Memoir of a Half-Life: 1968, Descent into Fear

This is a continuation of my slowly-unfolding Memoir of a Half-Life. A description of the work is here. Earlier segments: introduction and 1968 (Part 1).
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In the 36 years that preceded 1968, the modern United States was born. Nearly every feature of society that we think of as characteristically "American" happened in this span. Our freedoms, our collective national wealth, our diversity, our international influence, our innovation--all of it followed the crash in '29 and the election of FDR. (To be sure, roots extended back before him; but it was the Democratic consolidation in this period that made it law.) And it wasn't just the individual accomplishments themselves--it was the shocking accomplishment of them as a collective. Individually, they were monumental; together they were revolutionary: defeating the Nazis, labor reform, Soviet foes, the ascendence of t he middle class and accompanying market revolution, civil rights, the space project, the Great Society.

These produced a dramatic psychology of optimism, generosity, ambition, and fearlessness that pervaded the collective consciousness. All of this is relevant, of course, because '68 is when it ended. For my generation, a new national mood was born, along with me, in 1968.

If a novelist were to include the events of 1968 in her story, critics would deride them as preposterous, overwrought. With the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy and the subsequent election of Nixon, the metaphor was too obvious--we exchanged light for darkness, hope for paranoia. But this was the reality, and it was more than a metaphor: in 1964, Barry Goldwater's campaign offered up a marker that Americans cashed in 1968. We killed the man who had brought the races together, we killed the man who had fought corruption and offered a vast vision. And then we elected Richard Nixon, the personification of darkness and fear. His spirit, paranoid, divisive, and corrupt has been the spirit that animated the next 40 years--and, sadly, my lifetime.

I don't think I was alone in thinking the world was doomed. I lived in a suburban enclave of Boise, Idaho, and a pack of us ran around the alleys and open fields of the neighborhood. That this was it, that the world was certainly doomed to a future of nuclear war, was our working assumption. As I started to get old enough to think about driving--at ten, say--I recall discussions with friends about how we'd never actually live that long. We not only felt doomed, but doomed in an immediate way. This was during the Carter years, which were suffused with lament and loss. Children don't have sophisticated critical apparati at that age, but I was well aware (if only generally) that things were bad.

All eras have challenging events, but in the 1970s, so many of ours came from the inside. Nixon was a national embarrassment and made us wonder about our government's moral core. The fading economy brought shame to families like mine, where my father bounced from job to job, business to business. My father had three successive business failures in the 70s. It's bad enough to struggle to make ends meet, but add failure on, and it takes a little of your soul. No doubt my sense of this was greater than others, but with the gas crunch and stagflation, it all seemed to be of a piece.

Then came the Iran hostage crisis, which was external. But Carter's approach, coming amid the difficulties of the decade, seemed to highlight America's impotency. (In retrospect, with the wisdom of the Bush doctrine having been fully tested, it may not have been such a bad policy.) Three-mile island, declining wages, the Olympic boycott--everything just seemed to confirm our decline.

The reaction to 9/11 was instructive. The US--not just the political class or the GOP, but everyone--slid into a defensive crouch. The events of the past six years have been the fruit of the collective spirit of this era--fear. Although I was unaware of them at the time, there were other currents in American life at play: reaction to Roe v. Wade, the rejection of the civil rights movement, the nascent plan to unite fundamentalist Christian doctrine and market-based right-wing politics.

When I pick this up again, I'll get a little more personal and describe how it felt to grow up in this United States, and how all of this personally affected me--not unusually, I think.

Memoir of a Half-Life: 1968 (Part 1)

This is a continuation of my slowly-unfolding Memoir of a Half-Life. A description of the work is here, and the introduction is here.

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Any year examined closely looks, forty years later, pretty interesting. Modernity’s general shape can still be seen after 40 years, but enough has changed that such a moment has developed a fairly exotic patina. But even so, not all years are created equally. Generally speaking, every leap year is more interesting than non-leap years--there are Olympics and presidential elections. 1968 was these, but it was a lot more than that.

It was loaded with amazing events. While some single events stand out so strongly that a mention of the year is sufficient to reference them--1929, 1941--it might be hard to find a year with as many big events as 1968: the assassinations of MLK and RFK; My Lai and the Tet Offensive; Prague Spring and French May; the Democratic riots in Chicago and the election of Richard Nixon. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. Valerie Solanis shot Warhol. France detonated a nuclear bomb and becomes the fifth nuclear power. There were coups and riots all over the world (including one in Baghdad by a young Saddam Hussein), and black American athletes famously gave the Black Power salute at the Olympics. But even those events don't capture what was really important about 1968.

