Buying the Farm: Peace and War on a Sixties Commune

10. Annus Mirabilis (2002)

M 150 N 10 Annus Mirabilis (2002) The Buddhists? To those not watching the farm situation carefully, this was an unexpected development. Earlier, when Steve Diamond had suggested giving the farm to a group of local Buddhists, the reaction had been surprisingly positive. At the time, almost everyone except those actually living at the farm had considered it a very good idea. As with other good ideas, though—such as the two proposals from the community -based working committee and other calls for sensible solutions to the farm’s problems—its proponents had neither acted with sufficient strength nor found a champion able enough to carry it out. It had also been an improbable solution in that the local group probably could not have afforded the necessary renovations, nor was it likely that it would want to involve itself in the complex set of issues that divided the farm family and later sent it to court. Now, however, the idea played itself out in a somewhat different form. The name of the group that many came to hope would save the farm? The Peacemakers. In an interview in 2006, Harvey recounted the story behind this unlikely turn of events: As you know, I felt that the nature of the benefit concert from which we took the money to buy the farm mandated that it have a political mission . . . that’s one of the reasons I was comfortable turning the farm over to the Zen Peacemakers, which is an international organization focused on promoting peace and social justice. M 151 ANNUS MIRABILIS (2002) That was amazing magic; they were a perfect choice. They may have been the only choice in the sense that everybody agreed on them. It was incredible. I don’t know that there was another group on earth that would have gotten the same reaction. It’s as if they were manufactured to take over the farm, and I firmly believed that. Here’s how it happened. Bonnie Raitt’s been a friend of mine for a long time. We met in 1978, before MUSE. She is the premiere female rock’n’roll talent of our generation, but she’s more than rock’n’roll; she’s a magnificent human being. Bonnie had a husband, named Michael O’Keefe, who achieved immortality by being the son in The Great Santini, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award at the age of something like nineteen. He was also the caddy in Caddyshack. Hard to top that! Along the way, he became one of the Zen Peacemaker community. Well, I was agonizing in the middle of hell, you know, that period of what to do about the farm. This is probably in 2001, and—I couldn’t make this up—I was at my sister-in-law’s house in Columbus. She has two kids, and my kids were there, and we were running around this big family room, and the TV is on, and there’s a kids’ movie, and I hear this weird noise. It turned out to be a reindeer . There was this crazy kids’ drama on the TV, and I look at it, and there is Michael O’Keefe. It was a wacky role. I talked to him about it later. He loved it because he got paid really well. And I said to myself, “Oh, the Peacemakers!” I called him the next day, and I laid out the whole thing, and he said, “They’ll never go for it.” So I sent him a copy of Steve Diamond’s book What the Trees Said, and I said I just knew this was the group. I said, “These are the people, they have got to come to the farm.” He said, “No, no, no, they’ll never do it.” But he sent the book to Bernie [Glassman, founder of the Zen Peacemakers]. Bernie must have read it, and I guess Eve Marko, his wife. They were staying at a gorgeous place in Santa Barbara overlooking the ocean and, you know, why do they need a farm in Massachusetts? —and by the way, they were aware of some of the legal complications. They were in Santa Barbara at the same time that Steve was 152 N CHAPTER 10 there himself. Maybe he talked to them; I don’t know. For the Peacemakers , it was a stretch, but in the end, everybody agreed: it...