From time to time, a large body of writing drops into our lap that impresses us by its energy, iconoclasm and seriousness. Such is the case with the following book of essays by Terry Simons. These essays are radical, idiosyncratic, revisionist -- and we cannot think of an academic publisher who would look at them with favor. However, we think they deserve an audience and welcome the opportunity to publish them here. This is a work in progress (at least in the sense of completing details in the bibliographies). CD & ES
Part 1: Histories
Part 2: A Selection of Writings on the Cinema
Part 3: Miscellaneous Essays & Reviews
Part
1
Histories
Of Dirty Kitchens,
Bedlam, and the Bomb
Introduction
When
one examines the Cold War through the eyes of the poets a rich corpus of
material is in the offering. This essay
will, for reasons of length and brevity, be concerned with the political and
cultural responses of a select group of poets from the United States, Russia
and Latin America from 1945 to 1975. The subject matter will be based on the Cold
War timeline, but the reader should expect some digression within the text as
ideas and correlative issues are raised, compared and appropriated to the
essay’s political and cultural discussion.
The defeat of Nazism and the use of atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, created what some cultural historians
refer to as a “victory culture” in the U.S. Prior to America’s entrance into the war
after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, debate in Congress and among the U.S.
citizenry concerning the war in Europe was intensely mixed. America was not an imperialistic
power, and in fact debated the wisdom of hegemonic movements in general. Recovering from the Great Depression, and
looking back at the destruction of the Great War, a strong current of isolationism
was, despite Hitler’s outrages, an important aspect of the nation’s
polity. The Great War had demonstrated
the difficulties inherent in attempting to manage Europe
from three-thousand miles distance. But
improved communications, transportation and military technologies soon shrunk
the world, and by 1941 the U.S.
was poised to alter the balance of world power.
Victory
culture brought a new dynamic to the American socio-cultural climate in the
early Cold War years, as a rigid American nationalism sprouted from the ashes
of Europe.
The U.S.,
through diplomacy and innovative economical planning, schemed to fill the
post-war European void. The historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that the U.S., like Russia, sought security in its
post- war policy. However, one reality
of America’s
geopolitical situation hadn’t changed since the Great War. America
was still isolated geographically, making management of European and U.S. security difficult given Stalin’s purpose,
which “was not to restore a balance of power in Europe,
but rather to dominate the continent as thoroughly as Hitler had…”[i]
America’s
experiment with isolationism came to a bitter end with the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, its world hegemony arose with the annihilation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki,
and victory culture grew up under “containment.” In this scenario one may begin to discern the
complexity of poetic responses to the Cold War.
The Cold War’s effects on the human psyche in general, and the poetic
imagination in particular, were varied and unlimited, but without doubt
American writing changed with the invention of the Bomb and a ratcheting up of
American nationalism. Writing changed
because the end of the Second World War and the onset of Cold War changed
American culture. Intellectuals found
interesting things to examine within the context of a cultural revolution,
including growing consumerism, a quickening technology, a deconstruction of
American values, ascendant militarism, an awakening sexuality and evolving
gender roles and, most importantly, a new realization of the frailty of the
planet Earth. The effect of this new
awareness created chasms within society, which poets addressed in their
work.
The House of Bedlam
In
her 1949-1950 role as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, or Poet
Laureate of the United
States, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an
unlikely choice to carry the banner of intellectualism for the new American
Empire. An array of poet laureates
before her was selected for the job as much for their unwavering faith in
American virtue as for their supposed contributions to American poetics. Archibald MacLeish, as Librarian at the
Library of Congress during World War II, had led the U.S. propaganda effort. His job, which he performed admirably and
enthusiastically, was to help shape a pro-war citizenry.[ii] His opposite, Robert Lowell, sat out World
War II as a conscientious objector.
Subsequently Lowell,
like Joseph McCarthy, began to see the menace of communism everywhere in
American life. He was Poetry Consultant
in 1947-1948. An unstable man and
brilliant poet, Lowell
was given to drink, depression and telling authorities about his friends’
political lives. He was also a friend
and would-be- lover of Bishop.
