Читать книгу Utrillo's Children; A Memoir of Paris In 1969 - Robert Ph.D Dick - Страница 6

By my early 20s, I was reading and studying heavily. I had been fortunate, along with tens of thousands of others of my age, to go to college in the l960s, just fifteen years after World War II. It started as a halcyon time. Books–good books leading to good discussions and debate–were read and thought about. In student unions, in dorm rooms, we talked about life and love, and beautiful women. We knew we were lucky to be there, but we also knew some things weren't right. The great teachers were teaching us critical thinking. They taught us about those who died for causes. There were electrifying courses called The Democratic Society, and The History of Parliamentary Democracy, and Eros and Civilization, that moved all of us into moments of introspection and thought. Seminars on class, race, sociology, philosophy, economics, and math, were all subjects required for the student to obtain a Bachelors Degree, a college education that often was the first one in many American families.

Still, the more we got educated the more challenging we got. Increasingly, we knew we had power which was charged by the thrill of our youth, and we got real possessive of our youth. My age group’s exposure to high-level thought would saturate our life efforts and lead us to examine dictate and doctrine. Mix these motivations, book readings, and television's increasing coverage of domestic and world events together, and citizens were being created that weren't going to accept traditional power elites and the usual methods of governance. We believed in Jeffersonian democracy. “Nay! We really believed in Jeffersonian democracy.” We were changing, and we were no longer like our fathers.

Ernest Hemingway's book, A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the l920s, has sections that have a lot of discussion about books. Indeed, several of his significant friends, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and of course Sylvia Beach, guided his reading and thinking while he was in Paris. Like young Hemingway, we were ready to get our teeth into some good stuff–some good literature, some good history and philosophy. So what did we read? What did I read? Vividly, I remember getting my hands on some of the following; Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, George Orwell's, l984, Aldous Huxely's, Brave New World, Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy In A New Key, and of course J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Other books tweaked our interest as well. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician, took a stance opposing the Vietnam War. His viewpoint was popular, and his work, Why I Am Not A Christian, helped fuel the “God is Dead” movement.

For those who might part company with Russell's views but still have questions about traditional biblical approaches, there was Eric Fromm's radical humanism found in, Ye Shall Be As Gods, a small work with a twist on the Torah, and even the New Testament. Fromm's “Weltanschauung” was of interest to Jewish kids who might be finding their synagogues a bit of a bore.

Richard Cobb, Author of A Second Identity.

Also coming out in l969 was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a book about Vonnegut's own experiences as a young 22-year-old soldier during the allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. As the future would prove, many of the above books would be on the ban list of numerous organizations and institutions.

Such books as these, and of course there were many more, supplied vast amounts of intellectual food–they made us think and question, and we became a little more stiff-necked with our elders. We gradually understood that controlling information was key to authoritarianism and control. And speaking for myself, I began to understand Hitler's book burnings a little better. Another book comes to mind–A Second Identity by Richard Cobb. Cobb, a British historian and Francophile, was a legend in his own time. He wrote articles, he wrote books, and he lived and wrote in France for long periods of his life.

This guy was brilliant and a character. Once, he was known to have watched the dawn come up while nude (along with several others) at the Place de la Concorde in central Paris. He seldom gave a lecture without a pint near by. Cobb's writings and his views of history had an impact on me. He wrote once, “that if you want to understand history, you are not going to find it out in charts, corporate printouts or economic models, but in the mental world of crackpots, and eccentrics of humanity.”

He felt that only from those who lived life with some gusto, who lived life by passion and not by Guggenheims, would histories be written about the truths of historical movements. Such writings would get into the guts of what it meant to be alive, to be young, to be in love, to be in charge of your own existence. Cobb's positions came alive with the writings of someone like Ernest Hemingway.

If anybody sucked all he could out of life, it was this American writer. I first read Hemingway in the mid l960s. Although I think we wondered about his l961 suicide, here was a guy who could deliver a punch. His books and philosophy could get a headlock on you and not let go. As previously mentioned, if you wanted to get a sense of Paris in the l920s, read his book, A Moveable Feast, which came out in l964. I loved reading his comments on restaurants, on Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, and painters like Pascin. Above all else, there was a tone and atmosphere about the book that stayed with me.

Along with this Oak Park, Illinois writer, came Eric Hoffer, a Longshoreman by trade who wrote The True Believer and The Ordeal of Change. A lot of my fellow college students read them. They dealt with both mass movements and self-esteem intersecting with youthful, if sometimes misguided, energy.

