@ETpro: Hello from Montserrat, my friend.
The beginning, for me, was the summer of ’67. I had grown up in what my father accurately described as a Kennedy Liberal environment, which at the time was considered just left of moderate, but in today’s political climate I’ve heard KLs referred to as Socialists and Communists. We were solidly middle class suburbanites. My father was a former Marine, decorated, working as an executive in the defense industry. Washington politics and its effect on the markets was my family’s after-dinner table talk. Politics and economics and a little sociology. Up until ’67, America for me was white, single family homes, big cars, and moms in A-line dresses who did their best to emulate Donna Reed and Doris Day. We were privileged to live in a country that was clean, safe, wealthy, and offered the succeeding generation a better life than the last. We had even rebuilt our former enemies, Germany and Japan, in our own image with our Marshall Plan dollars instead of subjugating them under an imperialistic jackboot like all the victors before us. At the very same time we were rebuilding everyone else’s country, we built an interstate highway system that we were told was the envy of the world. We helped fund and create a land in Palestine so the Jews could finally live in a place of their own with true self-determination, and they could defend themselves at their own borders. And we assisted them in their defense because they too had a right to exist and pursue happiness. We were good. We were above board. We didn’t kill people needlessly, Americans certainly didn’t torture people, we didn’t send our spies out to assassinate our enemies like the cowardly Nazis and now the Russians, and we most emphatically would never start a war. Americans didn’t do things like that. To put it simply, that would be un-American. We did, however, export democracy freely, and we pursued capitalism enthusiastically because it was the only system that really worked: enabling all men, who are created equal, to have a piece of the pie. But most of all, our government was for the people and by the people. There was never any doubt about that.
Up until ’67, I only knew life in the safe, quiet, all-white middle class suburbs of Sacramento. My biggest worries were how to talk to girls, baseball practice and my pitching arm, my grades, how to talk to girls, whether I would go out for football next year or follow my dad’s advice and wait another year, how many more eight o’clock Masses I would have to serve as altar boy before the Monsignor noticed I had done twice as many as the other guys, and how to talk to girls. I strongly related to TV shows like Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver, Dr. Kildare (I was always meant to be the doctor in our family), Perry Mason (my big brother was chosen to be the lawyer in the family because he was so argumentative), but especially My Three Sons. The sons’ problems were just like mine, and my parent’s solutions were a lot like their father’s. That was the world I lived in, just like Chip on My Three Sons. And there were millions of kids living in that same world with me.
The only black people I’d ever seen were on TV. There was a show starring a light-skinned “Negro” woman who worked in a hospital as a nurse. I don’t remember any episodes that showed her family life at home, just her on the job surrounded by other nurses and doctors who were all white. I remember being disappointed at not getting a glimpse of Negro family life. Her name was Julia and she was very pretty. In 1967, suddenly, there were other black people on TV that I hadn’t noticed before because I didn’t watch the news much until then. The Jesuit priests at school strongly suggested that we start watching the news because in the near future there were decisions we were going to be forced to make, and it would go much better for us if we were informed when making those decisions.
These new black people were often very black, not like Julia at all, and they were being attacked by dogs purposely let off their leashes by white southern police officers and beaten by National Guardsmen for causing riots because their right to vote, to assemble, to eat at the Walgreens counter, to sit where wished on the bus, to go to school wherever they were qualified, to drink out of the nearest drinking fountain, to even go to the bathroom at just any public restroom was being hindered by law and custom and they weren’t going to take it anymore. It was becoming apparent to me that maybe there were other Americans that didn’t think that all men were created equal at all.
There was also the war. It was on TV, too. Every night all three networks would show us a few minutes of grainy black and white film depicting our boys being carried on stretchers by other GIs who were bending over while at a dead run to avoid the chopper blades and sniper fire because the “LZ was still hot,” according to the correspondent who was helmeted, wearing a flackjacket and crouching in the reeds near the chopper. Sometimes there were even the thud, thud, thuds of mortars going off nearby and the correspondent would hit the dirt while the GIs didn’t even flinch. Our GIs, our boys, our brave sonzabitches who were there to stop the Domino Effect. There to stop Communism from creeping out of China and Russia and into these small, insignificant places like Nam and Laos that nobody ever heard of, and eventually to our doorstep and into our homes. I wasn’t sure, but I figured that probably meant no more baseball or any other sport, a change of schools, maybe a change of neighborhood as well, probably no more Monsignor and altar boy practice, and the Communists would probably even find a way to totally fuck up all my efforts in the girl department. As the GI stretcher bearers neared the camera a bloodied, bandaged arm slipped out from under the tarp, just dangling there and the tarp was covering the kid’s face. They were carrying out the dead under fire. Americans don’t leave their men on the battlefield. No man left behind. Everybody makes it home. Because we are good people.
Then there were the campuses. There were sit-down strikes in protest of the war. There were demonstrations that often, after the cops showed up, became riots. There were draft card burnings. During the winter of ’66—’67, nearly every major US college campus had been shut down. There were Viet Nam war veterans, many still on active duty, speaking out against the war and for the college kids. As the war got bigger, the protests got bigger and more intense. 100,000 Mothers Against The War marched on Washington. Women carrying babies from the Washington Monument to the White House. I later read in a biography that that one really got to Johnson. Ruined his day.
