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A preamble. I've been re-reading From Whom the Bell Tolls. I've re-read it once before during the early Reagan years. On this round, I noticed a lot more politics in it than I had remembered.
I've been looking at Goya and Orozco and thinking about how to work out the themes of this war, through pictorial means, to get at the narrative symbolism---something more than just slogans, or the obvious atrocities.
While Iraq and Vietnam have nothing to do with each other, they share one overwhelming similarity, the public denial that they were and are atrocities, built on lies, and carried on for no purpose---other than some vague concept of imperial containment of one empire by another.
``...And when that failed to happen, something set in, a sadness, a rage, a bit of twenty-something anger trapped in amber which you've carried around for years and years...''
Well, not quite exactly. Close enough at first glance, but I thought about this all day. Where was I...?
In the early phases, say the immediate post-Kennedy year or so, the civil rights movements and most especially the urban insurrections suggested that with enough pressure of various kinds in and outside the system, hide bound government policies and laws could be changed. That mass perception seemed sensible, realistic. As the scale and the violence of mass engagements built up, we (my friends) thought that US war would get turned around.
That didn't happen. What happened instead was a two fold surprise to me. First, the system, the government and its apparatus started to disintegrate through its own loss of creditibility. As the drop in creditility began to steepen, the mass political base that supports government activities began to seriously erode. Then, second, the Johnson and then Nixon administrations hardened their positions and went after the protest groups and their base of support, using a lot of illegal means and police state tactics. These actions furthered the erosion process. Both adminstrations knew it, but kept on going. They were resolved to not change on the war, period. And they were willing to risk the collapse of their own power to do so. This awareness took place most especially in 1968 and culminated in Nixon's election---precisely because middle america felt the same thing I did. This place was coming apart.
So then in a sense, I didn't expect the US system to start to fail, rather I discovered that it could---and the means to promote that collapse were startlingly similar to historical revolutions in the past. Meanwhile the French government under de Gaulle did collapse. The Mexican government was scared to death and started shooting students in Mexico City during or right after the Olympic games. That spring the Czech government did change and the Russians moved in to crush it. (No to mention the wide spread insurrections all over the US over King's assassination...)
So the point is I could see it, imagine it as a realistic potential. UCB did start to unravel as academic pretense to grades, merit, etc almost vanished as many on the faculty started to join, at least in sympathy with the students and against the administration.
Reagan called in the National Guard a year later and put the whole city under marshall law. That's when you know for certain the power elite are scared---when they call out the troops to restore order... Once the national guard arrived, UCB pretty much closed down, basic city government functions crawled to almost a hault and the streets were full everyday. Public schools were almost empty. Of course retail trade dropped to zero. And the military presence became the focus. The soldiers couldn't stop the take over of another several block long strip of land running along Hearst St. (Which is now a park). In other words from the law and order view, bringing in the national guard made the so-called rule of law and order impossible... Reagan declared victory and withdrew the troops..
So, to repeat, at that point I discovered that the system of goverance could be broken down. I could see how such a thing was done. Protests, masses in the streets, the break down of institutional functions, the replacement of the police by the military. How to make the manuvering of awkward military units impossible in a compact urban area... Safety in numbers, large numbers. That's how it's done. It evolves into a life of its own. It becomes something almost alive on its own. They write about this stuff in books, but few really understand what these books are trying to describe, because most people have never seen this kind of thing before.
My anger then... came from the realization that the establishment was actually willing to risk everything and absolutely would not change or stop the war unless massive amounts of violence, chaos, and counterforce were used against it. In other words, when it really counted, democratically elected government, like any government will not represent the will of the people---if it is a question of the security of the power elite. We will always lose that battle, unless we can muster serious and sustained counterforce. In other words our concept of how a democratically elected government is supposed to work is an illusion. Oh, it works just fine as long as nothing is at stake. Just like civil rights are guaranteed as long as you don't have to make use of them.
But there is more. The more, is found in the broad public base of denial that any of those events, that kind of knowledge and awareness ever happened at all. The internal effect of that public denial becomes an eraser, a revisionist tool, not just of history, but of the pivotal period that formed my political sensibility. In other words, it's an angry shock to find we've (I) been systematically erased. We, as in that generation of people who grew up within all that, whatever it was. If anything remains, it is passed off as the lunatic fringe.
As an visually interesting reflection of how propaganda works, notice that most news film and video of the period was shot from the police side of the lines. So we see angry mobs. What we usually don't see are the waves of police from the crowd side. In effect we see the law and order side of the picture, and not the heavy handed repression of police state violence.
One of the other techs, early-30s something told me to go look up Kucinich's speech because I missed it. So I watched it. I laughed! I loved it, but I laughed. He sounded just like I did the other night in the bar (arguing union, etc), a raving maniac, jumping up and down.
Wake up America, K yells. Oh, Dennis, you have no idea how deeply they sleep. The complexity of denial and sleep has become a kind of fascination to me.
The guy (Mark Ames?) on Doug's show Saturday who just returned from Moscow, said he wanted to gas himself, referring to the Democratic convention and part of the current public un-reality and denial.
The whole phenomenon (now that I am sober) is really rich in the light it shines on history and public conscieousness. It's not wholly attributable to media propaganda machines because it's been internalized to such a degree that there is some psycho-social (mytho-cultural) system at work in the public mind that kicks off in advance of any news story. As a consequence, the effect is to read in the news, what we already know to be true in advance. So the news is only a confirmation, not information.
The Georgia thing for example. Russia invades Georgia... I can write the US script without knowing or hearing any more than that. Bush rattles saber, Putin acts tough, news at eleven...
So, I think back on my DUI, dreaming under the influence. I was engaged or sucked in precisely through a shared mythological world where the Democratic party carried on the FDR welfare state, civil rights, some anti-war vagueness, and a quasi-humane regulation of the economy, ... I got buzzed and completely forgot for a few minutes. Escapism.
Notes on spelling. I don't have a spell checker. I've always been a lousy speller. Eric was right about Barach rather than Barack--I never noticed the difference and assumed Barach, as in Barach Spinoza was the correct spelling... I had to do a web search to find Kucinich's speech. The web site was still on the desktop when I started off the evening, hence I got his last name right...
For Carrol. Hilary occurred in parenthesis to distinguish her from Bill. If it makes you feel any better, then I say to hell with Billy too. It's true, I had to hold my nose and look the other way, when I voted for Clinton last March and regretted it. I voted for her, because I thought she was more powerful than Obama and would beat McCain. I also suspect that the motivation behind Clinton's reluctance to concede was based not entirely on her ego (uppitiness, power or what have you--which were all implied in the press), but on the same thought, i.e. she thought she had a better shot at defeating McCain. And to carry it further, I noticed Clinton didn't move anywhere near to the right as much as Obama has moved. Maybe she didn't have to because there was not as far to go. On the other, I think she has done the triangulations, and feels secure where she is. She knows where she stands on all sorts of issues that Obama hasn't had to fight out in public yet, i.e political experience...
Now I am going to go back to Hemingway, Goya, Orozco, and the symbolism of war, capital, American public denial and self-reinforcing ignorance, the processes of the erasure of history.
Nothing remains of the past except my own deformed memories, and even these are eroding and transformed with later knowledge. I am not after the truth because I don't belive there is any to be found, so much as a congruence. The goal is to try and get the shape of it right, work towards a congruence.
``Rumor has it this is why H.S.T killed himself...too much of the same thing for too long...''
Don't worry. I depend on my passions. They nurture me between bounds of rationality... I don't take them as seriously as I try to write about them. Trapped in amber. That was a nice image.
CG