Those Were the Days!

The rally concluded, and people began strolling to the buses we had chartered to take them back to their cars.  Suddenly dozens of squad cars appeared, as if from nowhere.  They had been carefully concealed behind buildings surrounding the rally.  We counted hundreds of police from five different agencies.  Many of the squad cars displayed shotguns and contained six police officers in full riot gear, something most people there had seen only in television.  The Redwood City police department and the San Mateo County sheriff's office had prepared an elaborate ambush, and they were obviously disappointed that they had not found a chance to "teach you some patriotism," as one cop yelled at the protesters from a car window.

Only local newspapers reported that the march and rally had taken place, and they underestimated the size of the crowd, reporting that most citizens of Redwood City were hostile to such activities.  Bruce Brugmann, the Redwood City Tribune reporter who had been covering the napalm campaign, became so disgusted by the blatant censorship and and rewriting of his stories that he left to found the radical weekly newspaper the Bay Guardian.  Even a mere twenty miles away, the press and radio in San Francisco imposed a total news blackout.  This did keep many people in ignorance.  But it also educated tens of thousands about the role of the media.  Almost everyone in the area knew that an important event had taken place and could not help but wonder why it was not reported and how many events from other areas were not being reported to us.

The above text is taken from the historian H. Bruce Franklin's account of a rally against napalm production in the Bay Area in 1966, in his book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Massachusetts, 2000), pages 87-8.  The book as a whole is very informative.  I decided to read it today after seeing a critique of the first episode of the new Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary on the Vietnam War for PBS.  The critique mentioned that

in the 1990s historian H. Bruce Franklin found that most college students recognized the famous image of a prisoner being executed by a man firing a pistol inches away from the victim’s temple. But most of the students believed the shooter was a communist officer, rather that General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese national police, an American ally.

This didn't surprise me; it fit with so much else I knew, such as the long and largely successful propaganda campaign to cast the United States as the victim in Vietnam, rather than the victimizer.  Franklin also quotes an amazing speech on the Vietnam war by Barack Obama's role model Ronald Reagan in which, as Franklin points out, "not a single sentence ... is accurate or truthful" (29).  I've seen a similar falsification about the post-9/11 war on terror; it's as if the structure of the scenario is embedded in people's minds, and they need only to insert the names and dates to fit the situation.

But the reason I wanted to quote this particular passage has to do with other misrepresentations of history that I see among many liberals and progressives, including those who are old enough to know better.  The militarization of the police that is presently under way, for example, and the treatment of peaceful dissidents as enemies of the nation who must be crushed, is not as new as many people seem to want to think.  The 3500 or so white, clean-cut, middle-class folks who gathered to object to the production of napalm for use against Vietnamese civilians weren't attacked and beaten by the police that time, though it's clear that the police were hoping for an excuse to do just that.  Later on the police were less restrained.

The other point is the suppression of news of such a rally outside the local newspapers.  Many liberals fondly believe that the mainstream media took an adversary stance toward the government in those days.  That's simply false, though as always even their customary collusion was never abject enough to suit the mighty.  Whatever the flaws of the Internet (and they are many), it makes it much easier to spread information about such actions now.

This greatly offends the sensibilities of the high priests and priestesses of the cult of Expertise.  I've begun grappling with the dreadful apprehension that I may actually have to read Hillary Rodham Clinton's new book.  At first I was skeptical of the brief excerpts I saw online, which were so badly written and downright stupid that they were hard to credit: surely they weren't representative of the whole?  But the more I saw, the more I had to believe that they were.  (See Sam Kriss' account of his own ordeal reading the book here.)  And this bit, widely circulated, is symptomatic:

This is what happens in George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner see five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.

This Moebius strip of a sentence (well, two sentences) seems not to be atypical of What Happened.  Every quotation I've seen that features a literary allusion shows that she (or her ghostwriters) don't really understand the material they're invoking.  The "torturer" in that scene is a functionary of the "leaders," and his victim is one who has distrusted "the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, etc."  The torturer seeks to bring the dissident back into the fold, to trust those whom he should trust in a time of war and peril.  Orwell certainly hoped that his readers would mistrust "our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves."  (Ourselves?  Does Clinton mean the rabble there, or Herself and the other wise elites "we need to rely on"?)  For that matter, doesn't Clinton want us to mistrust our Supreme Leader Donald Trump, the press that made people dislike and distrust her, and ourselves if we find that we disbelieve Hillary Clinton?

