by W. E. Gutman
“I made a very deliberate decision not to tell the president [Ronald Reagan] so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the President if it ever leaked out.”
That too was a lie but Reagan’s waning “memory” of events he’d orchestrated or tacitly endorsed would prove a convenient exculpatory defense.
Writing in the November 14, 2002 edition of the New York Times, William Safire warned:
“… Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend – all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual, centralized grand database. To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you -- passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from noisy neighbors to the FBI, your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have the supersnoop’s dream: A ‘Total Information Awareness’ about every U.S. citizen.”
In response to widespread protests, members of Congress put the brakes on this abomination. The outcry against the invasion of Iraq and emasculation of civil liberties at home was deep and far-reaching. There was strong bipartisan support to dilute the program and place it under congressional supervision. Undaunted right-wing Republicans moved to toughen the Patriot Act and give it immutable status.
Then news came that the FBI was collecting information on the tactics, training and structure of antiwar demonstrators. The Bureau, a confidential memo revealed, had advised local officials that they should spy on protesters and report any suspicious activity to counterterrorism squads. Bristling at any suggestion of impropriety, FBI officials insisted that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying “extremist elements” plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters. They would not say by what criteria the two factions -- the “anarchists” and “sanctioned demonstrators” might be told apart. Civil rights groups and legal scholars countered that the program had all the earmarks of the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, when J. Edgar Hoover headed the FBI and his goons routinely swooped on political dissidents, among them comedian Lenny Bruce [“pardoned” posthumously in December 2003 by New York Governor George Pataki], poet Allan Ginsberg, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., singer John Lennon, and others in the arts, entertainment and academia. Eventually, abuses by Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy and others led to restrictions on FBI investigations of political activities. But these restrictions would be relaxed when Attorney General John Ashcroft, citing the September 11 attacks, issued guidelines giving agents authority to infiltrate political rallies and other public events. The FBI proceeded to target Americans engaged in lawful protest. In so doing, it blurred the line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience.
*
Shortly before I resigned from the Antelope Valley Press, one of my colleagues on the news desk casually quoted the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who said nearly half a century ago:
“Restrictions on free thought and free speech are the most dangerous of all subversions. They are the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”
Douglas was the quintessential liberal [free-thinking] member of the Warren Court -- he proclaimed a constitutional right to privacy, championed environmentalism and opposed the Vietnam War. He became a hero of the intellectual left, the only haven of sanity in which a threatened and shrinking centrist minority could take refuge.
Passing by the news desk at that moment and disregarding the sobriety and profound wisdom of Douglas’ words, a senior editor known for his diehard views, dismissed Douglas as a “womanizer and a drunk.” We all shook our heads.
“Better a progressive drunk and a womanizer than a narrow-minded pedant,” I said with discernible annoyance and aiming to be heard. I was heard all right. A day later I was advised to stop “making waves.”
*
I began my journalistic career ferrying copy at the late great New York Herald Tribune and sharpening pencils for the likes of legendary sportswriter Red Smith, theater critic Walter Kerr and film columnist Judith Crist. I ended it by polishing the syntax of uninspired scriveners who earned awards for twaddle that would have ended in the trash bin had it not been for the combined talent and diligence of my fellow copy editors. I was pondering the irony of it all when the Bush administration handed the nation’s mightiest media conglomerates a mid-year bonus that was bound to focus media ownership in yet fewer hands. Indeed, on June 2, 2003, the Federal Communications Commission, run by Republican Michael Powell -- son of Colin -- ended long-standing federal checks and balances on corporate media influence. Once the rules are out of the way, there will be more mergers and buy-outs of radio and TV stations and networks, and major newspapers. A single conglomerate will now be able to control most of a community’s major media outlets, including cable companies and broadband Internet service providers. Unless opposed, right-wing powerhouses are also inevitably likely to grow stronger, more vocal, more strident. Rupert Murdoch had his eyes set on Direct TV, the country’s most powerful satellite service. Others could be expected to follow suit.
