Monumental forces

Why the Fourth of July just hasn't been the same since we lost the war

Out There by Clif Garboden

Forget Beltway bandits: the real money in Washington, DC, must be in cleaning statues. DC has a Victorian substratum that, born of a bodacious sense of permanence, refuses to crumble. And in Victorian America, white males on pedestals were all the rage, so our capital is lousy with cast-iron generals on horseback. An act of Congress, a subscription drive, a commission, an installation, a star-spangled dedication ceremony -- thus was General Sherman or any of a hundred less-famous warmongers immortalized as civic wallpaper. It's difficult to be impressed by their histrionic figures these days; tough to imagine people were ever inspired to patriotism by something that's become such a cliché. Of course, our notion of nation itself has changed. Patriotism can be simplistic when you're undefeated. Vietnam finished that. Last month, I accidentally completed a full-circle, and completely unintended, pilgrimage -- a three-decade-trip from resisting a war to understanding it.

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(A warning without apology: if you're bored or threatened by home-front war stories from the '60s, or just don't want to hear about anything that happened before you were born, read no further. It's not your fault you showed up after the sideshow folded; it's not our fault we were there for the press preview.)

October, 1967: I took my first-ever airplane ride -- from Boston to Washington -- to rant and rage against the already eight-year-old Vietnam War, which would have 475,000 American troops in Southeast Asia by that December.

My immediate destination was a house populated by the loosely defined staff of Liberation News Service (LNS), a grassroots alternative news bureau that fed leftist antiwar and civil-rights feature stories to subscribing underground and college newspapers. The LNS house was swelled with fellow travelers in town for the next day's rally at the Lincoln Memorial and march on the Pentagon. It was a fervent and jovial, if politically eccentric, crowd that shared the floor -- as well as a "home before Christmas" naiveté about the power of mass protest -- that night.

After a short, troubled sleep in a capacious but dank basement, my tousled comrades and I headed for the rally, arriving early enough to grab a prime lawn spot directly in front of the Lincoln Memorial steps. From there, we watched the Mall fill with marchers till they flanked the Reflecting Pool all the way to the Washington Monument. I sat between someone from high school I'd never expected to see again and a guy waving a sign supporting Louis Abolaeia, the perennial Nude Party candidate for president (slogan: "I have nothing to hide"). Off to one side, the American Communist Party color guard positioned its banner to make it look as if the rest of us were there with them. Between us and Daniel Chester French's jumbo Lincoln came the usual parade of folk singers and rabble-rousers telling us what we already knew about the military-industrial complex's ill-inspired Asian caprice.

Unabashed protest balladeer Phil Ochs sang his mock anthem "The War Is Over," a brilliant, high-concept, head-messing lyric that, on its surface, seemed to advocate escaping the frustrations of street politics by making a separate peace -- simply believing the war was done. ("Pardon me if I refrain./ I declare the war is over.") Within the movement, it was a controversial song. Was Ochs advocating copping out? Dropping out? Apologists claimed he was dragging us through the fantasy of peace so we'd covet its reality. My theory is that Ochs, always ahead of the curve, had simply reached a level of mad resignation the rest of us wouldn't experience until the King and RFK assassinations in the spring of '68, when the song suddenly began to make a lot more sense. Cynics wept -- what can I say?

Thus inspired, the marchers (60,000, 100,000, 400,000 strong -- estimates varied) advanced across the Potomac and on to the Pentagon, where, that day at least, the warmakers they'd hoped to confront weren't answering the door.

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Enough about the old days.

June 1998: the annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) convention has me flying to Washington again to hook up with another jovial, if politically eccentric, group. This time we crash at the Capital Hilton, two blocks from the White House. Between self-criticism sessions, I set out in a nagging DC drizzle to sightsee; miles later I end up at the Vietnam Memorial. I'd seen pictures, and I'd debated the monument's potential for glorifying what amounts to a 16-year war crime, but nothing prepared me for the booming shudder I feel when I catch sight of the eastern tip of architect Maya Ying Lin's sunken Wall. No preposterous generals on horseback here. This is indeed the war come home, made real for a change. Tons of granite quarried in India, cut to fit in Barre, Vermont, and blasted in Memphis with 58,209 names of the dead or missing. With 2.5 million visitors a year, the Vietnam Memorial has impressive stats and emotional clout. Even in the rain, the parade of mostly overweight baseball-capped visitors is as relentless as the waves of regret lapping at the Wall.

Where did my psyche leave its bearings? I hike the ironically short distance back to the Lincoln Memorial looking for the spot where I sat 31 years ago. Except the grass is gone; there's pavement now. Disoriented, I actually ask the National Park Service ranger if there was lawn there 30 years ago, and (this is obviously the first time anyone's brought it up) she assures me that there was. But there was no Vietnam Memorial in 1967, and I can't shake the thought that if the people we were shouting at had heard us, the Wall would be a whole lot shorter.

But this isn't about being smug. It's about gratitude for all those fringe folk and true patriots who railed against the empire -- and newfound sympathy for that empire's tragic victims. Enjoy the Fourth of July. Just remember: flag waving, like fireworks, can be fun until somebody gets hurt.

Clif Garboden is senior managing editor of the Boston Phoenix. He can be reached at cgarboden[a]phx.com.

(October 1967, DC demonstration photo: copyright © Clif Garboden.)