As I write this, the US is officially at war. In fact, officially we are engaged in 3 wars - can you name them? Iraq, Afghanistan and... Korea.
Even without Korea, it would be hard to tell we were at war. People live lives, party, get in trouble, are born, die, go to the mall, go on vacation, go to jail and get out, add on that wing of the house, send their kids to preschool and college, have extramarital affairs, attend AA meetings, everything.
Iraq and Afghanistan make it a bit easier to describe the surreality of most of the 60s when we were in Nam. The war was on; intellectually we knew it. We all, even us detached teenagers, knew it was going on. The network news, at 7:30pm in those days, showed us the numbers - here's the Dow, here's the sports scores, here's the body counts. Kids got drafted, but in 1968, you got college deferments, deferments for being married, sole surviving son (hence the name of the popular band at the time, the Soul Survivors), 4F. In rich towns everybody knew a "Dr. Fake", who could find some reason to dole out a 4F to your son. In rich towns somebody knew somebody who could get you into the National Guard, or Coast Guard. And that was if you were literally dumb enough not to go to college.
Nam clattered on in the background in 68 and few cared. Each town, especially a low middle class town like mine, had one or maybe two guys killed during the entire war, and, let's face it, he usually wasn't the captain of the football team type. In 1968, in that one year, we actually lost more boys to underage driving than we did to combat deaths for the entirety of the Viet Nam Conflict, as it is officially known. In January 1968, Nam didn't really get many people worked up, one way or another. My old man, Normandy vet, VFW member, kept complaining that our home front "propaganda" was the problem, that maybe if more people "felt" the war in SE Asia, if more people had to change their lives in some way - rationing, women working, price controls, newsreels, SOMETHING - that would facility a better groundswell of support and help bring the war to a speedy, victorious end.
But none of that was gonna happen. Not during the gogo Sixties, not even for his generation of WWII vets, who just now were beginning to reap the full benefits of the Postwar Boom, the crowning piece of the puzzle - sending their kids to college. My own sister was in her frosh year at college. Rosy the Riveter wasn't only not needed - she wasn't even desirable in such an environment.
Nam clattered on, and we all expected it to be over soon, anyway. Look, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, all lasted less than 5 years. Even the American Revolution, from first shot to last shot, was 6 years. Those were the BIG wars. The little ones - 1812, Mexican, Spanish American - lasted less. Our own government, the good guys, the guys who had pushed for and backed the Civil Rights advances of the last 5 years, told us there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe if you were 18, unmarried, no prospects for college (which in those days meant, no interest in college, since virtually any college would accept a young male in those days, and "community colleges" were springing up to help address the deferment needs), you might worry about going off to fight in a war, but if you were 15, like me, by the time you were 22 and out of college, this war would be long over. Probably even by the time you were out of HS...
Nam clattered on. I knew no one who was in Nam. A couple of friends of mine had older brothers in the service, but they were either in the Navy or were stationed in Germany. Germany was not only easy duty, it was downright fun, to hear them talk. The Navy or Germany. Nobody in Nam, and certainly nobody in Korea.
So it was truly weird when the first really big war story of 1968 that cropped up was NOT about Nam but about Korea. Yeah, Korea, remember them? We're still technically at war with them! You may have thought that Korea ended in 1953, but that was only a cease fire, as we found out in Western Civilization class. We still had a lot of troops stationed there, something like 40,000, which until only very recently was more than in Nam itself. Some guys had re-upped just to stay "on the front lines against Communism" back in the 50s and had been there 15 years or even more. But nobody died there. So it was kinda like Germany, right? A little less fun. But overall, a piece of cake.
So it was definitely weird that on January 24 the news was not about Nam, but about, of all things, Korea! Korea?
This is 1968, remember, not 1952. Korea? There was a kid that I had gone to Kindergarten and into HS with; his FATHER was killed in Korea before he was born! Korea?? Guys signed up for duty in Korea so as not to go to Nam! Korea???