Unfortunately for Lowell,
Bishop preferred the love of women, but that didn’t stop him from recommending
and pushing for Bishop’s selection as Poetry Consultant, a seeming
contradiction in an era when homosexuality and communism were often assumed to
be similarly evil.[iii]
Nervous and never quite comfortable in her consultant
position, Bishop kept a journal while sitting in her office near the U.S.
Capitol. In her poem View of the
Capitol from the Library of Congress, she describes watching a performance
of the all male Air Force Band on the steps of the Capitol. The militaristic and patriarchal flair in the
performance caused her to furtively write:
“On the east steps the Air Force Band / in uniforms of Air Force
blue / is playing hard and loud, but—queer—/ the music doesn’t quite come
through.”[iv] The all male ensemble, the military
regalia, the music not quite clear—these are aspects of Bishop’s social
disaffiliation, of her sense of literal queerness, of her disenchantment
with the rising Cold War ethos. Victory
culture and the politics of containment had her flummoxed.[v]
During Bishop’s time as Poetry Consultant, the expatriate
American poet Ezra Pound was confined to St. Elisabeths, a mental hospital in Washington D.C. One of her consultant duties was to visit the
imprisoned poet, who had broadcast pro-fascist propaganda while living in Italy in the
early days of World War II. From her
visits with Pound and in recognition of the toll war had taken on the mental
health of Americans, Bishop fashioned Visits to St. Elizabeths. Moved by the madness surrounding her, she
wrote: “This is the house of
Bedlam / This is the man/ that lies in the house of Bedlam / This the time / of
the tragic man / that lies in the house of Bedlam.”[vi] She saw Pound’s circumstances as tragic,
which they were, but she was unprepared to separate him from the other victims
of war. The time of the tragic man
belonged to everybody. The human race,
not just Pound or the other patients in the hospital, had sunk into
bedlam. The Cold War was an extension of
bedlam, and victory culture had become a coping mechanism for average
Americans.[vii]
In June, 1950 the Korean War began and shortly thereafter
Bishop finished her year-long consultancy and moved to Brazil, where she lived for the
next eighteen years. As Pound had coped
with imminent war by backing the wrong side in 1939, Bishop coped by turning
her back on America. At the height of World War II she had written
a poem titled Roosters. Its
central metaphor constructs an imminent fight between roosters when: “at four o’clock / in the gun-metal blue
dark / we hear the first crow of the first cock / just below / the gun-metal
blue window / and immediately there is an echo.
And then the moment of truth:
Now in mid-air / by two they fight each other / Down comes a first
flame-feather / and one is flying / with raging heroism defying / even the
sensation of dying”[viii]. The poet, fatigued by war, cared not to
see more images of heroism and dying. A
woman of privilege, she escaped.[ix]
Bishop’s return coincided with the rise of the
anti-war protests and cultural upheavals that swept through sixties America. Americans had finally come to understand the
dark absurdities of victory culture containment and the constant threat
of annihilation. Many had thrown their
support behind the liberation movements of other nations, as well as of
individuals. When Bishop returned she returned to a people who finally made
sense to her.
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg
Elizabeth
Bishop had emerged from the academic school
of American poetics,
where a sense of cool disengagement and intellectualism prevailed. As she was fleeing the U.S. another
school of poetry was emerging. Centered
on Columbia College
in New York
in 1949, a literary movement of a different sort began with the confluence of a
new intellectualism. Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and others, were
direct, in-your-face poets with bad attitudes in a time when decorum and
button-down, grey-flannel appropriateness was the norm. Ginsberg was openly gay and proud, a trouble-maker
who had just been kicked out of Columbia. Kerouac, a football star, lost his
scholarship after a row with Columbia’s
coaching staff. Cassady and Burroughs were bi-sexual. Cassady grew up in Denver’s rugged downtown ghetto, abandoned by
his drunken father. Burroughs, scion of
the Burroughs Office Machines Company family, was a profound drug taster. Corso was a tough guy who had literally
grown up homeless on the streets of New
York.[x] As a group, they were anti-victory culture
propagandists. Their contribution as
Cold War protesters would not be defined for another decade or more, as the
Beats’ relevancy and massive popularity grew in the restless sixties. Redefined countless times through the next
decades, they became idealized freedom fighters. Collectively in the 1950s they raged against
ennui and perceived world madness.