The proposed FCC rule changes further weakened the ability of mainstream journalism to serve as a critical public safeguard. Soon reporters would have to “watch what they say,” especially if their papers were to be absorbed by TV empires not looking for objectivity but for a reinforcement of their own opinions and agendas. Advertising and “brand-washing” would be the end-all of all communications endeavors. And America would find itself increasingly short of moral gatekeepers.
Coverage of the war in Iraq, later of the Afghanistan fiasco, illustrates the extent to which U.S. media companies are loath to provide a serious field of analysis and debate. Clearly supportive of the military campaign and keen on lavishing sympathy and reverence on U.S. soldiers, “embedded” reporters -- undisguised handmaidens to the government -- continue to offer a unilateral, if not myopic, version of events. Their reporting sounds more like cheerleading for the war than a sober and wide-angle view of events. News outlets and prime-time TV networks pay obscure retired military officers handsome fees for engaging in endless and often inane conjecture, whereas journalists regurgitate pre-digested Pentagon propaganda and dispatches carefully sanitized to coat America’s weak stomach for blood and gore. Duty-bound to chronicle the evils of war while “supporting our troops.” television anchors churn out officially sanctioned banalities and redacted snippets of reality. Surely, there seems to be greater honesty in the contentious extremist rhetoric than in the fence-straddling oratory of a mainstream press averse to antagonizing the government and demoralizing the citizenry. But the double-speak would fail to persuade America that victory can ever legitimize war. In time -- pictures don’t lie and government assurances ring false -- the press would also fail to convince the nation that the war can ever be won. Mounting casualties at the front, growing antipathy against the U.S. and the rapid coalescence of disparate terrorist factions willing to die in what they perceive to be the infidels’ latest Crusade against Islam, would further dash any prospects of a decisive military or political victory in Iraq. Coerced to endorse -- if not applaud -- America’s newest “intervention,” the mainstream media would soon degenerate into a template of what is sayable and what is not. George Orwell, I thought, must be doing somersaults in his grave.
*
The world is full of naked emperors. Pointing fingers at their nudity, I suppose, is never fully appreciated, least of all by the multitude of bare-assed little Caesars parading in imaginary gilded garments. Forcibly undressing sacred cows makes slaying them a more festive occasion.
Free to sing my own tunes now t
hat age and a lifetime of polemic and agitation had decisively and permanently alienated me from mainstream America, I would indulge in an orgy of denunciations. Ferocity, defiance, and rancor often guided my pen. I was waging a frontal assault against orthodoxy, laissez-faire, nationalism, dogmatism, credulity, ignorance, hypocrisy, obscurantism, and lies. Like the vitriolic right-winger Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969), whose style I relished infinitely more than his politics, I claimed the right to rankle the conformist rabble, not because I identified with it, but because I found in this vast, self-absorbed, silent mass all the seeds of humanity’s misfortunes.
I’d forsaken the “middle way to enlightenment,” veered from the idealized but seldom traveled “holy eight-fold path,” -- discernment, dignity, poise, probity, discretion, restraint, tact and constancy. Instead, now fixed in an adversarial mindset, I would continue to lob incendiary devices that imperiled me more than those at which they were aimed.
LOST IN AMERICA
I went looking for myself.
–- Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE)
Somewhere at the edge of a gray town, a cookie-cutter copy of a thousand gray tank towns, on a gray street senselessly named after some tree or flower, deep inside a gray room adorned with mementos and frozen glimpses of time misspent, the self-probing continues. I’m not in Paris but in a gray town far away across the seas. I’m out of range from the ultimate cause so I seek answers in the gray dancing shadows on the ceiling and hang on to rapidly dissolving shreds of memory.
America. Fifty-six years spent chasing after my own tail, lurching from a brief state of wonderment to one of exasperation, disillusionment and unease as I stumbled one by one on the desiccated fragments of discredited myths and embalmed fiction, trying to fit in, hopelessly out of step, out of tune. Yes, I am a restive stranger, an untamed renegade, ill at ease not in my own skin but in everything that touches it, an interloper in a realm I still do not fully comprehend, outwardly housebroken, inwardly raging and defiant and aching, treading unfamiliar waters, lost in the blinding light of day. Fifty-six years: Two billion heartbeats pumping life into an out-of-soul experience, each pulse adding to my estrangement and perplexity.
