You can tell alot about a society by its historical artifacts. That is obvious. But what is not so obvious is that pop culture, or "low culture" as the snobs would have it, is often just as often indicative of a society, or even more so, than more conventional barometers.
There are many who would call Sly Stallone a joke as an actor, an ancestor of Keanu Reeves, an idiotic cipher who stumbled into multi-million dollar franchises in which the lead actor's dialogue consisted primarily of a series of grunts and "woahs" interspersed with automatic weapons fire.
That assessment is true of Reeves, but not of Stallone. The man can act. And, more germane to this blog, he understood the pulse of the people. By "the people", I mean Nixon's silent majority, rather than any "people" I've ever met.
Consider Rocky. Best Picture 1976. Written by, directed by, and starring Sylvester Stallone, an absolute nobody to the Hollywood kingmakers.
What made Rocky brilliant was that the hero fell, but he never lost his dignity in the eyes of the audience. In all previous American blockbusters, the good guy wins. But at the end of Rocky, Rocky loses. The good guy loses.
And that was the Pulse of the People in 1976. The good guys had just lost for the first time ever. America had just lost its first war and they needed a way to make it romantic, to construct a narrative whereby they fought the good fight and lost fair and square, but lost nothing vital in the process. Rocky provided that narrative.
Stallone managed to capture the Silent Majority's psyche with two characters that appeared simultaneously in American cinema. Stallone's run of Rocky and Rambo is rivaled only by Harrison Ford contemporaneous run of Han Solo and Indiana Jones.
The character of John J. Rambo is an even more brilliant distillation of America's psyche that that of Rocky Balboa. When Rambo is given the top-secret mission of returning to Vietnam in the 80's to find proof that the Vietnamese are still holding American POW's, he asks the immortal question: "Do we get to win this time?"
Do we get to win this time?
Americans dropped more bombs on a tiny stone-age country than had been dropped by all nations combined in the history of war up to that point, yet they were convinced that they hadn't gone far enough, that some hidden cabal had restrained them and sold them out.
This is what America wanted. We would have won last time if the unnamed "they" had let us. The "they" in this equation is whoever the viewer wants it to be: the media, the liberals, the communists, the protesters, etc.
As America got over its temporary humility and embraced the Reaganist creed of credit card-fueled expiation, both Rocky and Rambo movies became increasingly simplistic and boorish, with Stallone getting progressively more oily, bronzed, muscle-rippled, and dialogue-deficient.
Just like most of US.
To many of the few people who know who he is, George McGovern is a joke, the guy who managed to lose 49 states to a man forced to resign less than two years later. But if you scratch beneath the surface of that debacle, you will find a man who contributed more to democracy than any other living American.
As I was teaching 1968 (like 9/11, 1968 requires only numbers to evoke recognition) to high school seniors, I explained the Democratic Party's primaries of that year as the first democratic elections in American history.
We have it drilled into our heads that we live in a democracy, and the power and appeal of that paradigm is sufficient to obscure the matrix for most people. But 1968 was, in fact, the first time that choosing a party's nominee was open to the public.
For every prior election in American history, the candidates were chosen by party leaders in the proverbial and/or literal "smoke-filled room". Those choices were only "democratic" if you happened to be a party leader.
After picking their frontmen, the parties would present the American people with their great "democratic choice".
If a small clique decides on the candidates without any public input, then the choice between said candidates is only "democratic" in a very indirect way. In a real democracy, the people would pick the options and then pick from among the agreed-upon options rather than to be force-fed two stale and pre-packaged "choices" to pick from.
What's more "democratic": choosing between hamburgers and cheeseburger, or choosing from an entire menu of choices?
At any rate, things changed in 1968 when Robert Kennedy went directly to the people and ran in primary elections rather than courting the party elite, to whom Kennedy was too radical and independent for their blessings.
After Kennedy's murder, the Democrats reverted to their traditional modus operandi and nominated Vice-President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a man who had ran in precisely zero primaries.
And so, the American people, weary of war, were given the "choice" between two pro-war candidates, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. For many of those who still believed in the system, this was the death-knell.
But this is where George McGovern comes in. A close fried of Bobby Kennedy, McGovern stood for his slain colleague at the 1968 convention that coronated Humphrey. After the convention and the riots outside and inside the hall, McGovern set to rewrite the rules for the Democratic Party.
Long story short, it was McGovern who rewrote the rules to allow for a system of open primaries to replace the smoke-filled rooms. It was McGovern who made the Democratic Party democratic. And he was their first nominee under the new system.
McGovern was crushed by Nixon in 1972 for three reasons.
Reason the first: the old Democratic establishment tried to destroy him. Even after McGovern had won enough delegates in open primary elections, the old bosses tried to sandbag him at the convention by nominating....wait for it....Hubert Horatio Humphrey. The counterrevolution failed, but the party was split.
