Chapter 7: Last rally
“The class consciousness of the American people must be raised. Revealing the internal contradictions of this racist, imperialistic war is the only way to reach the workers, the true revolutionary class. Listen, my brothers, my sisters, be strengthened by the words of Lenin. Do not be led astray into whiling away your time in the traps of cultural revolution. Sexism and racism can only be combated on a battleground drawn by the needs and necessities of the working class. My brothers . . .”
Jared stands off to the side of the crowd, shifting slowly from foot to foot, brushing off the chill of the frozen streets, ears exposed to the brisk wind. They’re turning deep red. Better red than dead, he smirks, inverting the popular patriotic slogan, “Better dead than red.”
It’s so cold—wind chill of five below!—that few pedestrians are afoot this morning on the streets of downtown Minneapolis. Passersby must be wondering what is so important that this gaggle of crazies has assembled before the Federal Building to defy not only the government but the weather.
Above the woman speaking, above her head he sees the clear, crystalline air of the post revolutionary world in which, all having now been won, comes forth the Revolutionary Vanguard.
High on a platform raised above the roiling masses now liberated comes the Vanguard to liquidate itself. Here on this first day of working-class rule the Vanguard rises to denounce itself as too historically mired in pre revolutionary nostalgia to be of service anymore.
Now her voice swells on this Day of the Peoples' Triumph: “My brothers”— she momentarily stifles a throaty “Oh comrades!”—“Oh, liberated peoples! We, the Vanguard, have served our historical function. Today we proclaim to you our willingness to render ultimate service. Today we rid you of the last impurity, that of nostalgia. We wipe clean Party memory and history. We offer you ourselves.”
On cue, the platform rises twenty feet higher. Two huge billowy Red Banners cascade in folds onto the ground. Now no decorations remain. The platform is bare except for the twenty odd people. The sun brightens. It is indeed a crystal day, almost free of pollution. Suddenly, as if having found the appropriate instant, the platform evaporates in a gush of fire and smoke, so quickly as to hurt the eyes before they have a chance to blink. Thus it has been calculated, this moment of pure oblation, the transfiguration of human history. That fleeting spot in the historical struggle: the instant of revolutionary suicide.
So it might go, reflects Jared. How stupid but how possible.
The young woman—an Athena who strikes the eye even while wearing camouflage—takes a half-step backwards from the frozen metal microphone and thrusts a gloved fist up towards the heavens. “We shall WIN!” she bellows as others thrust fists, some clap, and some merely move, unspeaking, sideways onto their other foot, trying to keep warm. With her small brood of disciples this woman purposefully struts past Jared, the only other speaker at the rally. It’s a ritualized snubbing, a disdain echoed by two of her male followers who bump and jostle Jared as they leave. Athena is Aaren. Liquid Fire.
As much as he’s smitten, Jared has to restrain himself from laughing at her theatrics, at this comedic Marx Brothers spectacle. While the whole anti-war Movement’s begun to appear to him as a vaudevillian escapade, her style of far left politics is its own parody. Forgiving her that, he admires her bravery. She risked a lot by coming to the rally.
Jared knows that a New Year has already dawned in more ways than one. A great fear has settled upon the anti-war community with the bombing of the county jail. Paranoia’s running deep. Even “The Four minus one,” as Matt joked, could not agree on the best way to interpret their trial or even whether to attempt to assume a leadership position.
Their trial had been brief—actually truncated. The Feds cleared their calendar and hurried The Four to court as fast as legalities permitted. Corey copped his plea and they became officially re-baptized by the media as The Three. Each had his day in court. Actually, more like an hour and a half in court because the judge limited them to giving personal testimony only. They were prevented from talking about why they raided the draft boards. It was as if the backdrop of the Vietnam War didn’t exist.
To carry this off, the Feds had dropped the sabotage charge and then indicted them with “interference by force, violence or otherwise” against the Selective Service System. Now, all that had to be proved was that they broke into and entered the draft board. They were set up like three ducks in a row. Pow! Pow! Pow! Each was found guilty within seventy-two hours of opening statements. At Christmas time they were sentenced. It was an atomic bomb: “Five years.” The maximum. No minimums. Jared saw the plane fly by dragging its apocalyptic banner, The End.