How passe'! How "retro"! How weird!
Some right wingers used the opportunity to remind us about the larger Cold War and Soviet threat, even tho the Soviets were never really involved in Korea at all - it was the Red Chinese who swarmed across the Yalu. But this is January 1968 - we still had Nam, still had the Wall, still had proxy wars in the Mideast, shows like I Spy and the Man from UNCLE as well as the whole 007 series were popular because they were placed in the context of the Cold War - nobody needed a reminder about the Cold War.
So the whole thing was a blip. The North Koreans captured a ship, unjustly. Guys were held prisoner. We would negotiate their release. There was not gonna be renewed armed hostilities.
A blip. It came and went.
Just like the riots. Just like the JFK assassination. Just like Nam...
A blip.
Such was the state of mind of January 1968...
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Beginnings
I can't for the life of me remember where I was when the ball dropped on 1968. Funny, I can remember where I was in 1969, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, but not 68. Of course, this is consistent with my experience and life story - it was the last year of my youth, my "preconsciousness". After my spiritual awakening of August 1968, my life has been a consistent, accountable whole. From that point on I was an actor, an intention, a will, upon the world. Before then, I was merely a passive entity in it.
I don't remember much about the tumultuous events that were happening around me in January 1968. That is, I remember them, but they had little or no impact on me. I, as I believe most of the country, still felt that the JFK assassination was a tragedy, a random act of violence, and that nonetheless it did not, was not, deterring us from going about the business of perfecting the world. I did not really understand Viet Nam outside of the paradigm that it was a just and necessary war simply because we were involved in it, and we were, after all, the good guys - the purveyors of truth, justice, prosperity for the regular guy. My father, the WWII/Normandy vet stood for what we were all about - doing what had to be done to straighten out the mess back in the old country. Once we won we would help them get back on their feet and then go away and everybody could live a decent life. The stories of the first generation, the immigrants, still weighed heavy in our, the Boomers', consciousness - many if not most were of the immigrants were still with us and could aver that life outside this country was brutish, hard and unfair.
And look around! We were not rich, by any means, and by today's inflated expectations we would be considered quite poor, but we felt so materially well off that even as a freshman in HS we had discussions, debates really, about how materialism was somehow ruining us as a generation. More than once I had brought up what was the true feeling of most of my generation, yes, even us low middle class kids - our parents wanted us to have everything they did not have. Of course, that was material goods and comfort. Unfortunately, what we wanted most was everything they DID have - community, family closeness, a sense of belonging.
I didn't really get the civil rights movement either, despite the fact that I had been listening to "black" radio stations since 1965. In those days, in the NYC metro area, there had been 3 Top 40 stations - WINS, WMCA and WABC. By 1965 I was bored with it, with the Beatles and the British Invasion, with the inanity of most music they purveyed outside of the Beach Boys and Four Seasons, my great influences. My cousin, who was in HS in an integrated school, told me about the "black" stations - WWRL, WLIB and WNJR, the latter out of Newark. I began listening to these stations instead, and discovered a whole new world, both musically and culturally. They had relatively weaker signals, and I actually had to go to Two Guys and get a better transistor radio (which I got from my paper route money) and had to position it in certain spots to get these stations in. There was an optimal spot for each of the three stations.
I had never gotten the racial thing - It just never made sense to me. So Negros are dark. So what? Chinese have slanty eyes. So what? They have brains, right? They can speak, right? They can think, right? I used to try to listen to a local show on the local radio station, WJLK, the "Gospel Train" - I loved the music. Mysteriously, my mother used to change the station at that point, to WNEW. I chalked it up to her not liking Gospel music for some unknown reason (she was very religious). I never got the message that it was a racial thing. My father worked two jobs, and one of them was at a local supermarket, frequented by many blacks, but also many whites. I never saw my father treat black people any differently than whites. Both local high schools were totally integrated. Back in the early 60s, during the Freedom Rider days, I can remember being in the car with my family and the radio on, and when the news came that Wallace had to let the blacks into the University of Alabama, we all cheered!
