The point is this: compared to 1968-73, today is a total cakewalk. This is not to minimize the very serious problems we face, politically and otherwise. In fact, some of the moral breakdown that seemed so traumatizing back then has been normalized by our society, such that we don’t feel the pain of fracture as Americans did back then. Still, you want to talk about an American hell? It was then. Watching The Vietnam War is like seeing the history of some other country, not our own. Yet it happened within my own lifetime.
Mark Bauerlein, writing about Camille Paglia:
She announced it a few months back in an interview with the New York Observer. The very first question asked her about comparisons between President Trump and Adolf Hitler, to which she replied: “‘Presentism’ is a major affliction—an over-absorption in the present or near past, which produces a distortion of perspective and a sky-is-falling Chicken Little hysteria.”
This is a point that deserves repeated amplification. It explains, for instance, much of the indignation we see and hear on college campuses, wherein twenty-year-olds decry twenty-first-century American racism and sexism. The first response to their charges should not be to debate present conditions. It should be to ask them about actual conditions of the past—Jim Crow, the franchise for women and blacks, poverty rates and public health in former times . . . The answers will demonstrate that the only way to believe that America 2017 is a particularly vicious time for certain identities is to know nothing about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And we know, of course, how little history young Americans actually possess.
Paglia believes there is a causal connection between young Americans’ ignorance of history and their dim view of present conditions. At a conference in Oxford, Paglia stated again, in response to a student who criticized her and others for telling youths not to be so sensitive and snowflaky, “There is much too much focus on the present.”
Nothing in my recent experience has brought this home to me like watching The Vietnam War, the epic documentary film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, which is airing this week on PBS. (I was able to watch the entire thing in advance.) The years 1968 to 1973 were surely among the five worst in American history, second only to the Civil War, and perhaps — perhaps — the worst of the Great Depression. I was a small child then, blissfully unaware of what was happening around me in my country. Watching this film, I wonder what on earth my parents must have been thinking, day in and day out, as the country tore itself apart.
Most of us of a certain age have at least a general idea of what happened back then. The Vietnam War raged on, the antiwar movement spread, Woodstock, MLK and RFK murdered, radicalization, domestic bombings as routine, Richard Nixon and all his pomps and works, etc. But until watching this film, for some reason, I had not quite realized the depth and intensity of the coming-apart. I thought I had, but no.
I’m going to write more broadly about the film in a separate post, but I want to focus on this one aspect of it to underscore Paglia’s point. For me, giving myself over to The Vietnam War was to be sucked into a whirlpool, and to be forced to answer, over and over, “What would I have done back then?” In that context, the absurdity of people today acting like the Trump era and its polarization is some kind of short-fingered Götterdammerung is made vividly manifest. “Well, Mama, this is hell indeed. Donald Trump’s America is the Ninth Circle,” recently shriekedNew York Times columnist Charles Blow, who was born in 1970.
For my readers who, like me, didn’t live through that era, do this quick thought experiment, inspired by the film.
Imagine that the US was involved in a major overseas war in which over 11,000 American soldiers died in one year alone (1967). For a point of comparison, fewer than 7,000 US troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 14 years of combat there.
Imagine that 17,000 US soldiers would die in 1968, and 12,000 in 1969 fighting that war
Imagine that you might be drafted to go fight there.
Imagine what it would be like if you were convinced the war was profoundly immoral, and you had to choose between deserting the country and bearing arms in that war.
Imagine that many college campuses had become hotbeds not of snowflakey sit-ins, but of serious violence.
Imagine that domestic bombings by left-wing radicals had become a routine part of American life (e.g., five per day in an 18-month period in the early 1970s).
Imagine that two of the nation’s most prominent political leaders (MLK and RFK) Bobby were gunned down three months apart.
Imagine that your government and military were lying to Congress and to the American people about the war, and had been for years (as was revealed with the 1972 publication of the Pentagon Papers).
Imagine that major American cities were burning in race riots.
Imagine that cops in a major American city staged what was later called “a police riot” outside a political party’s national convention, and beat the hell out of protesters.
What’s harder to imagine is the historical context in which these shocking events were taking place. The distance between 1958 and 1968 is only ten years, but it surely felt like a lifetime. The country in 1958 was relatively stable, settled, and buttoned-up. A decade later, it was ripping itself apart, and would continue to do so for years to come.