In 1950, the year Bishop fled to Brazil, Lawrence Ferlinghetti visited San Francisco for the
first time. He had grown up near Coney
Island in New York,
the son of Italian immigrants, and commanded a sub chaser in the Navy during
World War II. Stunned by The City’s beauty, which reminded him of
coastal cities in the Mediterranean, he
immediately decided to make it home.[xi] Ferlinghetti (1919----) founded with Peter
Martin City Lights Bookstore in 1953.
Two years later he founded the publishing wing of his enterprise, City
Lights Pocket Press.[xii]
Allen Ginsberg’s (1926—1997) Howl and Other Poems
was the sixth imprint by City Lights.
Ferlinghetti had been present at San
Francisco’s Six Gallery on Fillmore Street, October 7, 1955 when
Ginsberg read Howl for the first time in public. “Nobody had ever heard anything like that
before,” Ferlinghetti recalled in a 2000 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “When you hear it for the first time, you say
‘I never saw the world like that before.’”[xiii] He
would publish the book and earn the scorn (and free publicity) of the
censors. Poet Michael McClure, marking
the 50th anniversary of the reading in 2005, wrote of the approximately
one-hundred folks who listened to Howl: “We knew we were standing with
our toes against a line in the sand and, whether we felt fear or exuberance we
were staring directly at the wall of censorship and repression—and we knew we
would not step back.”[xiv]
Howl is the seminal U.S. Cold War poem. Its unforgettable opening lines attacked Cold
War fear and repression: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro
streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…” [xv] The poem “was a vast castigation of American
consumer society,”[xvi]
says Ferlinghetti, who risked all by publishing it and fortunately had the
American Civil Liberties Union on his side when the San Francisco Police
Department filed obscenity charges against him. Subsequently, he was cleared of
all charges after a lengthy trial throughout the summer of 1957. An earlier customs seizure (the book was
printed in England)
was quickly dropped, but had drawn SFPD scrutiny and led to the charges against
City Lights.[xvii]
The
Dirtiest Kitchen
Attacks
on the intelligentsia and the attempted suppression of dissidents are a legacy
of the Cold War experience. There were, however, crucial differences in the
methods of suppression between the Soviet Union and the U.S. throughout
the Cold War. In the Soviet
Union, nothing like the ACLU existed, of course. America’s
rights of free expression gave U.S.
authors a distinct advantage over the USSR
in the intellectual arena, despite occasional U.S. experiments in
suppression. The crucial differences lay
in methods of governance. The Bolshevik
revolution of 1917 betrayed Russian leftists and intellectuals who supported the
tsarist overthrow and believed revolution would enhance freedoms. Vladimir
Lenin saw writers and artists as rivals and threats to a successful proletarian
state-workers’ society meant to improve the lives of Russians. Lenin’s antipathy for bourgeois society led
directly to the early communist suppression of intellectuals, whom he equated
with bourgeois interests. He had an
arguable point of course, albeit a historically incorrect one.[xviii]
With communist power consolidated in 1923, Lenin relaxed
the rules for writers and others and a relatively free expression flourished
until 1928, when the Central Committee deigned it necessary to begin to “guide”
expression and demand “social realism” in the arts. In the Terror of the 1930s dissenting writers
and other artists were slaughtered and imprisoned along with opposition
politicians and social activists. During
World War II artists served a propaganda purpose on every side. Stalin allowed
Russians to indict Nazism and defend the motherland. There were plenty of MacLeish-like writers
crushing Nazism with their pens.[xix]
Anna
Akhmatova (1889—1966) was usefully promoted on the front pages of Pravda
during the war, but denied other expression.