If there was race hate around, I never got the memo. I found it odd when, by 7th grade, I was called by some a "nigger lover". I didn't take it as an insult - I just found it a really odd thing to be called. Of course I'm a nigger lover! I'm a whitey lover, too! And a Chink lover! Isn't that what they're teaching us in Sunday school? Ridiculous...
It's not that I didn't know racism existed - the Huntley-Brinkley Report demonstrated night after night that it did exist - in the South. But here in the north things were okay. We lived in an all white town, but had to drive through all black neighborhoods to get to church, shopping and Grandma's house. I could not tell the difference between their neighborhoods and ours - the houses looked the same, the cars looked the same. There were no riots, no violence. When I met black people I smiled and was friendly as I would be to anyone, and they smiled back and were friendly like anyone. Sure, they spoke differently, but so did my grandparents. What's the big deal?
So by January 1, 1967, when there had been riots, they seemed remote - Watts, Detroit, even Newark seemed like they were as far away as Selma and Jackson and Mongomery. More importantly, they seemed to be a continuation of the inexorable drama of justice, just like Nam seemed to be part of the inexorably pageant of freedom. And just like all the new housing developments going up all around were part of the inexorable march of progress and a better life. It would be a stretch to say that I took such movements for justice, freedom and progress for granted, but only a slight stretch.
And they were part of my own family's story as well. The first generation came here to escape poverty. The second generation fought to ensure and spread freedom. And now it would be our turn to forward progress - scientific progress, social progress, hygenic progress. It was all part of the inexorable plan.
The Communists would eventually be defeated, just as the Nazis had been and the Huns before them. Freedom and democracy would prevail because it just made sense. I mean, look at us! We had freedom, democracy, and nice houses and cars and schools and good health and all the toys and stuff you could ever want. They were all part of the same thing. Who wouldn't want that?
And now we knew our destiny was space - we not only had the Jetsons, we had the reality of Mercury and Gemini and now Apollo. Sure, there had been a set back - 3 astronauts, including the popular Ed White and Gus Grissom, had died. But it had been an accident, and we weren't about to slink off. The moon was in reach! Can you believe it? We will be on the moon before I am out of HS! At this rate I'll be able to take my kids on vacation to Mars!
(Later in 1968, when "2001 A Space Odyssey" came out, its depictions of Pan Am flights and Bell video phones and Hilton Hotels seemed not just plausible, but inevitable.)
We were just a couple of years removed from the 1964-65 World's Fair, which I had the great fortune to live nearby. My family and I went perhaps 4 or 5 times. The Fair was steeped in the promise of technology, of progress, changing our lives dramatically in the very near future. AT&T, GM, GE all had pavillions that stressed how exciting and better the world was on the precipice of being, thanks to American technology. We were indeed the good guys!
It was hard not to see a sparkling, sterling future ahead, nuclear annihilation be damned!
Even given all this, the fact of the matter was that I was 15, a great student, a great athlete, attractive, into girls, sports, music and most of all, the aggrandizement of my own ego. I had grown up in the 60s, and living in the 60s more stuff happened of serious note and import in one week than we could expect nowadays in an entire year. That we had Nam, Civil Rights, Space, an impending presidential election, the Cold War (even Korea, as we would soon be reminded, by the Pueblo Incident in late January) going on in the background did not register much except as discussion topics in social studies classes. We had lived thru Civil Defense drills in grammar school, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination, all by 5th grade. It was part of the scenery, of the pageant, but not the substance of my life at that time.
No, it was all about, as Reggie Jackson would later put it, the magnificence of me.
I was also somewhat of a juvenile delinquent at the time - drinking heavily on the weekends, roaming the streets with a gang, doing petty prankish things, rumbling, intimidating. Later that year, when I ran for class president, one kid came up to me in astonishment and said, "Wow! I had no idea you were smart!" I was truly someone of multiple minds...
