[donation]
By Joel Thurtell
Iraq is a vicious, awful war. It hasn’t killed as many American GIs as Vietnam, nor as many Iraqis as Vietenamese and Cambodians. But Iraq is nonetheless a wasteful foreign war, one we were tricked into, one that has taken a devastating toll in life. And it’s clear most Americans wish were were out of Iraq. Yet despite protests now happening in St. Paul, Minn. because of the Republican Convention, there is no nationwide groundswell of protest.
Oh yes, when the U.S. declared war on Iraq, we had “Peace Now” yard signs on our lawn. That didn’t last long. It was evident that Bush would have his war as he wanted it. A few people protested, but it was nothing like what happened in the late sixties and early seventies with Vietnam. Then there was a real mobilization against the war.
What happened on the streets of Chicago in 1968 would never happen now. True, there are demonstrations and even arrests happening in St. Paul, but they are disconnected, onetime happenings. Today, the whole culture is different. It’s hard to imagine that a march in St. Paul will have any impact on the Iraq war. People may intellectually oppose the war, but it’s not a gut issue.
It’s hard to know exactly what did happen back in ’68. We can say in the most general way that street action had its effect. Mayor Richard Daley’s cops were seen on television beating harmless people. It was quickly labeled a “police riot,” and the monicker stuck.
I don’t agree that Chicago was a “police state,” as some of the leaders of the Chicago street movement claimed. If it had been a police state truly, Barry and I would never have gotten out of jail. We would have been “disappeared.” Instead, a few hours after our arrest, we were walking on the streets of Chicago free men. A few days later, I was standing on the diag in front of the University of Michigan’s General Library making a speech bitterly condemning what happened to us. No doubt there was a detective in the crowd taking notes. That is not paranoid babble, by the way. I know one of the former state troopers who kept track of politics at UM. More about that in another column.
There was a lot of speech-making in those days. A lot of posing. Mailer sure did a number on us that day in Grant Park. As I mentioned in an earlier column, he wrote about the police beatings in Grant Park as if he’d been watching them from high in the Hilton Hotel across the street from the park. But I saw and heard him give a speech at Grant Park the afternoon of Wednesday, August 28, a few hours before my friend Barry Sherman and I were hauled out of a sitting car, beaten and jailed. People were being clubbed in plain view of Mailer, but he didn’t mention it in his book.
It turns out that initially he refused Mobilization organizer Dave Dellinger’s request to speak at Grant Park. Why? He had a book contract, had to get that book done and didn’t want any messy demonstrating and possible arrests to get in the way. He describes himself saying that in his speech, which he eventually gave out of a feeling of guilt, and possibly also because he was drunk. And there was shame. He knew he was an icon in that crowd. But I believe that he couldn’t acknowledge that at the very moment he was encouraging us to take to the streets — hey, we were already in the streets! — people were being hurt by cops and he was telling us his commitment was not really for peace but to finishing a book.
For Mailer, it was all a big show, all about Mailer. After giving his speech, he was hailed by people in the crowd as a hero. He felt terribly gratified. Later, feeling remorse for having said, essentially, that he didn’t have time to make a statement against the war because he had a deadline, he went back to Grant Park and picked an argument with a National Guard officer. He was real drunk by then, describing himself as having “half a bottle” in his gut. Twice he was taken in, and twice he was released because of who he was — the author of a war novel, “The Naked and the Dead.”
Barry and I hadn’t written any best selling novels. Nobody vouched for out literary credentials to Judge Richard Samuels.
To Mailer, being arrested was a theatrical gesture, bragging rights. Having told us that he was too important to demonstrate against the war, having been greeted with great affection by the crowd, Mailer went back to his typewriter and tapped out these words to describe those of us who didn’t have deadlines and big bucks book contracts and only came for the humble purpose of saying “no” to the war:
“They were young men who were not going to Vietnam. So they would show every lover of war in Vietnam that the reason they did not go was not for lack of the courage to fight; no, they would carry the fight over every street in Old Town and the Loop where the opportunity presented itself. If they had been gassed and beaten, their leaders arrested on fake charges…they were going to demonstrate that they would not give up, that they were the stuff out of which the very best soldiers were made.”
If Mailer had stopped to interview me or any of my friends who were in Chicago that week, instead of communing with bottles of booze, he would have learned that the soldier analogy was total bullshit. We were there because we didn’t want to be soldiers in any form. We were there in hopes of pushing peace closer to reality. Phony soldiers, lacking courage — this is how two-faced Norman Mailer described us, the people he sucked up to in Grant Park, the people who welcomed him and cheered him and wished him well with his deadline.
I’ve had enough of Norman Mailer and his New Journalism. Seems like the same old crap to me. Too bad his book comes first to mind when people think of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Still, the book, and our demonstrating and all the other marches and demonstrations and protests finally forced the government out of Vietnam.
I talked about all this with my son, Abe, who’s 25 and a student at the University of Michigan. Why, I wondered, is there no outpouring of rage about Iraq?
“One reason,” Abe said. “No draft.”
Next: Fun times with the FBI
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