*
Where am I? I rewind my life. January 30, 1956. New York towers above me, gray, dank, alien, menacing, as I shiver on the promenade deck of the U.S. Constitution. I try to make sense of this latest disembodiment; I resent my parents who sent me here -- for my own good, they assured me; I’m ashamed of the docility with which I acquiesced to this exile. Driven by an age-old momentum, in search of new horizons, convinced that permanency can only be realized through change, I join the Navy in a failed attempt to resume a life of blissful itinerancy. I find myself marooned instead on the unfriendly shores of a racially divided military town that hates the military, hates foreigners, hates Jews, hates blacks. An overactive libido and imbecility intrude on my horizons and I get married at the age of 24, woefully unprepared for the demands of matrimony and the constraints of fatherhood. Now entombed in a dungeon of my own creation, I die each day a little as I grasp the folly of my actions.
I turn the pages and peel memories like an onion. America. 1956. Industrious. Affluent. At ease with itself, secure in its hypocrisy and crippling illusions. Elvis Presley scandalizes the puritan elite with his hit single, Hound Dog, but no one objects when, fiercely opposed to racial integration, ninety-six members of Congress sign the Southern Manifesto. Nor would anyone be outraged to learn, after his death in 2003, that Senator Strom Thurmond, the self-confessed racist who co-authored the manifesto, had fathered a child with his black maid. Schools, lunch counters, toilets and water fountains are segregated. Blacks must still ride in the back of the bus. They’re often lynched, arrested on trumped-up charges wrongly convicted and imprisoned, humiliated and dehumanized. Many, after spending years on death row, are executed because white justice is not color-blind. But what the hell, if you’re white and have a steady job, it’s the Life of Riley. Relaxed, playful, upbeat, frivolous, given to good-natured inanity -- as witnessed by the dimwitted feel-good movies it released that decade -- America bares its soul and hints at the anxieties, the fretful self-inquiry to which it would later succumb as the world began to unravel. Hollywood turns introspective: East of Eden. Rebel Without a Cause. The Blackboard Jungle. The Bad Seed. The Wild One. Marty. Orwell publishes his prescient dystopia, 1984. They all echo feelings of uneasiness first articulated in the internal dialogues of a nation stirring from complacency to vigilance, from presumed invincibility to perceived vulnerability, and willing, a least for now, to shed its ill-fitting and deceptive disguise. But the small screen, which holds the bulk of America captive, retaliates. The strong, silent, bronc-bustin’ pistol-packin’ cigarillo-chompin’ Bourbon-chuggin’ enforcer is still king. Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Have Gun: Will Travel and Bonanza all remind audiences of America’s heroic past and reanimate nostalgia for those senselessly brutal days.
*
The sixties and seventies usher an era oxygenated by the rise of an ebullient counterculture. Emancipated from the phony Puritanism of the finicky Fifties, cursorily cleansed from the obscenity of McCarthyism, sickened by the Vietnam War, the Kent State massacre, the Watergate scandal, America welcomes the Beatles, lets its hair down, burns draft cards and the flag, sets fire to ROTC buildings and dons bell-bottom pants, Nehru jackets, dashikis and beaded necklaces. Malcolm X electrifies his people and shocks white America. Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and comedian Dick Gregory, the eloquent drum major for civil rights, parlay acerbic tongue and mordant wit into a brand of social activism that bolsters black America’s self-identity. Back from Paris where he was embraced and cheered, James Baldwin rises from obscurity to become a commanding figure in American literature. Also back from Paris where she blossomed and honed an emergent sense of justice, Sartre scholar and once one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, Angela Davis, takes America by storm. A cultural phenomenon, Alex Haley’s Roots offers for the first time a black perspective of life in Africa and unerringly records the bestiality of slavery. In Kunta Kinté are incarnated the horrors and heroism of the black experience. Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and George Carlin turn humor on its head. Their irreverence and biting political satire challenge an outwardly strait-laced but dissolute society and helps redefine and broaden free speech. Jack Kerouac, the leading chronicler of the “beat generation” -- he coined the term -- shocks America with autobiographical sketches that reflect deep social angst assuaged by drugs, alcohol, spiritualism and scorching humor. His leading apostle, Allen Ginsberg, vents his rage against materialism with a tortured lyricism kindled by LSD. Flower children preach love, not war. Oh! Calcutta, memorable for its brazen display of frontal nudity, male and female, and Hair, America’s tribal love-rock musical, open to rave reviews. The plays enthrall audiences for years to come. This is an era of rebellious sex and drugs and freedom from the shackles of conformity, a time of nascent impiety and suspicion toward the political structures that Americans take for granted and trust, an epoch long remembered and still reviled by the conservative core that lived through it and died a little.