The only thing of note of that January in 1968 that I can recall is a basketball game where I came in off the bench and became the high scorer, grabbing rebound after rebound, getting steal after steal, making shot after shot. The next game I was benched again. I asked the frosh coach why? He told me the varsity coach wanted to develop taller players. I lost interest in basketball after JV the following year...
Oh - and there was this brief romance with Barbara. Barbara was beautiful, shapely, and had the sweetest personality. We went steady for pretty much the whole month. She dumped me and felt guilty about it. No matter. My ego wasn't dented - after all, it was she who had cheated. Boy, I must really have been overbearing...
Such a little thing like that was not about to dent the ego of the Imperial Me!
So that's how we entered 1968 - full of optimism, of inevitability, of egotism. Both me, and the country.
I don't remember much about the tumultuous events that were happening around me in January 1968. That is, I remember them, but they had little or no impact on me. I, as I believe most of the country, still felt that the JFK assassination was a tragedy, a random act of violence, and that nonetheless it did not, was not, deterring us from going about the business of perfecting the world. I did not really understand Viet Nam outside of the paradigm that it was a just and necessary war simply because we were involved in it, and we were, after all, the good guys - the purveyors of truth, justice, prosperity for the regular guy. My father, the WWII/Normandy vet stood for what we were all about - doing what had to be done to straighten out the mess back in the old country. Once we won we would help them get back on their feet and then go away and everybody could live a decent life. The stories of the first generation, the immigrants, still weighed heavy in our, the Boomers', consciousness - many if not most were of the immigrants were still with us and could aver that life outside this country was brutish, hard and unfair.
And look around! We were not rich, by any means, and by today's inflated expectations we would be considered quite poor, but we felt so materially well off that even as a freshman in HS we had discussions, debates really, about how materialism was somehow ruining us as a generation. More than once I had brought up what was the true feeling of most of my generation, yes, even us low middle class kids - our parents wanted us to have everything they did not have. Of course, that was material goods and comfort. Unfortunately, what we wanted most was everything they DID have - community, family closeness, a sense of belonging.
I didn't really get the civil rights movement either, despite the fact that I had been listening to "black" radio stations since 1965. In those days, in the NYC metro area, there had been 3 Top 40 stations - WINS, WMCA and WABC. By 1965 I was bored with it, with the Beatles and the British Invasion, with the inanity of most music they purveyed outside of the Beach Boys and Four Seasons, my great influences. My cousin, who was in HS in an integrated school, told me about the "black" stations - WWRL, WLIB and WNJR, the latter out of Newark. I began listening to these stations instead, and discovered a whole new world, both musically and culturally. They had relatively weaker signals, and I actually had to go to Two Guys and get a better transistor radio (which I got from my paper route money) and had to position it in certain spots to get these stations in. There was an optimal spot for each of the three stations.
I had never gotten the racial thing - It just never made sense to me. So Negros are dark. So what? Chinese have slanty eyes. So what? They have brains, right? They can speak, right? They can think, right? I used to try to listen to a local show on the local radio station, WJLK, the "Gospel Train" - I loved the music. Mysteriously, my mother used to change the station at that point, to WNEW. I chalked it up to her not liking Gospel music for some unknown reason (she was very religious). I never got the message that it was a racial thing. My father worked two jobs, and one of them was at a local supermarket, frequented by many blacks, but also many whites. I never saw my father treat black people any differently than whites. Both local high schools were totally integrated. Back in the early 60s, during the Freedom Rider days, I can remember being in the car with my family and the radio on, and when the news came that Wallace had to let the blacks into the University of Alabama, we all cheered!
If there was race hate around, I never got the memo. I found it odd when, by 7th grade, I was called by some a "nigger lover". I didn't take it as an insult - I just found it a really odd thing to be called. Of course I'm a nigger lover! I'm a whitey lover, too! And a Chink lover! Isn't that what they're teaching us in Sunday school? Ridiculous...