Unexpectedly, theirs became the longest sentence ever meted out to white anti-war radicals, and it had its effect. Jared realizes that today's rally is a testimony to that truth and the fact that the “Good Guys” are not winning. Shit, not even show or place!
For him their sentence is but a refrain adding “white middle-class kids” to the historic litany of governmental slaughter, such as the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears. He knows that The Three are merely a symbol, yet the severity of their sentence reveals that they are a significant, not an irrelevant symbol. This fact is underscored by the government’s choice not to ignore them, not to trivialize them. Insightfully, Jared realizes that the State sees The Three as undermining a cornerstone symbol of its own sacred politics.
With a flinch of humility, Jared’s grasp on the meaning of the trial brings back something one of his uncles attempted to “Get into your thick Mick skull!” several years ago, which is just now beginning to make sense. Uncle Eugene was a priest and an internationally famous theologian who had been deeply involved with Dulles, Kennedy and McNamara. This “Defender of the Faith,” as others in the family called him—for he was ever quoting this historic Council or such-and-such a theologian, even to explain something as simple as why Catholics genuflect in church—this priestly uncle had spoken of America’s “Civil Religion.” It was for him the demon faith of secular America. He defined it as that cluster of cultural symbols that holds a country together, what others also call the “Religion of the Republic.”
Jared remembers: It’s a religion that steals bits and pieces from Christianity and Judaism but is more the stepchild of paganism and astrology. “Notice the occult symbols on the dollar bill,” his uncle told him. Jared never forgot this lesson, hearing in the moment the crisp snap of the five-dollar bill. “Juxtaposed to God, but it’s still a secular order. See”—and his finger circled the dollar’s Great Seal—“Seclorum.”
Uncle Eugene, O.F.M., Conventual—who was actually raised Maurice but cherished his monastic name more than his birth name—pointed out that the uniqueness of America is, indeed, its Declaration of Independence. But “Independence from what or from whom?” Then he’d answer without waiting, even in later years when Jared already knew the answer.
“As taught in school, it was from King George and from the notion of the ‘Divine Right of Kings.’ What’s not taught is that in not adopting a specific Christian denomination—the vaunted ‘separation of church and state’—that in actuality a new religion was created.”
Right now, Jared realizes that he has actually unmasked, by his criminal deeds, the truth of his uncle’s insight. But should I speak about this to this audience? Will they understand?In the flash of time it takes him to step up to the mic, the lectures from his uncle—what else to call them?—return. He hears the scholarly tone as his uncle orates: “History reveals that every State power has been offset, at times challenged, by a traditional religious power. More often the story is that the religious power kowtows to the secular, as Christianity did to Constantine!”
Ah, this is where it all begins – the Church kneels to the State!
“Without doubt, the American Revolution was an original revolution, without historic or anthropological precedent. Note—pay particular attention
to this shift—as the Church power becomes invisible, the fledgling American State sets itself up as godly!”
Jared hadn’t had the training back then to fully follow his uncle's train of thought. But when he attempted, two years ago, to become a “Roman Catholic Conscientious Objector” he was told that there was no such thing. Forced to investigate the whole matter of “Peace Churches”—those who did officially qualify for CO status—and the “wall of separation” between church and state, he found that the religious argument was not only not persuasive but not the moral language of the draft board.
This realization deflated and flattened him because his only tools for revealing his conscience were his theological language and the Roman Catholic moral tradition. At the same time, the Church itself offered him—and others struggling with like questions—no sanctuary. In desperation, he had fled to the local, haphazardly organized “Draft Resistance Center.” Only at this Center was Vietnam discussed as a moral issue.
What was happening? Jared, quite honestly, couldn't answer that question. But then he began to see it, see it through the eyes and stories of the early flock of returning veterans. Vets who hung out at the Draft Resistance Center because they too found it to be the only place where they could rap down the war, smoke dope, crank out high-decibel Jimi Hendrix all day without being judged criminal, crazy, or “Rude!” Significantly, their stories were not like their own fathers’ or Jared's dad’s World War II stories. In contrast, their stories didn’t fit the mold of John Wayne’s cartoonish war movies. They spoke not about being soldiers but about being warriors.
What this meant and where it began to hook up with this Civil Religion notion was that they recounted how they were ordered to “Obliterate. Waste. Search and destroy everyone and everything!” They’d been thrust into terror and were to be the instruments of terror. A holy terror that’s bound by no laws, no protocols of war, no moral or ethical niceties. They lived not as soldiers under a commander but as marauders under a single command, “Waste ’em!”
