Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  That was his way of atoning.

  And he was innocent, as proven by the fact that he wasn’t in jail—a child could see that. A child saw him wreathed in one halo of glory after another. In March 1948, the Communists established the National News for him, dedicated to former members of the NSDAP or other patriotic thinkers, to help him feel at home in their Germany; three weeks later, when their People’s Police confiscated all products of the press licensed in the West and shut down their distribution, they continued to allow people like Knoop a discreet subscription to the West Berlin Daily Mirror to counteract any hint of feeling not at home, mailed in a sealed envelope of course. When he did take a fall, nine years later, he had to say goodbye to a whole colony of boathouses, a pheasant-breeding facility, and the first canopy swing—called “Hollywood”—in all of Gneez and the district too, but for Cresspahl’s daughter it came too late. She could grasp that the Communists had let him help them to rise above the level of commodity circulation, as long as they still had something to learn from him and the Soviet Union; she felt sorry enough for him when he was led off past white-faced government secretaries in his waiting room, but it was too late. She’d had to spend too long being ashamed of having reached into that sack of oranges.

  July 6, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day

  is also the day when Auntie Times tells us what her special correspondent Bernard Weinraub wrote her from Saigon, South Vietnam, back under the date of June 27:

  “AMERICAN IMPACT ON VIETNAM’S ECONOMY, POLITICS AND CULTURE IS PROFOUND

  Ten years ago fewer than 1,000 American servicemen were stationed in Vietnam, and their presence was scarcely noticed.

  Today, 530,000 American troops and 12,000 civilians are swarming through this tortured country, and their presence is affecting the very roots of South Vietnamese life.

  . . . Lambrettas and cars. In 30,000 to 40,000 homes and in village squares throughout the country, South Vietnamese families watch in fascination ‘The Addams Family,’ and ‘Perry Mason’ on armed forces television. In college classrooms students read John Updike and J. D. Salinger. In coffee shops, young men who work for United States agencies and girls in mini-skirts sip Coca-Cola and complain that the Americans have taken over.

  The American presence has also contributed to a tangle of more profound changes that remain, with a war on, contradictory and complex. Students, teachers, Government employes and businessmen insist, for example, that the influx of American soldiers, civilians and dollars is tearing the family apart and creating social havoc.

  . . .‘An impossible situation has been created,’ said an American-educated lawyer. ‘The poor families come to Saigon from the countryside because of the war. The father has few skills, so he becomes a day laborer or drives a pedicab. Before he was respected by the children. He knew about the farm. He knew about the land. Now he knows nothing.

  ‘The young boys wash cars for the Americans or shine shoes or sell papers or work as pickpockets,’ the lawyer went on. ‘They may earn 500 or 600 piasters [$5 or $6] a day. Their fathers earn 200 piasters a day. Here is a 10-year-old boy earning three times as much as his father. It is unheard of.’

  Beyond the impact of Americans and American dollars, of course, there is the over-all, shattering impact of the war itself. Virtually every young farmer or peasant is forced to join the Government forces or the Vietcong; more than a million people have become refugees; the disruption of farms and villages has led an additional two million to flee to the cities . . .

  . . . since thousands of families in rural areas are physically moved out of their farms by allied troops to create free-strike zones.

  . . .‘The Vietnamese never wants to leave his village,’ said a professor at Saigon University. ‘They want to be born there and they want to die there.

  ‘That is not easy for you Americans to understand, since you can move from village to village in your country,’ he went on. ‘But here it is very painful for a Vietnamese to leave his village, and when they are forced to move they hate you. It is as simple as that—they hate you.’

  . . . Another [American] declared:

  ‘It’s easy to blame everything wrong here on the Americans—the Vietnamese love doing it. But, look, this society was damned rotten when we got here and what we’re getting now is an exaggeration of the rottenness, the corruption, the national hangups.’

  . . . Ironically the strongest American cultural influence has touched folk singing in the antiwar ballads of the most famous college singer in Vietnam, Trinh Cong Son.