It's not that I didn't know racism existed - the Huntley-Brinkley Report demonstrated night after night that it did exist - in the South. But here in the north things were okay. We lived in an all white town, but had to drive through all black neighborhoods to get to church, shopping and Grandma's house. I could not tell the difference between their neighborhoods and ours - the houses looked the same, the cars looked the same. There were no riots, no violence. When I met black people I smiled and was friendly as I would be to anyone, and they smiled back and were friendly like anyone. Sure, they spoke differently, but so did my grandparents. What's the big deal?
So by January 1, 1967, when there had been riots, they seemed remote - Watts, Detroit, even Newark seemed like they were as far away as Selma and Jackson and Mongomery. More importantly, they seemed to be a continuation of the inexorable drama of justice, just like Nam seemed to be part of the inexorably pageant of freedom. And just like all the new housing developments going up all around were part of the inexorable march of progress and a better life. It would be a stretch to say that I took such movements for justice, freedom and progress for granted, but only a slight stretch.
And they were part of my own family's story as well. The first generation came here to escape poverty. The second generation fought to ensure and spread freedom. And now it would be our turn to forward progress - scientific progress, social progress, hygenic progress. It was all part of the inexorable plan.
The Communists would eventually be defeated, just as the Nazis had been and the Huns before them. Freedom and democracy would prevail because it just made sense. I mean, look at us! We had freedom, democracy, and nice houses and cars and schools and good health and all the toys and stuff you could ever want. They were all part of the same thing. Who wouldn't want that?
And now we knew our destiny was space - we not only had the Jetsons, we had the reality of Mercury and Gemini and now Apollo. Sure, there had been a set back - 3 astronauts, including the popular Ed White and Gus Grissom, had died. But it had been an accident, and we weren't about to slink off. The moon was in reach! Can you believe it? We will be on the moon before I am out of HS! At this rate I'll be able to take my kids on vacation to Mars!
(Later in 1968, when "2001 A Space Odyssey" came out, its depictions of Pan Am flights and Bell video phones and Hilton Hotels seemed not just plausible, but inevitable.)
We were just a couple of years removed from the 1964-65 World's Fair, which I had the great fortune to live nearby. My family and I went perhaps 4 or 5 times. The Fair was steeped in the promise of technology, of progress, changing our lives dramatically in the very near future. AT&T, GM, GE all had pavillions that stressed how exciting and better the world was on the precipice of being, thanks to American technology. We were indeed the good guys!
It was hard not to see a sparkling, sterling future ahead, nuclear annihilation be damned!
Even given all this, the fact of the matter was that I was 15, a great student, a great athlete, attractive, into girls, sports, music and most of all, the aggrandizement of my own ego. I had grown up in the 60s, and living in the 60s more stuff happened of serious note and import in one week than we could expect nowadays in an entire year. That we had Nam, Civil Rights, Space, an impending presidential election, the Cold War (even Korea, as we would soon be reminded, by the Pueblo Incident in late January) going on in the background did not register much except as discussion topics in social studies classes. We had lived thru Civil Defense drills in grammar school, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination, all by 5th grade. It was part of the scenery, of the pageant, but not the substance of my life at that time.
No, it was all about, as Reggie Jackson would later put it, the magnificence of me.
I was also somewhat of a juvenile delinquent at the time - drinking heavily on the weekends, roaming the streets with a gang, doing petty prankish things, rumbling, intimidating. Later that year, when I ran for class president, one kid came up to me in astonishment and said, "Wow! I had no idea you were smart!" I was truly someone of multiple minds...
The only thing of note of that January in 1968 that I can recall is a basketball game where I came in off the bench and became the high scorer, grabbing rebound after rebound, getting steal after steal, making shot after shot. The next game I was benched again. I asked the frosh coach why? He told me the varsity coach wanted to develop taller players. I lost interest in basketball after JV the following year...
