Congenial-speak #37

Ten Years Gone

I was thinking about victories when I began—spacial, personal, political, wins against an establishment. I was dealing with trying to make some stark realities from the past speak to me or my audience with their contrasts. When I decided to write a political memoir, I was treading on new genre. In my historical fiction and often in poetry politics is usually wrapped—or warped—in my writing somewhere, between the lines, at the little toe of a foot note, with debate poised on a literary tongue. It comes naturally, with a comforting commonality that's been my safe word since I was a four-year-old dancing on our dinning room table. I had never written a memoir though. My background was in writing stories of personal experience. How accurate did I need to be? Could I write about people who, for the most part, were living. Could I serve them justly, give them the justice they may not have found then? What liberties, if any, could I take? I thought I handled them with care. My job was to somehow, believably, integrate my personal history, those of family, friends, neighbors, with the Vietnam War and its unimpeachable history. Textbooks, research articles, online compilations can only define the consensus. A personal sense filters it. As an adult writing this book 45 years after the facts, I was well acquainted with people who had been in the game then. My parents, friends of theirs, people like Vance (Opperman),who I've never met but did know a good friend of his, all added to the authenticity of the book. I lived vicariously through them. I put my feet in their shoes, related to what they told me, what I had (as a kid) seen locally. I watched interviews with Gene McCarthy, Vance, and people my parents knew. I read articles of the exploits of the head of the McCarthy delegation of the Minnesota DFL and future state AG Warren Spannus. I studied the campaign of Hubert Humphrey and the shorter ones of Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

My 22-year-old niece was compiling a time-line with her grandmother, my mom who, among many other things, nominated Shirley Chisholm at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She has always been humble, certainly not expecting any credit or even a slap on the back for the things she did, her incidental swats at the glass ceilings for housewives on our block, while raising me and my sister in her 30s. I think I caught whiff of the time-line in an Email one day in 2013. I don't think the '72 convention was even on it. I took it as an opportunity to write some kind of book about that whole scene, that chapter in the lives we all shared. It occurred to me that it was a compelling story; a Jewish Holocaust refugee (dad) marrying an ultra-liberal progressive from the Bronx, coming to the land of the all-night DFL, adopting a biracial child, and growing together when said child is rehabilitating from a head injury in the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the many societal changes it facilitated. There might have been, albeit unconsciously, a hint that some recognition for past reparations could be appreciated. Some form of literal remunerations of those years was warranted. It was a time when to them windmills likely offered the best, most worthy fight. I grew up seeing the frustration, hopelessness, and obfuscation of any peaceful alternatives to senseless destruction. The people I write about, my family, friends that I'll never know again like I did, their lives unfolded, sometimes hinging on the way the war winds blew. For me it was a door, a Pandora's box, opening for better or worse. A progressively liberal environment was the stimulant, the motif, by which I grew. These ideas and values held by my parents were helpful, for example, in my re-entry into my public school system. (In my book I show the car accident I had in 1971 and say how it required me to go to a different school). They were fortuitous in having the vocational needs I had met by a school system just beginning to take issue with such demands. I learned at my father's side as I tagged along to see him rise through the levels of local politics. I came of age watching government work, democracy fought for in its day. I remember in my book the circumstances our family was in surrounding democracy's greatest perceptual challenge in my young life—the vitriolic 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Bouillabaisse

Today it is a far different kettle of fish. As the short-lived “Mooch” said, it stinks from the head down. We need look no further than the events in Charlottesville, VA for evidence of that. But, as I said, that is a different kettle of fish, another blog post or worm can to be kicked at some more, or some. Democracy, as I was introduced to it, is as close as it's ever been in my relatively long life to becoming extinct. In January of this year the trajectory, the arc that Obama spoke of, took a turn off its true course. Like a writer follows a story arc, I followed America's story live since 1965, when the war escalated with the North Vietnam bombing mission called Operation Rolling Thunder. This offensive move by Johnson, promulgated by the illegitimate Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, raised a growing consciousness in America that this war was illegal, immoral, and ultimately unwinnable. Communism was all the rage. Johnson feared its proliferation through Southeast Asia. And guess what, in April of 1975 when the last chopper left the US Embassy, within hours South Vietnam fell to Communist rule.

Throughout the beginning of the 21^st century it has been alarmingly evident that fascism is now the “ism,” the tonic, the acerbic sponge to fear on the world table. The vestigial ghosts of the Cold War have faded as much as transparencies can. Certainly with the current ad-hock administration, whose puppet head can't seem to find the words to criticize Putin for anything, Communism, the “Red Menace,” our rivals in hockey or space exploration is in a land of old times long forgotten. Although how the cotton made its way to the gin has not slipped our minds. The meeting in April of 1865 at Appomattox, VA is planted in the northern-most mindset. Robert E. Lee, the statue whose removal was the base of the upheaval in Charlottesville, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Personally I couldn't have cared less about Lee's statue, providing of course that somewhere there is one of Grant. The statue of Lee is a reminder that the South lost the Civil War, that those ideas lost, that white supremacist mentality that has no home in America. It has no place on this planet but, again, that is another kettle of fish.