Response to Phil Hall: A Little of My Political Odyssey

Not that my political odyssey is necessarily important. But Phil solicited my participation in this blog, which I am grateful for, and I was moved by his last post to respond. I didn't know that Phil was from South Africa, and I didn't know that Phil was 50. That's part of what's great about the internet (the "blogosphere"): like the dog in the New Yorker cartoon says, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." I had been thinking I was dealing with some English Bright Young Things, frankly, not that there's anything wrong with that. Me, I'm 51, American, resident of Puerto Rico for the past 13 years with the Puerto Rican in-laws to prove it. As every reader of this blog undoubtedly thinks they know, we Americans are given to unintentionally embarrassing bouts of self-revelation. When among the English I always suppress the pop auto-psychoanalysis that passes for bonding among my people.

But now Phil has told us about growing up with leftist parents in apartheid South Africa, by way of explaining himself. (It used to be that white Americans were embarrassed to identify themselves with white South Africans, nowadays I guess it's the reverse.) For Phil, the issue that defined his political identity, according to him, was apartheid. Hard to see how that could not be the case. For me, the issue was the war in Indochina, otherwise known as the Vietnam War. In 1968 I was 10 years old (like Phil). My oldest sister was graduating from high school and off to the University of California at Santa Cruz. We were raised in the American Society of Friends (Quakers), the denomination chosen by my very WASPy father and my apostate Irish Catholic mother (my father has Quaker ancestors). I remember sitting in the meeting listening to the arguments, and the scandal when some young people raised the Viet Cong flag over the old stone meetinghouse in Rochester, New York.

That year, 1968, my father voted for the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. My mother, outraged by LBJ's escalation of the war, voted for Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war third party candidate. Nixon won the election by less than one percent of the vote. This was my basic lesson in United States politics. You see, the difference between the USSR and the USA was that in the USSR there was one party, and in the USA, two. One, two: see, two is better! But on the reasoning that if the Democrats won, maybe one less person would be killed, very many of us in the US just try to get behind the Democratic candidate. I turned 18 in 1976 and cast my first vote for president for the winner, Jimmy Carter.

It would be another 16 years before I voted for the winner again. But I have rarely wobbled from my role as a Democratic Party loyalist. In 1988 I had agreed to be a precinct captain for Michael Dukakis. This was in Boulder, Colorado. We had our little meeting of five people in a back bedroom of the caucus house; I would have much preferred participating in the living room discussion of the thirty or so Jesse Jackson supporters. (For more on my history as a voter in the US click here.)

But I get ahead of myself. I was saying that the war in Vietnam was my defining political issue. I was in junior high 1970-1972, the years of "Vietnamization," the Nixon administration's strategy of pulling out US troops and relying instead, not on the South Vietnamese forces, who plainly had no belly for the fight, but rather on aerial bombardment of North Vietnam (and, illegally, Cambodia and Laos). The doctrine of massive firepower has its roots in the American Civil War, when the North used its superior industrial base to beat the South into submission, and matured during World Wars I and II, when the US was able to dominate the world through sheer productive power. In the case of an anti-insurgency struggle in Southeast Asia, these tactics were insane: more tonnage of bombs was dropped on Indochina than all the tonnage, of both sides combined, in all of the theatres of WWII.

And I knew it. I was walking around the halls of Brighton High, a public (in the American sense) school of over 5,000 mostly fairly affluent students, and hardly anyone, it seemed, was aware of what was (still) happening in Vietnam. Not my mother. She was all too vocally aware. Bombs dropping on women and children and village people. The US to blame. This experience seared me. My memory is of living in a community where most people were simply unaware of what was being done in their name.

And so it was that with the end of the 70s came the Reagan-era wars in Central America. I was a member of CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. I followed Mark Danner's heroic reporting from El Salvador and Guatemala. Finally in 1984-1985, during a year-long trip overland from Colorado to Bolivia, I spent a month as a "sandalista" in Nicaragua. We helped to bring in the cotton harvest from Alphonse Robello's plantations on the Nicoya Peninsula, which juts into the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast. Robello had been an original member of the Sandinista Front, but had fallen out with the Ortegas and fled to Miami. The migrant workers from El Salvador couldn't take the ferry across the Gulf because of the wars. This was during the period that an American helicopter had been shot down on the Honduran border and Reagan was talking about a possible invasion. Some young boys took me out to the cliffs near the farm one night to see the lights of the battleship New Jersey which would come in close at night to freak out the Nicaraguans. We could also see the lights from the Isla del Tigre, a "contra" stronghold in the Gulf that was a staging area for attacks along the border.

Later other, sometimes more prosaic, issues came to the fore, gay rights (where the US has unaccountably done very well compared to most, leading to my participation in many marches, rtallies etc: an interesting topic for another time), the amazing anti-nuclear movement, and today health care. Another old story: in the election of 1980 George H. W. Bush was running for the Republican nomination against Ronald Reagan. Running right, he suggested that a nuclear war was winnable. When he flew into the conservative bastion of Sarasota, Florida, we were ready with quite a spunky demonstration. My sign said "Ban the Bomb." My friend Adam's said "George Orwell Junior Anti-Sex League for Bush." A man at the rally took in my sign and said "Get a job." I laughed and maybe he did too. The next issue of William Buckley's magazine The National Review ran a column on us, quoting both of our signs: bliss! Later we Friends would post bail for Guatemalan Army deserters imprisoned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the US, knowing that they would flee (repatriation meant death in the days of Rios Montt).

Since then there has been a lot more. I came to the University of Puerto Rico in 1996 for a job, nothing more. (It was the study of the Spanish language that took me on my first trip to Cuba for five weeks in 1998.) But if one is reasonably aware, reasonably active, there are the local issues as well as the international ones. As Phil says in his post, an important part of life is engagement. Because I have written and spoken on the mental lives of non-human animals, I was asked by some supporters of the animal shelter here to be a judge at the "Mutt Show": ranking dogs on prettiest eyes, most coquettish walk, looks most like owner, etc. Fine. Where opportunity for doing good emerges, one takes it. The bottom line, I decided a long time ago (maybe with some guidance from Bertrand Russell), is this: one is active, in speech and deeds, in the effort to make the world a better place, until one dies. That is a necessary component of a well-realized life. I do not believe that that will ever change.