Digital Underground - uXu - Underground eXperts United #uxu-532

### ### ### ### ### #### ### ### ### #### ### ### ##### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ##### ### ### ########## ### ### ########## ### ### ### ### Underground eXperts United Presents... ####### ## ## ####### # # ####### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## # ## ## #### ## ## #### # # ####### #### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## # ## ## ## ## ####### ####### # # ####### ####### ####### [ The Coup ] [ By Eric Chaet ] ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ THE COUP by Eric Chaet I WAS ALREADY EIGHTEEN when my first-ever date with a girl was cancelled because of the assassination of the president. I was shy. I did not feel I had much to offer any of the girls whose company and approval I desired. And dating rituals were no more appealing than all the other rituals. I was not interested in finding a mate for marriage. The example of my parents marriage - my mother was lobbying unsuccessfully to redirect it, my father was complacent as long as more money than necessary was coming in, there was no mutual respect or affection - had me hoping for a life of individual independence, with occasional alliances. Hoping to 'score' sexually had not yet become part of my being. It was something I learned by persuasion later from my immediate peers - from whose tough posing I isolated myself as a teenager - and those using slick advertising techniques. Of course, my hormones were eager to be persuaded. I did not have to be forced to look at the nudes in Playboy magazine, which had recently become nearly ubiquitous among boys and young men. Anyway, I had decided that my development required that I begin to interact with young women, on a one-to-one basis - and dating, foolish a ritual as it seemed, was the way it was being done. So, as you might with dread arrange to be interviewed for a job you wanted only for the money, I had arranged a date. I was slight, without athletic prowess, weak. It had not dawned on me yet to develop myself physically, as I was developing myself intellectually. That most of my fellow students - that most of my fellow humans - seemed to lead pointless and fraudulently cheerful lives - presenting themselves as impressively as possible to one another, hiding their deficiencies even from themselves - did not make my own life purposeful or estimable in my eyes. I felt most in rapport with those in my dormitory - farm boys, bookish boys, fundamentalists - who were introverted and clumsy - the diffident ones who had no great confidence that their future was bound to be bright - and I knew that that was not a promising situation. I did not know anything of any apparent use, and had no trade. I could understand, to a degree, what Dostoyevsky, Melville, and Socrates meant. I knew that that did not amount to much, but I also knew that it had been a struggle to understand. The ability to express my own ideas and ideas I imagined were my own, came too easily for me to feel any pride or sense of accomplishment. (I did not realize how difficult it was going to prove to be, accurately and completely and usefully to make any idea at all understood, in the face of people's competitiveness, pre-conceptions, and readiness to take offense, or disbelieve what they were unused to believing.) I could type. I did not know what I was going to do. Following up on a card on a bulletin board inviting participation in a mixer, I had put on my jacket and tie, and walked from my dormitory at the University of Missouri in Columbia, across town, among the darkened shops and streets of the little downtown - to Stephens College, a private girls' college, known for fashion, drama, and dance - and approached, among snacks, balloons, and other awkward youths, a young woman whose appearance did not overwhelm me. I nervously made small talk, sipping ginger ale - and arranged a date for the next Saturday. I do not remember much about her, except that she was a little more massive than I was - most people were - and that she was making an effort to be nothing but pleasant - she, too, felt that she was not what she ought to be. For a change I appreciated it and reciprocated. We made a date for the following week. But then assassins (or, possibly, a lone assassin - the official story) shot President John Kennedy. I HAD BEGUN ATTENDING THE UNIVERSITY in February of 1963. At that time, I was five feet six inches tall. Since then, I had worked a summer feeding hot corrugated cardboard into a giant printer-slotter, nights, in a factory just west of the Chicago city limit, and had grown four inches. I had a flat-top hair cut, and had begun shaving twice a week. (I shaved a day early, before the long walk to Stephens College.) Every night, I spent thirty-five cents, and bought a milk shake, a couple of hours after dinner - but I had only managed to bring my weight up to one hundred twenty-five pounds. I had been reading U.S. News and