80

When I think about the current wreckage of everything, and worry that it might get worse, I reflect on the day I was born, eighty years ago today. On October 1, 1940, Adolf Hitler, always a contender for History’s Worst Man, was the master of Europe. From the Channel to Poland, from Norway to North Africa, every European nation was either a province of the Reich, a conquest, an ally, or a friendly neutral. His only conceivable rival—Soviet Russia—was tied up in a mutual non-aggression pact. Only Britain held out as a combatant and the smart money, including the US ambassador to the UK, thought she could not last much longer.  Hitler had announced a that his regime would last a thousand years and there was no reason to believe otherwise. The blitz was on—no one imagined then that a nation could survive when thousands of tons of explosives were falling from the sky on its major cities almost every night. No one had imagined it, just as no one imagined what has happened to our country. Everyone in 1940 thought things could only get worse; there were waves of suicides. 

One of the advantages of old age is that you remember when things were even worse than they are today, from which this wisdom is derived: lighten up! Camus, who had actually lived through the Hell on Earth that many now fear may afflict our country, said, “The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.”  Why doubt him?

If you’re a subscriber to the New York Times, they will show you an image of every paper they have printed, starting 175 years ago and on to 2002. The headlines for the day I was born are about an RAF raid on Berlin, and a speech by the governor of New York arguing that FDR should have a third term because of the International crisis and the rise of fascism.   Also noted on that page were the increasingly warm relations between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. An intelligent observer would be justified in thinking that this pact represented the final failure of democracy—what power could confront this dual citadel of darkness?

The front page also reports that the investigation of Frank (“I am the Law”) Hague, boss of Jersey City, NJ,  for stuffing ballot boxes, is stymied by a fire that burned up all the election records, the fire apparently set by the clerk in charge. I mention this one to remind us that the corruption of American elections is not a new thing.

October 1, 1940, a Tuesday, is the beginning of Rosh Hashona, marking 5701 years since the Creation of the World. Today Albert Einstein becomes an American citizen. He had already written his letter to President Roosevelt warning of the possibility that the Nazis had a program to build a bomb of enormous power and that the US should start an atomic bomb program too. There is a half-page ad introducing homogenized milk. A drawing of an aproned mom giving same to her kids accompanies the text explaining how to pronounce the new word and describing the process. The mom and kids are white, as is every other model in an ad and every person in every photo. In the world of the New York Times, on October 1, 1940, there are no people who are not white. The other people are not part of the record of history.

On October 1, 1940, the Times reports that the German military government of Warsaw has decreed that all Polish citizens must henceforth ride in the back of streetcars, reserving the front for German personnel. They got this idea—humiliation by transportation—from us.

Ten years later my family was living in the Deep South and I was able to experience the unbearable creepiness of Jim Crow—creepy even for a white kid. What it was like for a black kid, I never knew, because I never had a chance to meet one. Unlike my peers, I had not been imbued with the art of not paying attention to what was going on and the whole business was batshit crazy to me. In 1950, It seemed like lasting forever but it did not; in my lifetime it vanished like a bad dream. The wisdom here is that anything can be changed given enough people with enough determination and discipline; and, of course, the willingness to be jailed or die.  Also, radical change takes time to permeate. The Times has an ad this day for Gone With the Wind, still at the Astor after more than a year, but closing in two weeks. (It opened again, however, and you can enjoy its racist nonsense anytime you like on a home screen.)

Also on the front page on October 1, 1940, the House Un-American Activities Committee is investigating Nazis in German-American organizations.  After the war, the committee will investigate communists, or people who might have been communists, or people who might have just not liked fascists, a little too prematurely,  Martin Dies, the committee chairman would be ably assisted in his fight against domestic communism by one Senator in particular, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

It is difficult at this remove to summon the qualms this fellow provoked during the decade of his influence, as the chief symbol of the great Red Scare of the 1950s. I was not personally affected but I had a pal whose dad had been fired from his job as a school teacher because of suspect activities in the 1930s, and was reduced to menial work—no one would give a professional job to a ‘communist,’ meaning someone who would not implicate others while under investigation.  I first witnessed actual want in that household, and the air of hopeless desperation that lay thick on it. Many people believed that McCarthy was another Hitler, presaging a turn toward fascism. Others thought him the savior of America.

But McCarthy blew up, exposed in public hearings and by journalists, and his power vanished like Jim Crow did, another awakening from nightmare. Today the main reminder of his fearful apex is the most famous protégé of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief of staff, who is now the President of the United States.  

Another thing learned over years: troubles pass away and often the worst does not happen. Sound banal? Yeah, all this shit seems banal to me too. That’s why the word banal was invented, so we could ignore the deep wisdom that every generation learns, and which is nearly impossible to convey to the next. 

