Dizzy for President!

[BFrank]

Dizzy for president!
- John Fordham
Wednesday October 20 2004
The Guardian

American politics could have turned out very differently if a little-known presidential campaign of the mid-1960s had been able to vault the millionaires-only hurdle. Duke Ellington could have been secretary of state, Max Roach could have been running the military, and the CIA might have been under the thumb of that master of subterfuge, Miles Davis himself.

The presidential candidate offering these irresistible alternatives was the trumpeter and bebop pioneer John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, who declared himself a runner in 1964, up against Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. As well as a potential cabinet of jazz all-stars, Gillespie's ticket advocated US withdrawal from Vietnam, putting African-American astronauts into space, and renaming the White House the Blues House.

The short-lived Gillespie presidential run is being celebrated from now until voting day 2004 at the Soho Theatre in London, in American actor Jake Broder's Vote Dizzy! Broder is better known for his devotion to the late satirist, surrealist and all-round subversive Richard "Lord" Buckley, whose influence has been audible in artists from Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor to Robin Williams and Captain Beefheart. Though Broder's Lord Buckley show provides much of the fuel for Vote Dizzy!, the impetus of the 2004 election has turned it into a hybrid of Buckley material and Gillespie campaign-trail anecdote, with live jazz, spoof political conventions and John Hendricks's original Vote Dizzy! election song (performed by vocalist David Tughan) thrown in.

Gillespie got his nickname from his habit of taking a joke a long way, but he never meant the presidential gag to get as far as it did. In 1963 he had marketed "Dizzy for President" badges to raise money for Core (Congress for Racial Equality), and a variety of civil rights projects under Dr Martin Luther King's direction. But his fans were so keen on the idea, he decided to run with it. Shortage of cash forced Gillespie out of the race long before polling day, but not before fans had had a chance to preach their favourite gospel - that if the world's leaders understood the open, collectively motivated, border-crossing language of jazz, nobody would be rich, but nobody would mind and the world might be safer and saner.

"When you dig under the surface of most comedy," Broder says, "you often find anger and fury. But not with Lord Buckley and not with Dizzy. Dig into there and you just find love. They were tilting at windmills, but aren't we all?"

[Gary Sisco]

I voted for him again later on, a couple of times.

[A. Kingstone]

Does Ralph Nader know about this?

[Gary Sisco]

Who cares?

[A. Kingstone]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Who cares?

...3rd candidate, independent-I realize this is a touchy subject but jeez....

[BFrank]

I thought the Lord Buckley connection was interesting, actaully.

[Gary Sisco]

A. -- I know, I know, I went and took a vote away from Dukakis and another from Clinton. (You see? You see? It's all my fault.) ;-) I'd have taken one away from Mondale as well but I was in Nicaragua, practicing a more aggressive form of rebellion.

!Yo y mi gente votaremos por el Frente!

[A. Kingstone]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

A. -- I know, I know, I went and took a vote away from Dukakis and another from Clinton. (You see? You see? It's all my fault.) ;-) I'd have taken one away from Mondale as well but I was in Nicaragua, practicing a more aggressive form of rebellion.

!Yo y mi gente votaremos por el Frente!

Really!! Sandinista?

I remember a Playboy interview (no really) with Ortega and the the other leaders, seven in total I believe, who would not be in any room together at the same time for fear of assasination. Ortega said when questioned on receiving aid from the Soviets that they were under attack and while in a fight you will accept help from anybody.

[Gary Sisco]

And you will, in fact. Who wouldn't?

There were nine, actually. Three from each of the three tendencies that existed in the FSLN for several years until just prior to the final insurrectionary wave.

It's bullshit about them not being all in the same room. I saw all of them sitting in a group on bleecher seats, many times, during demostrations of tens and even hundreds of thousands of people, almost all of them armed. I (and many others) was close enough several times to have tossed a grenade and killed all nine of them, no problem, and was never even questioned by their security, though obviously a gringo and also armed, and armed while carrying a knapsack at the same time, which could have contained any number of things dangerous to their health.

It's a completely different scene when a country's leadership has nothing to fear from its people. No everyday joe in the US would ever get that close to anyone with real power, nor would you ever see them all in the same place like that, in public, never mind in a public that's a demonstration the size of Woodstock, and armed as well.

[A. Kingstone]

Was the Sandinistas downfall democratic?

[Gary Sisco]

Sure, if you ignore the people having been ground down by a terrorist war paid for and directed by the US, and which could have gone on and on for as long as it took for an election to have the US's desired results. There was an election in '84 that I call The Election That Never Happened because it's never mentioned in American accounts. It didn't have the desired result, so it didn't happen and, necessarily, wasn't "fair." You'll soon see the same process work itself out in Iraq, which will get a democratic gubmint, like it or not.

