“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.”
– Henry David Thoreau
In the last post I gushed about An Unfinished Love Story and felt quite enthusiastic about the continued sharing of my political-origins story. Upon a few days’ reflection, while my admiration for Goodwin’s book has not lessened—I realize my enthusiasm for the words (“Ask not….”) and activities of political life (including that most sacred of responsibilities—voting) has, over the many decades since, mostly been beaten into a sullen sense of responsibility. I am sad to say I’ve become a cynical old curmudgeon, which I think I’ll just share here and there, now and then, because, in real life, I don’t want to continually mouth these negatives in front of my grandchildren. As I’m sure I’ve said before—everyone needs hope to get through to the next day—who am I to cast doubts?
However, I am determined to complete the story of Me, the Democrat. When I say complete, it’s not that I’m no longer a Democrat or that I won’t continue voting, it’s just that seeing clearly now with the rain being gone isn’t giving me that old song-optimism, instead it looks like the sun is scorching the earth beyond salvage. Oh, stop it, Marjorie. Enough with the doom and gloom for a moment.
Back to the 60s, 1964 to be exact. My baby boys and I fly off to the Philippines from Bemidji, Minnesota, by way of Minneapolis, San Francisco, Hawaii, and Guam. And there, we live happily for nearly a year and a half, with husband Don, jaunting off to Vietnam, practically right next door, to serve 1-2-3 month stints as a “village sheriff.” Do you see the layers of irony (or sadness or disbelief or naivety) here? First of all, Don was one of the least sheriff-like people in the world. He was an air force enlisted guy, a former crew chief for the Thunderbirds. He was, as far as I remember swagger-free, prejudice-free, opposite of militaristic or gung-ho, and really just wanted to go to work, maybe a regular day around airplanes, and then go scuba-diving, or just hang around beaches and water. At least that’s my long-ago memory of him.
And then there’s me. Clueless. I did know the US was engaged in Vietnam. But I had no opinion. Yeah. Me. Vietnam. No opinion. As an excuse (although not a good one), I had two small boys and (me, the kid from Northome, Minnesota) a life in the tropics. I was reading spy novels, preparing exotic dishes from an assortment of Ladies Magazines, and mothering (with the help of Lety, our housekeeper). I smoked cigarettes, drank coffee, pondered World War and Cold War spies (thanks to an obsession with le Carré), and do not remember ever considering what the hell the US was doing in Vietnam.
Early fall 1965, we fly back to the States, to be stationed in Goldsboro, North Caroline, where we would live until moving to New Mexico in 1970. Not an interesting place, in fact uninteresting enough to finally drive me to where I had long been desirous of heading—college. East Carolina University to be exact. Where I finally joined the real political world from several directions.
Before too many semesters passed, I had realized history was my preferred route to knowing stuff. While I loved all of those basic classes in math, science, philosophy, and literature, it was history that led me down so many wondrous paths of discovery. I was soon completely engaged, taking as close to a full load of classes, both at the Center in Goldsboro, and eventually the main campus in Greenville, as I could muster.
While ECU was as far from a hot bed of political activity as one could get, we did have one or two small and timid protests on the main campus. We also had a professor whom, oddly enough, I remember fondly, John East, a right-winger, who later served in Congress. I had him for one or more political science classes and, at 27 or 28 by then, I was one of his older and, it turns out, more outspoken students—in fact I cannot remember any other than a few small voices in the room. He loved it and goaded me constantly to defend my positions. It especially interested him that I had subscribed to a Black Panthers newsletter, which being a born-again white southern conservative, he found akin to exchanging letters with Stalin. However, to his credit and the slightly-less dangerous rhetoric of that time, he challenged me, not to shut up, but to figure out how to justify my positions.
While we were living in the Philippines, most of the Great Society of Lyndon Baines Johnson had become a reality: Civil Rights, The War on Poverty, acts improving education at all levels, Medicare and Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Arts and so much more. Some of this had begun during JFK’s time in office, but it took one of the master wheeler-dealers of all political time to get it passed.
For so many years, I’ve thought only of the images of Johnson and Nixon looking me in the eye as they blatantly, cold-bloodedly lied every night on the national news about Vietnam. And the words “Hey hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” echo in my head. Goodwin’s book reminded me in the most thoughtful of ways what a force of good for the whole country he had been until he succumbed to the militarists around him, the reactionary voices of faulty historical premises, unbridled jingoism, and grandiose ambition. I owe LBJ a belated apology after all these years of thoughtlessly lumping him in with Richard Nixon.