Akhmatova had enjoyed a measure of popularity in Russia and
around the world as a supporter of Lenin’s revolution, but like many others she
fell out of favor with the Bolsheviks in the twenties. Lenin had her first husband, also a poet,
killed. Stalin brought her back to help
destroy Hitler and then returned her to noisy exile to continually butt heads
with Andrei Zhdanov, the Party’s cultural affairs apparatchik in the early Cold
War era. She developed a propensity for
fighting back. Her felinity, toughness
and public relations skills probably kept her out of jail, but the culture
police used other ploys to teach her a lesson, the most famous being the arrest
and confinement of her son to prison on typically trumped up state crimes.[xx]
Serving
Stalin’s purposes, she wrote during the war: “By our doors Great Victory
stays. . . / But how we’ll glory her advent? / Let women lift higher the children! They blessed / With life mid a thousand
deaths-- / Thus will be the dearest answered.”[xxi] Here was social realism! The image of cultural revolution uplifted
from mother to child, the dearest cause victory, and despite the thousands
dead, the Great Victory near. But in Requiem,
a poem denouncing the Terror, which did not see publication for many years, she
wrote at the Cold War’s height: “In this time, just a dead could
half-manage / a weak smile—with the peaceful state glad / And, like some heavy,
needless appendage, / Mid its prisons swung gray Leningrad / And, when
mad from the tortures’ succession, / Marched the army of those, who’d been
doomed, / Sang the engines the last separation / With their whistles through
smoking gloom…”[xxii]
If
Akhmatova’s The Victory was state-accepted social realism, her Requiem
was simply realistic, a cold exposition of what happened to many dissidents
during the Terror. Soviet Cold War
ideology, then, would not fool dissident poets as they looked at the past or
the present, even for those who had written hard for the motherland during the
war. To write more realistically while
being suppressed during the Cold War, Soviet dissidents turned to samizdat,
self-published and self-distributed writing, and often using pseudonyms to
avoid confrontations with the culture police.
The practice was extremely dangerous, until Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech”
in 1956. His condemnation of the
Stalinist “cult” in Russia
gave Soviet writers hope and sparked a short-lived and public literary
storm. In the midst of the Khrushchev
Thaw poetry grew in popularity and the samizdat flourished. Akhmatova reemerged when many in the West
assumed she was dead. Other banned and
suppressed writers appeared in public.
Crowds gathered in Moscow
to celebrate poetry. A new sense of
freedom bloomed as students read regularly in Mayak, named for the
monument to Vladimir Mayakovsky which opened on June 29, 1958 in the center of Moscow. An impromptu reading at the opening led to
regular poetry sessions there. Then, as suddenly as the Thaw appeared, a
crackdown began when Alexander Ginzburg, publisher of Syntaxis, was
arrested and charged with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”[xxiii]
One
of the first dissident Russian poets to immigrate to the West during the Cold
War was Josip Aleksandrovich Brodsky (1940—1996). Joseph Brodsky attended school to age fifteen
before taking a long series of menial jobs.
A Jew, he unsuccessfully applied for admission to a submarine academy, a
slight that may have blackened his view of communism. Though he never directly
criticized the Soviet government, he earned a reputation as a “social
parasite.” Scorned by authorities
because he appeared to be contributing nothing to the workers’ state while
gaining a mass following through samizdat, Brodsky’s diffidence also
arose from his childhood memories of growing up in Leningrad, where iconic
images of Lenin were everywhere—hero worship he instinctively loathed.
Brodsky
was brought to trial in 1964 and convicted of being a parasite. He was sentenced to a mental ward after his
trial judge asked, “And who recognized you as a poet?” “No one,” Brodsky replied. “Who listed me a member of the human race?”[xxiv] The official charge against the poet,
commonly pointed at dissidents in the post-thaw era, accused him of being “less
than one,” i.e., less than loyal to the one workers’ state and communist
ideology.[xxv] His The Berlin Wall Tune surveyed
the tragedy of the Wall: “Dull is
the day here. In the night /
searchlights illuminate the blight / making sure that if someone screams / it’s
not due to bad dreams / For dreams here aren’t bad: just wet with blood / of
one of your like who’s left his pad / to ramble at will; and in his head /
dreams are replaced with lead.”[xxvi] In the 1970s, while living in the U.S.,
where he died in 1996, Brodsky penned a book of essays titled, predictably, Less
Than One.
