Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

  What did the SDSers want? Lears said that it was something called participatory democracy. In participatory democracy, people got into politics on a day-to-day basis. They debated all the main issues that touched them and then voted—and their vote, the popular vote, was binding. The SDSers seemed to think that heaven was a protracted meeting, where everyone got to pop off interminably. But at least, as Lears described it, the document came from a reasonably benevolent group of people. They wanted everyone to have a better life. Sometimes they seemed a little milquetoasty, like a lot of former high school class presidents who’d grown their hair long but still wanted to impress the principal with their seriousness and command of parliamentary procedure. But they could be impressive as well. Lears read us a high point or two: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”

  Was Lears himself an SDSer? He presented their views with some conviction, but then he tended to make any ideas he was presenting seem, temporarily, to be his own. We would debate the question of his SDS membership pretty hotly in the time to come.

  My guess was no. He was too strange a character, too indrawn and eccentric, to fit into any group smoothly. He was a party of one.

  The Hawk Man who came with SDS was nothing that you could have predicted based on what we’d heard about the Port Huron Statement. To give Hawk his due, he blew us away. By 1970, I had heard a few people on TV argue against the Vietnam War. They were bland, pasty men in bland suits talking to and past other bland men in dark suits, who thought the war either a national obligation or an exalted mission. Drone, drone, drone. But everyone held virtually the same premises, premises that did not even need to be brought to the fore. They were that the United States was a nation good to its core, that we had invented liberty and self-government, that we had saved old Europe from itself, twice, and thence had become, against our own will, default guardians of the world.

  We made an occasional mistake, let this be granted. There were times when our naïveté, our combined goodness and lack of guile, might get us into trouble. But we learned from every stumble, righted ourselves, and quickly got back to being what we were: the best hope of the free world. Liberals, that is, saw and recorded the stumbles. To the conservatives we were all right all the time, nothing to worry much about. Or, a stealthy Kissingeresque step forward, we were one of many sovereign nations pursuing our national interests—except that with our national interest generally coincided the interests of the world.

  In the winter of 1970, when the SDSers came to radicalize us, the war seemed to be winding down. The North Vietnamese had changed their strategy. With the Tet offensive of 1968, they had tried to end the war with a stroke. They had attacked cities all through central South Vietnam, including Saigon itself, the capital, where fighting ran on for two weeks. Tet shocked people at home in the States. No one could believe that the Viet Cong, who had been depicted as a side-bet operation, were strong enough to get South Vietnam in their grip and shake it.

  But for their part, the Cong were nearly ruined by the operation. They suffered hideous casualties, and they failed in their ultimate intent, which was to get the people of South Vietnam to join them in rebelling against the Americans and their Vietnamese lackeys. So General Giap changed course, shifting from a war of conquest to a war of attrition. Though there were still plenty of ground casualties, by 1970 there hadn’t been a major battle in Vietnam for about a year.

  Nixon had promised peace with honor; he’d been elected on the assurance that he had a plan to bring the war to an end—a plan that he did not possess. By the winter of 1970, the battle was being turned over to the loyal South Vietnamese—Vietnamization had begun—and American troops were, it seemed, receding from the fray.

  In November 1969, Nixon had given his most successful speech, next to the Checkers performance—in which he’d fought off imputations of graft, pointed to his wife’s good Republican cloth coat, and averred that under no conditions would he give back the gift of a small lovable dog named Checkers. The Checkers speech had saved Nixon’s career; the speech of November 3, 1969, galvanized his presidency. This was the “silent majority” oration, where Nixon, driven nearly mad by the war protesters, called out to the great American middle, the majority, who did their duty noiselessly, who never whined, who believed in America and a star-spangled God, to come to his aid. And they did. Calls and letters and telegrams hit the White House and Congress like a tidal surge of red, white, and blue. Nixon was driving again.

  The war-protest movement had gone into a lower key; the war itself seemed to be fading. Many people who thought about it—I didn’t, not unless compelled—believed that peace was near. This was, of course, dead wrong. Up ahead were the bombing and invasion of Cambodia; the burning of thirty ROTC buildings at American colleges; the deaths at Kent State and Jackson State. The Hawk Man—give him his due—was not at all lulled by recent events.

  Three desks had been hauled to the front of the room, and the Hawk Man sat in the middle one, flanked by his minions. Our usual conversational circle was broken; we students were seated in a mass (Lears in our midst, as I recall), waiting to hear the word. The room was filled with about twice its normal population. The interlopers had skipped a class of their own in order to be here.

  This was a first. Not the skipping of a class; kids at Medford High skipped class whenever they could get away with it. If a teacher rarely took attendance or did it only half the time, then some fraction of the class would daily execute the local and diminished version of the Great Escape. They would hang out in parking lots behind the school, smoke cigarettes, drink, slap-fight with each other, cruise around in a spiffed up Chevy or a low-to-the-ground Buick, address one another as shithead, sometimes in an amiable way, sometimes not, and otherwise do as much nothing as was humanly possible.