Maybe it was the province of our age, but themes from leftist thinkers always seemed to appeal to us. Writers like Albert Camus in his books The Rebel and The Plague, spoke of social “engagement” and individual freedom. Ideas on existence, pacifism, and critiques of Capitalism tumbled out of books from Herbert Marcuse to C. Wright Mills. Then there were Arthur Koestler, Saul Bellow (The Dangling Man–who could ever forget that one), Franz Kafka, and Frederick Nietzsche. We read these books at the same time that thousands of us were being sucked into a military meat grinder.

Until we got drafted, we were sitting in classes on the development of American Democracy and Representative Government while war news, lynchings, and assassinations were nightly fare on Walter Cronkite and CBS. A few black kids were also sitting in those same classes.

Artifacts of the 1960s.

University of Missouri, circa 1968.

Some things weren't making a whole lot sense. On May 13, l966, I received my 1-A classification while television was broadcasting dark body bags coming back from Vietnam, bumping down an elevator from the jaws of a military plane. Hundreds of us per week were being killed in Vietnam, and who knows how many more were horribly wounded. Corrupt politicians were telling us we were winning the war in Asia–well, maybe not! For along with the books mentioned above, we began to see antiwar materials in the bookstores. There were writers and reporters who were digging into secret places, and what they were finding was explosive. They were whistle-blowing on our government, and finding that lying and duplicity were business as usual in the highest offices in Washington. I.F. Stone wrote about President Johnson's l964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This act allowed him to order bombing of North Vietnam without Congressional approval. Professors, students and parents wondered, “Where did the U.S. Constitution go?” “Didn't we have a three branch government with checks and balances?” “What the hell is meant by this ‘War Powers Act?’”

The printed word has power, and writers were beginning to supply the public with information–information contrary to party line.

CBS reporter, David Schoenbrun, a New Yorker who was fluent in French and a true intellectual, got to the front lines in Vietnam, interviewed the grunts, and found out we weren't winning the war! He reported that Presidents, Generals, and advisers, to cover up miscalculations and just plain stupidity, were lying through their teeth. Schoenbrun personally went on a speaking tour, telling audiences his conclusions about 'Nam. I heard him at the University of Missouri at Kansas City in, I believe, l965. He received a standing ovation. It often takes great courage to stand up to power, but in my youth it was happening and it blew the top off this country.

Jon Marqua was right–it didn't take much to light the match. By the late l960s, blood was on the streets. Televised killings, assassinations, police brutality, and charging police dogs, ripping at the arms and legs of Americans, became habitual stuff on television programs.

Corrupt politicians, the Military Industrial Complex, (that of course included the Selective Service or the Lottery) and, sadly, some university presidents, dug in for the battle. Draft Boards dotted the American landscape and were made up of ordinary citizens who had extraordinary power. On your eighteenth birthday, you were required to register with your local draft board. From then on, you were liable to be “called up” for military duty at their whim. As one Vietnam Veteran later commented, “The Military Draft System dominated our generation's thought processes for a protracted period of our lives.”

Families argued among themselves over the issues. The young became radicalized, many joining the black community in their drive for racial equality, and many crowded into anti-war and draft-resisting demonstrations. Urban ghettos were exploding and it seemed the level of violence increased daily. America was paying its dues, and those of us under thirty didn't trust anyone.

For me personally, my luck held out. While I waited to be inducted, I decided to kill some time in graduate school at the University of Missouri. Maybe it was because I was an only son, or maybe because I got married, or maybe because my draft board became so incensed at the mess the country was in, I got a deferment, or at least a deferment for 6 month blocks of time. Then my status would be repeatedly reviewed–at least that's what I was told. (Deferments could be granted for health, education or various family situations, but who could plan a life under circumstances like that?) As a result, none of my days were comfortable, and planning for a future seemed futile. Presidents had come and presidents had gone, most trying to obliterate what was left of Vietnam.

The lies to the nation continued and it ripped us up. Even for young patriots, and “Hawks,” and those in ROTC, it was not a good time to grow up. When the decade of the l960s started, it really did seem to be a good time–very few of us had heard about Dien Bien Phu. And, probably fewer Americans had heard of President Eisenhower's early commitments of soldiers to Vietnam.

So early on, things seemed golden and peaceful, at least to us white kids. Folk singers, and early rockers began to get play time, and we danced to Teen Town, shook our hips and idolized Elvis, Little Richard and Fats Domino. The decade would end in a quagmire of lost dreams, smashed hopes, broken bodies, and political debacle. I would then be 26 years old.

There is a wonderful phrase: “The Fog of War.”

What “the fog of war” means is:

war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all of the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.

Robert S. McNamara, in The Fog of War