In
contrast to Brodsky, who spent eighteen months in jail before Soviet
authorities released him, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933---) played his political
cards a little closer to the vest and stayed out of trouble. The son of a well-positioned party loyalist,
he traveled with his father as a youth and eventually became known as the voice
of Russia’s
“young generation.” Khrushchev and
Brezhnev patronized him to illustrate the new Soviet freedoms and he traveled
widely as an arts representative until 1963, when he published A Precocious
Autobiography in English. His travel
was revoked for two years, but his value as an ambassador of Soviet “freedom” was
too important to ignore. In 1968 he
objected to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, penning Russian Tanks in
Prague, with lines that demonstrated he took the provocation personally:
“A Russian writer / crushed by Russian tanks in Prague.”[xxvii]
Yevtushenko’s
career was a dance. His early work
echoed the 1917 Mayakovsky and showed a youthful loyalty to communism that
eroded in the post-Stalin era. The
important thaw year of 1956 saw him shoot to international fame with the
publication of Babi Yar, which recalled the German army’s massacre of
Jews in Kiev,
September, 1941. But the poem also
castigated his own country “for forgetting the message of the Internationale.”[xxviii] Thenceforth, Yevtushenko was a thorn in the
Party’s side, as well as a useful tool. In an interview for the CNN documentary, Cold
War, Yevtushenko provides a glimpse of the Russian mindset in the
Khrushchev years. The poet explains that
Khrushchev called him after Yevtushenko sent the deposed leader a birthday
card. Khrushchev, abandoned by the
Party, called to express thanks for the gift card and to apologize for treating
writers unfairly when he held power. “I
ask forgiveness, your forgiveness, your colleagues,’ writers’, about my
rudeness. I know that I was unbearably
rude, and I was very ashamed for a long time.”[xxix] Khrushchev claimed he was repressive only
because the hard liners in the politburo accused him of being “too soft with
the liberals.” Politics was a
profession Khrushchev advised the poet to avoid. He said, “please don’t be involved into
politics—that’s the dirtiest kitchen we could imagine.”[xxx]
Yevtushenko
need not have been warned away from politics, of course. He made his reputation and was able to stay
out of prison because he was a beloved international poet whose main body of
work centered on an array of problems focusing on the human condition. “I became popular nationally not as a
political poet, but as a poet of love,” he states in the CNN interview. “For
the first time in my life, my socialist lips touched so-called ‘capitalist
lips,’ because I kissed an American girl, breaking any Cold War rules.”[xxxi] His early poems were not political, but
rather examined loneliness. They were
attacked because the brotherhood of communism denied the legitimacy of
loneliness in a nation where everybody was supposedly working toward the same
socio-economic ideals.[xxxii] That, of course, is not the way life works,
except in the realm of Stalin’s social realism, which became increasingly
moribund before finally dying with the USSR.
The Bomb
If
politics is the “dirtiest kitchen,” as Khrushchev avowed, then the U.S.
poets were as hip to politics as the Russians.
In his poem “Many Have Fallen” Gregory Corso (1930—2001) looks
back twenty years at his famous work, Bomb, first
published in 1958. That year he had taken to prophecy, “the heaviest
kind: Doomsday / It was announced in a frolicy poem called BOMB / and concluded
like this: / Know that in the hearts of men to come / more bombs will be born /
…yea, into our lives a bomb shall fall / Well, 20 years later / not one
but 86 bombs, A-Bombs, have fallen / We bombed Utah, Nevada, New Mexico / and
all survived /…until two decades later.”[xxxiii]
His
prophecy hinted that the fallout shelters Americans dreamed of buying in the
fifties might come in even handier in the nuclear-proliferated seventies. How could all the testing be good for the
fragile Earth? Why was overkill such a
popular enterprise? These are the
questions Corso addressed in 1978, by turning his humorous style against the
absurdity of proliferation. How many
bombs would it take to kill everything?
