(until of them shall be asked one
thing, they romp or doze)
have got it made;
no prob. was ever set them, their
poor ol’ jerks
of parents loved them, with deep-freeze, & snacks
would keep a Hindu family-group
alive.
Well, so they’re liars &
gluttons & cowards: so what?
. . . It’s the Land of Plenty,
maybe about to sigh.
Why shouldn’t they terrify
with hegemony Dad (stupido Dad)
and teach?
(The tanks of the elders roll, in
exercise, on the German plain.)
Even if their sense is to (swill
&) die
why don’t they join us, pal, as
Texas did
(the oil-mailed arrogant butt),
and learn how to speak
modestly, & with exactness,
and
. . . like a sense of the
country, man? Come off it. Powers,
the fêted traitor, became
so in hours,
and the President, ignorant, didn’t
even lie.
When the U-2 pilot, Francis Gary
Powers, was shot down on a spy mission over the Soviet Union, he was supposed
to have taken a suicide pill that was issued by the CIA to U-2 pilots, thus
avoiding a public international incident. Instead, he bailed out of the plane
and was captured, becoming a “fêted traitor” and triggering another infamous
Cold War crisis. What was going on back home? Plenty for the kids to eat, three
cars, no problems. Spoiled rotten, as the saying goes. This poem is all about
the disjunction between the seemingly carefree life of food, cars, the
consumerist American Dream on one hand, and the terrifying reality of America
at war (again) with another world power, with only the existence of atomic
weaponry and their threat of global annihilation keeping the US and the USSR
from really going at it. But they were ready: The tanks kept exercising, the
planes kept flying in a cat-and-mouse probing, that often broke out into full-bore
aerial combat that the public never heard about—until Powers, unwilling to kill
himself, brought it all into light of day. For any sensibility aware of irony
and absurdity, it was a freaky situation. Welcome to American life in the ‘50s
and early ‘60s. Sock hops, the Beach Boys, fast cars, candy, and movies at
home, and abroad, Migs and Phantoms firing missiles at each other, Cuba and
Berlin, Sputnik and Mercury as Cold War symbols of industrial advantage, Bikini
Atoll and the Nevada desert aglow with nuclear testing. The only things that
brought it home were little kids going through air raid drills at school and
the black and yellow Fallout Shelter signs nailed up everywhere. Vietnam
changed everything: Now it was war, something you could support or protest. No
more denying the facts.
It’s tempting to read this whole
situation, as I think B. intends, in a kind of vertical integration: The
reality of war and conflict is masked by the appearance of prosperity and
happiness, deadly aerial combat is replaced on the front page by malt shops and
Disneyland. The American Dream is a fraud, beneath its happy surface there is
conflict, and more to the point, the conflict is necessary for the fraudulent
image-making. The cultural happiness only matters, is only even tolerated, if
there is an underlying agenda for it. If it has propaganda value. Dippy dozing
teenagers are permitted because they serve a purpose in camouflaging the
strategic war machine. But I tend to think that it’s even more complicated than
that. American is big enough and widespread enough that both elements are
valid. If lazy teenagers are spoiled enough to afford a car, that’s a reality. Hundreds
of thousands of workers in Detroit made that car, and that was the reality of
their lives and their livelihoods. A U-2 shot down over Russia is also real—piloted
by a man who was one of those lazy teenagers himself just a year or two ago.
The Cold War served a rhetorical purpose for the power on both sides, and in
fact consumerist prosperity was sometimes upheld as a Cold War weapon in
itself. But no one died from that: It was all about image and the rhetorical
consolidation of control. But way over there, or else under the mask, however
one sees it, there was war, and what a dreadful, sick thing that is. In the
end, if war has to happen, then it should never be hidden.
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