World Report and the London Economist, for years, but, of course, with the incomplete understanding of youth. (With age, you gain a greater, never a complete, understanding of the context, particularly of your own position among the events in the world about which you are reading.) I had mixed feelings about Kennedy, about whom I knew little. Mostly, I thought that he wanted to do more than the government or the head of it ought to do. I was not aware of his struggle to restrain the military, of his conflict with J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), or of his womanizing. I was malnourished, and my education to date, like my personality, was pathetic, with spots of outstanding development, which I took to be more complete and significant than they were. I had not studied nutrition, but even if I had, I had not imagined myself healthy and energetic - so I did not have any sense of what I needed to eat, or what I needed to avoid. Anyway, I could not afford to do much but eat the food the cafeteria provided, which was heavy on fried meats and starches - better for me than for the overweight students. I did not understand how muscles could be developed, nor how to replace habitual postures and movements that had bad consequences, with others with good consequences. I wanted to become wise, and use ideas to extract humanity from its history of wars, injustices, and insistence on false ideas that caused otherwise unnecessary suffering. After paying tuition and room and board, I had maybe a hundred dollars in the world, no prospects, and no one with assets or connections interested in my well-being. UPON MY ARRIVAL AT THE UNIVERSITY, I was directed to stand in a very long line, in a huge shed, in which men in suits were sitting behind tables, registering students for classes. I remember that when, finally, it was my turn, I was delighted to sign up for Political Science, Anthropology, and Spanish, as well as Rhetoric and Composition, and that I allowed myself to be talked into signing up for physics. I needed five more hours, and would need two science courses to graduate, explained the man who was helping me register, who happened to be a teacher from the Physics Department, which always had trouble getting its quota of students, as no one mistook physics courses for easy ones. Then, I was informed that I had to sign up for ROTC - the Reserve Officers Training Corps - that is, training to be a military officer. I had studied the catalogue. That I could recall, it had said nothing about such a requirement. I was suddenly in a panic. I would not sign up. My 'advisor' - the physics teacher, the stranger at the table - put my paperwork aside. I stumbled out of the room, found a pay telephone, called home collect, and explained my dilemma. My mother made empathetic sounds, and handed the phone to my father. My father, who had smiled and shaken my hand (it was the first time I could remember that either of us had liked the other) when I was getting on the Greyhound bus, in the basement of the terminal in downtown Chicago, to which he had driven my mother, my brother, and me - insisted with surprising, unmistakable authority that I not return home, that I sign the papers, that I do what I had to do in order to go forward. I walked, shedding tears - of which, of course, I was ashamed - and returning to the giant shed, signed the papers. THEREFORE, WHILE I WAS READING wonderful works of literature in my Rhetoric and Composition class; learning about coming of age in Samoa of a few decades ago; repeating Spanish phrases heard thru earphones; listening with little comprehension to lectures regarding magnetism, electricity, atoms, and specific gravity (tho able by memory-power to 'earn' a 'B' on multiple-choice tests); and reading and writing about REALPOLITIK (the guiding principle of which was struggle for power over others, unhindered by any tinge of empathy or compassion) - I was also beginning to learn to load and shoot an M-1 rifle. I approached my Political Science teacher, who wanted us to understand REALPOLITIK, but also made sure we understood that he wished it were otherwise - and talked over my dilemma with him. Young Dr. Li, with owlish glasses, published articles regarding the politics of the Philippines. He always wore a perfectly-pressed gray suit and silk tie. Dr. Li invited me to roast beef, baked potato, salad, corn, and green beans - even dessert! - served by a man in uniform, in the faculty lounge; and, while we ate, told me what conscientious objectors were, and how to obtain the papers, to declare myself one. I wrestled with those papers. It seemed I had 'a right' not to serve in the military. But I had either to belong to an organized religious group recognized as anti-military service - Quakers, Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses - or else declare that it was because of my conception of a 'Supreme Being' that I could not serve. I would not kill another person - that seemed clear to me - why, I did not know. To me the question was, how anyone ELSE could kill another person - not why I would not. (I remembered a comedy routine, on a record album my mother had played for me, about a son and a father, in a cannibal culture, discussing cannibalism. The son did not want to eat people. "People have always eaten people", the father insisted. It never occurred to me to mention this comedy routine - until this moment, 35 years after the struggle regarding conscientious objection, maybe 45 years after hearing the recording. Comprehension does not develop simply, chronologically, or linearly, in one mode.) As for a 'Supreme Being', I had no such belief. I did not think that there was or was not such a thing. My objection to serving in the military, to killing others - was based on no such belief. But those were the options. So - just as I had signed the papers that would require my attending ROTC classes and drills, and began learning what I had come to learn, as well - now I signed a statement saying that I could not serve in the military, could not kill others, because of my belief in a Supreme Being. My conscientious objector status was pending - I was to go before a committee soon - when assassins shot John Kennedy. NOW THAT I KNOW MORE about John Kennedy - and REALPOLITIK - I think more highly of him - and more seriously of it. Still, Kennedy, like others who wielded power more wickedly, allowed himself to do things in my name that I do not allow myself to do. Since it seems that more people believe that there were several assassins, than believe the official story (tho we are periodically told that those who disbelieve the official story are 'conspiracy theorists', meaning irrational, suggestible, unhinged to varying degrees), I am not claiming any brilliant insight. In fact, as usual - damn it - I do not know enough to act or speak or write with any certainty. I believe - I have no way of knowing - that people with considerable power in the federal government commissioned the assassination, succeeded, were not punished, managed to get many others in the federal government to cover their asses, and thrived. And that their cooperation was thereafter necessary for the rise of those who followed them into positions of power, and who exercised it stupidly and deceitfully during and since the Indochina War. Which eliminated anyone - unwilling either to believe what it would be foolish to believe given the evidence known, or to ACT as tho they believed it - from contention for positions of power in the federal govenment of the United States of America. THERE WERE FOUR THREE-STOREY DORMS - with walls of big, laquered bricks - in a square, with a cafeteria in a separate building, in the center. The rooms were built for two students each - but, those days, three of us were assigned to each room - with three desks, a single bed, and a bunk bed. I slept up top. Most of the young men were interested, primarily, in young women, beers, cars, football, and burgers. A few were zealous fundamentalist Protestant Christians. Some of these were aggressively committed to ridiculous 'facts', totally at odds with nature, as anyone not so committed could see. Some were committed to the spirit of the teachings of Jesus, mainly kindness and the courage to stand against custom and the state, and, as a result of their upbringing, found themselves believing that they believed all the impossible 'facts' in 'infallible' scripture too. I was raised a Jew, by a father without religious convictions who went thru the motions of the rituals twice a year, on the high holidays, at the synagogue, and who sent me to five years of afternoon Hebrew lessons. Judaism is a religion and simultaneously an ethnic identity. My father believed he was a religious Jew, when, in fact, he had no religious convictions. But, especially since Hitler and the Nazis had tried to wipe out the Jews when my father was young, my father was dedicated to the preservation of Judaism. Only, he did not want to bother to do anything about it. Instead, he paid money and sent me to study Hebrew. My mother, when I asked her, said she was an agnostic, and explained that that meant she took no position, pro or con, regarding the existence of God. My mothers' ideas, in general (it seems to me, looking back on it), were closer to the truth and to wisdom. She identified with all people, not just family, not just Jews. She turned to the arts as a way to transcend parochialism - tho she tended more and more to get caught up in elements of sensuality and elegance in the arts. But her position in the world was weak. She was not earning money, she had to take care of the children. She could not even put her ideas, consistently, into effect in the household - as my father did not even take them seriously, let alone cooperate with them. My father's ideas led only to the comfort of well fed animals. He had been raised in poverty and insecurity - his father and mother were immigrants from Russian ghettos who