All of this discovery and personal change had a soundtrack, of course, incorporating all the folk protest tunes from my one and only favorite musical decade—the sixties. Those songs have lyrics that say stuff. They’re crammed with opinions, meaning, passions that are big and important. Tunes you could sing along with in protest and belief. Everything I catch a line of here and there today is almost blindly-angry or insipid. Personal moaning and desire and INSIPID. There, I said it. How old do you think I am. That would be 103.
Here’s my favorite anti-war song because it’s to sing with and mourn with and Bob Dylan wrote it and first performed it in 1963. It’s titled “With God on our Side,” and I used it to teach history during my one full year of junior high social studies teaching many years later. I’m going to cull a few lines only because, obscure as this blog is you never know when the copyright lawyers will appear. Please google, read lyrics and listen to Dylan sing it.
He sings us from the Indian wars/Spanish-American War/Civil War/First World War/Second World War to what comes next. Each stanza returning with the darkest of refrains…having God on our side.
And that the land that I live in has God on its side
Oh, the country was young with God on its side
With guns in their hands and God on their side
For you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side
The Germans now too have God on their side
And accept it all bravely with God on my side
And you never ask questions when God’s on your side
Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side
So now as I’m leavin’, I’m weary as hell
The confusion I’m feelin’ ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor
That if God’s on our side, he’ll stop the next war
If Taylor Swift started writing and singing comparably challenging lyrics we might indeed have that revolution about which Judy Collins was singing: “We want our rights and we don’t care how/We want a revolution now.” There could be worse things than the Swifties taking over the world, I suppose.
1968 came along. By now I was consuming news like an addict and reading some of the better periodicals along with my history books. I wasn’t exactly well-informed, but compared to the dummy that landed in Goldsboro from the Philippines in 1965, I was a whole different person.
1968. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were murdered right there before our eyes practically.
In my mind’s ear, I hear the exact cadence and pitch of MLK on April 3rd, 1968, my 29th birthday. The night before he was killed. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land”
And Bobby Kennedy, looking so young, turning from the stage “…and now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there…’ as he makes a peace sign.
I am tired of this post. So sad…reading MLK’s words, looking at RFK, so promising a young man, turning away from the podium in LA. Hearing Dylan sing.
When I was listening to the audio book of “An Unfinished Love Story” at the gym, I found myself slowing down, tensing up as snatches of the speeches of Martin Luther King , Lyndon Johnson, and Bobby Kennedy were shared. I knew it was among the last words two of them would utter, and that the third, who should have gone down as one of our presidential greats would come to have “…how many kids did you kill today” represent him.
I think, like Goodwin, I’ll stop with the end of the sixties. I could talk about leaving Greenville, North Carolina, where my kids and I lived in a rambling old white house, and I went to school full time and watched the news. And Nixon took office.
I recently read Walter Isaacson’s book, Kissinger, which obviously tells us more than we could ever want to know about Nixon as well as Kissinger. There’s no way around the fact they were both mostly loathsome, adding nothing good to any human endeavors. I unfortunately read that account of the early seventies just before Goodwin’s book on the sixties was released, so the order of the decades was reversed in my reading and hard to keep straight in my head. It was discombobulating to hold on to the reality of future horrors yet to be inflicted by Nixon/Kissinger, while reliving the tragedy of LBJ.
My last intense political time was as a staff person at the New Mexico office for McGovern/Shriver. I’ve written about that particular tragedy and posted one of these picture before so I do not have the desire or the energy to say more. As the 70s passed I volunteered a few times on campaigns: Robert Mondragon for Governor (I think?—no, maybe Senator? Who cares!), one of Joseph Montoya’s Senate races, maybe some local pols—a few walks, parties, small contribution or two.
Then I just became a voter. Generally unenthusiastic…but almost any Democrat beats the alternative. (True, even back then) I do remember when I first heard Barack Obama speak. I was driving back from a trip to Minnesota, stopping over in a motel in some almost-surely godforsaken town on the Great Plains. Turned on the 2004 Democratic convention, and there he was. OMG. Called my friend Sue in Texas and said he’s going to be the next president isn’t he? Yup, that happened, but he didn’t save the world, which I guess is going to take starting over at WW2 level carnage. Or extinction/dinosaur-return level.
I did it. Exposed the fact that my serious political life was brief and ever since I’ve just been dutifully voting. Although part of my reason for starting these desultory ramblings through my memories is that a couple of weeks ago we had our primaries. I went to vote with only one interesting race in mind…and remembered that I like to vote.