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mondo culture-o
Election Eve Special by Gillian G. Gaar  Banksy
2001 was a devastating year for our country, because of one key event, one which plunged us into a nightmare cycle of
despair and doubt, coupled with a chilling uncertainty about if we could ever find our way to the light again, or if
we were doomed to suffer more unspeakable tragedy in the future.
I'm sure the date is seared in your mind just like is mine: January 20, 2001. The day George W. Bush was
inaugurated as president.
Yes, I'm sure others might point to the terrorist attacks of September 11 instead. But in my mind, the two events are intertwined, two body blows occurring eight months apart, from which we have yet to fully recover. Two events that made us wonder about the fate of our nation, a subject that's certainly been on my mind of late, given the upcoming presidential election.
September 11 has become the kind of event people reinterpret to further their own agenda. Backlash author Susan Faludi was confronted with this when a reporter called her that morning for a comment on the tragedy. Terrorism not being her specialty, Faludi was puzzled as to why she was called until the reporter's "gleeful" comment, "Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!" I must say, the state of feminism was not wha t I was thinking about that morning, but others were, as she chronicles in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. It's an extension of the kind of thing Rev. Jerry Falwell was ranting about when he blamed 9/11 on pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, and lesbians (hey, doesn't that describe much of our readership?). And more was to follow. I thankfully missed the headline hailing Don Rumsfeld as "America's New Pin-up," nor did I realize our wanting "to teach little boys to be more like girls" resulted in our becoming unforgiveably soft (I thought it was the American diet) and thus more prone to terrorist attacks. But I'm never surprised at our capacity to retreat into fear as a preferable black-and-white solution in an ever-graying world.
It also explains the prevalence of conspiracy theories; isn't it nicer to think there's a reason lurking behind the dastardly events that befall us instead of their simply being the random occurrences of a chaotic world? So we move to the updated edition of The Rough Guide To Conspiracy Theories by James McConnachie and Robin Tudge, which helpfully compiles a selection of them in one handy volume. You'll find all the biggies here: 9/11 of course, along with JFK, Princess Diana, Jonestown, Holocaust deniers, extra-terrestrials, and many more. It's neither pro- nor anti-conspiracy; more a compendium of info, the kind of book you can spend hours flipping through looking up trivia. So if you feel the need to stoke your underlying paranoia, you'll find lots of ammo here.
RFK's murder naturally appears in the book, and his bid for the presidency is the subject of Thurston Clarke's eloquent The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy And 82 Days That Inspired America. I've often thought that Kennedy's murder was the event that brutally shoved this country onto the wrong path, which made reading this book a heartbreaking experience. Consider his words when addressing a crowd in Indianapolis right after he's told them Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered: "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world." Contrast that with the current rhetoric about pursuing terrorists "to the gates of hell." Or this observation from the campaign trail: "He never mentioned his opponent by name, or questioned their character or patriotism." How times have changed.
Bobby Kennedy remains an inspirational figure because he aspired to touch the better part of human nature, and his constant insistence that helping the less well off in our society wasn't an obligation, it was a noble calling (try and recall the last time you heard any presidential candidate talk about "the poor"; they generally stick to "the middle class" or, at best, "working people").
But of course, we got saddled with Nixon instead, and those fraught late '60s were a period that very much paralleled our own, as revealed in Rick Perlstein's fascinating mega-tome Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America." Take this from a Nixon aide about Nixon supporter John Wayne: "Wayne might sound bad to people in New York, but he sounds great to the schmucks we're trying to reach through John Wayne. The people down there among the Yahoo Belt." Simply substitute "Sarah Palin" for "John Wayne." Or how about House Armed Services Committee chairman Mendel Rivers saying, with regard to Vietnam, that the U.S. should "flatten Hanoi and tell world opinion to go fly a kite." Hmm... if those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, it's clear the lessons we should've gleaned from our history haven't made it through our thick skulls yet.
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