never learned English - and considered such comfort success. His position in the world was far stronger than my mother's. He was earning enough to shelter and feed us all, and to pay, even, for extra lessons. He simply paid no attention to any of my mothers' or to my or my siblings' challenges. Except to yell until we shut up. He ate, slept in front of the TV, went to bed, and, in his suit, went off to work. He was sure of himself. People paid him. I had been raised, mostly, among Catholics, in a polyglot neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, of, mostly, immigrants and children of immigrants from eastern Europe, with a considerable admixture of southern and northwestern Europeans. Protestants were rare. The black ghetto started about five miles east of my neighborhood. About a block north, across 63rd Street, began the largest community of Poles in the world, outside Warsaw. AT THE UNIVERSITY of Missouri, I was the most extreme in one respect: I wanted knowledge, and, even more than knowledge, insight. I wanted to learn. I wanted to become wise. I wanted to develop my intellectual capacity - tho I had no term for it. I had been raised to believe - and I believed - that my salvation lay in learning. (Both my father, who sold to wage-earners and small businessmen his knowledge of the laws and of the procedures by which they were put into effect and maintained; and my mother, who aspired to transcend the unsatisfactory status quo - believed in the power of learning.) Under the cafeteria - which had glass walls all around at ground level - was a large basement room, with easy chairs; ping-pong tables; a soda, milk-shake, burger and fries bar; and a big television set. Hundreds crowded around that television, in the hours after assassins shot Kennedy. The networks put on a compelling show, following, with great gravity, the script laid down by officials who, periodically, released statements regarding the condition of the president, the work of police agencies, the vice president, the president's family, the presumed assassin, then HIS assassin, etc. I was one of those who watched and listened, my own life forgotten. After a while, I got up and wandered out, alone, into the night. It was drizzling. I walked thru campus, among the classroom buildings, under streetlamps, then along a route I had never gone before, past the houses on the outskirts of campus. I was walking in the opposite direction from the downtown and from Stephens College. I was walking further south than I had ever been before in my life - out among the first fields and farm buildings. Under the dim light of a naked bulb, in the drizzle, by a shed, I saw what I took to be a very unusual-looking cow - until I got closer.... It was an immense hog - one giant integrated bulge of confident and powerful fat and muscle, king or queen of all he or she surveyed. I had never imagined such a large pig existed. I remembered once having seen Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, giving a speech, in a big room in a downtown Chicago hotel; I was one of dozens of students being honored for some 'achievement' - probably high grades on tests of what was not really knowledge. The Mayor had been built like that hog, and exuded similar strength and confidence in his or her dominant role. My father - also stout and vigorous - decades later, told me that he thought Mayor Daley was a 'good guy' because my father worked his way thru the same law school, during the early Depression, that Daley attended, and, ever since, the Mayor would say hello to my father, and call him by name - which no one else in the world had continued to do, as my father allied himself with no powerful associates, and his prospects narrowed. I saw Mayor Daley a second time, when I was hunting work once, years later, in downtown Chicago. He and I passed one another at an intersection of two canyons of giant office buildings, at the base of the grotesquely ugly Picasso sculpture that the city had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to place at the bottom of the new glass and steel City Hall hive. In the thirty-foot high, expressionless horse face, cut from a thick sheet of rusting iron, which leaned against another thick sheet of rusting iron about twenty feet high leaning in the opposite way, I could see no insight, beauty, or use - nothing, except that, once you were sufficiently celebrated, officials who otherwise despised art would pay plenty to be associated with whatever you produced. Possibly, my situation made me unreceptive. The Mayor, the stoutest person with a hunter's energy and alertness I have ever seen, was walking in the midst of the noon-time crowd, and our eyes - among the pre-occupied - met. His face became the question, What are YOU hunting? - not threatened - clearly I meant no harm - only - I THOUGHT I KNEW EVERYONE'S ANGLES... The hog in the yard south of campus the day of the assassination was not fazed by my presence, across the yard and on the other