“It is as if we hold the future on loan; knowing not when it will come due.”
----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”
I remember waking, a half century ago, to a clear sunny morning and the songs of birds at my window. I had gone to bed the night before after watching President Johnson’s speech on Vietnam which ended in his startling announcement that he would not seek another term as President. I was elated. I hated to see Johnson leave the national scene because he had done so much for civil rights and for the poor in of this country. We have not seen his like since. But the specter of Vietnam hung over the upcoming election like the grim reaper. I had long since joined the ranks of the dissenters and had been voicing opposition to the war since late in 1965 so the candidacies of first Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy held out great hope that we would begin to change our tragic course in Southeast Asia. On this day it looked as if all things were to come to pass. It felt as if there was a new dawn in America. I remember grabbing a quick breakfast and then heading out the door unto Sixth Street toward my car heading off for classes in Allendale. I got about half way across the street when I encountered my old friend John Hierholzer. “Hey Joe!” he shouted, “What do you make of Johnson’s speech last night”? I stopped in the middle of the street as he drove his car up to me, “It looks like Bobby’s got it now!” I shouted back in glee. “There’s no one but Humphrey standing between him and the nomination, he should be able to beat Hubert”, I said. “Remember what day it is”, John admonished. “What day is it?” I asked. “April Fool’s Day” was his response. So it was.
I had first met John at St. John's Lutheran when I was in second grade. I still remember it. I was assigned my seat and behind me was seated the new kid in school who was full of questions about what to do and where to go. He kind of latched on to me and we became fast friends. I lived in the country then so we saw each other only during school, but later that year we moved into the city down by the river near the old factories and he brought me home with him a few times and introduced me to his parents. In due course we moved into the same block, our house being just around the corner. John and I went through the rest of grade school, junior high school and high school together. Upon graduation we applied to the same college so again we were classmates. On this morning we ran into each other as each of us was about to drive the thirty miles to the Allendale campus. His welcome and familiar voice always carried a note of caution, a trait he picked up from his stern German father. John was the kind of friend every mom wanted their son to be around, whenever we had the urge to do something rash or stupid one could always depend on John to point out the folly of it and make us stop and think. So when he told me it was April Fool’s Day a chill shot through me; a certain indescribable foreboding. I quickly shrugged it off marking it down as one of my friends odd remarks, for which he was so well known, hoping there could not possibly be any significance. I was wrong.
It has been fifty years now since that terrible time, that time so full of promise, that time when all our life lay before us. It was also a time in which none of us spoke about the future. At school no one asked what one's father did for a living. No one asked “What are you going to do when you graduate?”, for everything was held in abeyance, the future itself suspended in disbelief as we all awaited uncertain fate. It was as if we held the future on loan knowing not when it would come due.
For half a century now we have wandered in darkness as the Generation of Swine have squandered the national treasure. Now, this April First, we await the fool's gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn, as the quintessential Boomer, our very own Caesar Disgustus, makes a pig's breakfast of what is left of this republic.
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”.
Impeach and Imprison.
_____________________
Note: This essay is a re-write of one posted on this day ten years ago in 2008, marking another milestone in remembrance of the year that marked the zenith of American power and prestige, but also marked, with the coming of the modern conservative movement, the destruction of the social contract as well as the beginning of the end of the American empire.
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