With the Bomb and kitchen politics merging in a whorish nexus,
the superpowers hammered away at each other.
They attacked with “beautiful” explosions in great, quiet spaces, like Nevada and Siberia. United States
propaganda sought to sell the Bomb in the victory culture containment
realm. The Russians struggled to keep
up, saddled with their own version of victory culture containment.
In
the U.S.,
the defense contractors grew rich. In
the state controlled Russian economy, the people grew poorer and poorer as
defense spending became a black hole filled with rubles. Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, became the
credo that drove the engine of the American economy. Americans had become what Theodore Roszak
would call “Technology’s Children” in 1969’s The Making of a Counter
Culture. Americans were stricken
with a “generational disaffiliation,” he wrote. The rhetoric of the new
technocratic elites created generalized “assumptions about reality” and led to
“quarrels between technocrats” that the disaffiliated were ill-equipped to
understand, said Roszak. Technology
workers became the new royalty, and the distribution of goods and services grew
imbalanced among those elites and the burgeoning population of have-nots. Misdistribution, not scarcity became the
norm.[xxxiv]
Before
Roszak, the poets and disaffiliated youths were first to comprehend the
shifting cultural sands, beginning with the Beats, of whom Corso was a
recognized member. He had returned from
England in 1958 to see protesters shouting, “Ban the Bomb, Ban the Bomb (and
said) ‘It’s a death shot that’s laid on them…and it’s not as if the Bomb had
never fallen…how am I going to tackle this thing, suddenly death was the big
shot to handle…not just the Bomb.’”[xxxv] He dealt with it by writing a volume titled The
Happy Birthday of Death, an “ironic epic hymn…, in which the speaker
experiences all the standard psychological responses to the unimaginable, the
horrific…But the poet knows well that he is singing with his throat cut…”[xxxvi] It is with irony that Corso examines the
Bomb, finding humor in its awful potential to annihilate humanity.
Humor
has always been fear’s enemy, and as such it became Corso’s method of attacking
victory culture and containment politics.
Todd Gitlin writes, “Whatever the national pride in the blasts that
pulverized Bikini and Eniwetok atolls,
whatever the Atomic Energy Commission’s bland assurances, the Bomb actually
disrupted our daily lives. We grew up
taking cover in school drills—the first American generation compelled from
infancy to fear not only war but the end of days.”[xxxvii] The national pride in the Bomb was pure
fantasy, dangerous and delusional. It was a peculiar aspect of the dirtiest kitchen,
manifest by dangerous and delusional men, whom the poets struggled to pull back
into reality, reminding all that “There is a hell for bombs / They’re
there I see them there / They sit in bits and sing songs / mostly German songs
/ and two very long American songs /…they wish there were more songs /
especially Russian and Chinese songs / and some more very long American songs /
Poor little Bomb that’ll never be / an Eskimo song.[xxxviii]
Reality
The
near entirety of Bob Dylan’s early and mid-career poetry examines the cultural
repercussions of the Cold War. Bob Dylan
(1941---) began his career in 1960, singing in Greenwich
Village coffee houses. His
politically charged “protest” songs, such as 1962’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,”
“denounced the complacence of middle-class society and quickly became an anthem
of liberal dissent,” write David A. Horowitz and Peter Carroll in their survey,
On the Edge: U.S.
in the 20th Century.[xxxix] The protest of course concerned Cold War
complacency and victory culture, the smug sameness of ordinary society. Dylan’s antecedents, then, were the
Beats.
