How Many Fingers Is America Holding Up?

Chris O'Carroll

A speaker or speakers shouted a demand that the governor order the flag outside the State House lowered to half staff in mourning for the dead students. We began chanting, “Lower the flag! Lower the flag! Lower the flag!” There was some muttering about rushing the flagpole and tearing the banner down, but support for that plan was scanty. The symbolism would have been all wrong. Venting our grief and anger with a violent attack on the flag was not the point. Four young Americans had just died for their country. Had just died at the hands of their country. We were calling for a respectful, dignified public tribute.

The governor of Massachusetts at that time was Francis Sargent, a liberal by Republican standards, from the party’s dwindling Nelson Rockefeller/Elliott Richardson wing. From his office inside the State House, he issued the order we were chanting for. A state trooper or some figure in uniform emerged from the gold-domed building and we cheered him like a rock star as he reeled the Stars & Stripes halfway down.

It was a triumphant moment. And it ruined me for all subsequent demonstrations. Once you’ve had that kind of instant gratification, how can any other protest march or rally measure up?

In the long run, lowering the flag to honor the Kent State dead turned out to be a somewhat simpler matter than ending a war. Now in 2003, a third of a century later, averting a war is starting to look downright impossible. Certainly an afternoon of chanting outside the White House or the United Nations isn’t going to do it. But when we have serious grievances that we want the government to redress, it would be un-American not to join in some peaceable assembly. So here I am on a cold but sunny Saturday in the middle of February, brandishing a No War sign at the corner of Rt. 5 and Rt. 202 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Or maybe my sign says Honk For Peace; there are several manifesto-on-a-stick placards being handed up and down the raggedly organized ranks.

February 15, day after Valentine’s Day. Make love, not war. That used to be an all-in-one-breath slogan, now we need two consecutive days. Remember that Joni Mitchell song about Woodstock? I can hear her singing now: “By the time we got to Holyoke, we were about 75 strong.” Catchy. There’s a bigger demonstration going on down in New York, and we’re the local remnant who couldn’t make the trip. We’re missing all the fun of cops riding their horses into crowds of peaceniks. We’re not getting our share of the 250 or so nuisance arrests that exemplify the city’s harassment campaign against the anti-war movement. Not a single state or local cop shows up to hassle us in the name of Orange Alert security. During the hour or so that we keep our peace vigil, the worst we have to contend with is the sub-freezing temperature and the occasional hostile shout from a passing motorist.

It’s common for people of all political persuasions to stand appalled when they get a look at some of the nutjobs who agree with them. I mean, imagine my chagrin a dozen years ago when I found myself allied with Pat Buchanan against Daddy Bush’s war in the Gulf. To see fools and scoundrels on the other side of an issue is always a pleasure. To spy them in one’s own camp is disconcerting. So my wife and I are scoping out all the unfamiliar faces in our Holyoke mini-demo, and we’re relieved to see that this is a pretty reasonable looking bunch. (I assume they’re scoping us out in a similar vein; I have no way to know what conclusions they might be drawing.)

One gentle old woman in shabby clothes is singing softly, “Say no to war, say no to war. Dear America, say no to war. Say yes to peace, say yes to peace. Dear America, say yes to peace.” When she stops singing for a while and chats with the other demonstrators, we learn that she’ll shortly be leaving for Vietnam to attend a 35th anniversary event at My Lai. That village, as you no doubt recall, was the site of one particularly notorious massacre by American troops in a war that Daddy Bush’s boy George supported as long as he personally didn’t have to fight in it. Now grown more brazen in his no-show hawkishness, he froths with eagerness to plunge the nation into a war that he and his wealthy cronies won’t have to fight in and won’t even have to pay for. An all-volunteer military plus radical tax cuts for the rich. It’s a beautiful system, deftly shifting both the burden of Pentagon funding and the risk of dying on the battlefield away from the ruling elite who are the beneficiaries of Republican class warfare.

A couple of today’s demonstrators are guys about my age wearing vintage Vietnam Veterans Against the War buttons. I don’t know their stories, but I’m guessing they didn’t luck out the way I did with a high number in the draft lottery. The year I turned 18, the Selective Service drew me a number over 300, which put me as far out of danger as if my father had been a rich, politically connected oilman who knew how to jump my name to the top of a National Guard waiting list. I was happy not to be killing and dying myself. Unlike George, I didn’t want anybody else killing and dying in my place.

One of the anti-war vets, a tall, burly guy with a liberal salting of gray in his black Fu Manchu, is laughing as he recounts a confrontation with one war supporter who stopped by to heckle the protestors. “He goes, ‘What about Vietnam?’ I let him see my button and I ask him, ‘Yeah, what about Vietnam?’ So he backs off that and he goes, ‘Well, what about 9/11?’ I ask him, ‘What 9/11? You mean with the Saudi and Yemeni and Egyptian hijackers, that 9/11?’”

“I think the theory is, round off to the nearest Arab and nuke ’em,” I suggest. Just then, a panel truck with a local business logo on the side drives by. The young guy at the wheel shouts out the window, “Bomb Eye-rack! Bomb Eye-rack! Bomb Eye-rack!”

The other Vietnam vet shakes his head as the truck disappears through the intersection. “Yeah, find Iraq on a map, dude.” I tell him about a bumper sticker I spotted the other day: War Is God’s Way of Teaching Americans Geography.

