Charles Kaiser on the song that could change this election

Blowin' in the Wind

"In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope." —Barack Obama

And now it all comes down to Tuesday, with an election that features half the nation. Americans my age may never see another moment like this one, so full of possibility, and fraught with risk.

It has been 40 years since the last time we felt this way, when the teenagers of the '60s drank this elixir of hope, the one that buoyed us for a few short weeks in the spring of 1968. After Gene McCarthy's opposition to the war in Vietnam pushed Lyndon Johnson out of the presidential campaign, we believed in miracles. That lasted for four days, until Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. Then, somehow, for eight more weeks, Bobby Kennedy kept hope alive, until he too was cut down by a bullet. The year ended with the election of Richard Nixon, and the politics of fear have mostly ruled America ever since.

In 1969, the left went to sleep, the right went to work, and we have been reaping a pestilence from those postures ever since. By worshiping greed and cultivating fear of blacks and gays and everything else that is "other," the Republicans have triumphed in seven of the past 10 presidential elections. And for the past seven years, George W. Bush has wallowed at the altar of his "architect," Karl Rove, a man whose politics are nothing but an homage to the ghost of Joe McCarthy.

And they had the gall to call themselves a party of values, a party of Christians.

But now the echoes of those fabled '60s moments when everything seemed possible are getting steadily louder. In Iowa, Xers and Millennials came out in unprecedented numbers to create the first Obama miracle. Then the sons and daughters of the men and women who were mostly disenfranchised before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came out to produce the second miracle of South Carolina.

Just as we were in 1968, the righteous ones today are propelled by their hatred of a terrible war, and led by a man whose words have the mystical power to elevate everyone who listens to them.

It's true, of course, that it requires a leap of faith to support this largely untested man from Kenya and Kansas and Hawaii and Illinois. But as Frank Rich pointed out yesterday, it is exactly the same leap that was required to fall in love with the possibilities of John F. Kennedy. That is why Teddy and Caroline performed such a remarkably explicit passing of the torch to this vessel of hope—after Caroline's children convinced her that Barack was the man who might finally carry us forward again.

Until last Friday, one essential element of the 1960s was still missing—the fleeting synergy of culture and politics, which actually made all our improbable hopes possible. The melodies and the lyrics of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Arlo Guthrie combined with the politics of civil rights to produce a kind of alchemy whose powers have eluded us ever since.

Suddenly, three days ago, that gap has filled in magnificent fashion with a music video inspired by the words Barack delivered after he lost the New Hampshire primary.

The song was written by Will.i.am, the black rapper born William James Adams, Jr., in Toronto in 1975. The film was directed by Jesse Dylan, the first son of Bob—the boy for whom his father wrote "Forever Young."

In just two days last week, the two artists gathered their friends to produce "Yes, We Can": four minutes and 30 seconds of pure magic. Herbie Hancock and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are the video's only human links to the past, but it's filmed in black and white, which gives it the feel of the early '60s. And Hancock's jauntiness at the piano is the perfect counterpoint to the tragic eyes of Jabbar.

The words are all from Barack's speech. Now they are crisscrossing the planet at lightning speed via the Internet. Each stanza is delivered by Barack with the stunning precision that is his trademark. They are echoed by 36 black and white men and women who came together for this spectacular demonstration of the power of words and music and images. This is how it begins:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.
Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a president who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land.

The song evokes the catchiness of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant," the brilliant referencing of Don McClean's "American Pie," and the soaring power of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In the Wind," all at once.

It is dangerous, I know, to hope like this. As the song says, "We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come." We know "that the battle ahead will be long," but we must "always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change."

Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

---

Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, New York, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone, Details, Interview, The Advocate, Vogue, and Salon. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton. To find out more, visit charleskaiser.com.