Eulogy for Vic Sadot
Presented at his Celebration of Life
Ashland Nature Center
Hockessin, Delaware
January 13, 2019
by Phillip Bannowsky
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Vic Sadot
July 21, 1947-October 6, 2018 | |
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Vic Sadot’s musical career is charted beautifully by his
brother Rob in his remarks and
obituary, from Vic’s founding of the Americana
and folk-rock Crazy Planet Band to its re-incarnation as the Cajun-Zydeco
Planete Folle, and we learn how Vic so often performed at events in the
struggle for peace and social justice. I’d like to fill in a little with what I
know about the political activism integral to his musical career. When I’m
done, we’d like anyone else who has something to share about any aspect or
incident in Vic’s life to come forward.
Victor Rene Sadot. “Vic,” was a musician, writer, publisher,
social worker, disc-jockey, autoworker, and above all a revolutionary patriot.
A son of an autoworker who had come to America after his French home had been
force to quarter Nazi soldiers, Vic shared his father’s love for his adopted
home, in spite of the economic insecurities of working class life. It is
rumored (and now verified by his brother Rob) that he even led the Young
Republicans at the University of Delaware. However, like so many of us from of
that era, he was badly disillusioned as the truth about America’s aggression in
Viet Nam came to light and as peace and black liberation struggles met with
repression, but he was inspired by the protest, folk, and rock music of the era
and by the first principles of America’s founding mothers and fathers. A 1968
article in The Review, official
student newspaper at the university, lists Vic Sadot as a speaker at a rally
opposing the firing of Professors Rob Bresler and Al Myers. A year later, Vic
was named “Outstanding Senior” at a Student Government Association banquet
where then Governor Russell Peterson castigated students who disrupted classes.
Inside scoop: Peterson’s son was a conscientious objector and member of Students
for a Democratic Society.
I remember really getting to know Vic in Washington DC at a
peace demonstration in the early seventies. Around that time Vic and his
brothers Joe and Rob had been arrested at the Fort Belvoir Army base in
Virginia for leafleting the troops during an Armed Forces “Open to the Public
Day.” He was the public, an American citizen, and whether they liked it or not
he was going to act in the spirit of the nation’s founders. Joe, by the way,
used to publish a satirical newsletter called The Crazy Planet, hence the name of Vic’s band.
Back to what the founders had to say, their words inspired
Vic to become an organizer for the Delaware People’s Bicentennial Commission, a
group founded by Jeremy Rifkin that crashed various official parties put on in
1975 and 1976 and applied what founding patriots like Thomas Paine said about
King George to the corporate kings who had taken over. Vic recruited me and about
a dozen others to shake thinks up in the Company State. Once, the city of
Newark held a public bicentennial-slash-renaissance fair celebration, and of
course Vic and the rest of us showed up to exercise our free-speech rights, but
they tried to kick us out, trying to claim it was actually private. The brouhaha
revealed that one of the City Council members had a financial interest in the
event, even though she hoped that news would not be made public, but that’s
your corporate Queens for you. We had a lot of fun in PBC, a somewhat gonzo operation
in Delaware, where Vic set the tone.
Ovelapping somewhat with these activities, Vic began working
for Chrysler in Newark and was one of the founding members of what we called
the Progressive Movement, a rank-and-file faction of the United Automobile
Workers Local 1183 that agitated for civil rights, women’s rights, safety,
union democracy, and a return to the union’s first principles. In fact, Vic inspired one of our first
campaigns, the distribution of Labor’s
Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais. Vic wrote a review
in the Progressive Movement’s newsletter, and we managed to sell maybe a dozen
copies. These stories of radical agitators who built the labor movement had a
positive influence on the political environment at Newark Assembly where
several of us eventually won union office, although after Vic left.
One day while we were passing out our newsletter at the
front gate, a couple of guys from the leading faction showed up, clearly
looking for trouble, but we can’t completely blame them for what happened. We
had been on a short strike a couple weeks before and Lyndon Larouche’s phony
U.S. labor party showed up claiming that the strike was a plot by the C.I.A.,
that they were members of the University’s SDS chapter—they were not—that they
had many of their members in the plant—they did not—and they were taking over. Long
story short, these two union guys tried to tear the flyers out of Vic’s hands
and throw him over the rail, where most certainly he would have broken some
bones. Vic pulled away, fortunately, and started explaining to the guy
rationally how we were union brothers simply expressing our opinions blah blah,
but these guys had got themselves good and drunk to elevate their courage and
suppress their rational thinking. In 1979, Vic expanded into publishing. Carrying
on the tradition begun by the late 60s Heterodoxical
Voice and the early 70s Purgatory
Swamp Press, in 1979 Vic founded
the Delaware Free Press, changed to Delaware
Alternative Press after the first issue was hit with a cease and desist.
