“It was the English,” Kaspar cried,
“Who put the French to rout;
But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out;
But everybody said,” quoth he,
“That ‘twas a famous victory.”
— Robert Southey
My first three years were the last three years of the Second World War. Good years they were, for a kid in America. My mother did magic, breaking a plastic pouch of blood-red dye into the mixing bowl, causing the interlocking mixer blades to turn white margarine into gold. The neighborhood men towered over the flowers of the corn in the Victory Garden, and the corn covered most of the sky as I looked up holding a flap of my father’s suit pants.
One afternoon my father came home from work at three in the afternoon, and my mother fetched my sister and me and told us to get all the pans and lids out from the cabinet beneath the kitchen counter. This had always been a punishable offense, but she assured us it would not be on this day. Our father set us in the red wagon with the pots and lids spilling from our laps. All up and down the block neighbors were emerging onto the sidewalks with kids likewise equipped. And we paraded the sidewalk, our neighbors before and behind, beating metal with metal, cheering, many parents crying, the dogs yapping and fighting in sheer confusion.
That was how Americans in my neighborhood celebrated the end of a war. It was the last such celebration I’ve seen.Four years later, my father and I stepped off the El onto the Addison Street Station on our way to a Cubs game and saw the headlines in the Tribune box, huge and black as the back of a scream, announcing that Russia had the Bomb. My father stopped dead. I was old enough to understand that the Russians were evil and that their having the Bomb was a terrible thing. I wondered if the Cubs would play.
Three years after that, my hero Tommy Myers stood at home plate, a place on our vacant lot ball field marked only by mutual agreement, and called the question we had been debating, with only overgrown lilac and honeysuckle hedges for witness: in Korea, is the North or the South the Good Side? The question had been hard. The Cubs, of course, were Northsiders, but a small, vocal minority loved the Sox, who were, of course, Southsiders. Tommy Myers finally settled it by pointing out what any idiot would have seen in the first place if he’d thought about it: the North was the good side in our Civil War. So then we all knew what side we were on. I was glad it was settled so that we could start playing baseball and I could get my mind off the larger concerns of the world. They seemed distant and unreal compared to the difficulties presented by left field, which sloped dramatically uphill and was full of gopher holes.
All the people in my neighborhood had been pretty angry when the President relieved the great General Douglas MacArthur of his command. Mac visited our town and paraded down Main Street in an open car, and I cheered him, though without the pots and pans. I watched my father almost strangle in order to keep from crying when MacArthur gave his “Farewell Address” to Congress. I didn’t understand the point the General was making in that address. It was that some kind of devils in foreign guise were about to come into our homes and do bad things to all of us. He didn’t explain why he’d been fired, or how that worked in with the devils.
I had to watch TV to understand that. Herbert Philbrick arrived through that new medium to explain it to me on a show called I Led Three Lives: Citizen, Communist Counterspy. That show led me to understand that a foreign devil wasn’t necessarily foreign; he might be my next-door neighbor, a seemingly dull old person who went to work in a suit as my dad did every day, but spent his nights in the basement in a room shut off from casual inspection by deviously designed blinds, typing the fruits of his spying to his foreign devil masters. Or, hero that he was, typing his reports to the FBI itself. I began to look at neighboring fathers in a new and more interesting light. Heretofore, they’d seemed about as boring as my own dad.
This new war seemed to be a war by Good Americans against Bad Americans, and I saw descriptions of it in the movies as well as on tv. Richard Carlson, tv’s Herb Philbrick, played a part in a movie called The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Creature looked suspiciously like an ordinary human, but he wore tights spangled with stuffed, sewn scales and an excellent amphibian/insect mask.Though he wore his monsterhood on his face, you could tell he had started out as a human. He contracted a dislike for humans when the actor Richard Denning, playing an obviously bad sort of American, a fellow who didn’t have the Good of the Mission in mind, shot him in the ass with a spear gun.
So of course Herb Philbrick had to kill the Creature before he killed the whole Research Party, and, not incidentally, before he got his slimy hands on the Stone Babe, in whom he had evinced a distasteful interest not unlike that previously displayed by Richard Denning, whose intentions you could see at a glance, with the assistance of the cameraman and the musical score, were Not Honorable. It was touch and go for Richard Carlson, but he killed the Creature and got the girl. It was always touch and go, after the Korean War ended, for all the heroes with whom I was presented by the media. Russia, after all, had The Bomb, and the whole country was full of spies and traitors.