Once
scorned by academic poets, Dylan’s reputation as a skilled writer has
grown. Clever in his condemnation of
victory culture mentality, he takes on the cold warriors: Idiot wind,
blowing like a circle around my skull, / From the Grand
Coulee Dam to the Capitol.[xl] Idiot Wind, released in 1975, spoke
to a generation reeling from the Cold War inspired political calculation and
abuses of power, such as Watergate. By
1975 Nixon had resigned, America
had quit in Vietnam, and Bob
Dylan had learned to expect nothing but the worst from Washington D.C. He had started out as a protest singer, but
he had evolved into something else entirely—a rocker with a savage wit and an
individual streak that the folk movement and some Cold War protesters found too
enigmatic.[xli]
Like
the Beats, Dylan scorned the militarism of Cold War culture and the crass
consumer society that, provoked by new advertising techniques, created a
booming economy at the expense of an inwardly calm, meditative consideration of
existence. Counterculturists believed
rising corporatism and individual greed were playing into the hands of the Cold
War provocateurs. Consumer society
acquiesced to the corporate Cold War mentality and helped it thrive at the
expense of mental health, spirituality, and the ability to co-exist on
Earth. Consumer Cold War society said
if you were to live well on the planet, you needed to keep up with the
Jones’s.
Advertising,
often expressed as guilt mechanism, propelled unreasonable social expectations
to the fore. Questions of identity and
self proliferated like cruise missiles.
The New Age dawned and filled the Cold War void in Americans’
lives. Roszak’s “children of technology”
clutched the New Age’s tenets like life preservers and held on. A new conformity arose, displacing the
victory culture of Bishop’s fifties.
Victory culture wasn’t finished however.
It just morphed into a more dominant and pervasive consumer
mentality—today’s. The militaristic U.S. economy
gave millions a taste of something they never imagined they would ever
experience—wealth and ease. Thus the
point of existence became not meaning, but the sort of ease a good
computer provides.
Pawns
in the Game
While
the U.S. struggled with the
hubris of victory culture at home and containment abroad, third world nations
found leverage by playing the Soviets, Chinese and the U.S. against each other. Poets’ reactions to the Cold War struggle of
third world liberation movements are as varied as the continents where these
revolutions played out.
The
American poet Etheridge Knight (1931-1991) was a drug addicted eighth grade
drop out who enlisted in the Army when he was seventeen. After being wounded in Korea, he
returned to drugs and went to prison for robbery. There he discovered poetry and began his
identification with the Black Power movement of the 1960s. He described his work as a response to the
“psyche wound” of his war experience.[xlii] “It is hard / To make a poem in prison.
/ The air lends itself / not to the singer. / The seasons creep by unseen / And
spark no fresh fires. / Soft words are rare, and drunk drunk / against
the clang of keys; / Wide eyes stare fat zeroes / And plead only for
pity.”[xliii]
The
psychic wounds created by Knight’s witness of war’s real consequences fed his
inability to cope with victory culture.
Shell shocked soldiers are a manifestation of every war, but the
ushering in of the new warfare amid containment politics began to take a toll
on even ordinary Americans from the Korean War onward. While victory culture made the Korean War and
the early phase of the Vietnam War palatable to a majority of Americans,
another cultural shift would soon occur.
Again, it was largely due to technology and the televised war in Southeast Asia.
“One two three what are we fighting for / don’t ask me I don’t give a
damn / next stop is Vietnam” [xliv]
wrote Country Joe McDonald at mid-war. Television had beamed the apocalyptic nature
of war into millions of American homes just in time for dinner every evening,
begging the question. What exactly were
Americans fighting for in the Nam? Mothers and fathers and their draft-age sons
began to sense something amiss. “Father,
father, father,” sang Marvin Gaye, “we don’t need to escalate.”[xlv] Etheridge Knight’s psychic wounds were
filtering into the body politic. At that
point the Vietnam War was lost.
Here
is a poem—shown in its entirety because it is one of the finest Vietnam era
poems—by Bruce Weigl (1949---), published in Carolyn Forche’s anthology Against
Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness:
The Last Lie
Some guy in the miserable convoy
raised up in the back of our open truck
and threw a can of C rations at a child
who called into the rumble for food.