side of the fence from him or her, in the drizzle. As I WOULD NOT SHIFT THE BALANCE OF POWER in the yard, he or she disregarded me. But that hog ROCKED me. I became aware of myself, observing the hog, and recalling Mayor Daley. I had not been aware - since the shooting - and for a long time before - since I could not remember when - of myself. I was all wet and cold. My clothes were too light for the temperature, and soaking wet. Besides the drizzling rain, there was a cold wind. More than winter was coming. I shivered, and turned back. EARLIER IN THE DAY, in the same big shed in which I had first registered for classes, in my rough brown army ROTC uniform - my conscientious objector status pending - I was learning to operate the bolt of an M-1 rifle - that is, how to get rid of a spent cartridge, and replace it with another round of ammunition - when the officer training us told us to stop and come to attention. He announced that the president had been shot. Then he told us to resume our learning to use the bolt, at his command. The bolt was activated by a spring, when you pulled the trigger. To load the rifle, you pulled the bolt back all the way, against the resistance of the spring, to where a little prominence of metal served as a catch - after which you could insert a new cartridge. I promptly pulled the bolt back not quite far enough, and released it - without any sense of the mechanism or attention to the position of the thumb of my other hand - so that the bolt slammed into it. WHICH IS WHY, now that I was walking back into town, from the sight of the giant hog, and the recollection of myself - to the television room, for non-stop information and dis-information among all the other unusually serious students - my thumb nail was black, and, now, I was aware of the thumb throbbing. I did not stay among the other students long. It was so odd: I knew they never gave politics - except electioneering - a thought. They were engrossed for days - then it was as tho nothing had happened. 'Deciding' - or rather coming to the miserable feeling that there was nothing I could do about the assassination or what was being done in its aftermath - or about much of anything except my own little affairs - I wandered off to drink a milk shake, and to study a Spanish conversation about buying a train ticket in Barcelona - just in case I should ever be in such a situation. A DECADE LATER, I WAS in such a situation - and, tho far more temporarily, in a similar mood - attempting to find my way to the train station just across the California border (to which I had hitchhiked from Los Angeles), at Mexicali, to buy a ticket to Guatemala - there being, apparently, no role for me in the United States. Guatemala seemed suitably remote, all the way across Mexico. My Spanish was so incomplete, rusty, and halting, that I ended up at the bus station buying a ticket (cost: $10.75 worth of pesos) to Guadalajara - half-way to Guatemala (where I had no business, anyway). In Guadalajara, I starved for a week, walked around most of every day - in brutal heat and intense down-pours, while others took siestas - then took another bus, thru the night, sleeping next to a caged rooster, to Monterrey - where I ran thru the fluorescent terminal with a grinning stranger in suit and tie who impulsively guided me to my bus, just then about to depart for Laredo. From Laredo, I hitchhiked to Toronto, in Canada - twisting my ankle on a snow-buried curb when I leapt out of a car in a fierce blizzard in St. Louis - and set type for my first book (poems), each letter upside-down and backwards, between tips of thumb and forefinger, using hundred year old equipment no one else cared to use any more. I HAD BEEN EXCUSED from further participation in ROTC, but was still registered for the military draft. I had graduated with honors and won a fellowship to graduate school which I reluctantly accepted to avoid being drafted to participate in the Indochina War. I had marched and picketed in 'civil rights' demonstrations in Chicago, Missouri, and Mississippi - during the final years of official segregation in the United States - then participated in anti-Indochina War demonstrations. I continued to do without dates, but found intelligent and conscientious women - some very beautiful, some plain on the outside but beautiful within - most a mixture of beauty and wisdom and resentment and delusion - who attracted me and were eager - without benefit of dating or marriage, and taking full advantage of birth control devices between the eras of syphilis and HIV - to cheer and be cheered, encourage and be encouraged, to share whatever we had to share with one another. With some of these women, I got along better and longer than others. Some took pending problems I had not earned out on me, and I brought problems to some that they had not earned, and could not cope with. FROM TORONTO, BROKE, I HITCHED to Chicago, stayed with my parents - who were not sure they were glad to see me (my father said he