On October 1, 1940, the Times reports, General George Caitlin Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, announces the new commanders of the army he was building. The US army, which had numbered around 150,000 just a few tears ago, was growing into a modern force of 1.1 million, a spectacular achievement. I sometimes like to think of what George C. Marshall—a man of supreme decency, competence, and courage—would have to say about some of the characters hanging around national security in the current administration. Of the generals he named, some are familiar and had good wars. Others were canned for incompetence when they had to lead troops in combat. That was another thing about the era of my birth: people who fucked up got fired, they were ruined. Now, we don’t want to play the blame game. Why the hell not? 

But then there’s Frank Hague, and there’s the naked, outright, corruption, double-dealing and trading money for influence that characterized American politics at that time. Plus the outright n-hollering, the lynching, the naked unashamed racism. Another banality: some things about the past were better than they are at present, and some were far worse. Reactionaries who moon over the past and radicals who reject it categorically seem both of them wrong to me. I say that as someone who has lived virtually all of his life in the past.

In societies where the future is expected to be much like the present and the past, the old are a precious cultural resource, especially in non-literate people.  But with us, everyone understands that the present is nothing like the past and the future will be nothing like the present, and that therefore the experience of the old is useless. And it is true that the old find it hard to surf the relentless torrent of innovation. For example, I find myself absolutely cut off from popular culture. I haven’t known who the leading popular singers are for fifty years. I watch movies and I can’t understand what’s going on or why anyone would want to watch that movie. My use of information technology is primitive; I have no brand. I used to write for Wired; now I can hardly read it.This is, of course, common. I recall that Freud, who died in 1939, never saw a movie, and that my mother never quite got the Beatles, although she was encyclopedic on swing and Latin dances. 

But here’s a curious thing. Somehow we’re back in the 1930’s again. History is repeating itself, as Marx famously predicted, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The day I was born, the tragedy was in full spate, with fascism flooding Europe, and strong everywhere, including here, as the Times reports. So to the present farce.

The first thing is—and this is the central wisdom of age—things end. As he said himself, someday it will go away, it’s like a miracle. On October 1, 1940, practically no one on earth could imagine an end to fascist domination. It might really have lasted a thousand years, because—and it may be hard to understand this—lots of people really loved fascism. It was thrilling in its performance (those uniforms, those parades!) and successful in its wars. It kindled intense patriotism and absolved people of the painfulness of making decisions. It fought anomie.  It had a powerful intellectual backing from some of the brightest people of the age. Best of all, it designated an Other who could be abused with impunity and upon whom one could blame all the troubles of life. What’s not to like? And almost all the powerful people defended it, and after all, monarchy used to be a thing and it lasted more than a thousand years, and slavery, ditto, and that lasted four hundred. Henceforth, this was how things were to be, world without end.

But as we know, that tragedy had a happy ending. By my fifth birthday, fascism had vanished utterly as an expansive force or a threat to the world. Throughout the vast realm that Hitler had controlled it was difficult to find anyone who had supported him. 

What will become of the current farce remains, of course, an open question. People on both sides of the divide now suffer from an excess of scenarios. One set of scenarios leads to something like Lebanon or Yugoslavia, a riven nation, with artillery falling on pleasant urban precincts. Another set leads to Argentina, Chile, or El Salvador—the deep night of full-on repression, imprisoning of the opposition, disappearances, torture prisons, the crushing of all dissent. We might actually get to experience the horrors our foreign policies imposed on other nations. We will finally get to see how we would have behaved in Casablanca. Or we might form an authoritarian axis with Russia and China and keep that going for generations, Orwell’s “boot in the face, forever.” Authoritarian oligarchies are very stable. Rome lasted 700 years, Venice a thousand. There are scenarios where Trump and his family end up hanging naked from lampposts, and there are others in which he retires into his own show on Fox, where people call him “sir” all the time. Still others laud him as the far-seeing founder of a white empire. No one can tell which will be our fate, and that’s what makes for our constant, wasting agita.

I was born in the second administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and there is a fair chance that I will die in the second administration of the present guy. Thus the arc of American history over one lifetime!  It’s hard to convey now how disgraced the rightists were after the war, how solid the liberal establishment seemed, and how impossible the current situation still seems to me. But I admit to a prejudice for political happy endings, despite what I’ve lived though, the assassinations and the stupid wars. It happened that I was a kid in the infantry when the Cuban missile crisis hit. They cancelled all leaves, and they started to scrub the peacetime marking off planes at the airbase nearby. According to unofficial sources, we were going in the third wave, right after the Marines and airborne. We dodged that one, and the 60s riots didn’t destroy the country, and George Wallace didn’t become president and Nixon didn’t prevail. Yes the country is ruined; but like the man said, there’s a lot of ruin in a country. 

So I have to believe that the world I won’t live to see will eventually right itself, that the conditions that allowed two entirely different universes of fact to exist simultaneously will be resolved, that the kids I see around here, my granddaughter’s generation, will be called to heroism, like my parents’ generation was, and bring about the necessary, agonizing revolutions. This is not to ignore the possibility that things may become very bleak before that. When I was born, people were learning that they still could live their lives even though planes were dropping tons of high explosive on their cities every night, even though before that everyone had been sure that this would reduce any population to abject surrender.  Again, and yet again, the harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.