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The War in Spain Has Ended Long Ago, Aunt Rose
Thursday, April 22, 2010, 6:49 AM

SNCC holds a reunion, from young and black to old and gray. Ron Radosh writes:

These days, there is nothing old civil rights activists like to do better than hold reunions, where like World War II veterans, they trade war stories, recall the “good fight,” and praise themselves for leading the struggle which eventually led to the election of America’s first African-America President.

It should be no surprise then to find SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) activists “now averaging 65 years of age” engaging at such nostalgia at their recent reunion in Raleigh, North Carolina.

There was some attempt to insist on the relevance of SNCC today. Eric Holder “told the SNCC veterans, ‘There is a straight line from those lunch counter sit-ins to the Oval Office today.’ The purpose of the event was not simply to reminisce, but to ‘rekindle the spirit of 1960 and build on SNCC’s achievements,’ Holder added. ‘There is still marching to be done.’”

But mostly it was reminiscence and self-congratulation, of a kind so old, and hackneyed, and past its sell-by date, that, reading about it, I began to remember—of all things—Allen Ginsberg’s 1958 poem “To Aunt Rose”:

Aunt Rose—now—might I see you
with your thin face and buck tooth smile and pain
                     of rheumatism—and a long black heavy shoe
                            for your bony left leg
   limping down the long hall in Newark on the running carpet
                     past the black grand piano   
                            in the day room
                                    where the parties were
             and I sang Spanish loyalist songs   
                     in a high squeaky voice
                            (hysterical) the committee listening
                     while you limped around the room
                            collected the money—
   Aunt Honey, Uncle Sam, a stranger with a cloth arm
                     in his pocket
                        and huge young bald head
                           of Abraham Lincoln Brigade

In some ways, of course, it’s a straightforward example of the Ubi Sunt genre of poem: Where are the snows of yesteryear? And, in some ways, “To Aunt Rose” is part of the mockery, then emerging, of the old Stalinist left by what would come to be called the New Left. But it ends:

last time I saw you was the hospital
             pale skull protruding under ashen skin   
                     blue veined unconscious girl   
                           in an oxygen tent
             the war in Spain has ended long ago   
                           Aunt Rose

And whatever one thinks of Allen Ginsberg as a poet and a man—Norman Podhoretz wrote a personalized and fascinating and damning analysis back in 1997—that’s a pretty good line, which we ought to remember for a variety of occasions in which we find ourselves refusing to let go of the past lest we not matter in the present: the war in Spain has ended long ago, / Aunt Rose.

1 Comment

    Betty-Chia Karro
    April 24th, 2010 | 12:54 pm

    The war in Spain has ended; but the struggle for civil rights does continue. Take a look at Belafonte’s address at the SNCC conference. He spoke of his current work to address the problems of the pipeline to prison that our young are facing.

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