Somebody had already trademarked the name.
Soon after that, Vic joined the editorial board for the historic
Broadside—Sing
Out Magazine, the famous mimeographed music mag from New York that printed
words and music by topical singers from Woody Guthrie to Steve Forbert to Phil
Ochs. In 1982, Vic republished in Broadside
an article he wrote for the Delaware
Alternative Press called “Phil Ochs’ FBI File.”
Vic was the ideal musicologist to host the “Freewheeling
Roots Show” on the University of Delaware’s radio station in the early nineties.
He brought the spirit of Phil Ochs to Delaware’s airwaves, the spirit of “The
Broadside Balladeer,” to quote the title of Vic’s tribute song to Phil.
Over the years Vic contributed his music, analysis, and
activism to numerous environmental and social justice issues, from the campaign
to “Save White Clay Creek—Don’t Dam it” to the struggle against the suppression of Dupont: Behinnd the Nylon Curtain, by
Gerald Colby Zilg, to intervening to help fellow workers at the Newark Food Coop,
to the struggle for Democracy and Independence in Haiti, to Save the Whales and
to the dangers of Fukushima.
Vic saw countless deceptions and outrages emanating from the
national security state that ruled the country he loved, from the assassination
of JFK to Gulf of Tonkin incident to the Saddam’s missing weapons of mass
destruction. Accordingly, Vic took on the mantle of “the Truth Troubadour” on
behalf of the 9-11 truth movement, which holds that the attack on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon was a false flag operation. He composed and recorded
dozens of songs on the topic such as “The Ballad of Pat Tillman,” “Cheney’s in
the Bunker,” and “Trouble in the Rubble.” These songs can all be found under
Vic Sadot on
YouTube.
We lost touch somewhat after he moved to California in 2008,
but his name was always coming up in reports from the barricades. Vic had
always kept up the struggle, even when he was struggling with his own troubles.
Who knew he’d find peace in Berzerkely?
I recently learned that Vic had joined the Berkeley
Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, where he of course became chair of their
social justice committee. I had always known him as a non-believer in religious
mythology. We had been business partners painting houses in one period and
roommates in another, and we had many discussions about science, politics, and free-thinking.
Still, I think how Vic felt can be described in the words he applied to his
brother Joe Sadot, who died in 1978 at the age of 26. In Vic’s introduction to Green Leaves, the collected literary and
sketch work of Joe’s, Vic wrote:
“He rejected supernatural spiritualism, but he embraced the natural
spiritualism of awe and reverence for the mysteries of life and the intimacies
of love and comradery.”
Before I call on friends and family to share their memories,
I’d like us all to remember Vic and those of his family who have passed on in
the tradition practiced by South American revolutionaries who would call roll
for their fallen comrades. After each name, all assembled would call out “presente,” meaning the fallen are still
present in their works and in our hearts. Let’s try it first with Phil Ochs. I
say his name and you say “Presente! loud.”
Phil Ochs: Presente!
We’ll begin with Vic’s father, then his mother, his brother,
and himself.
Jean Sadot: Presente!
Eleanor Sadot: Presente!
Joe Sadot: Presente!
Vic Sadot: Presente!
The White Working Class is not some single thing seething with macho resentment, racism, and contempt for expertise, but a contradictory conglomeration of mostly decent, hardworking people, exploited, sneered at, and abandoned by a liberal elite, who are sometimes mischaracterized as left. I say this because I am of the white working class and of the left, having humped the line for 31 backbreaking years alongside workers—both white and of color—at Chrysler’s Newark Assembly Plant in Delaware. In the early ‘80s, they voted for me, a professed socialist, to serve them in the Plant Shop Committee for three years. They’d seen the newsletters I’d distributed with my comrades at the plant gates opposing speedup, pushing for safety, and urging affirmative action in our pale and male skilled trades. Later, in the late ‘90s, they voted nearly unanimously at our UAW local 1183 meeting to support my work chairing state-wide efforts to stop denying former felons their right to vote, a disenfranchisement targeting citizens of color. One of my proudest possessions is hanging in my office: a plaque my union gave me recognizing my work.