  The broadest social—and, by extension, cultural—impact of the Americans has fallen on the powerful middle class, who exclusively ran the Government’s bureaucracy, taught in primary schools and colleges and served as lawyers, doctors and businessmen. This socially conscious class, to all indications, had little link to or sympathy for the peasants, or even the army.

  American officials say privately that the disruption within this entrenched class is welcome. Middle-class Vietnamese are naturally bitter. Especially at their decline in status.

  ‘A university professor may earn 18,000 piasters a month [$150], while a bar girl can earn 100,000 piasters [$850],’ said 58-year-old Ho Huu Tuong, a lower-house representative who was a prominent intellectual in the nineteen forties. ‘The intelligentsia are the disinherited, the lost, because of the American impact. We have lost our position.’

  ‘Money has become the idol,’ said Mr. Thien, the Information Minister. ‘Money, money, money.’

  The theme is echoed by poorer Vietnamese—the pedicab drivers, the small businessmen, the maids, the cooks—but for them the problem of status is irrelevant and the flow of American dollars is hardly unwelcome. ‘How can I hate the Americans?’ asked a grinning woman who sells black-market cigarettes at a stand on Tu Do, in the heart of Saigon. ‘They have so much money in their pockets.’

  . . . At the official level, only enormous American assistance—$600-million this fiscal year—keeps Vietnam afloat. The figure is exclusive of American military expenditures of more than $2-billion a month.

  . . . Only 6 per cent of last year’s budget was met by direct taxes on income and business profits in comparison with about 80 per cent in the United States.

  This results in Government reliance on levies on foodstuffs, tobacco, alcohol, matches and other items that fall with heavy weight on the poor. And, through bribes and bureaucracy, the rich often pay no taxes at all.

  . . . Since 1962, land distribution in South Vietnam has been at a virtual standstill and the bulk of the land remains in the hands of absentee landlords.

  . . .There is a general feeling that Mr. Thieu, Mr. Ky or any other Vietnamese leader would have enormous political difficulties, even if they agreed to every possible reform that the Americans have urged.

  For the heart of the Government or ‘system’ is an unwieldy, Kafkaesque bureaucracy that hampers progress at every turn. And in that area, the American impact has been minimal.

  Paperwork, documents, stamps, bored officials, bribes are everywhere. Officials work four-hour days.

  ‘It will take us at least a generation to change the system,’ said one of the highest American officials at the United States mission. ‘Maybe more than a generation.’

  . . . A South Vietnamese publisher told an American recently: ‘You are our guests in this country and Vietnamese have been very friendly to you. Do not outlive our hospitality.’

  . . .‘Smugness of so many of them is appalling,’ said a junior American official. ‘If we were not at war it would be funny.’

  But a student in La Pagode, a coffee shop on Tu Do, observed: ‘Americans must fight for us so we can live in peace.’

  Had the student volunteered to join the army? ‘No, I must study, I am a student,’ he replied.”

  © The New York Times

  And who else does Auntie Times want us to get to know today? Lynn Tinkel.

  On June 19, Lynn Tinkel, a twenty-two-year-old Bronx school
teacher, was going somewhere with her friend James Lunenfeld, two years older than she, also a teacher, and was doing so on the INDependent’s platform under Fifty-Ninth Street. The hour was late—two thirty in the morning—and she thought: Uhh: the thought came into her mind: I feel like taking a picture of my friend James.

  But it is forbidden to take pictures in the New York subway! A wise Transit Authority rule forbids it, without written permission, signed and sealed. This was where Lynn had her idea, James his in turn, and that costs a cool $25 fine or ten days in jail!

  Yesterday, Lynn stood before a man in robes, in the Criminal Court at 100 Center Street, presumably Chamber 5a (Traffic Court), and was acquitted. For her, it was the principle of the thing. If she felt like taking a picture of her friend on the subway platform. . . .The judge agreed and let her go in peace.

  Now the Transit Authority thinks a closer look at this rule might be in order. For instance, it could explicitly tell photographers they can’t use tripods, over which people have been known to trip; or that flashbulbs might blind a train driver or passengers . . . that’s what its closer look has yielded so far. Anyway, Lynn is free, and if the air temperature above Broadway was lower than 82 degrees Fahrenheit with a humidity index of 73 percent, would we go down into the subway and take photos of each other question mark?