would help me if I went to law school, or if I wanted to study to be a rabbi - i.e., from my point of view, if I would surrender) - and worked in a factory half a mile from the factory in which I would fed the giant printer-slotter a decade previously. In this second factory, I 'caught' giant strips of plastic sheeting as they came out of an extruder, and slit each strip across its five feet width with a razor blade I held, otherwise, in my teeth, every hundred turns of the shining stainless steel rod onto which the plastic turned, guided by my hands. I traveled two hours each way, transferring from bus to bus, working night shift, thirty days. I would have had to pay three weeks of wages to join the union to work any longer, so I took my earnings, and moved on. AS DID THOSE WHO KNEW MORE about the assassination and gained by it. And those who thrived by serving them and replacing them. And those who served their replacements and kept their mouths shut and their minds otherwise occupied or drifting - thru and after the Indochina War. And those unwilling sufficiently ruthlessly to suppress what they suspected or to suppress caring about all the stupid and deceitful doings that benefited some at the expense of the rest: who therefore failed to thrive; or found ways to thrive, or at least survive, that those who did what they had to do to contend for primacy were not able to imagine, even when they saw it, right before their eyes. WHEN I CAN I nowadays eat nutritiously and exercise - and do what I can in preparation to exert influence in the very arenas given up on by the conscientious but intimidated - who, as I do, turn to words and images, in hopes of finding a way thru the current political, economic, physical, emotional, and spiritual idea-set and its on-going consequences - among whom I hope to find willing and evolvingly able allies for actions that affect the future. I am one who is variably conscientious and variably intimidated. I strive to purify the conscientious element, and to reduce the intimidated element - but even the striving is variable. I have seen great changes - not necessarily good ones, tho de-segregation was far more good than bad - that began, apparently abruptly, just when it seemed that change was impossible; when that which could not possibly ever happen - but many passionately desired - suddenly began to happen. If you do not want merely to be secure and comfortable, no matter what is happening to your neighbors in the world, or which of your own precious potentials you must surrender; if you do not want merely to be a prominent person doing what someone else would do if you did not do it - and maintaining and extending the status quo, while taking bows: then it takes longer to become who you must be, and to do what you must do. You start where you start and who you are when you start. During all the time that you are becoming who you must become, you must be doing what you must do. It is cumulative. (And what you must do is rarely what is expected of you, by others.) You have your entire life, but not one second longer. Tho you have your entire life, propitious moments are unusual, and being prepared in the right way at those moments is rarest of all. These ideas, about becoming and preparing, are dangerous. It is easy to become committed to them in over-simplified fashion, by inertia, or out of pride after suffering some defeat or series of defeats - and to despise and sacrifice this moment, and who you can not help being right now, and enjoyment of being who you are this moment. Likewise, it is easy to give up on creating a better situation - instead committing yourself in over-simplified fashion to enjoying yourself and the moment - allowing yourself to believe, as most do, that what is extraordinarily difficult is impossible, and consoling yourself with widely - and cleverly- advertised (and also personal, secret) consolation prizes. REGARDING THIS STORY, or whatever it has turned into: Some say a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Fine. Then this is something other than a story. Or else it is not so that a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not very important, is it? I realize that it will not have been easy for you to follow, in one reading, without concentrating your attention with unusual force, what I have said. I have gone back and forth in time - I have put in all sorts of details (and left out still more - of which, more another time). Even my sentences are unusual and frequently difficult. I made it as simple as I could. I am attempting to be of service to you. What I hope to achieve by communicating what I am here communicating with you, if it can be achieved, will not be achieved in an instant. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #532 Underground eXperts United 2000 uXu #532 ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/texts/uxu/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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