For them it was a war without end, amen. Their commission was to slay all: men, women, children, animals and plants. To step beyond morality, not just to kill but to obliterate. To commit genocide and biocide with instruments of cosmic destruction. Their slogans: “Bomb them back to the Stone Age!” “Agent Orange—Nothing will grow for twenty-five years!”
As such, these men met themselves within an alien mythology. They were faithful and obedient Abrahams about to slay Isaacs. Their god commanded, “Do it!” He called a thousand times to “Do it!” again and again. So they stabbed and stabbed, not the ram from the bush but Issac! Wrestled the Angel and slew him. Returned with blood-soaked hands and raped Sarah unto death.
When these early-returning vets rapped, they feared that they would never be able to settle back into an ordered society now that they had lived outside of the moral order. Their condemnation: Once exiled from the lawful, they did not know how to get back in.
Ironically—bitterly— they found themselves targeted as “the enemy.” Hated by so many upstanding citizens whose kin in government denied them benefits and judged them to be whiners and unfit, even cowardly. Worse, these battle-weary patriots heard themselves denounced as traitors—not praised as heroes. Angry, confused but fearless they continued to fight for peace even when it meant defending the Constitution against the government, itself!
In every commune Jared kept finding these vets. Little did he know them to be the harbingers of his own fate—to know the prison within prison, the war within the war.
For Vietnam—under some curse?—had turned them all into outlaws to the human spirit. The State had destroyed them by destroying the moral soul which their families had nurtured.
“Not Christian, but Civil Religionists. Do you get it?”
Jared: “Yes, I get it.”
Uncle: “No you don’t!”
When asked, “Why did you turn nonviolent? Why do you oppose the war?” His answer: “Because they brought the battlefield right here, home!”
The vets—brothers of his own generation—started out here “at home” in a Selective Service office. That’s where they “signed up” and made the commitment. That’s where the lies began. Jared knows that the draft office is his part of the battlefield. It is there he must go to slay the Warrior’s god.
In his Catholic and theological mind, the draft office became the sanctuary that held the tabernacle and its hosts—draft cards. To touch them was to touch the Warrior God. Through these cards the State was transubstantiated into the Warrior God. Each male at eighteen—and no male, whether Joe Athlete or paraplegic, genius or moron, can escape—each must register with the draft. After Registration, deferments may be given but no one could choose not to register . . . without being slain—sent to prison or forced into exile.
In this light Jared formed an often voiced public answer to his own core question about their trial, “What does the State believe it is doing to us?” Death. Execution. Obliteration. That’s what he realizes they intend. Felons. What is their future?
Despite the numbing, bitter cold of this day, an insight pierces his awareness. The Three are to be sacrificed in the ancient tradition of first-son sacrifice. Like Abraham and Isaac, upon the mount called Vietnam, the State finds son-sacrifice acceptable. The Three must be sacrificed on the altar of prison as counter-sacrifice, to warn, to deter, to scare. They are the scapegoats, the ones burdened with the sins of all and sent into the desert. Expulsion. Never to return.
Yes! Yes! The Three are a symbol whose meaning is clear: “white,” “white middle-class,” “white middle-class males.” From these no dissent, no questioning of authority would be, can be tolerated. “As such they are part of a twin symbol, whose other side is written in the body and blood of their drafted brothers, those animally named “grunts”!
Jared wonders, What has been spawned in America? Is it the State beyond any morality and gods?
The inner scream, Cold! Freezing! You’re gonna die! shatters his daydreaming and as he stomps and flails at himself like Minnesotans are wont to do in imitation of penguins, he laughs at the absurdity of the day, himself, the war ….
As Jared wakes from his reverie, he checks out the assembled group. He’s taken with the thought that The Three—in point of fact a teensy band of not-famous Heartland kids, like their slain peers at Kent State—have been drawn out by the State onto a larger stage than they ever intended or imagined. They are a symbol made public by the State’s need to proclaim that middle-class morality will no longer be tolerated. That the citizen's power housed in the Bill of Rights—that power claimed by dissidents and nonconformists—is forever imprisoned.
All these insights, experiences, truths, discoveries, betrayals, crimes—all in this instant flash before him and Jared is conscious of stepping up to the mic as a criminal. Violent felon. The violence of having destroyed government property: paper cards not human flesh.