During those years I lived with the only recurring dream I’ve ever dreamed, as opposed to lived in. I would be out walking down a dirt path outside my cousins’ Wisconsin farm and turn around to see the Mushroom Cloud rising above it. Two or three nights a week I had this dream, all through the 1950s. It woke me up every time.
But toward the end of that era, just when I was getting used to generalized terror as a condition of life, Castro’s revolution succeeded in overthrowing someone in Cuba, and Castro announced shortly that his was a Communist Revolution, and then we had a new and present Devil to consider, “not ninety miles from our shore.” An outside enemy, a fellow who stubbornly refused to speak our language, a fellow who spoke badly of us in public and welcomed the Russians, for Christ’s sake, into his country. Not ninety miles from our shore.
By this time I was getting ready to leave high school and go to college, and while my heritage was Republican, I was seduced by John Kennedy. I would have voted for him in 1960, because he seemed the kind of fellow who wouldn’t back down, and who’d do whatever needed to be done to defeat our fearful enemies, those enemies I’d grown up hearing about and watching on tv. We watched as he did just that during the Missile Crisis. He didn’t blink. He evinced Grace Under Pressure.
I still felt that way after he’d been in the ground two years and I was drafted. The films I saw in basic training at Ft. Knox have been shown since, in a documentary made during the ‘90s, as occasions for irony. They weren’t ironic in our eyes. We still believed that our government mainly told the truth, and the films were pretty well done by the standards of their time. They were reminiscent, in short, of the tv shows we’d grown up watching. Simple: there’s these goods, and these evils.
So I would have gone off to Viet Nam when I got drafted, but fate would not have it so, and I was the last guy in my MOS (radio relay/signalman) to go anywhere but Viet Nam for many years thereafter. I went instead to Germany and spent my year and a half there playing war games in the snow, setting up communications networks along the East German border in anticipation of the event the Army dreaded most, a massive Russian invasion.
My post had a library, and I started reading about the War in Vietnam. Mainly, I read Bernard Fall’s great books about the French experience there, and after I read them, I didn’t want to volunteer for Nam duty anymore.
By the time I got home in 1968, new wars were on. One raged between Americans who opposed this war we were fighting and those who supported it, however dubiously. Another seemed to be a new kind of war, the enemy an abstraction, Poverty. When Nixon arrived in office, he declared yet another war, this one on “Drugs.” I was hard put to keep up with all the wars we were prosecuting.
When America quit the war in Southeast Asia, and our beloved allies got to escape, if they had the strength to hang on to the struts of our last departing copters, my generation heaved a great sigh of relief and dove back into its programming, which told it that consumption is the goal of all human affairs, and you’d best get cracking, boy, or you won’t get your fair share of the Goods – advice my generation has followed to this very day.
We were quite relieved that the war was over. No more Americans were being shipped home in body bags every day on national TV. While the Russians had Chancellor Brezhnev writhing his threatening though somehow comical eyebrows around in interminable pompous speeches, we didn’t take him seriously. We were quite accustomed, by this time, to the balance of terror. We knew that old man wouldn’t be fool enough to try anything on us.
We didn’t pay attention to the wars our country continued to fight. We didn’t notice the wars in Indonesia, Libya, Chile, Guatemala, Korea, Iran, Malaysia, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, Afghanistan, Poland, Czechoslovakia — though in all of these wars and many others we were taking our modest part, supplying arms to the friendlies, denying aid to the creatures from the black lagoon.
One night in 1991, I was driving down to the state prison to discuss with some inmates The Grapes of Wrath and stopped along the way for dinner at a roadside joint. When I got back in my car and turned on the radio, my country was once again at war, bombing the devil out of Iraq. And our enemy, Saddam, had had the grace to grow a great black mustache, reminiscent of both Hitler’s AND Stalin’s. (In case we missed the comparison, we were duly reminded by the tv commentators who quoted their government “sources” regarding the “Hitler of the Mideast.”)
I was approaching 50 then. The subsequent decades have provided little surcease from war. We’ve engaged in a semiofficial war in Bosnia, a continuous campaign against Iraq; a fruitless adventure in Afghanistan, on the home front our declared wars on crime and drugs have proceeded unabated, and our undeclared war on the environment has recently intensified. I find myself recalling almost daily the words Jules Henry wrote in Culture Against Man: “Where is the culture of life? The culture of life resides in all those people who, inarticulate, frightened, and confused, are wondering, ‘where it will all end.’ Thus the forces of death are confident and organized while the forces of life – the people who long for peace – are, for the most part, scattered, inarticulate, and wooly-minded, overwhelmed by their own impotence. Death struts about the house while Life cowers in the corner.”
