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Underground eXperts United File 532
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Underground eXperts United
Presents...
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[ 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.
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uXu #532 Underground eXperts United 2000 uXu #532
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