Ironically, today Jared gets top billing by default. No one else could be found to take the stage with him—no one from the nonviolent community. Aaren was her own show. Sadly, within the activist community, people are saying, “They won't listen. So why should we risk it?”
It’s the Corey syndrome. The war’s gotten itchingly personal, intimate. Liberals, pacifists, hangers-on: All have begun to look more like the hippies they so often deplore. It’s political now to define nonviolence as being “laid back” and “dropping out.” Passivity. But Jared doesn't care to focus on that negativity. He grabs the mic. I am a raider. He would have hit the draft boards by himself if the others had not come.
Those looking at me, do they know? How crazed I am? God-crazed?
Dikbar: Preach on it, white boy!
What shall I say? Mic to his lips. Do you really want more words? He shuffles his feet. He’s a symbol junkie. An artist of the psyche. He needs, right now, like the addict's fix, a vision, a phrase of incantation. This is one of his strongest links to Aaren.
Aaren. Jared burns with both a curiosity to know about her and a thirst to know her. Did she send the note? Did she do the bombing? Opinion ran deep and contradictory within the radical community. Some were convinced beyond doubt that she did it. That she did it to “heighten the contradictions,” as she so often urged. Others held it to be the work of the FBI. That it was their attempt to divide the anti-war community and discredit them in the eyes of the general community.
Still, Jared can't decide. He almost wants to believe that she did it, even though the bombings had by themselves almost totally wiped out the symbolic effectiveness of the draft raids. He’s stimulated and aroused by her energy, her aggressiveness, and he has to admit, her female brand of leadership.
Aaren, however, has made it known that she does not want to see him, ever. Publicly, at every opportunity, she distances herself from “The Four and their foolishness.” She did not attend their trial or comment on their prison fate. She consigned them and especially him “to revolutionary perdition!” This makes Jared suspicious of Sean's version of her sexual submission.
Aaren!
“I'm proud to introduce Jared Jennings of The Three!” A smattering of applause, muffled by gloved hands hiding from the bone-chilling cold.
Jared hasn't ever been able to prepare himself for these moments. He knows that he won't have to talk long. Those who are out today are either the indefatigably committed or the unbaptized who don't know that the days of mass rallies are over. The media does, though, for they are absent. Rallies don't even merit filler status. Burston never published his Dikbar letter nor made any attempt to contact him after his release. In point of fact, today's mission is almost pastoral because after Aaren's Maoist denunciations those who stayed are in need of a word of hope.
How strange again to stand before a microphone and spit, spit my syllables riding their groans, aimed at hearts . . . He shakes his head to clear away this type of thinking. In one slip of a moment when he catches them about ready to listen, he begins.
“Brothers and sisters,” planting his soles on the first of the granite steps leading up to the Federal sanctuary before them, “Brothers and sisters, today,” moving his hands towards them, lifting his heart high into his chest, working to get his large-boned frame into a rhythm of power touching, “we are here once again to protest the hideous way in which people relate to each other.”
Now what he wants to say is, Listen, that's all that I’ve got to say. That sums it up. Think about it. But his tongue labors on.
“What may be the greatest difficulty this day is the small number of people here. We are small in number, true. The days of the mass rallies and marches seem to be over. The politicians talk about winding down the war. And a report from this building,” he points to it without turning around, “back to D.C. today will produce thrills in some assistant Attorney General's febrile brain. He’ll wear an idiot's grin. For take my word,” he strikes his heart with open palm, “a word from my heart's knowledge that the smallness of our number is a sign of our success. Yes, our success. The Resistance doesn’t chart its progress like the military, with body counts! No, we have always been few in number. The Remnant. The Yeast. The Catalyst. It took only one person resisting, one person burning his draft card to start the Resistance!
As long as there is one person who believes, who practices living nonviolence, then the war will end! It is inevitable.”
He shifts, sways slightly, brushes small ice flakes from his ragged moustache.
“What we have today is the manifestation of fear. Hundreds are not here because they fear their government. Consider that! Were you raised to fear your government? Ten, five years ago, would anyone have feared going to a rally? Now after Kent State there's the fear of getting shot. Killed. Murdered, right here in America. On Main Street. And by our own army! Believe me, when the people fear the government it is time for the government to fear the people. For the people will not be shackled by a tyranny of fear!”
