The Year of Five Liberations (1 of 5)
by John Shannon
art by Paul Takizawa
1
Gandhi shrewdly suspected that understanding the history of the twentieth century was mostly a matter of learning how to ask the right questions. Facts are after all opinions, he said. The only questions anybody asks any longer about the New Left are about its blowback, how powerfully it spurred on the slow-gathering counter-offensive of the Right—DeGaulle immediately, then Thatcher, America’s Evangelicals, Pope Ratzi. But that question is so wrong that it only makes me pity the kids growing up today without all that superb flux, the pre-corporate rock-and-roll, the instant camaraderie of long hair, and that definitive real-world laboratory we were given where we could test ourselves against a set of challenges that every one of us had to face. Those times conferred a privilege, like the Resistance for a Frenchman in the 1940s, the Civil Rights Movement for an African-American in Mississippi in the early 1960s. If you passed through that crucible, you learned who you were. If you grow up in an extended period of quietism and conformist triumphalism, like now, you’ll probably never know. But that has little to do with the question, either.
2
It was Gordy’s favorite war story (names have been changed to protect history itself), emphasizing as it did the ambiguity of all human endeavor and it let him brandish over our heads his unambiguous dick-waving superiority as a vet from the Big Nam which we weren’t. He’d even smuggled out an M-16 piece-by-piece and he’d been in and out of addiction to the dread skezag and all we’d ever done was tootle a bit of marijuana at college while he’d wailed out his Post-Traumatic demons at the VA Center up in the big city.
There’s always a fucking war, I thought. So, eat me, Gordy.
“There was this ville up the Song Ba river where we got sent to patrol every time the LT got smoke up his ass. Intel kept sending him bulletins that this place was NLF. Go get ’em. Well, shit. Half the men from that ville fought with Charlie at night, the place paid rice tax to the Front and they all lined up to say, Aaah, when the VC medics dropped by to show how much they really really cared.”
Rocky, my best friend and comrade, hadn’t heard the tale but I had and I didn’t want to butt in, so I let my eyes drift to the poster I’d just made and taped up over our dining room table. I’d traced the outlines of five countries: Viet Nam, Cambodia, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola, and below them I’d printed The Year Of Five Liberations. Debs Organizing Committee. It was so easy to be upbeat in 1975, and now, so terribly long after that innocent year (every year is innocent until its consequences go south on you), the problem is trying not to sink into easy irony. And it’s almost impossible. So, let me vent it right now and get it over with. Another colleague, Denny McMahon, said to me not long after we’d started the DOC and Denny had to leave town for a job, “Look, we’re just like a car club except we want state power.” Even if I’d been able to smile about it then you can’t really look at it that way, not ever, trust me. It’s just plain too dismissive and it misses the point in yet another way. Oh yeah, there’s a point and I’ll get there.
“But during the day they ran up the South Vietnamese flag and they had a village chief appointed by Saigon and they paid their fucking government taxes. They tacked up government notices when the armored riverboat came up the Song Ba and they cheered dutifully whenever a general flew in on his American Huey. Like a thousand other villages. So tell me, Rock, who did that village really belong to?”
Rocky shrugged. “The good guys.”
“Say the U.S. had won—or Saigon, if you prefer. The NLF sympathies would have melted away without a trace. The tree didn’t fall in the forest. By any measure, the village would have been loyal to Saigon all along. It’s not a cover-up I’m talking about. That’s the damned thing about life. What happens this year changes the meaning of the past as much as it changes the future.”
Gordy wasn’t stupid, however reductionist he became from time to time. Rocky wrinkled up his face and bit his lip and looked at Gordy as if Gordy had a powerful car that could take us all somewhere pretty fast but not somewhere he necessarily wanted to go, at least not then. The subtext of the whole discussion was some argument about the objective consequences of acts, how you could end up boosting Outcome A by not being sternly vigilant against revisionism or gradualism or roll-your-own even though you actually believed in Outcome B. It was an argument that tended so heavily to Stalinoid thinking that it always set off alarm bells for me.
“I think you’d have to know the inner thoughts of the people in the village,” Rocky whickered.
“I get it,” I said and Gordy tried hard not to show annoyance at my interruption. “You bring in the gunships to sort out the truth. When you count the bodies you can freeze history just where you want it.”
We were trying to build our collective in the heart of what’s come to be called an edge city. One of those counties abutting a big city where rampant white flight has urbanized things willy-nilly to generate a vast plum-pudding of uncontrolled development around multiple centers—a center of business with its mini skyscrapers along some interstate, a hub of entertainment with an amusement park and maybe a sports stadium, a university town, a beach town if you’re lucky enough to be on the water, and even a dingy and unimproved historic center to house the new immigrants who do the dirty jobs, a weedy place that inevitably grows up on the core of the oldest of the engulfed cities and is full of legacy bungalows and legacy place names. That’s where four of us lived of course, in a rambling bungalow deep in the black and brown core, on a street named after one of the county’s forgotten Anglo pioneers.
“The only guarantee I know for never being wrong is never trying to do anything. There’s a lot of that around.” It was the last thing I said to Gordy that day but it wasn’t the end of the discussion.
Let me step back. I have to say now that mostly those times weren’t as antagonistic as I make them seem because for one, we’ve all become stubborn citizens of the post-modern now and we only know the world as the thousand head-butts we’ve put in this surrounding envelope that we’re constantly ramming in order to define ourselves. And those are what I remember best of course—all the feuds and spats and grudges. Of course we didn’t call them that. They were political disagreements. I have to remind myself that there were also moments of comradeship that could bring me to tears and a genuine friendship unlike any I’ve known since.
We’d been bosom friends before the group, Rocky and I, dropping out of the university together at the height of the Viet Nam War and high-fiving each other on the day we’d got our first working class jobs, me in a rubber factory so alien that I was struck dumb by that shocking first day of hissing roaring heat and repetitive motions that left my hands red raw meat, and Rocky as an apprentice carpenter in a union training program. It was only weeks later that we founded, along with Dan Storm, the first of our political groups, a kind of forerunner of the DOC. Not just friends—work with me here. We were comrades, as that word had been used in the 1930s, before all the toxic Cold War contamination, and we set out together on this political odyssey as fierce and doctrinaire as young Turks, but Rocky’s outlook firmed up over time much like Gordy’s or perhaps like one of the tilt-up concrete slabs that they poured into the wooden forms he was learning to hammer together, and he set hard that way, while my own doctrinal inclinations sagged slowly into comfortable shapes and became a kind of swaybacked creed that could carry a lot of amiable folks along. This may be a positive trait, or not. Who knows? I do know that toward the end, I was embarrassed by the seemingly sourceless rage Rocky espoused which would absolutely blister anyone around him who hinted at irresolution or accommodation or just ordinary kindness to an opponent. We had always been a strange group on the workaholic and frenetic New Left, insisting on taking the time every week for study of the classics, and Rocky’s favorite essay became Mao’s Against Liberalism, that horrifying little affirmation of inflexibility of purpose, doctrine over friendship, doctrine over kindness, doctrine over any other human quality. Rocky as Savanarolo, Rocky as Khmer Rouge. I don’t even know what’s become of him today.
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