Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (iii)

On a physical level in August 1971, I was still attracted to the white working-class suburban women in their late teens and early 20's that I would see riding the same buses I rode to beaches on Long Island like Long Beach--or that I would see sunbathing on blankets on the same beaches that I sat on. But in late 1971, the U.S. mainstream media's political perspective and tv programming still seemed to generally reflect a mentality/value structure of repressed sexuality for the most part, encouraging the white women who grew up in the suburbs and hadn't attended college to still feel guilty about being into free love and, even, to a certain degree, pre-marital sex.

So unless the white working-class suburban women in their late teens or early 20's around me had broken somewhat from the dominant culturally straight mass media programming and had become more than plastic hippies, they usually seemed to be emotionally closed to getting involved with a hedonistic anarcho-communist hippie-type like myself in late August 1971. Especially, since I owned no car, had no money and was hunting around for a 9-to-5 wage-slavery slot on days when I wasn't hanging around on some beach in late August 1971.

And, in late August 1971, the Catholic Church still seemed to retain enough influence over white working-class teenage women and women in in their early 20's on Long Island who were of Catholic religious background, so that many of those who hadn't gone to college or become hippies would still seem to feel some guilt about becoming involved with a guy, unless they assumed the involvement would lead to a marriage and children (as well as an escape from a 9-to-5 wage-slave job).

Also, in late August 1971, radical feminist intellectual consciousness still had not penetrated much into the minds of most of the white working-class teenage women or women in their early 20's who hadn't been to college yet, especially since the U.S. mass media still hadn't yet begun even promoting even the non-radical, middle-class feminist careerist consciousness that it began promoting by the middle of the 1970's.

So, intellectually, most of the white teenage suburban women and college age women around me on Long Island still seemed to be on a very different intellectual/philosophical/psychological wavelength than I was in late August 1971; in terms of how they expected men and women should act in relationship to each other, beauty standards, what kind of men and women were most desirable as lovers, and what kind of goals and aspirations women and men should attempt to achieve in their lives during the remaining decades of the 20th-century--assuming they survived as individuals.

Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (ii)

With nothing happening much anymore politically in New York City in terms of a New Left Movement by August 1971, working collectively as part of some radical aboveground anti-imperialist political collective no longer seemed like an option for me. In late August 1971 I heard some vague news that George Jackson had been killed in prison in California. Prior to August 1971, his case and imprisonment had seemed more of an issue that California radicals and West Coast radicals responded to and too far away for radicals on the East Coast to get involved in. But the fact that prison authorities felt they could get away with assassinating George Jackson in late August 1971 reinforced my feeling that the New Left Movement for radical change--or at least its aboveground component--no longer posed any kind of immediate revolutionary political threat to either the Nixon regime or the U.S. white corporate power structure.

So during the last 4 months of 1971 I was more into just writing prose and writing folk love songs and protest folk songs than into any kind of either individual or collective radical political activism. Most people around me in the New York City area still seemed politically brainwashed or manipulated by the U.S. mass media; and the only way I felt I was able to respond to what I regarded as the low political consciousness of nearly all the people around me was to try to raise their consciousness in small ways via writing prose or folk songs, despite not having any outlet for either my prose or my protest folk songs.

Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (1)

By late August 1971 there wasn't much of a 1960s New Left left in New York City. Most of the late 1960s white New Left student activists and yippies had either gone underground, moved out of Manhattan to cities with larger white youth ghettos like Cambridge, Massachusetts or Berkeley, California or to the country in places like Maine, Vermont and New Mexico, had gotten off-campus 9-to-5 straight jobs or alternative jobs, or had returned to U.S. university campuses to resume their professional training for yuppie job slots within the "real world" of work or within the academic world of imperialist Amerika by the mid-1970s.

The scene on the beaches on Long Island like Long Beach didn't look much different than it had looked in the summers of the early 1960s, except for the fact that the teenage white guys and college student white guys now had longer hair than they had had in the pre-Beatles period of the 1960s; and some of the teenage and college student white guys now sometimes smoked pot and shared joints outside on the beach.

The teenage and college student white suburban women on the beach in their bathing suits seemed not much different than their counterparts had been in the early 1960s; and still seemed content to mostly just lie next to each other on blankets getting suntans and relaxing under the sun for a few hours, in-between brief intervals of swimming in the ocean and letting the men on the beach notice how they each looked in their bathing suits that summer.

But even during August 1970 of the previous year, only a few months after the post-Kent State/post-Jackson State campus upheavals in the United States, the suburban beach scene at Long Beach on Long Island probably still looked similar to how it had looked in August 1960 and failed to reflect the political crisis that the U.S. was in at that time.

Beaches on Long Island are probably the last place that the change in mass consciousness would be reflected, unless, of course, a change in local demographics and ethnic group or racial group numbers on the beach created some kind of inter-group racial or ethnic tensions on a particular beach. But even when the racial or ethnic background of the people who go to a particular beach on Long Island changes dramatically over a decade, what usually just seems to happen on these beaches is that many of the whites who used to go to a particular beach seem to end up finding another beach to go to swim at or sit on blankets at, if they're the type of white beachgoers who always want to be surrounded by a "white majority" at the beach.

Kind of crazy response, perhaps. But given the level of interpersonal racism, institutional racism and racial/ethnic tensions and divisions that have been built into U.S. capitalist society and its socializing process historically by the white racist U.S. white corporate power structure and its corporate media propaganda machine, perhaps not too surprising.