The history of the 20th Century swung on two hinges. The first, in 1932, was a response to the stock market collapse of 1929. It precipitated the great compression, the rise of the middle class, and the emergence of the US as a superpower. Politically, it represented a triumph for the masses over the economic and cultural elites, reorienting cultural values toward collectivism and away from individualism. Equally as radically, the period also saw the end to legal racial preferences—in place, despite a civil war, for over 150 years. The second hinge came a symmetrical 36 years later, dividing the century neatly into thirds. While the first evidence of the change came in the mid-60s, the key year was 1968, the year I was born.

There are a lot of ways to read history. As a political story, the 20th Century can be seen as a struggle of the wealthy and powerful against the poor and disenfranchised. And, while that narrative has had a powerful effect on my own politics, a more personal story—and arguably the more profoundly transformative—describes the changes in our culture. Unlike the political history, which looks like a game of tug-of-war (the wealthy winning in the first part of the century, the poor and non-white fighting back in the middle, the wealthy and white back in command by the end), the cultural history has continued to evolve.

Prior to 1932 the US, despite its lofty democratic foundation, offered the mass of its citizens not a whole hell of a lot more than, say, India. More or less, people were on their own. There was a tiny overclass, a vast underclass, and a group who were actively oppressed—in some cases enslaved. They scratched out an existence on the farms or in the factories, their kids took care of them when they were too old to work, and if they were lucky, they died of “natural causes” because they didn’t have more than a country doctor to attend to minor ailments. The radical transformation of the 20th Century came with the recognition that this Darwinian existence could be ameliorated by pooling resources.

The New Deal created for the first time in history a culture of generosity. Our well-being was interconnected. The cultural benefits this produced were profound: we built a war machine that depended on an inconceivable amount of cooperation and generosity; we built the atomic bomb; we went to the moon. So much of what came to be thought of as quintessentially “American” came from this era. The admixture of democratic values, the US’s uniquely classless orientation (whatever the reality), the explosive growth of the middle class, the moral achievements of the civil rights movement, and the monumental national accomplishments of mid-century all produced a sense of a pragmatic, generous, unified country.

And then came 1968.

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Next: 1968 (Part two): descent into fear.

Memoir of a Half-Life

According to actuarial tables, the average American can expect to live to 78 (45th in the world, in front of Denmark and Ireland, but behind Bosnia and Puerto Rico). If you figure in that I'm healthier, skinnier, and eat better than the average American, I can probably expect to live a little longer, barring violent interactions with busses, black widows, icy sidewalks, and hantavirus. (Here's a couple of calculators to see where you fit in: one, two.) For the sake of argument, let's say I have an expiration date of about 80 years. The upshot is that since passing my 40th birthday in January, I embark on the second half of life.

I'm going to try something experimental here in my dark little corner of the internet. I've begun a brief little memoir looking back on those forty years. About once a week, I'll post a chapter, and link it at the side so it's easy to follow through if you miss a bit coming in late. I don't really know where it's headed, but since I'm only going to pass the halfway mark once I thought I'd take advantage and make a few notes. What the hell--that's what blogs are for, right?

The Introduction begins here.

Memoir of a Half-Life: Introduction

When we are small children, there is very little we actually know. Most of the world exists in the realm of the possible. We know that people make sense of the curled scratches written on pages. They know how to make sense of clock faces, the pattern in which to tangle their shoelaces. They know how to drive and how to procure cars. Sometimes we are baffled that they seem to know more about unimportant things (accounting) yet have forgotten critical stuff, like which dinosaurs are the most bad-ass. For children that which can be imagined is very little different from that which is known. Once they get the hang of it, children realize that they may learn to fly, grow up to be a dog, visit Mars, or (they worry) master accounting. In the childish mind, it’s all the same.

(When I was about five, I was going to grow up to be Franco Harris. Literally—not so much a pro football player, but Pittsburgh Steeler running back Franco Harris.)

Our childhood sense of anticipation shifts a bit as we ripen into adolescence—some of the fantasies have run aground on the hard rocks of childhood cruelty and loss. (Who hasn’t experienced the brutal homicide of Santa by the time they’re ten?) But into this burgeoning sense of tangible reality, we begin to associate some of our more likely dreams with our identity. The punky music kids see themselves as outre; the smart kids begin to imagine lives of success and praise.

