April 1, 2018: Hey Joe!, Future on Loan, April Fool

“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.

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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.

February 27, 2018: Most Trusted Man, Losing Middle America, Truth to Power

This year marks a half century since that time so long ago when the conservative movement rose the ascendancy of American politics. The fateful year that began with so much promise and ended with the ultimate booby prize, marked the beginning of the emergence of a toxic, vitriolic, and insidious cancer upon the body politic. From time to time, in the ensuing posts, I will take moments to remember that fateful year and mark the milestones. Today is one such occasion.

On this date, 50 years ago, CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite did something that, at the time, was extraordinary. It is difficult to imagine a time when those who report the news do not editorialize but simply report what they see; but that was the norm 'back in the day'. Consequently, in poll after poll, Cronkite was reputed to be the most trusted man in America, finishing a close second behind god himself. Such was his stature that n the 1971 movie “Cold Turkey”, a story about a clergyman who leads his community to accept a challenge by a tobacco company to quit smoking for thirty days, the effort reaches truly national indeed mythical stature when Cronkite, played by Ray Goulding of the comedy team Bob and Ray, appears amid angelic choir with a florescent light forming an overhead halo.

Cronkite stepped 'down' from his pinnacle to voice, for him, a singular editorial opinion. He had gone to Vietnam in the waning days of the Tet Offensive to see for himself. Tet is the Vietnamese New Year celebration and the communists had launched, in late January of 1968, a massive offensive to coincide with the country's national celebration, hoping to catch the South Vietnamese forces unawares. Visions of the U.S. Embassy under attack put lie to the administration narrative that the end of the war was nearly at hand, with only some mopping up operations left to be done. Cronkite went to Saigon and was lectured by General William Westmoreland who instructed the veteran reporter to 'do his homework'. Cronkite did. He left the headquarters and went out into the field touring, among other places, Hue where bitter block by block and house to house fighting had been going on for weeks reducing the once grand colonial capital. It reminded him of the ruins of towns and villages he had seen while reporting from the field in World War II.

He returned home convinced, as he reported on this night 50 years ago, that it was clear 'to this reporter' that victory cannot be won. It was also clear that it was not possible for the other side to win. What the country faced, he told his fellow Americans, was a stalemate demanding a political settlement. Negotiations.

President Johnson, watching the telecast, turned to one of his aides and said “If we've lost Cronkite we have lost middle America”. Johnson realized at that moment that—to paraphrase Richard Nixon—the war will no longer play in Peoria. Accordingly he began to talk to First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, about retiring from office.

Cronkite was, through his position in the press, speaking to the nation. But in a very real sense he was addressing an audience of one: the President of the United States. Johnson got the message. Barely 6 weeks later, in an address from the Oval Office to the nation, Johnson confirmed Cronkite's assessment, declaring a willingness to meet our adversaries at the peace table while suspending certain military actions, the need to devote full time to any upcoming negotiations, that he would not seek nor accept the nomination of his party for President of the United States.

The myth, pilloried so well in the film, was that Cronkite's shift into open skepticism if not opposition, turned the country against the war. It is central to the conservative narrative that the press had sold out the country and gave credence to the paranoia concerning the press that had fueled what, until that time, was nearly a singular grievance on the part of Richard Nixon. Cronkite's influence was wide, but not nearly so deep. The conservative critique makes too much of such influence. It would be another three years before polls began to show a palpable majority questioning the wisdom of the war, another five years before the United States had withdrawn nearly all its forces, and seven years before the South Vietnamese government, a tin-horn dictatorship rife with corruption, would fall. In sum the country didn't turn on a dime, the war dragged on for nearly three quarters of a decade. But the corner had been turned.

Then, of course, there were the upcoming returns from the New Hampshire Primary where Senator Gene McCarthy would perform beyond all expectations denying the once invincible Johnson a clear majority finishing with 42 per cent behind Johnson's 49. Not only had McCarthy, due to the arcane rules governing how delegates were awarded, shown how vulnerable was the president on the war issue, but had actually won a majority of the delegates. The outlook for the president, electorally speaking was grim. Polls had him well behind in upcoming Wisconsin and, in the wings, awaited Bobby Kennedy.

