The year was 1968.
I was in the middle of trying to write my master’s thesis to get a teaching job when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
Earlier that spring, after years of hard work and study, I’d won a three-year fellowship to the University of Hamburg, Germany. A direct route to a PhD, the fellowship paid for room, board, tuition, a living allowance, and transport via ocean liner. But my local draft board told me that I couldn’t count on a student deferment if I left the country, and the prospect of being called up overseas, where I’d have to report directly to a military base, was downright scary. I had no input from my family (including my retired military father), no one to turn to for support. The fellowship was the culmination of my last two years of work as a German major at U.T. Austin, and I was truly proud to win it. But we were all living under the gun back then: every time you made the grade and qualified for deferment, the Selective Service raised the bar and culled another few thousand from the campuses for Vietnam. No matter how hard you worked and did what you were told, your country kept trying to kill you. And this was when we had a Constitution.
In the end, I turned the fellowship down and opted for what I thought was safety (oh, do we know better now). I’d never wanted to be a professor, anyway — my goal in winning the fellowship was to earn a ticket to Europe for a few years and see what clicked. Going for the deferment instead of taking my chances dropped me into hell at a little junior college in Wharton, Texas, where the streets on the black side of the tracks weren’t even paved.
You had to be there, brothers and sisters. I had a mustache and a paisley tie, which made me the token hippie teacher so the school could show that it was hip. There was a deputy sheriff parked across the street from my house every day for months. My first wife and I put oiled rice paper on the windows so he couldn’t see inside with his binoculars. My mail arrived obviously opened much of the time. After my wife and I broke up, someone sent a female student to my house to try to seduce me. It was all too weird, and I sent her away. Later I learned there’d been a car full of football players just outside, waiting for her to scream so they could run inside and pound me into hamburger. This was rural Texas in ‘68 and ‘69, where the authorities could “kill you dead,” as the saying went, and leave your body in the woods. They read my mail, my magazines and newspapers too. They spied on me at home and in class. And this was when we had a Bill of Rights.
There was so much more. The KKK bombed the transmitter of the listener-sponsored Pacifica FM station that was my lifeline. By that time, there were so many GIs dying every day in Vietnam, the station broadcast the news by reading casualty reports over protest music, ending with “and the war goes on…” I went to a hippie cafe in the middle of Houston, a local hangout for anti-war students, where they’d had to erect a heavy rope mesh barrier across the open front to catch the firebombs tossed by drive-by patriots. I remember sitting there and wondering if I’d be barbecued. And this was when we believed in the ultimate protection of the law.
When I was just a scared, naive, twenty-something kid, trying to follow my conscience and do my best, I could have ended up in jail or worse. But somewhere, sometime, at some point along the way, I could have found someone to plead my case, to set me free and punish my tormentors. Even if it was ignored in the breach, the Constitution was there as a bulwark of last resort.
Americans don’t have that guarantee today. What will happen when it all gets to be too much, when your kid’s been hauled away for “interrogation” for wearing the wrong T-shirt to school or questioning a politician, when someone with a grudge against you claims he saw you talking to a swarthy fellow with an accent and then you lose your job? When you have no job, your house is gone, you can’t pay for surgery, and no one will stand up for you, what does your citizenship count for then?
“You can’t DO this to me!” Oh, yes they can.
It’s codified.
It’s who we are.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You must remember Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara. Now those put Bush, Wolfowitz and Condoleeza to shame. See – we are living proof that nothing seems to change. But it does. Inside our country things are much better for women and minorities. That is, unless you speak Arabic.
Lyndon Johnson chalked up the body bags for only one reason, to hold on to power. Our present moronic rulers are doing the same thing, but only because they think they are right.
Lyndon Johnson is the only person I have ever hated. I still find contentment that he lost all power and spent the rest of his life driving around his ranch throwing beer cans out of the window of his Cadillac. May he burn in hell forever. If I had the energy, I would go and piss on his grave.
As for McNamara, I was sorely surprised he was still alive. A few months ago he apologized.
As for Iraq, I have always maintained that we should simply declare victory, and leave. A few apologies to the Iraqi people would also be in order. Just leave them alone and let them kill one another off, like we did in Somalia.
I have to disagree with you on Lyndon. The war was an outrageous tragedy. But he also got things done that changed society. He cared about helping the poor. I hated him at the time, but gave that up years ago.
I was a groundskeeper (with an M.A.) at U.T. when he died and they brought the casket to the LBJ Library. It was on a cold, rainy afternoon and no major public ceremony had been planned. We had to rake the edges of the sidewalks, then got to stand along the entryway when they carried the body through. A small miltary band played a funeral march by Chopin. It was moving as hell, and I was sorry to see him go. His wife Lady Bird did an astonishing amount of good and served as a U.T. regent for a long time. They, the both of them, really cared about people and the land.
I think he thought he was doing the right thing in Vietnam at first. He didn’t start it, remember — that went back to Eisenhower, at least. But the goddamned war and what that did to us. Whatcha gonna do, eh?
“But do you know anyone who’s been ‘disappeared,’ who’s been taken away in the middle of the night and never heard from again? Do you know anyone else who knows someone like that?”
Ah – the parallels. When I was in Germany in 68, the Holocaust came up in a conversation with my German friends. They told me they had agonised over how their parents, whom they knew to be good, kind people, had allowed it to happen. Their parents, while not excusing themselves, said the Jews tended to keep together so they and their friends didn’t have any Jewish friends. Thus when Jewish students disappeared they just accepted the official explanation that they had been ‘relocated’. These people lived in northern Germany. They didn’t actually ‘know’ what was happening to the Jews till later. By then they were caught … make a fuss and you too will be ‘disappeared’.
Thus good people do nothing.