One of my friends, who taught both middle school and grade school in hardscrabble, working-class neighborhoods, said he preferred the younger kids because none of them yet knew they were doomed. He knew this because he once asked his older kids to raise their hands if they planned to go to college. A hand or two. But the younger kids, equally as disadvantaged, who would in a few years time see their sunny horizons darken, all raised their hands.

College becomes a costume shop of identity. We get a degree at the end; while it should be considered provisional at best, a souvenir photo of us dressed up in the garb of our imagined future identity, instead we relate to it all the more firmly. We exit in a dreamworld not a lot more sophisticated than the one we created at 15. I don’t doubt there are variations, but American culture nurtures from a young age the identification with work as self. Other measures of selfhood—happiness, family connections—are emphasized less in America than most cultures. We are what we do and, by extention, accomplish.

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When I was about twenty years old, I had a distinct sense of being exactly at the fissure between childhood and adulthood. A part of me had reached its full potential and was about to change irrevocably, but in that moment, I could regard it, like a perfect bloom of childhood, as if fixed. For that fleeting moment in life, I could imagine disappearing into either world—the carelessness of youth, or the responsibility of maturity. I spent a week or two enjoying the sensation, which carried with it the luxury of fantasy as I tried on adulthood without worrying about the drudgery that actually accompanies it.

What I was not able to witness were the imminent changes to the dreamworld with which I had been busy populating my future selves. Dreams flourish in the absence of information and youth is uniquely unaware of adulthood’s realities. Our world is tabula rasa, but the moment we take the first step toward one of our future selves, countless others grow dimmer. We don’t perceive the gravity of our trajectory, experiencing only the sense of open horizons; we charge off, fearlessly, failing to recognize the deaths of all the potential selves we abandon in our enthusiasm to get started.

Another twenty years has passed, and another interstitial moment arrives. The dreamworld of youth is disappearing irrevocably. I have been wearing several layers of psychic clothing that appear increasingly insubstantial. The act of dreaming that has governed much of my mind for 40 years is fading. Dreams are dying—some because I can’t accomplish them (Franco Harris), some because I already have.

It turns out the act of dreaming has been a mistaken endeavor from the outset.

The childlike understanding of possibilities at some point gave way to the identification with the dream. One goes from a verb to a noun. I have cultivated dreams not only because they form a structure for my life to follow, but because they have helped create my self-image. But of course, self-images require at least the appearance of external support. The older we get, the harder it is to find any meaning in the labels we give ourselves—anyway, I do. I can call myself a writer or not, a Buddhist or not, a researcher or not. After a time, it has become clear that all of these dreamy self-images depend on some external umpire to make the call. At 40, I find it extremely difficult to continue to believe in this umpire. This is why the accomplishment of dreams always results in a sense of dissipation—I was not involved in the dream for the satisfaction of accomplishment, but the result I thougth it would afford. I saw my name published and … nothing. I wrote a novel. So what? So, I have spent a life coveting, but the wrong thing.

At forty, I’m having a simultaneously destabilizing epiphany: on the one hand, I’m deflated to realize that the benchmarks against which I have secretly been measuring myself don’t exist; on the other hand, I’m left with a sensation of being rudderless. My dreams were foolish, but at least they gave me direction.

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This 40-year-old vertigo can't be unusual. One of its causes is the failure to look back at the path and see where I've come from. The experience of forty years doesn't feel like much, but sifting through the actual years, and it stretches pretty far back into prehistory. There are wonderful treasures there to be revealed, if only to myself. Look, there's Fryer's Quality Pies, that dive on 23rd filled with blue smoke, punky kids staying warm on a single 50-cent coffee, and neighborhood elders, some of whom were born in the previous century. There's a funny old woman standing in the living room talking about "peaching" President Nixon. There's a couple of tow-headed kids riding in the back of a pick-up truck driven by a man drinking beer.

What does it say to have been born in America in 1968? What do my experiences say about the larger world? How has the larger world created the person who now sits typing these words? How does one get born into a hunting, fishing, working-class Christian family in suburban Boise, Idaho and end up a liberal, Buddhist, pacifist in urban Portland? Memoirs, to the extent they have value, bring the personal and the epochal together. Over the next weeks and months, I'll try to do just that--bringing answers to these questions together with the larger context of time, place, and events that we all share.

Next post: 1968, Part 1