WE WON’T BE FOOLED AGAIN – Part 1

By Barbara Groark

OK, first, try this link - http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=9JMbaZ6j1J4

Well, I certainly don’t approve of that final finger – too much like an old photo from the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Zimmers, from England, are about 25 or 30 or 40 years more advanced in years than we, so we can at least do as well at party time, can’t we? Do you think we should have karaoke at the reunion at some point? I think so. Groups and singles? Or a Complaints Choir?
(http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=complaint+choir&search_type=)

As for me, as a singer I’m more of a dancer. However, I will join a backup group – I’m OK in the background, with people like Marlene Altamuro – we could be the Vandellas, as of old (or rather, ‘back in the day’). I was always more of a Vandella than a Supreme. Isn’t Sue Malloy a singer? She could be Martha. Food for thought. The committee should be consulted. Cassie Riger? Kay Dunlap? Molly Hall? Any volunteers for some customized entertainment?

One day in about 1985, I was amused to find myself working for the military-industrial complex, that is, for a government contractor doing work for the Department of Defense and who were the only ones hiring at the time. I had to laugh – they even trusted me with a Secret clearance – at how far I’d adjusted attitude-wise from my late teens and twenties, when the automatically absorbed, knee-jerk mindset of people our age was to be anti-military, anti-government, anti-church, even anti-fashion. I was mostly on the sidelines observing and pondering, except at the kitchen or dining room table with family or friends. My sister Pat, a year younger than we (now living in Georgia with her husband and kids and working as a fourth-grade teacher), actually did some protest-marching on Moratorium Day in Washington, and lived for a short time on a commune in Tennessee. Don’t we absorb the ideas of our own time, place, and group of friends – all mostly matters of chance – and think of those things as the only truths, because we ourselves have discovered them, till ten or so years go by, and other truths are discovered, competing with the old ones without taking them out completely, and making life more ambiguous but more interesting (thank God)? Then ten more years go by – and now we are the ones in charge of something and are feeling maybe more sympathetic toward the old regime (“Yeah, wait till you’re in charge of something,” I heard someone say) – and then ten more and ten more – geez, I’m stilling looking up words in the dictionary!

Don’t you like that insurance commercial where the trim, gray-haired businessman in a beautiful suit and tie and gold cufflinks, in his high-rise office overlooking a city, wants to find a way to “stick it to the Man” – and his younger colleague says, “But, sir, you ARE the Man!” Now there’s a guy who could not progress through his own ages. He’s stuck in the late 1960s and 1970s. And you get them in females, too. Knuckleheadedness is an equal-opportunity condition.

My family had all girls, and the boy cousins were four or five years younger, so the draft was not an immediate issue at the worst moments of the Vietnam War; a cousin later served in the Philippines, and another is now a Navy commander. I know some of our classmates served in Vietnam after our graduation. My first boyfriend in college was a Vietnam vet of the pre-Tet offensive moment, however, and that’s another reason for me not to be sentimental about that era and the treatment of soldiers at the time. The mayor of my boyfriend’s North Jersey town at his homecoming wanted to give him a big parade and key to the city or something, but he refused it. I think he was not proud of his own actions as a soldier, but he never said what they were. He did say there were moments when it was as if he were not there, and then he’d become aware of dead bodies of the enemy all around. To me this seemed to be a source of wonder, maybe awe and horror, but not shame. But he had already made his decision. He could not go to God with it, nor to counseling, but only to alcohol and other evasions, and I escaped that prison in time.

Maybe my reaction was such as it was because, when I came to think of it many years later, I was sort of in the military class myself – my mother’s one uncle died in France in 1918, and another uncle boxed with the Army traveling team in the teens and twenties, even once boxing the world heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. My mother’s own brother died in a plane over Luxembourg in 1944, and has a grave over there – at the 50th memorial in the 1990s a bunch of relatives (but not me) went over to visit and were honored like royalty – in fact they met some royalty there because Luxembourg (an archduchy) is so small the whole country is practically on a first-name basis with the people running the country. The main organizer was ten years old during World War II when he and his friends witnessed the planes crashing; the boys used to defy the Nazi occupiers’ curfew and go out at night and lie on their backs in a farm field watching the Allied B-17s rumble overhead on their way back to England after making bombing drops in Germany. The crash was an accident: an updraft caused one plane in formation directly below another to hit the one above it, sending both planes to the ground in flames and killing all aboard. This man who was a boy then always signed off his letters to the attendees at the memorial: “Thank you for liberating us!” Every American gets the glory – still – as far as those people are concerned.

On my father’s side, one brother handled a Navy landing vehicle at Iwo Jima, a fact we never knew till after he died since he never spoke of his experience. Another brother, who signed up underage into the Navy, witnessed the testing at Bikini Island of the atom bomb before they were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He and his friends were taking a swim when they saw the mushroom cloud in the distance. An officer observing the test nearby wore a protective suit that covered him head to toe, and he stood behind glass, but no one thought to tell the boys to get out of the water. Now my uncle has several strange and serious diseases that are being traced back to that time.