I watch these transformations with a relish that does not foster a desire to partake. I inwardly rejoice at the consternation these upheavals seem to wreak upon America’s squeamish psyche, but I espouse none of the causes they champion or spawn, at least not openly. I will not let my hair grow until long hair becomes passé. I cut it short the moment manes are back in vogue. I sport a beard when facial hair goes out of style; I shave it off as soon as hirsute faces outnumber beardless ones. I adopt none of the fashions or affectations of the time -- polyester leisure suits and wide psychedelic neckties and bandannas and high-heeled clogs and anti-bomb peace symbols. I use none of the jargon, neologisms and mannerisms typical of that era. I “drop out” on my own time, at my own pace, disinclined to assert my individuality by rushing to embrace someone else’s conformist eccentricities. Purely academic, my fascination for t
he politics of dissent remains voyeuristic. I refuse to get involved for fear that doing so will compromise my spectator status.
Inevitably, I experiment with marijuana and hashish but soon shun the demented and slovenly atmosphere of pot parties. Fed up with the inane laughter, the tangential, off-the-wall conversations, the brutish sex, the narcoleptic sleep, the Dionysian junk food binges, I get high alone in semidarkness and utter silence, plumbing the musings, images and moods the psychedelic high produces. Bored with a steady diet of “altered states,” sickened by the immoderate craving for food they produce, tired of sinking into an abyss of depression as the effects wear off, I give up the weed and move back uptown. I surrender to it briefly twenty years later when my first marriage begins to unravel.
Marriage is a prison in which one lands without trial, in which one tarries without pleasure and from which one escapes destitute.
Emulating Baudelaire, Cocteau, de Maupassant, De Quincey and Poe, I compile under the influence the first notes of a work that would take twenty years to complete. Enigmatic and disturbing even to me, the book teeters dizzyingly between allegory, surrealism and madness. In it, I dissect a world in which the obvious and the cryptic are willfully commingled. Implicit in this cautionary parable is a haunting but strangely tenable ethical question, a premise no doubt issued from my growing malaise with the paradox that is America -- sublime on paper, less than perfect in its incarnate totality, bursting with lofty ideals, ready to rescind them when deemed expedient. Imagine a society, I submit, that censors dreams, a realm in which “unauthorized” musings, nightmares and chimeras, whether seized in one’s sleep or evoked in a wakeful state, are rebuked and recidivist dreamers are reprogrammed or permanently disabled. I argue that because knowledge of the world is inextricably shaped and conditioned by the opinions we inherit or perfunctorily manufacture along the way, dream and reality are rival symptoms of the same disease; reality is incurable. A complete understanding of reality lies beyond the limits of rational thought. Iconoclastic, honed to stun, the crypto-novel warns against absolutism and the tyranny of inflexible ideas. Stomached by a few, misunderstood by most, reviled by those who manage to read it in its entirety, the book is a dismal commercial failure. Unsold copies still languish at the bottom of a closet, the mute reminders that nobody wants to be scandalized, even when the affronts are painted in the pastel hues of allegory and narrated in the language of dreams.