Reason the second: Richard Nixon was directing a vast criminal conspiracy using public and private agents of the White House, FBI, CIA, IRS, Post Office, etc., to destroy McGovern. "Rat-fucking" was the term that Nixon's campaign gave it. An example of rat-fucking? Breaking into the home of the man who had just shot third-party candidate George Wallace and planting George McGovern campaign literature.
Remember, the umbrella of shit that came to be known as Watergate explicitly and specifically originated in the Campaign the Re-Elect the President. The campaign against McGovern was so tainted that it forced a sitting president from office. That must factor into historic appraisals of that defeat; the 1972 election was hardly a fair fight.
Reason the third: Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam. Nearly everyone agreed in 1972 that the war was a tragedy. The only question was whether it was a mistake or a crime. George McGovern never called it a crime, but he was unnervingly honest and blunt in how he talked about Vietnam, and many Americans were disconcerted with his failure to condemn the Communists in the middle of each sentence.
Vietnam is the ultimate case-study in the imperial American mind. Absolutely fascinating. And here's one of the things that jumps out at me. Americans hated the war, but they hated the protesters more. Americans knew they were wrong but they hated anyone who would dare say it out loud. And McGovern said it out loud.
George McGovern was a combat pilot during World War II who had killed hundreds of people and who had men in his own plane killed beside him. And he was called a coward for demanding that his country stop bombing poor people. He was hated, as so many men are, because he told the truth.
If he is to be remembered as a loser, I wish we had losers like him in politics today.
Martin Luther King is perhaps the most willfully misunderstood man in our history (One of many; Americans don't seem to want to understand their leaders). All people have a tendency to ignore those aspects of a person's life that they are discomforted by, to obscure all traces of contradiction or challenges to their own preferred and preconceived narrative.
And what is America's preferred narrative of Martin Luther King? It can be summed up in 4 words: I Have A Dream. That was, indeed, a great speech. But it is nowhere near an accurate portrayal of all that the man stood for, especially if one looks at the last year of his life.
In 1963, King was not a radical, and he was most certainly not a revolutionary, even though millions of cretinous and frothy bigots surely would dispute that fact. Rather, King was at this stage simply a reformer. And this difference is not only semantic.
A reformer accepts the basic foundations and tenets of the system in question. If one listens to what King was saying during this period, it was simply this: America is a great country with a great form of government full of great people who simply need to be challenged to live out the greatness inherent in our souls, as articulated in those twin pillars of greatness, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Proposing that a government enforce its own laws is not a radical proposal. And that's all King was saying during this period. In fact, he often pointed out that Civil Rights Acts would be entirely unnecessary if the laws already on the book were simply enforced and if people walked through life as if they actually believed in the words of the Declaration and Constitution.
In fact, King was so conciliatory toward the "system" or the "establishment", that he submitted his I Have A Dream speech to the government for possible censorship and revision before he even delivered it. That the Kennedy brothers saw no need for revision is evidence enough that King was no radical, no revolutionary.
And when, today, Americans are asked what King's message was, more than 95%, from President Obama on down, will directly or indirectly give the exact same answer: "I Have A Dream".
And again, not to detract from this speech, and it was a great speech, but dreaming that white and black folks will be allowed to have a hamburger next to each other in public is not all that audacious a dream, is it? There was nothing radical or revolutionary about it, except among openly avowed white supremacists of the type who see no difference between treating a black man as a human being and begging him to rape your daughter.
But what King should remembered for, he is not. What he should be remembered for is largely forgotten, because it challenges the dominant narrative: that all King ever wanted was for black and white kids to be in the same algebra class, and that some deranged loner bigot killed him for it.
Well, if one examines the language from King's last year, one will see swiftly, surely, and shockingly that, by 1967, King was no reformer. And he seemed to have simply skipped over the radical phase. In the pantheon of the three "R's", he was now, without a doubt, a revolutionary.
No longer was his bedrock the assumption of American goodness, greatness, and fairness. No longer was he simply seeking admission to the freest, greatest society in the world. Now, he talked of total overhaul. Now, he questioned the very moral and political and economic foundations of our entire culture. Now, he wanted more than a hamburger.
Why this shift? Well the shorthand answer to that question is the same as it is for so many seemingly unrelated questions about the course of this nation over the last 50 years: Vietnam. It was Vietnam that felled the scales from King's eyes, that obliterated the traditional quarantine between foreign policy and civil rights, and that led to a scathing critique not of some logistical question about the Cold War, but to the very soul of us.
"A time comes", he began, "when silence is betrayal." When one reads this speech, one is enlivened and awed by the intellectual and rhetorical freedom of a man who has no intention of ever running for president. The apolitical King made American politicians seem even more venal than they already did, with talks of "credibility" and "peace with honor".