When I scan a few recent generations of my ancestry, I realize that I ought to be a lot more gung ho about war and empire. My paternal grandfather’s paternal grandfather was one of the many Irish peasants who decided that whupping wogs on behalf of the British crown was a better deal than scraping a peat and potatoes living out of their native soil. He died in uniform in India, whence his son emigrated to the U.S. in time to make a few bucks as a Civil War gunrunner. His modus operandi was to buy up cheap lots of factory rejects from Northern arms manufacturers, smuggle them through the blockades, and sell them to the Confederacy. He didn’t particularly care whether one of his guns worked properly and put a bullet through the heart of a New Hampshire farmboy, or malfunctioned and blew up in the face of an Alabama farmboy. He kept his eye on the money, didn’t worry about the blood. He and the Bush family would have got on like a house afire, as long as it was somebody else’s house.

His son, my father’s father, was only 15 when he lied about his age to join the Navy for the splendid little Spanish-American War. After basic training - which in those days still involved cutlasses and boarding drills, as if the war were going to be a pirate movie - the Navy put him to work on a shipyard painting detail. Well, screw that. This boy had just learned how to swing a cutlass. He didn’t come here to paint, he came to fight. So he deserted from the Navy, joined the Army under another name, and finally won his all-expenses-paid trip to the Philippines. After the war, he settled into a civilian job as a coppersmith in a Navy shipyard. No hard feelings about that desertion business, but you’ll notice he didn’t take a job as a painter. Over the next few decades, he raised eleven kids on the wages the government paid him to keep his one small corner of the military industrial complex right and tight.

My father joined the Navy straight out of high school, just about midway between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki. He survived the kamikaze sinking of his aircraft carrier and came home to attend college on the GI Bill, enabling me to be born into the comforts of white-collar suburbia in Baby Boom America. On the whole, war has been good to me.

I don’t know that many generations of Bush family military history. I only know that the first president Bush, the one who actually won an election, is reckoned a World War II hero by some partisans, but appears to feel a certain uneasiness about his service record. He and his political advisors have long treated his war experience as something in need of spin-doctor embellishment. Back when Jimmy Carter was president and Bush was running for the Republican nomination, his campaign literature touted him as a combat veteran whose war had included “a daring rescue at sea, not unlike a recent president.”

That’s when I first realized the extent to which the Bush clan had adopted the lying weasel as its family totem. The recent president referred to was, of course, John Kennedy. Bush’s daring rescue story was not unlike an outright lie, inasmuch as it took pains to elide one subtle distinction. Whereas JFK rescued somebody, GHWB got rescued by somebody. To my way of thinking, any Republican politician who can’t resist the urge to go whoring after a dose of Kennedyesque glamour would look less pathetic if he simply shot himself in the head.

At that point in his career, Bush père was still selling himself as the rational alternative to Ronald Reagan, whose supporters he characterized as the Republican Party’s “extra chromosome” contingent, a turn of phrase that did not endear him to the hard right, nor to the families of people with Down’s Syndrome. He was also fighting shy of ideological labels in those days, urging the nation to regard him not as a “conservative” or a “liberal,” but simply as an American. Bush fils, while stupider and more thuggish than his father, has at least been shrewd enough to notice the bankability of the C-word. He declares himself a mental and moral pygmy with every public utterance, but he has been good enough to spare us any aw-shucks-don’t-pin-a-label-on-me prevarication. In a public life whose leitmotif has been contempt for the truth, that touch of honesty about his right-wing predilections is kind of adorable, like a boyish cowlick on the head of an unrepentant serial killer.

My wife is chatting now with one of the anti-war Vietnam vets. She’s a historian and the daughter of an anthropologist. Interviews everybody, collects life stories, analyzes everything. Together, she and her new friend are developing a theory about the responses our demonstration is drawing from passing motorists. Drivers of smaller cars, they’ve decided, are more likely to wave, smile, offer a thumbs-up or a two-fingered peace sign. Drivers of SUVs are more likely to shout an epithet, brandish a fist, or salute with a single digit. I’m sure that generalization is bound to break down eventually - fueled though it undeniably is by petroleum politics, Bush’s war fever is not about oil alone - but it’s fun to keep track of responses for a while and note how many of them do seem to fit the pattern.

I wave my sign back and forth or pump it up and down in reply to every friendly honk, and I have to admit that most of the encouragement is coming from smaller vehicles. Then an SUV driver shouts a few words that wouldn’t pass muster on network TV. My wife and the vets against the war guy flash simultaneous grins and whoop with satisfaction at this validation of their hypothesis. Some of the other protestors look at them oddly. Why are they so frickin’ happy to be abused by fans of the war?

I wrote a poem once about a peace demonstration. It was published in Thunder Sandwich. It’s not strictly speaking an anti-war poem, so I didn’t send it to Laura Bush on February 12. That was the date of the White House poetry event that the First Lady planned and then canceled when she got word that some of the invited poets were going to speak up against her husband’s war. Can you imagine that? On a day announced as a celebration of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman, three inflexible pillars of conservative ruling-class values, some rabble-rousers were going to ruin the party with dissenting talk of peace. I wanted to come up with a poem for the occasion, but all I could manage was this bit of doggerel:

DOING HER BIT FOR THE WAR EFFORT,
THE FIRST LADY CALLS OFF A GATHERING OF POETS

What if these upstart writers say
They’re more than genteel decoration?
What if they fling into the fray
Some unacknowledged legislation?

A car whooshes past with the driver’s arm thrust out the window and his middle finger raised in our direction. The two Vietnam vets wave back and smile. One of them shrugs, “At least he gave us half the peace sign.”

Chris O'Carroll