  There’s something The New York Times has missed.

  The sidewalks on Broadway are bordered with steel bandages that make the street corners steep and difficult to manage for people with baby carriages or even the kind of grocery carts that families use to carry home food for the entire week. Today, for the first time, our eye is caught and our soles are soothed by the gentle slopes that the city has sunk into the transition between street and sidewalk, a relief to taxpayers and recognition of its obligations; a down payment: as Marie says, still in a bad mood from the muggy air over the harbor, which made it hard for her to sweat.

  Can this be? Something escaping the gaze of The New York Times—a change in the style of Broadway’s furnishings on the corner of Ninety-Eighth, an aesthetic correction, and sociographical event? Alas, it is we who must make sure to mention it.

  July 7, 1968 Sunday

  Haven’t we been steadfastly insisting that The New York Times was an auntie? Wasn’t that our very own word?

  We can prove it with her performance yesterday—her lecture on the profound impact of the US-American presence on the economy, politics, and culture of the part of Vietnam that this country intends to save from Communism. She’s considered, double-checked, and articulated everything: The South Vietnamese in range of armed forces television gobble up The Addams Family as eagerly as they do Perry Mason; the students read contemporary classics of New England and Pennsylvania literature; Coca-Cola’s in the homes and the homes have been torn apart, as are families, by the unheard-of income structures and the forced separation from farm and house and village; the folk singers sing antiwar songs in American styles; the middle class is bitter at their loss of influence over politics and the ruling bureaucracy, bitter at the new status symbol, money (barmaids earn five times as much as university professors); direct taxes cover only six percent of the state budget; a once independent rice-producing country has to import rice; land reform is at a standstill; the pervasive influence of French and American bureaucracy has ruined the local variety: every consequence of the American war is at least mentioned, not even excluding the religious disputes. Only one blessing of Western civilization, while being another American import, does The New York Times pass over in silence: venereal diseases. What an auntie.

  We could prove it with her manifestation today. Fully eight hundred lines on the brutality of the American police; severely, clinically, she bends over the sinners and asks what this might be about: because civilian citizens don’t say otherwise? because citizens lay fingers on policemen too? because policemen like others’ pain? because they’re filled head to toe with contempt? because they’re scared? stressed? because they’re ashamed of their modest education? because the police academy fails to conduct psychiatric examinations? This is followed, to make the rebuke all the more stinging, by the blow that it was a New Jersey policeman who, without observing the legal requirements, bought the forty-year-old Smith & Wesson revolver that he then sold, equally illegally, to a second policeman, and only then did the firearm reach the hands of the man who shot and killed a young woman in the ladies’ toilets in Central Park four days ago. She is going to make the policemen of this country behave if it’s the last thing she does, this aunt.

  A person of such stature should be able to take for granted that only appropriate opinions about her are current, namely these (disregarding of course the ill-bred definitions coming out of Moscow and its surroundings). But this noble simplicity and quiet grandeur is beyond her. Instead, risking aspersions on her self-confidence, she’d rather hedge her bets and disseminate on her own what one is to think of her. We have read, for instance, on an agèd enamel sign in Woodlawn Cemetery that: she is indispensable for intelligent conversation; in the subway, that: without her we cannot keep up with the times, and the tempting consolation that: you don’t have to read it all, but it’s such a pleasant feeling to know that it’s all in there; we have read in bronze and marble that: she is the diary of the world; today, though, it’s that: one of the nicest things about The New York Times is that you can get it delivered—this with a sketch that shows her in the act of delivery.

  And so who do we see there?

  An older person, not exactly maidenly, but chaste. An aunt.

  A short person. What is it that pushes her head forward—is it gout, or so she can better peer over her pince-nez? Beady jet-black eyes, rectangular glasses. Lips curved up at both corners into a delicate semicircle; nothing remotely like frivolity or a vulgar grin. Controlled friendliness. Not a wrinkle anywhere on her face.