Basically, the war -- which claimed plus or minus 50,000 lives, on top of the 50k or the anti-Somoza struggle took -- in a country of 3 million people, half teenagers, at the time -- necessarily, had to more and more take priority over everything else, including the changes that had been instituted by the revolution earlier on, and of course, the endless economic damage and cost, plus the embargo by the US (for long the country's major, not to say only, trading partner), and the constantly decreasing to less than worthless currency, and etc.

Not to say that FSLN didn't bungle shit in several important ways, the most important of which, from my perspective and also from talking to and listening to local people in many towns, was the failure to hold *municipal* elections. The FSLN -- and the US -- were much too focused on national elections, when the people themselves were often more concerned with local ones, for obvious reasons, as they are most anywhere. Indeed, the US never even raised that issue. And the draft (which was universal) became more and more unpopular as the war went on and on and on.

(I've still to this day never heard or read about a municipal election there.)

Basically, the people got tired of what looked like and would have been endless warfare along with an increasingly grinding poverty (even by longtime Nicaraguan standards). They more and more asked why it was that they had to be a revolutionary example for the people elsewhere and be expected to apparently endlessly sacrifice literally everything in a futile war against a superpower, which viewed it as essentially a minor dust-up (both parties).

They needed a change, so they voted for one. And of course, they got one. Not a single clause of the truce agreement was carried out by Chamorro's or any other gubmint since, and the economy now is virtually nonexistent, and of course Americans have long moved on to other things and no one gives a fuck, if they even remember, which most don't. And many of voting age or more now were too young at the time to remember anything from "before." So, that's that.

In there also of course was the collapse of the USSR, which didn't actually give them all that much support, really, but it *did* give Cuba much support (on the same scale as the US gives to Israel in fact, then and now, adjusted for inflation), which allowed Cuba to very much help out, by paying for things like sugar refineries and what have you. Cuba couldn't continue that once they lost the Soviet's economic underwriting. Most of the international support was moral and political support more than material, if truth be told. Which it rarely is, of course, here or anywhere.

I want to add for clarification, however, that I was not a Sandinista. Americans use that term way too lightly. A Sandinista, capital S, meant being a member of the Frente, which I wasn't and couldn't have been, and which not many Nicaraguans were, actually. One of my best Nicaraguan friends was Tomas Borge's personal bodyguard but wasn't approved for membership in the Frente because he was considered "too cosmopolitan" for their tastes. Strange that he could be trusted with Borge's life but not as a member of the party, but true nevertheless.

I wasn't a small s sandinista, either. I was socialist revolutionary peforming my internationalist duty and fulfilling personal commitment to *the Nicaraguan people's revolution* by helping them build it in any way I could, and defend it as well, when forced to. In fact, I had many a long and interesting political argument with Sandinistas (who never took offense, by the way) over many issues, and indeed cemented many friendships by doing so. Argument makes people's positions clearer and hence, ironically, helps everyone to know who their friends are. Or aren't. I was with the people all the way, and with the Frente for as far as they went with the people, which was very far, and one whole hell of a lot farther than the "democratic" gubmints since.

Nevertheless, for many years, the FSLN was undisputably the most popular political organization of any kind in the country, which was very much a multiparty place. The elections of '84, which I witnessed en toto, from the initial announcement through the campaign through the voting process itself, had seven parties running, no problem. Three on the left and three on the right, plus the Frente -- and a couple of the parties on the right were openly in support of Raygun's terrorists and were also directly and openly subsidized by the US. They were still allowed to make propaganda and run campaigns freely -- which would never happen here in the US, clearly. The Frente won a large majority, hands down, simply because they were the most popular, the largest, and the most organized of the lot, no comparison.

But since they won, hands down in a free election, the election has ceased to exist in American memory, including that of the journalists who covered it at the time, judging from the shit they write now.

Whatever. A long time ago. That world no longer exists.

[A. Kingstone]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Argument makes people's positions clearer and hence, ironically, helps everyone to know who their friends are. Or aren't. I was with the people all the way, and with the Frente for as far as they went with the people, which was very far, and one whole hell of a lot farther than the "democratic" gubmints since.

.

Gary : Thanks so much for your lenghty and passionate response. In your response I've gained a glimse of many things, not least of which is seeing you more clearly.

I am guilty of forgetting.

I apologise to others for usurping this thread.

[Gary Sisco]

You're welcome but, yeah, we should let this one die. It's not an appropriate forum.

And I'll probably vote for Dizzy again more than once in the future. Even in his grave, he's a better choice than the braindead vampires running ting today (or likely to tomorrow).

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

You're welcome but, yeah, we should let this one die. It's not an appropriate forum.

OK.

Where's Gary Sisco and what have you done with him?