  But here was a first—kids were skipping class to go to another class. It’s possible that in the history of the institution this had never happened before. There were a few predictable interlopers, smart kids from the honors classes, kids who may have been turning up to see if they couldn’t get to know more about Harvard to help them augment their applications. These were kids who traveled through the high school in discreet bubbles of rectitude, treating Medford High as though it were a real school: jollying it up with their favorite teachers; pretending they themselves were invisible as they sped from one class to the next, chatting with each other about the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a bracing game of Risk they had left unfinished; looking down at their respectable tie-shoes, picked and purchased by Mom, when a gang of blacks or South Medford Italians approached; gathering up their books without complaint when they’d been knocked flying by a fast-moving hand; never engaging the enemy.

  But some other kids had shown up as well. Sitting across from the Peace Hawk and his deputies was Jonesy. He was not sitting at a desk but insouciantly balanced up on top of the chair back, feet on the seat. He was poised to listen to what the SDSers said, because Jonesy, Peter Jones, observed the usages. He could be courtly, polite. But I knew Jonesy well and I knew that he was not going to like what he heard and that when his turn came, he would not hold back.

  The Hawk Man launched into his rap. His view, to put it concisely and make it cruder than it was, though it was crude enough, was that America had been a criminal nation from day one. We lived on an enormous and invisible grave site, taking our guilty repose over the bodies of the slain and despoiled. We never looked down, never knew that the corpses were there. What Germany had done to the Jews, America had done to the Indians, done to our African slaves, done to the Filipinos, was doing n
ow to the Vietnamese and would do to any poor, inconvenient people who lay between the arrogant republic and its hunger for more.

  “This is a criminal nation,” I heard the Hawk Man say, “and the only solution when you’re faced with a criminal is to bring it to justice.”

  Put America behind bars? In its entirety?

  What the Hawk Man seemed to have in mind were war-crimes tribunals on the order of the one conducted at Nuremberg—punishment, then, for the main living perpetrators and judicious reparations for those who had survived America’s maniac wrath but had been damaged by it nonetheless.

  Was he kidding? Was the rant this guy’s idea of a show of some kind, a put-on, as it was then called? Not in the least. He meant it. He thought he was living in the vitals of a murderous beast, and he wanted to poison it, or maybe mangle its guts from within—in any event, bring it down in a great heap of scales and talons.

  This idea is all but commonplace now—commonplace in the sense that everyone has heard it, though only the rare few uphold it—yet at the time it was a brute shock, a hard punch in the face of a piety that I did not know I sustained. When you are in high school, and generally disaffected, it’s possible to think of yourself as alienated from every standing opinion. But there is a difference between being disaffected, which is lazy and confused, and being opposed, which, however wrongheaded it might be, nonetheless involves the affirmation of strong and often unpopular ideas. I was disaffected. But I was no figure of opposition—Hawk Man was.

  It is very hard, perhaps it is not possible, to re-create the feeling of American pride that reigned in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly for children. This or that nation could preen about its moral fiber—the Swiss probably enjoyed this sort of thing; the Brits, perhaps, too. Other countries could puff themselves up over their might: One thinks of the parades of tanks rolling down the boulevards in Moscow and Beijing. But we were a nation that possessed both. Our military power was unparalleled. (To our minds, we had won the Second World War almost single-handedly; we knew little of the massive Russian victories.) And we were good. We wanted freedom, self-determination, democracy for everyone in the world. With the war in Vietnam, those of us who had grown up on this faith, which was instilled as fiercely as any religion, had to contend with the possibility that we were not omnipotent, and far from pure. It was quite simply too much to assimilate.

  I recall that when Castro took power in Cuba and threw his lot in with the Russians, I took it as a personal affront. I was hurt, mad, uncomprehending. It was 1961. I was at the time nine years old. On the day that Castro rolled in triumph into Havana, I heard the story on the radio and compelled my grandmother to swear not once but three times that Castro’s forces, victorious though they were, would be no match, none, for the American Army.

  So when the SDS Hawk, with his razory voice and his arrogant mien, began laying down this alien gospel, it threw me into confusion. I too was angry at the world as it stood. But that anger had no content; it was something that barely entered words, something that could be discharged by a hard smash on the football field. I looked to Lears for a clue about how to take all this, but the Socratic demeanor was on. He looked intent and slightly, just slightly, bemused. Let them make of it what they will, his expression seemed to say, just so long as they make something.

  THE HAWK MAN riffed about “scenarios” and what was and would be going down, and he spoke of the military-industrial complex. ROTC was something called “Rot-C” to him. He was smart, Hawk-Dove, and he had endless facts on file, but he was also as brittle and iced-over as any of the best and the brightest, any of the Pentagon or State Department types he so despised.

  You could discern from the strains of his yelp that it truly was all about him, and that, right as he may have been, he cared nothing for the rest of us at all. He was simply shocked, stricken in his pride, by the fact that the government, which had previously been a few songs and parades and diversions for the menials and the mentally overtaxed, had now taken an interest in him and was considering fracturing his well-greased life. Now the machine wanted to give him a mandatory graduation present, a close haircut, an un-stylish uniform, day-to-day commerce with people who’d grown up on farms and in urban shitholes and never heard of Hegel, and, most of all, the chance to get his ass blown off by devilish Asians. No, thanks—that was someone else’s destiny, not what Peace Hawk saw in his crystal ball.