There’s a swell of clapping. One lone whistler. Jared is striking a chord.
He’s preaching but it’s a preaching whose message is directed at himself! He knows that he comes today to learn, not teach. Learn from them. Them—these mostly unknown, never to be met again people who draw himself from within himself. Only when he is under their eyes, only when he’s in range of their heartbeats, only when he’s embraced by their spirits, then—he knows—only then will he know the truth, be healed.
“Listen, draw yourself closer and feel the warmth of each other's presence. Look at me. For in a little over two weeks you won't be able to see me.”
A quiet pause, one held stable by his peering stare at them all—he holds them all in one fixed ray of energy.
“As many of you know, I will be in prison. I will be unknown to you in my days. For I shall be stripped of all my outward forms and colors. Hammered into a day of square hours. Sat upon as to my freedom of movement. Separated by steel from my loved ones. Yet . . . Yet,” his lips take a strange fire from the near-arctic cold, “am I to be dead? Will I not live in your bones? The strut you make on these common streets. The caress of a cheek I have seen in this, our struggle. Will I not be forever alive in your desires and yearnings?”
He arches back. Releases into a jerky swaying. His right hand vice-grips the mic stand.
“As this day is small in number so shall my days be small. They will be days of my cut off ness. Days of my exile. But am I to then die?
“Yes, I will die if you let me. You, my friends, my friends—some in name, others in slight memory—you will kill me, as only you can. For those who kick us and beat us and manhandle us, those who have the pieces of iron and the walls of time with which to torture us, they, they cannot kill us. We can only kill ourselves. We can only kill each other. It’s by betrayal that we die . . . and kill. And you know that I’ve been betrayed!”
With lowering voice he moves closer to the mic's head.
“I will betray you, I will kill you, if I waste my life in despair inside those prison walls. And you will betray me, kill me if you do not go back and live, live deeply, live with passion. Live as I know those thousands of others we once groped the streets with are now living. Gone back into the regimented times, into the squared offices, into the squeaking and screeching machines, back . . . back in the motion of the tide . . . back to come forward again when it shall be time.”
Jared’s shoulders relax, pitch downward. His elbows draw in towards his waist. His hands cross his lower chest, almost a gesture of prayer.
“Brothers and sisters, there is only one hope that I have. And that hope is you. As you live, so I live. As you die, so I die.”
Four seconds of holding words unspoken, then, “Brothers and sisters, it is a beautiful day. Beautiful—ah, humph. Damn, how I hate Minnesota days, they're so damn cold—yet beautiful, yeah, because they make us feel. The cold brings us to a part of ourselves we often forget. It makes us over-conscious of the warmth we generate. Let me say, the only way to warm the earth for planting the peace, for nurturing children seeds of our hope, is to warm it with the passion of your hearts.” Then Jared halts.
Many other images flood his mind. His temples ache and throb. The sweat on his forehead comes alive, instantly frozen, like mosquitoes stabbing with icy pricks. He wants to go on. To talk on and on about his fear of prison. About the years of struggle. About his love of the Vietnamese whom he has never seen. About his love of his brother Americans condemned to fight the Vietnamese. To wax poetic and to evoke that glint in men’s and women's eyes that he has seen now and then and which, once seen, has enticed him to come back to seek it again. He has seen it but briefly today.
No more words? Done? “Peace!” he shouts, waving the fingered vee of Peace! above his head. He steps down and among the protesters, someone touches his shoulder. “I'll miss you, brother. Good luck.” An older woman, precisely dressed and cosmetically made up, a stereotypical suburbanite, comes up, clo
se enough to hug him. But she doesn't touch him. No, she wipes a tear, then extends her arms towards him, pushing something hard into his chest. Fear flashes—a bomb! But it’s a Bible! Jared’s jerky reaction almost makes him stumble but he catches himself on the shoulder of the rally's organizer. The elderly woman holds her ground, her gesture demands that he take hold of her gift. He does, but she does not let go. She holds on, stares deeply, penetrating into his soul through eyes that are soft but fierce. “Thank you. Thank you, for going to prison for us.”
Undaunted, she presses the Bible hard against his chest. She speaks again, her voice at once ancient, prophetical, oracular, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
Stunned. In a way only a Catholic ex-monk could feel, Jared is chastised, humbled, fearful. The last rally ends.
Kill the dove! Page 7