My and many of your parents’ four years of high school were the four years of World War II. Without being too hard on ourselves, guess we weren’t the first to ever have big problems to figure out. But all this recollection of family history added to my breakaway from the prevailing tone of the sixties and seventies.

But, wait, I’m not finished yet. Like Forrest Gump, I need to do hard things once in a while. So instead of running the dogs in the Itiderod in Alaska or the training up for the women’s end of the Iron Man Competition, I read Dante’s Divine Comedy a few times – you know, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, the whole deal - somebody told me I didn’t need that sort of thing, so naturally I was curious. The book is like Catholicism for Dummies (by the way, that’s a real title) or Theology for Dummies (another real one), or Star Wars for grownups. It is called a comedy, and I recommend it for anyone over 30. Like with Rowling’s Hogwarts School, you start recognizing certain types, perhaps your father’s type, who may show up in hell, purgatory, or paradise. Or find a human type who in some circumstances would get placed in hell (totally without God), in other circumstances and with better decision-making would end up in purgatory (not perfect but working on it), or if that work is complete may end up in paradise. Popes, for example – Dante puts a few in each area, and he wasn’t excommunicated. You also may scare yourself thinking you have all the spiritual diseases presented, like people who are new at reading medical books. But don’t worry, this passes.

Dante says at some point that we actually make our own decision where we want to go; we judge ourselves in the end. He also says that heaven, hell, and purgatory are not exactly as he describes, but our silly humanity needs to hold onto a structure like this, at least to begin with. If you go there (this would be a real adventure vacation), I like the Ciardi translation, but I haven’t tried the Pinsky yet.

You may be asking, what in blue blazes does this have to do with the sixties’ attitude toward the military and authority in general (beyond anti-authoritarian curiosity)? Well, friends, I finally slogged through to Paradiso, and according to Dante, you can only get in there if you have any kind of love – romantic, platonic, filial, love of knowledge, love of God. And one of the kinds of love he calls patria, which is love of country, and all the dead who died in battle are found there and live eternally on their very own planet (Mars). Anybody who dies in battle, no matter what he was like otherwise, automatically gets to Paradise.

Truthfully, the patria idea was a shocking concept to a former sixties adolescent. I’m embarrassed to say to even allow this idea took some adjustment. But I did allow it, and then I started meeting other people who did not hold the old prevailing view, such as a black woman at work whose brother had died in Vietnam. It had happened years before, so the effect was not new, but she was proud, sad, quiet, still a little puzzled when she spoke of it briefly and matter-of-factly. She reminded me of my mother, whose one brother was buried in Luxembourg.

I nevertheless did not become a Republican. There was too much ranting on the Christian Right – though I agreed with a lot of what they stood for – for me to really trust them. The techniques were too familiar. I even agree with a lot of Ann Coulter’s discussions in her book Godless, though her provocative sound-bite marketing techniques are pretty offensive to anyone with sense.

But the tired old Left has no nostalgic appeal either. Last year the political action group MoveOn placed a full-page ad in the New York Times stating “General Betray-us” to mock General Petraeus, who was testifying about the Iraq War in Washington, and the group seems to be wondering why great hordes are not joining their numbers. I don’t know about you, but I wanted to boo them off the media stage - can we bring back booing? There is also a group of ladies who wants everybody to wear pink to protest the Iraq War, and if there is a more cockamamie way to do anything I don’t know what it is. How stupid do they think we are? Don’t they know we’ve been doing our homework?

OK, I’m done. I recently re-registered as an independent, by the way. (Karaoke: vote yes.)

And here’s another video. I think we have time to learn this by October.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLGLum5SyKQ

Poem - High School Reunion: 25 Years

Here is something I wrote after the HCHS 25-Year Reunion.

HIGH SCHOOL REUNION: 25 YEARS

Chatting with cocktails, dressed well, some
sequins, everyone looks confident,
prosperous, a bunch of forty-three-year-olds,
surprising numbers in shapes of old, but faces
better now in person than in pictures.

One may notice swords in chests, several sizes,
fixtures protruding through clothes,
some decorated with scarves and ribbons,
or worn like military medals, a condition to
make a speaker's voice quieter, smile
warmer, judgment kinder than of old.

We've made it halfway, most of us.

Men and women, tongue-tied, clownish, spiteful
as students, now expansive, generous,
naming children, some tiny, one grandchild, businesses,
travels, adventures, being there when the wall
came down. Some are back to church.

It has been good, most of it. It has been
a good fight. We are halfway through.
We are not as surprised or offended by life
as at twenty or thirty. We do not
complain. We briefly do the Bristol Stomp.