond anything Nixon – a conventional politician – could have conceived. When will the bubble finally burst? What’s happening in LA may be the catalyst for convincing Americans that life under Trump is not at all normal, and profoundly dangerous for everybody. But will the great awkening require an historic tragedy such as Peterloo or Tiananmen Square, in which armed forces fire on protesters?

Mayor Daley’s “shoot to kill” order, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, left a handful of protestors dead, and a permanent stain on American history. If the current surge of protests continues, one can expect the violence to escalate. Every major protest has its bad element – troublemakers, thrill seekers, thugs and looters that disrupt all plans for peaceful resistance. Given his ‘strongman’ fixations, a mere whiff of trouble is all the excuse Trump would require to demand his troops use deadly force.

We’re standing at the threshold of something that could become incredibly nasty. This particular fracas may not be the trigger, but unless there is a drastic change of policy in the way ICE is being used, the next round of confrontations can’t be be far away.

Looking back on the 1970s it’s almost touching to see the faith that figures such as Jerry Rubin, John and Yoko had in “the people” – the same people who gorged themselves on consumer junk, spent their lives watching TV, and voted for Nixon in record numbers. If that faith was eventually rewarded it was largely through Nixon’s personal efforts. We’ll soon find out if Trump has done enough to ensure his own downfall, or whether the show goes on and on, pushing America and the planet ever closer to the brink.

The art column looks at Cezanne to Giacometti, a selection of highlights from the Museum Berggruen in Berlin, now on display at National Gallery of Australia. It’s a first class group of works by artists such as Cezanne, Picasso, Klee, Giacometti, Braque and Matisse, supplemented by just as many items from a less illustrious bunch of Australian artists. It’s with some relief I can report that the Aussies are not disgraced in this juxtaposition, merely overshadowed. The quality of the Berggruen works, including an entire room of pictures by Paul Klee, makes this the most compelling show the NGA have staged for a long time.

The other article posted this week is a piece on French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, written for the Australian Financial Review. When I visited the United States it was amazing how many people were virtually apologising for their government, but the anxieties have only continued to escalate. The incredible MFA collection – which is capable of lending 19 Monets to the National Gallery of Victoria – is a reminder of the cultural power America once wielded, until about six months ago. It’s also a testimony to the lasting power of great art, as opposed to all the artistic and political experiments of the 1960s-70s, which caused ripples at the time but have faded away to nothingness, while the anger and violence that seems so endemic to US society have surged again to the surface.

One to One: John & Yoko

Directed by Kevin Macdonald & Sam Rice-Edwards

Written by Clare Keogh

Starring: John Lennon, Yoko One, et al

UK, 101 mins, M

Sydney Film Festival, 4-15 June 2025