He
didn’t toss the can, he wound up and hung it
on
the child’s forehead and she was stunned
backwards into the dust of our trucks.
Across
the sudden angle of the road’s curving
I could still see her when she rose,
waving
one hand across her swollen, bleeding head,
wildly swinging her other hand
at the children who mobbed her,
who tried to take her food.
I
grit my teeth to myself to remember that girl
smiling
as she fought off her brothers and sisters.
She laughed
as if she though it were a joke
and the guy with me laughed
and fingered the edge of another can
like it was the seam of a baseball
until his rage ripped
again into the faces of children
who called to us for food.[xlvi]
Here, in most graphic terms, was U.S. victory culture and containment politics at
work in a U.S.
occupied country. The image of an
innocent child staring down the dark rage of the warrior who threw the can at
her like a baseball is a frozen moment of classic hegemony, the final word on a
political policy in utter disarray.
But politicians’ failures did not stop the superpowers’
meddling. In Latin America, where Cold
War played out without the American boots-on-the-ground fervor of Vietnam, but
with nonetheless politically poisonous intrigue by the superpowers, two Chilean
poets answered the call to leftist politics.
Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra were leftists with a rabid distaste for
South American-style military dictatorships.
Neruda (1904—1973) preferred the idealism of the Workers’ State and had
been a staunch Stalinist until the revelations of Khrushchev’s secret speech
turned him against the Soviets. He lived
much of the time in ambassadorial roles in Buenos Aires,
Ceylon, Java,
Singapore and Mexico and was a leading communist politician in
Chile
until the Communist Party there was banned in 1948. For over a year he stayed underground in Chile until escaping to Europe,
where he stayed until 1950. In 1971 he
became ambassador to France
at the behest of Salvador Allende and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Unwell, he returned to Chile in 1972, dying two weeks
after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup of 1973.[xlvii]
He seems to have written The Dictators for every
brutal dictator he had known in his political career. “An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
/ a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating / petal that brings nausea. /
Between the coconut palms the graves are full / of ruined bones, / of
speechless death-rattles. / The delicate dictator is talking / with top hats,
gold braid, and collars… /…hatred has grown scale on scale,/ blow on blow, in
the ghastly water of the swamp,/ with a snout full of ooze and silence.”[xlviii]
Nicanor Parra (1914--) survived Pinochet’s ruthless
dictatorship, becoming a dissenting voice of cultural and academic Chile. He considers himself an “anti-poet” and
writes in a colloquial style. He
excoriated the Chilean dictatorship with a razor wit, as in Warnings: “No
praying allowed, no sneezing. / No spitting, eulogizing, kneeling /
Worshipping, howling, expectorating…/ Running is absolutely forbidden. / No
smoking. No fucking”[xlix]
Parra particularly, among the most well known Latin
American poets, felt the weight of both Soviet and U.S. influences during the Cold
War. He called the era Modern Times.
“These are calamitous times we’re living through / you can’t speak
without committing a contradiction / or keep quiet without complicity with the
Pentagon. / Everyone knows there’s no alternative possible/ all roads lead to Cuba / but the
air is dirty / breathing is a futile act. / The enemy says / the country is to
blame / as if countries were men…”[l]
Modern times in the Cold War era were calamitous and
contradicting times. In these post-Cold
War times something else is at work, though it is no less calamitous and
contradicting for those who feel estranged from politics, while knowing that to
give up on politics is to surrender a part of living. The legacy of the Cold War for the U.S, the
supposed winner of the long conflict, is that the “lone superpower” is in
danger of becoming, like a spoiled only child, a little too full of
itself. The legacy has left the U.S. with a
tendency toward hubris, recklessness and a beguiling lack of manners. It is as if victory culture has become part
of the nation’s DNA, as if arrogance is a birthright, as if the United States
is incapable of committing a wrong. For
one who survived the Vietnam
era, witnessed and felt the outrage of the American people toward their
government of liars and cheats, it is impossible to not repeat the question
Marvin Gaye asked in 1969 when he told his father there was no need to escalate
the war—What’s Going On?