Coming as it did just before Johnson had replaced Robert McNamara with Clark Clifford at Defense Secretary, and as his council of 'wise men'--Johnson's Kitchen Cabinet—itself began to change its tune and echo Cronkite's chilling assessment, those closest to the President had begun to change their minds and speak newly discovered truth to power. The president had ears and responded accordingly.

Contrast now with our present situation where ensconced upon the throne sits a man who neither understands, nor reads, nor listens. Imagine if you will, our very own Caesar Disgustus caught in the currents of such national torment.

“an' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh.”

Impeach and Imprison.

See. Bowden, Mark. “Cronkite's 'Stalemate”' The New York Times Tuesday, February 27^th 2018.

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March 20, 2015: Old Man’s Lament, So Much Older Then, I Cannot Write Act III

"My faith was so much stronger then
I believed in fellow men
I was so much older then
When I was young
When I was young”

                  ----- The Animals “When I Was Young” (1)

It is, perhaps, the lament of every generation that life has reached it’s zenith, perhaps civilization its apex, when ‘I was young’.  Age, it seems, not only brings a catalogue of ailments and declining abilities but an increasing sensation that the polished brass of youth has grown rather tarnished and tawdry. Life begins to ape one’s aching body and society, in short order, follows the trajectory of body and soul. In any case, it appears to be a near universal human experience that life was better all those years ago.  I was so much older then, when I was young.

2014 marked a century since the outbreak of the “Great War” when Europe became a killing field and the United States emerged as a world power.  It also marked the end of the “American” century as, it was announced last December, China has now overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy.  The United States, the “Arsenal of Democracy”, which had held the pre-eminent position as the world’s largest economy since the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, has now relinquished its place as the world’s greatest economic engine, with political and military power soon to follow.

This, too, is the legacy of the “Generation of Swine” who have managed in a span of 30 years to squander the national trust..  We have witnessed the wholesale gutting of the industrial base, the disinvestment in our workforce, our schools, our infrastructure, ourselves.  We have engaged in a ‘every-man-for-himself’ race to the bottom.  We no longer believe in government because we no longer believe in our fellow men.  No longer do we heed Jeremy Bentham’s dictum of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ but charity, as well as public policy, are increasingly defined as, my wife would say, to “me, my four and no more”.

Life has become base, crude, uncivilized and tawdry. Rap music and ‘pants to the ground’.  Television after you subtract out the 4 channels broadcasting, at any given time, ‘the world’s greatest pillow’, the religious howlers, and the conspiracy channels one is left holding an empty bag.  The “History” and “Discovery” channels, which formerly broadcast content that at least had the pretense of scholarship are now nothing more than programs about witches, goblins, haunted houses, and conspiracy theories. There is the standard daytime fare: Jerry Springer and his imitators in which the lower intestines of American culture are daily flushed into the living rooms of the nation, if not the world.  Then there is the news.  Where once stood Murrow, Cronkite, Blair, Rather, Severied,  Huntley and Brinkley, and a host of professional reporters we are now presented with the likes of O’Reilly, Beck, and a whole network of babbling buffoons.  Jane Curtin, reprising her role on “Weekend Update” for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” was moved to quip “40 years ago I was the only dumb blonde on television delivering fake news...now we have a whole network”, referring, of course, to the debasement of the industry by the likes of Rupert Murdock.  And let’s not even talk about radio where hate speech is the order of the day, where either one is inundated with diatribes belittling the poor, minorities, women and those who struggle under ‘the new world order’, or with infantile paranoid conspiracy theories spun by the likes of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones where we are led to dance on ramparts.  Once we could take matters in hand, as we did at the Pettis Bridge in Selma and march for freedom, today we huddle fearing anyone and everyone.  Increasingly my country feels like my aging body, where once we marched in confidence, today we recoil and huddle in pain and fear waiting for the next blow from the hopelessly juvenile, cretinous, knuckle-dragging Tea-baggers,as they do the bidding of their corporate masters.  We were so much older then, when we were young.

“I have left Act I, for involution
And Act II. There, mired in complexity
I cannot write Act III.”

----Senator Eugene McCarthy “Lament for an Aging Politician” (2)
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1. http://www.metrolyrics.com/when-i-was-young-lyrics-the-animals.html
2. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eugene_McCarthy