Living in Long Beach, California is a mixed bag. While the air quality is not as bad as it is in nearby Wilmington, you are fairly safe in assuming that no one living in Santa Monica or Malibu or Huntington Beach is yearning to drive here and spend a day looking at the non-existent waves of very polluted water in Long Beach’s bay. The streets are in terrible condition; potholes abound. On the other hand, the city does have neighborhoods that provide some sense of psychological refuge from the insidiousness of the right-wing fanaticism that has become pervasive in part of this country. There is more tolerance here, even for people who support Trump. No one physically attacks them, as happens in other parts of the country to people who criticize the current occupants of the White House. For all its imperfections, Long Beach has been my home city for two decades. In many ways, its ethnic, gender, and cultural diversities represent the possibilities of a country that would still claim to have meaningful ideals. How long Long Beach, as a city, and California, as a state, can hold out, however, is difficult to gauge. Will the dictatorial accelerant in Washington, D.C. manage to subdue California by 2028, or will it end up being the lone holdout?
California may end up, in fact, becoming the equivalent of Massachusetts in the 1972 election: the only state to object to the election of the GOP’s candidate for president. The majority of voters in 49 states preferred Richard Nixon, who then ordered a massive bombing campaign in Vietnam called “Operation Lineback II.” Its targets included civilian sites, such as Hanoi’s main hospital. If you ask me if I have forgiven the people who voted for Nixon, the answer is no. If you ask me whether I believe that the current occupants of the White House feel any shame or guilt about this part of American history, the answer is no.
I don’t hate the country I live in. I just loathe its hypocrisy. “Peace with honor” was supposedly Nixon’s goal. What honor? The honor of having dropped more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in all of Europe during all of World War II? The honor of targeting a hospital? The honor of My Lai? The honor of a young girl drenched in napalm and running down a country road?
Would it be any different if I lived elsewhere? China? Russia? Indonesia? Israel? Are you kidding? The leaders of those countries are even more appalling than Trump, who is currently engaged in a campaign that implicitly is aligned with an ideology that justifies ethnic cleansing. He is hardly the first U.S. president to promote domestic partitioning or to favor one set of people over another. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 was intended to address the assistance that this country might offer to those in Europe who were displaced by the ravages of World War II.
At the same time, this country was loading people who did the hardest work for the least money onto airplanes and sending them back to Mexico. One of those planes crashed, on January 28, 1948. Woody Guthrie wrote a poem about it, which later was set to music by Martin Hoffman. This song is a classic piece of protest art. What amazes me is how few people have heard of it. Of course, I probably would not know of it if it were not for a friend, the songwriter Patty Zeitlin, who also attended the Church in Ocean Park back in the mid-1970s. It is in her honor that I nominate this song to be part of your playlist today.
“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” by Woody Guthrie and Martin Hoffman
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22Deportee%3A+(Palne+Wreck+at+Los+Gatos&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:6a291eed,vid:qu-duTWccyI,st:0
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22Deportee%3A+(Palne+Wreck+at+Los+Gatos&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:b86d1d23,vid:lAgRmr0DafA,st:0
(Bruce Springsteen’s cover version)
POSTSCRIPT: After writing this blog entry, I found that a recent newspaper article by Petula Dvorak in the Washington Post has also addressed the relevance of this song.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2025/01/31/migrant-deportations-woody-guthrie-deportees/
(This article was published less than two weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated.)
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Thought experiment: Maybe Stephen Colbert should invite Mr. Springsteen on his recently cancelled television show to sing this song.
About Bill Mohr