  Jonesy would have counted in the Peace Hawk’s estimation as one of the shrunken members of the herd, and Jonesy would have sensed as much. Jones was the football team’s preeminent hitter. He was about five-feet-ten and 160 pounds. He was our middle guard, the nose tackle, and when he unloaded on some fat-assed offensive lineman, he could send him off like a beach ball bouncing in big loops down the highway.

  Jonesy had about seven brothers and, from what I could gather, about four of these were in the army, a couple maybe in Vietnam. Jonesy loved these brothers, though when they were home I suspect they fought each other—kicking, biting, and gouging encouraged—if only to keep the dull times at bay.

  Jonesy loved his football pals, too, though he made a distinction between those who liked to hit and who made it to practice every day, for whom he would have done anything, particularly if it involved damaging a third party, and the skills players, ends and backs, who did not savor contact and who were faggots (the word pronounced with some irony, not always that much).

  I knew something about Jonesy’s views on Vietnam because they’d come out at football practice. Of course, everyone knows how it was bound to be with a bunch of football players from a working-class high school in 1969 when they got to the subject of Vietnam. Football players are supposed, in all social mythology, to be the school reactionaries, abusing and beating those who step out of line, going off to the peace marches to help their hard-hat dads attack the doves. But that’s not how it went with us.

  On October 15, the day of the first Vietnam Moratorium demonstration, we looked up over our heads to see a plane writing in the sky. We were running what was called team offense, practicing the plays we’d use in the game the next week, going at three-quarters speed. They were the same old plays; it didn’t require much concentration. The major activity was speculating on what the skywriter was trying to create on the blue canvas overhead. It looked like the beginnings of a woman. Naked maybe? No. An animal then, a whale? A camel? Nope. Soon it became clear that it was a peace sign, a celestial totem for the crowd on the Boston Common protesting the war. Jonesy screamed out that what we were seeing was the footprint of the great American chicken. But Rick Cirone and Fred Tommasso, the class president, and Jackie Lane, the black kid on the team, threw their hands up and flashed the peace sign back. Jonesy and a fair number of the lineman in turn gave the sign the middle finger, upraised. It seemed, to put it a little crudely, that the defensive backfield was pretty solidly against the war, that much of the interior line was pro-, and that there was a great unsaluting middle, of which I was a part.

  For the next three weeks or so, the war got constant discussion in the locker room, and if the discourse never reached the heights of the Platonic academy, it was not the stupidest talk one could hear in America on the subject. For some time, at Medford High, the only place that I heard any opposition to the war was from football players. Strange? After up-downs and after head-banging block-and-tackle drills that left you bleeding from the nose and mouth and, if you were very unlucky, the ears, it wasn’t likely you’d back off an opinion for fear of what someone might decide to say to you by way of rebuttal. In any event, if you look at the MHS football team photos, fall 1969, you can see Fred, and perhaps Rick, too, laying two splayed fingers out over their bent knees—the peace sign.

  Jonesy now told the Peace Hawk what he’d told us in the locker room before. First, he gave barely two shits about the justice of the Vietnam conflict. A couple of other principles were uppermost in his mind, and he described them with bitter fluency to the Hawk Man and his cadre. He ad
mitted that it was a stupid conflict to be in, but when you are in a fight, you win. Or you destroy yourself trying—you destroy yourself rather than quit. If you quit, you sacrifice your honor, and without honor, it is, as Achilles knew, not possible to live.

  Second point: Joneses were involved, Joneses actual and Joneses metaphorical. He had friends in Asia. Other people he knew had friends and brothers and husbands there. The Cong and the NVA were trying to kill these guys; ergo, fuck the Cong. Let them burn in screaming napalm hell.

  When the Hawk Man got explicit about his support for the NVA, talking about the impending victory of the forces of national liberation, Jonesy became furious.

  “Do you have anyone,” he said, keeping his voice under control, keeping from roaring, “do you have a single real friend who is in Vietnam? Do you have any relatives there?”

  The war was hitting Medford much more directly than Harvard. In the Medford Daily Mercury you read about kids coming home dead who not long ago had been high school athletes.

  A few nights before, I’d seen Rat Pelagrino, a hard guy from Barry Park, in front of Brigham’s. He had just met up with a friend of his back from Asia. The guy was in a wheelchair, minus a leg and an arm, with a ruined face, and not much time to live. Rat caught this sight while high on mescaline. His friend’s face, a horror as it was, had seemed to turn grotesque shades, yellow and green and pink, Rat said, and begun to melt before his eyes. Rat, wearing his friend’s army jacket, was huddled into a ball, knees to his chest, face down, weeping furiously in the doorway of Brigham’s. His body shook, as though a horrible wind were blasting through and only he felt it. “I can’t believe what they fuckin’ did to him,” he said. “We used to be kids.”