Greif is a reaction to loss. America was entering the classic stages of grief as described by Kubler-Ross. The country was mourning a loss. By the summer of ’67, although America was schizophrenic in the process, the country was mourning the loss of innocence. Blacks and white youth were in the angry stage and white adults were in deep denial. There were not only racial and socio-economic divisions, there was a generation gap as well. The youth were questioning not just the war, but the type of society that got itself to such a state to prosecute such a war. By the summer of 1967 one hundred and thirty American cities were burning. It was becoming glaringly apparent the Jesuits were right. Within the next few years I would have to make some major decisions.
The after dinner talk began to change. My father had a different kind of Domino Theory. It started with truth. A democracy cannot survive without an open government. Open, like transparent, like truthful. Without truth, the information goes bad and if the information is bad, any conclusions made based on that information would necessarly be faulty conclusions. Decisions are based on conclusions. Bad information leads to faulty conclusions which in turn lead to bad decisions. Those are the dominos in my dad’s theory. Votes are decisions. If voting becomes a meaningless exercise, then there is no democracy – only the appearance of one.
But the balls of the whole thing, the meat and potatoes if you will, is that free markets cannot survive outside a democracy and the healthiest democracies have the healthiest free markets. And the fact is, all this stuff about democracy is really, in the end, about a free market because that’s what puts food in your kid’s mouth, allows he or she to dream of upward mobility, and even possibly be comfortable enough to reach the top of Maslov’s pyramid and actually engage in the pursuit of happiness instead of the pursuit of potable water.
A fixed market, an un-free market, is like the board game Monopoly. Inevitably, one guy controls everything and it’s no fun anymore. It’s still capitalism, but it’s more like a Mafia style capitalism. And fuck you and your vote, because everyone knows the man with the gold makes the rules. So, my father saw this symbiosis of democracy and free markets which I realized for the first time was in jeopardy in the summer of 1967. Because we were being lied to.
Then came Tet and we left marines behind at Khe Sahn because we had to. That’s war, and another reason not to enter it blithely. Then Martin Luther King was assassinated. Then Bobby. Then the 1968 Democratic Convention riots and resultant Chicago Seven Trials. More government cover-ups, this time it was about the carpet bombings in Laos and Cambodia to shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Watts. Detroit. Chicago. Oakland. My Lai and Kent State.
The Pentagon Papers released by Daniel Elsburg in 1971 confirmed our suspiscions that we were being lied to about the war from the very begining. Our representatives were told lies that led them to draw up the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which turned out to be a very bad decision. My dad’s domino theory again.
By the summer of ’69 I was pretty sure we were headed for the shitter if there weren’t some very fundamental changes in thinking among us all, not just in Washington. It wasn’t long after the Pentagon Papers that the markets began to dip and by the mid ‘70s people just lost faith in America. Not surprising. Depression is one of the stages of grief. Then the Church Committee Report revealed what dirty bastards we’d been all along, to the world in general and to our own citizens in particular. At least going back to Iran, 1953, and CIA man Kermit Roosevelt arranging a political assassination which enabled the Shah to be head of state. So we had been doing a lot of shit and being lied to about it for a long, long time.
For me, Reagan was the epitome of the denial stage. Kubler-Ross explains that a person can bounce back and forth from one stage to another until they finally get well, if ever. Reagan floated in on a cloud of positive thinking, as if we could solve all our problems by just saying everything was OK, then it would be OK. You can’t OK yourself out of a trainwreck. It takes actual work. The papers kept saying things were getting better, but homeless people started showing up in towns that had never seen them before, libraries were closing down, schoolbooks weren’t being replaced, crime was up. Certain people did well in the market, but most found it sluggish. Things weren’t OK because nothing had really changed. Reaganites thrived on nastalgia, they wanted Leave it to Beaver and Donna Reed back and were hell bent in denial to get them. But that time was all a Potemkin village, a chimera, a pack of fucking lies. You can’t get back a world that never really existed. What we got was more of the same, only different because this time we weren’t so innocent, we had changed, become more tolerant of certain things, we had become inured, cynical.
I finally left the country in 1982 and didn’t set foot in it again for a decade. I came back to a place that had deteriorated in many ways, especially intellectually. Eventually we had two expensive, pre-emptive wars we could hardly afford – one based on false premises—an out and out lie— and the other fruitless and suffering from terminal mission creep. We torture people and rendition them to places where we can get away with it. I used to be all pissed off about things like CIA agents surveilling college students and FBI infiltrators and riot provocateurs at demonstrations. Christ, now we have the most pervasive internal surveillance in history backed up by the Patriot Act and no reaction from the middle class. Rights have been removed, the treasury stolen, we have sluggish markets, and wealth is rapidly flowing into the top 5% of the population while the rest of America obsesses over the shit that’s on TV. No reaction. Nothing but crickets.
I bitch a lot, but maybe I’m just like everybody else at the end of the day. Maybe we’re quiet because, even if we knew how to get us back on track, what could we actually do about it? As quietly frustrated individuals, I mean. So, I guess there’s not much difference between me and the rest of America. We all non-confront in our own way. They watch TV and I sail.
And apparently rant. Sorry. Nothing else to do tonight but wait for the coffee to wear off and bore networld. GW, btw.
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