Roger Armbrust was national news editor of Back Stage in New York City. His poetry has appeared in New York Quarterly, Chelsea and Icarus. He has also published a book of poems called "How to Survive" and a chapbook titled "Final Grace." He recently moved back to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. This is the second part of this interview.
What do you think it is that makes people want to compare the present time to 1968? What haven't we learned from that period?
The fact that we’re living exactly 40 years later and experiencing another war quagmire naturally invites comparison.
But there’s a big difference now. In 2008, television and corporate power, primarily through the mergers that have occurred over the last ten years or so, have dulled the electorate’s senses. We settled for unquestioning shallowness in entertainment news—the way most folks become “informed” about their nation and world—rather than in-depth information to help us grow and change.
I’m talking about the hyper-silent majority, middle-class Americans. The automaton, unquestioning Americans who let the Bush administration have its way with the Constitution, stealing an election via the U.S. Supreme Court, and then governing in two illegal ways: (1) secret, distorted legal opinions coming from the Justice Department that give Bush absolute authority as “commander in chief” in a “state of war”—not having to answer to Congress or the Supreme Court, and (2) signing statements—at the end of hundreds of new Congressional laws—in which Bush, with words written by Cheney’s legal henchman David Addington, said that he won’t execute all or a portion of those many laws because he—not a federal court—believes the laws are unconstitutional.
Bush, through using the distorted legal opinions—primarily written by Justice lawyer John Yoo—has manipulated his “war on terror” to constantly call himself “commander in chief” and govern as a military monarch. Bush, Cheney, Addington, and Yoo, unfortunately with the complicity of a cowardly Congress, have lied and manipulated, funding their terrorist war in an effort to get a firm foothold in the Middle East, the way our government tried to get a foothold in Southeast Asia in the ‘60s.
The scare tactic in the ‘60s was government warning of the “domino effect”: If Vietnam falls to the communists, all of Southeast Asia will fall. The scare tactic in the early 21st Century is “terrorism”: If we don’t attack this evil worldwide, we’re all doomed.
This modern scare tactic is perfect for Bush, an alleged Born-Again who sees the terror war as his chance for a worldwide New Crusades, the Christians going after the Moslems. Only the public relations ploy isn’t to convert them to a new religion, but to a new form of government: “Democracy,” which of course is really corporate capitalism. Halliburton’s Cheney knows this. Bush, the oilman, does too. And they know why they wanted to attack Iraq and not North Korea, with its nuclear threat. Because North Korea has no oil; it has to import oil. Iraq possesses the third largest oil reserve in the world. Paul Wolfowitz walked into the White House with George W. Bush in January 2001 and immediately said they needed to find a way to take Iraq’s oil fields back from Saddam. He even wrote a paper on it. And look what they’ve done.
To do it, Bush et al had to lie about the Weapons of Mass Destruction. And I still suspicion they allowed Sept. 11 to happen. I was living in Greenwich Village then, a mile from Ground Zero. When I heard on the news that federal investigators, on Sept. 12, had found the motel where the terrorists had stayed, I immediately asked, “Why did they find it the day after the attack, and not the day before?” I believe we’ll eventually find out how involved the administration was, but it will be a few years after they’re out of power.
Then there’s Congress, who really should have known better about Iraq. Most of them remember the ‘60s and Vietnam, understood how lying and manipulation got us into that quagmire, cost us so many lives and hearts, and shook the foundation of the nation. They knew that Iraq could end up a quagmire.
Cheney surely knew. Did you see the YouTube tape of Cheney being interviewed in April 1994? He was answering questions from someone with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He had, a year earlier, left as Defense Secretary under George Herbert Walker Bush. The questioner asked why, when Americans had defeated Saddam’s elite forces and retaken Kuwait’s oil fields, they didn’t push on into Baghdad. Cheney responded that the president believed it would turn into a “quagmire,” and he described what the specifics of the chaos would be. It’s just what we’ve experienced since invading Iraq.
But Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz—and Congress, too—all know the world runs on oil. And no one gulps it in more than Americans. We consume about 20 million barrels of oil a day, as much as Japan, China, Germany and Russia together. So the Bush gang and Congress think like Higgins, Cliff Robertson’s character, a CIA assistant director, in “Three Days of the Condor,” the 1975 movie starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. Near the film’s end, Robertson tells Redford that the public, when it runs out of a vital necessity, like oil, will demand that the government find a way to grab it.
“Ask 'em when they're running out,” Higgins says of the public. “Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!”
And that’s what Bush’s gang and the Congress have been aiming for. Of course, they can’t say that publicly, because that would make the cause illegal.
So, you see, in 1968 you had a nation becoming split about Vietnam, with massive protests by the young experiencing their first war, and witnessed by their parents who had experienced what Patton called “The Great World War II.” They had not seen America lose a war, and had found that world war morally justifiable by repulsing Hitler. And then came Vietnam and more and more the public began to realize something was terribly wrong. Just as the public, mostly afraid and unquestioning at first, has done with the Iraqi invasion. Fear of the Communist evil in the ‘60s, and fear of the terrorist evil in the 2000s. And, eventually, because we DO still have a Constitution here and a brave minority in government and the press and public who still defend it and question lying authority, the broader public of both those ages have turned against their government’s efforts.
But it was easier in the ‘60s because the media, while growing in strength, was more independent. Television’s covering a war was a new thing. In WWII it was newsreel cameras we saw in movie theatres, and radio broadcasts. In Korea too. And TV debates, which began with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, were more truly like debates then. They weren’t candidates talking in sound bites, like today. Kennedy and Nixon had four debates, each on ONE ISSUE. Not sound bites on several issues, with candidates being able to memorize a few lines, rather than truly understand the major issues of the day.
I must confess, our education and senses were both pretty dull back then. But not like today in our fast-food society, where we become irritated if someone speaks on an issue for any longer than the 30-second commercials we’ve been programmed to tolerate and, with Tivo and remote channel-changers, been programmed to avoid. And in the ‘60s, because the TV networks were independent, they were, CBS especially, bent on challenging government. Walter Cronkite, the respected anchor of CBS’s evening news, turned against the war, and that’s when the Johnson administration began to develop real problems with the public. Then it culminated in ’68 with the Chicago police violence against protestors at the national Democratic convention—networks bringing that into America’s living rooms—which really cost Humphrey the presidency.
Today, of course, the TV networks have been engulfed within behemoth media conglomerates. And the Federal Communications Commission has also looked for ways to censor broadcasting, an extension of government’s conservative leadership.
So, what we really didn’t learn as a nation from the ‘60s, was that government leaders depend on lies and fear to keep us off balance and get their way. And today, more than ever, with huge government, fat corporations, and technology controlled by such a small power clique, its gotten easier than ever to control us. The power clique depends on us to have to respond to so much so fast, and with fear, that we forget about history.
I remember in the ‘70s reading an article, in The Nation, I think, about war protestors that gathered in Sheep Meadow, in New York, to recall their ‘60s efforts. I finished reading that, and wrote a poem called “Prediction,” recalling the nation, Nixon, and the Vietnam War’s end. My last lines were: “…we would walk away from a decade of death, forgetting all we had learned.”
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