"A time comes when silence is betrayal...I watched the War on Poverty broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war...we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools".
"So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the fact of such cruel manipulation of the poor".
"I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without haveing first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government".
"Perhaps only my sense of humor and irony can save me when I hear the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of tons of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8,000 miles away from its shores".
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death"
Those are a few samples of King's rhetoric in his last year. First he had a dream, but 4 years later he perceived the onset of spiritual death.
Why does this matter? It matters because King must not be allowed to be confined, cribbed, castrated, really, into a paradoxical sliver of what and who he actually was: the moral and intellectual conscience of a nation.
To confine King to "I Have A Dream" is to take the view that the only thing really wrong with America 50 years ago was that blacks couldn't go to the movies with white people. That is cartoonish and dangerous.
It is quite easily work to apprehend why so many people, and especially politicians, have zero interest in remembering what King was saying as he matured. On the one hand, he's held by the establishment (only after his death, of course) as an angel, a peacemaker, a true American. But then there's the problem of the quotes above.
And therein lies the contradiction. Since President Obama has (rightly) said that his life is the fulfillment of King's (early) dream, let's do a little hypothetical. What if, next Martin Luther King day, President Obama was asked whether he agreed with quotes like those above.
We know what would happen. President Obama, casually cast as cherry on top of King's sundae, would have to publicly and explicitly say "I do not agree". We all know he would HAVE to reject such treasonous and slanderous statements, since no president has or will ever acknowledge that America has sinned.
Personally, I do not cherish the thought of Obama being so confronted, but it would be a "teachable moment", as the president says , to watch Obama have to condemn Martin Luther King's true thoughts. The whole truth about Martin Luther King is that he started out as a reformer and ended up as a revolutionary. In the officially-sanctioned memory of the man, however, his radical and revolutionary words and actions are excised from the record, leaving us with an inaccurate and unchallenging Hallmark card of a memory, and relegates a great man's greatest words to the proverbial dustbin.
There have been a handful of American presidents with the moral cowardice to start wars. And there have been a handful of American presidents with the moral cowardice to inherit and continue unwinnable wars. But there has been only one American president with the moral courage to end an unwinnable war as soon as he possibly could.
Dwight David Eisenhower, our last General President, our borderline Caesar, who behaved more like Cincinnatus or George Washington, is the only commander in chief we've ever had who actually commanded the chiefs to stop a war.
There are 4 points in postwar (aka imperial) American history when presidents could have ended unwinnable wars. 3 of 4 times they escalated.
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in to the presidency in his own right. To be sure, if Kennedy were not a corpse, Johnson would never have been president, but John Kennedy was not nearly as hawkish on Vietnam as was LBJ; the Vietnam war was still not inevitable when JFK was killed.
In any case, Johnson ran in '64 on the premise and the promise that he would not "send American boys to die in Vietnam". That promise, among other things, gave him the biggest landslide victory to that point in our history. A mandate, to say the least, to not make Vietnam an American war.
Three months after the inauguration, Johnson sent in the Marines.
In 1968, Johnson abdicated the presidency, a de facto resignation, in the face of rage over his war. Richard Nixon ran on the premise and the promise that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. He was elected to end the war.
Instead, he invaded Cambodia, carried out the heaviest bombing raids in human history on North Vietnam over Christmas, and presided over more than half of the American and Vietnamese deaths in the war before he resigned.
In 2008, Barack Obama ran on the premise and the promise that our response to 9/11 was catastrophically conceived and executed.
He categorically rejected the invasion and occupation of Iraq and vowed to end it.
He categorically rejected the concept and reality of Guantanamo, and all the sordid acts that fall under that now nearly pornographic word.
He acknowledged the logic of action in Afghanistan, and vowed to rehaul the effort.
But now, he deigns to nearly double our presence there, which will double our casualties, which will make it doubly hard to withdraw.
The only president who has done the right thing in similar circumstances was Ike. 25% of our presidents until JFK were Generals. Ike was the last.
When Eisenhower ran in '52, his only promise and premise was the maddeningly innocuous "I shall go to Korea". But that was enough to win. And after he won, Ike went to Korea and ended the war. We didn't "win", but we stopped dying, killing, and spending on a wormhole of an endeavor.
When Ike came in, he stopped a pointless war, without worrying that nobody would trust us anymore, that nobody would think we loved freedom anymore, that nobody would think we had a small collective penis. Ike didn't need to act tough. Because he knew what tough was.
As Ike left office, he delivered one of the masterpieces of American oratory.
"We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.
To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle--with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment."
"Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."
"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage."
Sounds like Barack. But it was Ike. And I never thought I'd say this, but I wish Barack had a little more Ike in him.
