Don't you
understand, what I'm trying to say?
Can't you see the
fear that I'm feeling today?
If the button is
pushed, there's no running away,
There'll be no one
to save with the world in a grave,
take a look around
you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy,
but you tell me
over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't
believe we're on the eve of destruction.
~ Eve of Destruction written by P. F. Sloan, recorded by Barry McGuire.
October 1964; probably 3 or 4 times in a month mom put fried pork chops on the menu. Chops carried more fat back then and so it followed that they carried a hell of a lot more flavor. Mom would put the pan drippings to good use and make a batch of cream gravy. Nothing quite like pork chops and mashed potatoes in a bath of cream gravy. It was the meat and potatoes diet that was starting to undergo scrutiny. The medicos waved a bony finger at America and warned that fatty red meat, cream, butter and all that frying was going to clog the arteries and bring about a national cardiac crisis. We were faced with the fear that our diet was killing us.
As so as we cemented our arteries, we watched the dour TV newsmen report on the upcoming
presidential election. The GOP had nominated the conservative Barry
Goldwater to unseat Lyndon B. Johnson who took office after JFK was
assassinated. It was the dual of initials; LBJ versus AuH2O (the chemical symbols for Gold and Water). Johnson teetered on the Vietnamese fence by positioning himself as a pillar of war restraint who could still be tough on Communism. It might have been a hard sell against anyone but Goldwater. The Arizona Senator's tough posture on the Commies translated to acute "hoof in mouth" disease with some propositions that scared the shit out of the electorate. His notion on dealing with Chinese supply lines in Vietnam was to clear them out with "low yield nuclear weapons." I still recall the GOP campaign slogan touting Goldwater's conservatism, "In your heart you know he's right," being turned by the Democrats to, "In your heart you know he might" (launch a nuke) and "In your guts you know he's nuts." And so as we sat at the dinner table that forkful of
dessert hung suspended as we watched with unease and then gasped at Johnson’s campaign ad; a
little girl, a daisy and a nuclear mushroom cloud.
Oh yeah, we knew all about mushroom clouds. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
within my parents’ recent memories and as a kid I remember news footage of those boiling explosions. My grade school friends and I may have been too young to be concerned but we knew all about mega tonnage and we were in awe along with the rest of the world of the Soviet's gargantuan tests. I was 10
years old when Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro had their atomic pissing contest. It was the Eve of Destruction that Barry
McGuire would sing about two years later.
As kids we carried A-bombs in the backs of our minds. We wondered if the destructive force of a nuke dropped on downtown San Francisco would carry as far south as San Mateo. My friends and I would ride our bikes around the nearby College of San Mateo, often passing by the stairs that led down to the fallout shelter. I seem to recall some sense of relief that we had a shelter so close, although in retrospect had the bomb been dropped when class was in session the shelter would have filled up with college students leaving the rest of us to go through the radioactive baking cycle. We knew all about the Strategic Air Command B-52s that hovered round the clock on the outskirts of Soviet air space to deliver retaliation in the event of of a Soviet launch. We knew that fighter pilots on alert slept in the cockpits of their jets on the tarmacs. When the sixties began we went through the bomb drills not really knowing what we were doing as we got into a tuck position under our desks. We giggled and made faces at each other. By the mid-sixties we probably started to question what the hell good a student desk would do in the midst of a nuclear attack. Finally, by the end of the sixties as we entered high school we darkly joked that the tuck position was invented to be able to conveniently and easily "kiss your ass goodbye." And yet there was this perverse fascination, an attraction to the images of nuclear blasts. The vivid colors and the seeming grace in which the big cloud formed carried a strange and awful beauty. And then of course there was the awesome, hard to imagine power. We were transfixed, but really, who would admit to it?
 |
| Practicing to kiss your ass goodbye? |
When I look back on the cold war I pause for a moment at 9/11; I recall the general fear that gripped our nation in the hours, days and weeks that followed. It makes me wonder how much fear our parents felt when they knew that destruction and death from above were just a few minutes away. A nuclear storm could strike Oklahoma City with more destruction than a tornado and about as little warning; or a bomb could topple San Francisco as suddenly as a 7.0 earthquake. If we kids could sense the danger of nuclear holocaust how much fear dogged our parents? In some cases it was enough for them to build bomb shelters under the house and then be prepared to lock out the desperate folks who used to be friends and neighbors before the sky started to fall.
 |
| The images that left us in awe |
In October 1963, just weeks before the election, my parents
brought me with them to Washington Square in San Francisco to listen to Johnson
preach peace in a stump speech. LBJ concluded his
speech by saying, “
For 11 months I have
tried to help us have peace in the world, and if I can have your help, if I can
have your hand, if I can have your heart, if I can have your prayers, if the
good Lord is willing, I will continue to try to lead this Nation and this world
to peace." Johnson won the election handily but in the end it didn't work
out so well; for LBJ or for America - at least not on the foreign policy front.
America sat at the dinner table that election year and was fed a diet of fear. By Goldwater, the fear of the Red Menace; by Johnson the fear of Goldwater. Not much has really changed has it? Candidates still serve up the fear diet; just in a different flavor. Soft on Communism has become naive about terrorism. I feel fortunate that as a boy I had a connection to a different time, as my dad would relate to me the calm that FDR tried to deliver to an anxious nation; "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Fear is now a permanent ingredient in the campaign recipe. We'll never go back will we? Sad.
Stump speeches. I look back at LBJ in Washington Square as irretrievable nostalgia. Presidential
candidates don’t make stump speeches anymore.
They rarely come to California anymore but when they do it's with a purpose irrelevant to the election itself; Republicans know
they can’t win here and Democrats know it’s in the bag. So why would you come to the most populous
state in the Union? To meet the people you hope to lead? To deliver to the electorate your vision of
hope for the nation? Hell no. It’s to appear at a gazillion dollar a plate
fundraising dinner. They go out of their
way to appear in front of friendly crowds because protest signs make bad photo ops and heckling a poor sound bite. Politicians have lied through their teeth for
ages. In the old days you got to see
them do it in person - for free, in a big city park. Now you have to whip out the AMEX, or
mortgage the homestead so you can listen to a fellow mortgage his morals at a private dinner in a rich guy's mansion.
And ironically, some fifty years after we were being told that our diet was about as healthy as a glass of hemlock, the stigma has been removed from red meat, starches and heavy cream. Meat and potatoes have been repackaged as the healthy, salutary paleo-diet. I suppose that if the diet experts ever tire of analyzing what we eat they can turn to politics. They seem to be pretty good at flip-flopping and scaring the shit out of the public.
"Wife, we need to get off those damned grains and legumes. They're killing us. Whip me up a chicken fried steak with a an order of cream gravy and do it on the double quick"