Oh, it's true that Americans have come to distrust our government and other institutions over the past half-century.  H. Bruce Franklin reports the results of a poll that tracks the growth of this distrust since 1958: "In 1958 ... over three fourths (76.3 percent) of the American people believed that the government was run for the benefit of all, while only 17.6 percent believed that it was run by a few big interests" (43).  By 1994 the numbers had flipped: "76 percent expressed this profound distrust of the government, while a mere 19 perccnt still clung to the belief that they lived in a representative democracy" (46).  This is bad news -- how long can a country survive when its citizens have so little trust in their government? -- but for people like Hillary Clinton, the remedy is more trust in our national institutions; it is unthinkable that those institutions should be more trustworthy.  Instead we citizens must believe in our leaders' probity, which is not much more plausible than that five fingers are four.

As Hope and Change Sink Slowly in the West ...

 

I'd pretty much given up on Pearl Cleage because of her relentless cheerleading for Obama, but then today she posted this on Facebook:

I know it's unrealistic to dream this dream, but a part of my imagination keeps seeing a scene where President Obama goes to Ferguson and walks through the streets, talking to people, reassuring Michael Brown's family that justice will [be] done, being present on the scene, smelling the tear gas in the air, making sense of things,, articulating a vision for the next phase of our national life...

This is pretty mild stuff, but it's the closest to actual criticism of Obama that I've ever seen from her in the past five and a half years. When someone like Cleage lays down her pompoms and faces reality, even if only for a moment, even someone like me finds it difficult to do the "I Told You So" dance. But only for a moment.

Good News for Modern Woman

I'm gradually rereading all of Marge Piercy's work this year, and I've just begun her second novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep, originally published in 1970.  I remembered from my previous reading, long ago, how rough the book had seemed: it's very much a product of the Sixties, full of sex and drugs and rock and roll.  I don't think it's yet a feminist novel yet (that would come in her third one, Small Changes): three of the four main characters are young males, who are a bit more willing than than the norm to recognize their common humanity with women, but they still have to be shocked into it.  For example, the science and math prodigy Billy is surprised when a young woman turns out to be a person:

Ginny hung around and finally out of embarrassment he put her to work with the crew.  It turned out she wasn't stupid.  He could not say why he had assumed she was.  She even asked good questions.  He forgot to be worried about how he should act.  He treated her like the rest of the crew and that seemed to work.

To be fair to Billy, his assumption about Ginny was based as much in class and intellectual snobbery as in sexism, and it's probably significant that he learns to see past it.

Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a science fiction novel (Piercy has published at least three of them), a precursor of her now-classic Woman on the Edge of Time.  The premise is a youth revolt in the later 20th or early 21st century, after a heavy clampdown on the social-justice movements of the 1960s.  Universal service, military or civilian, has been instituted to keep the population under control.

What got my attention and led me to write about the book here was this passage about the climax of a student school takeover (emphasis added):

The fourth night, the police cordon was reinforced by busloads of tactical police, and they knew the crisis had come.  "Four days and three nights to turn five hundred kids into a people," Corey said.  They lay on the roof watching the police bring up a bulldozer and get ready to smash in through the south doors.  It was eerie.  The moon was risen and bright on them.  The police did not move like men, because they were so encased in their weapons and paraphernalia.  They carried side arms, cases for handcuffs on their left hips, a club for head knocking and ball breaking, a gas mask and extra rounds of ammunition.  Some had devices on their backs for spraying gas.  Others carried spray cans or grenades.  They moved with the stiffness of men laden with gadgets and protected from any sense of what they do.  Something that looked like a tank was drawn up.

Since the Occupy movement began, many people have become aware of the increasing militarization of American police forces.  Piercy reminded me that it's not new, but she also foresaw how much it would advance.  It seems to me that most of the countercultural fiction from the 1960s and 1970s read by students today was written by men; but some important work was written by women, and Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a good example.  It even got an enthusiastic blurb from Thomas Pynchon, and it's newly back in print.  It's a reminder that the Occupy Movement is in many ways a replay of what people knew forty years ago and more -- which is depressing on one hand, but also suggests that there are lessons to be learned if the suppression of dissent isn't to be repeated now.