"We protested last week. Couple hundred of us, out at the intersection over there."
Within 90 minutes of my parents' arrival on a weekend visit, the dinner conversation has turned to war. "Couple hundred isn't much of a protest," my father says with his head cocked and the faintest trace of a smirk.
I ignore it and carry on. "The last few nights I've stayed up real late with friends. We talk about what countries we could move to. You know, when things get worse."
My father shakes his head, now clearly smirking. "Don't get so worked up about it."
"Well, you oughta know how it feels," my finger is pointed at his belly. "You lived through it at my age." This somehow comes out as an accusation.
A hesitating busboy approaches, while my dad leans forward with a short laugh and a broad smile and says, "But that was Vietnam."
"This is worse than Vietnam!" I belt out a little too loud.
"Worse than Vee-et-NAM!?" My dad raises his hands, his eyes wide and looking around the restaurant for sympathetic witness to his incredulity. The busboy skitters out of sight. "Gregory, you gotta be kiddin' me. 55,000 American soldiers were killed, we watched it on TV every day. It went on for more than a decade - "
He begins to recount epic stories about the moral fervor of a roiling country and I begin to falter. He's a history buff, and Vietnam is his favorite subject. My English degree won't help me argue the paramount importance of this terrible moment. I can only think helplessly of Joyce: History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Through all of this, my mother remains silent with a thin, tight smile. I used to think, in bewilderment, that during these arguments she would never say anything because she thought she had nothing smart to say. At this moment it occurs to me that maybe she just thinks the arguments are stupid. Suddenly I think that my mother is right.
But the bait is there, and I bite. "Our leaders are using forged documents to accuse other nations of acquiring nuclear weapons. Our actions are alienating the world. We are feeding flames that could ignite a totalitarian backlash to rival those of the first half of the 20th century."
"Which newspapers told you that? French ones?" He laughs, my mother and I don't.
Sharp, deep breath. I wonder, with cold and deep unease, what my father was like at age 21.
"Did you learn nothing from that time?" I start calm but lose it fast. "Did you forget it all, or were you too stoned to realize what was happening in the first place?" Whoa.
It's not the first time I've found myself hippie bashing like Limbaugh. Earlier this semester, I wrote about the massive, broad-based protests that occurred worldwide on Feb. 15, comparing them to Vietnam-era protests that I dismissed as "violent, faddish and futile." My father was quick to call and point out that this time my tendency toward sweeping generalization went a little too far.
"There was some violence, and certainly many people were there out of self-interest, but that doesn't fairly describe the movement." I pointed out that the early radicalism of the anti-war movement spurred a backlash that landed Nixon in government, prolonged the war and can still be felt in Washington today. He answered that the essential accomplishment of the movement - instilling a spirit of dissent into the mainstream - was an unprecedented leap forward in American history.
I don't ask my next question - "Where is that mainstream now?" - because I know the answer: it's reaping tax cuts, reading the Wall Street Journal, buying its children SUVs and sending them to overpriced universities. And supporting our troops.
Eight years ago I spent my afternoons lying on the bed, reading about Haight Ashbury, Abbie Hoffman and the '68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago while the Woodstock boxed set CDs rarely left my stereo. During Hendrix's tormented "Star Spangled Banner" my father would walk in and say, "I crawled out of my muddy tent one morning and there he was, playing this." I imagined seeing it, the wrenched guitar sounding like a wall of righteous fire that would scorch the whole country.
The "utopian exhilaration" of 1968. Students took to the streets across the world, spread their ideas. Changed the whole world. The flames died down after '68, crises were averted and things got back on course. In the 70s and 80s America's politicians were corrupt but our country herself was noble once more, and we only had to carefully, neatly close down the Cold War. Then, in 1989, history ended. And in the 90s we were all just rich and bored. Wars were fought in obscure countries during four-minute news clips somewhere in between dinner and Seinfeld.
Now it turns out the problems weren't solved; they just submerged to come back without bothering with pretext. Liberal society's reaction is more dystopian trepidation than utopian exhilaration. I've long since been disillusioned with Boomer mythology (Forrest Gump went from Most to Least Favorite movie with astonishing speed), but now there's this anger... It's all embarrassingly Oedipal.
Abbie Hoffman once said, "Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit." I realize that history might be over for my father, while for me it all just got started a year and a half ago. What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Dad continues, more serious now: "Look, I don't like how Bush has handled this either. But in the end, we'll get this guy, we'll get the oil and the region will get a chance to begin again. I don't think that's such a bad thing."
I pause, because though his flippant assessment of war makes me flinch, I realize our logic is similar. I suddenly explain my lack of faith in the protests, how "No Blood For Oil" misses the point that we're about to run out of oil. How profit is just a positive side effect for the men who believe they are fighting to extend the time left for the American way of life. A wasteful, imbalancing way of life that's only sustainable at a price to the entire world. How, from the short term perspective of American interests, this war really was almost necessary.
"You're also forgetting," he adds, "we weren't up against a war in the 60s. It was civil rights, it was women's lib. The entire American way of life was questioned, if not attacked."
"Exactly! So we need to mobilize around the war but move on to vigorously challenge the structures of energy consumption and empire..."
He cocks his eyebrow. "Oh? And how you gonna do that?"
"Start small. Get at the root. I can get one of those hybrid cars, whatever you call them. What do you say? "
He thinks a moment and shrugs: "If you got the money, go right ahead."
Sadly, this shuts me up.
Greg Bloom, Trinity '03, gives many thanks to his parents, especially his father, who really doesn't deserve to be a straw man all the time. Hey, can he get 20 bucks? To the peaceful denizens of 837 Clarendon, thanks for putting up with me on every third Sunday: Blaiser, Bugs Bunny, Glam Justin, Little Warren Beatty, Gay Boy, Princess of Brooklyn, MC Escher and my Earth Momma. And Editorial Page Editor Kenneth Reinker for being an all-around sweet dude.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.