Oh - and there was this brief romance with Barbara. Barbara was beautiful, shapely, and had the sweetest personality. We went steady for pretty much the whole month. She dumped me and felt guilty about it. No matter. My ego wasn't dented - after all, it was she who had cheated. Boy, I must really have been overbearing...
Such a little thing like that was not about to dent the ego of the Imperial Me!
So that's how we entered 1968 - full of optimism, of inevitability, of egotism. Both me, and the country.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
A Personal/Cultural History of 1968
It's New Year's Day, 2008. I just read Bob Herbert's essay in the NYTimes:
Still Reeling After all These Years
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/opinion/01herbert.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=e08b95da8ccddfaa&ei=5087%0A
I have a great interest in that year, 1968, a year when I turned 16. My first interest is as a historian - I consider it the midpoint of the pivotal decade in the history of this country, a decade that started full in the blush of Kennedy optimism, and ended in the jadedness of Nixon and the OPEC price shocks, changing the American scene (to this point) permanently. It was the end of the 5 years of trying to make this country live up to its ideals, and the beginning of a five year period of disillusionment after disillusionment, leaving us with a cynicism that we have not yet been able to cast off.
I have interest in 1968 for personal reasons - the end of youth, the beginning of adulthood. The year I fell deeply in love, seriously in love, for the first time; the year of my improbable and life changing spiritual awakening.
1968 was the beginning of my life as a creative person, and as a mathematician.
In 1968 I read the most influential books of my literary life - Moby Dick and The Grapes of Wrath - and saw the most influential movie of my life so far - 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It is hard to communicate to young people today what life in the Sixties was like, how much change went on, how many events happened, how they came at you on a daily basis. Even within such a decade, 1968 was special in that it was the most eventful of all of the 60s.
I decided to create this blog as a kind of personal journal of a restrospective journey. There is so much about that year, that time, both personally and as a person awake and aware at the time (and by the end of the year even moreso...), that I would like to document, to express, if for no other reason than to add to the colloquial history of the time.
I don't know, at the moment, what shape this will take, how it will evolve, what impact it will have, whether anyone will choose to read it or keep up with it.
All I know is that everything in it will have deep connection to 1968, the most important year in the history of the US, if not the world, post WWII, and the most important year in my own life.
Let's see where it leads...
Still Reeling After all These Years
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/opinion/01herbert.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=e08b95da8ccddfaa&ei=5087%0A
I have a great interest in that year, 1968, a year when I turned 16. My first interest is as a historian - I consider it the midpoint of the pivotal decade in the history of this country, a decade that started full in the blush of Kennedy optimism, and ended in the jadedness of Nixon and the OPEC price shocks, changing the American scene (to this point) permanently. It was the end of the 5 years of trying to make this country live up to its ideals, and the beginning of a five year period of disillusionment after disillusionment, leaving us with a cynicism that we have not yet been able to cast off.
I have interest in 1968 for personal reasons - the end of youth, the beginning of adulthood. The year I fell deeply in love, seriously in love, for the first time; the year of my improbable and life changing spiritual awakening.
1968 was the beginning of my life as a creative person, and as a mathematician.
In 1968 I read the most influential books of my literary life - Moby Dick and The Grapes of Wrath - and saw the most influential movie of my life so far - 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It is hard to communicate to young people today what life in the Sixties was like, how much change went on, how many events happened, how they came at you on a daily basis. Even within such a decade, 1968 was special in that it was the most eventful of all of the 60s.
I decided to create this blog as a kind of personal journal of a restrospective journey. There is so much about that year, that time, both personally and as a person awake and aware at the time (and by the end of the year even moreso...), that I would like to document, to express, if for no other reason than to add to the colloquial history of the time.
I don't know, at the moment, what shape this will take, how it will evolve, what impact it will have, whether anyone will choose to read it or keep up with it.
All I know is that everything in it will have deep connection to 1968, the most important year in the history of the US, if not the world, post WWII, and the most important year in my own life.
Let's see where it leads...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)