University of Virginia Library

Ring Around The Midden: Poking For A Hope

News Analysis

By Rob Buford
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

For arrogant certainty,
Time magazine rivaled the
Pentagon. "The Cooling of
America," last week's special
section on the mid-winter calm
apparent here at home, was one
hell of an obituary.

Had Time's intimidating
essayists announced that Abbie
Hoffman and Tom Hayden
were planning to open a luxury
ski club in Vermont, one could
not have been more put off to
learn that the movement was
dead.

To hear Time tell it, the
nice kid who used to groove
with his grass had graduated to
amphetamine, and his friend
who tripped three times a week
was now out in Heroin Heights.
Sound simple? Earlier flights to
Canada dropped off in a mass
flight to fantasy. With a "new
romanticism" typified by
"Love Story," and a political
ethic summed up adequately in
the idea of petty rip-off in the
bloody violence of "a new
dawn," — the senses imploded
in nightmare headlines:

TWENTY MILLION CHARLIE
MANSONS AT LARGE!

One could only poke
impatiently at the sodden heap
which had become America's
aspirations, her dreams. The
magic fled as America painted
her self-portrait on a burning
Asian countryside. Eight
policemen murdered in
America last weekend, and
Tom Wicker of the New York
Times was shocked to find, in
Nixon's second year in office,
70,000 civilians had been killed
in Indochina by American
bombs.

How to form any kind of
viable image of the nation's
true identity: Will the REAL
America please stand up? If the
movement to end the war,
which above all it was — if it
was ever anything at all — had
seen setbacks under stress, how
strange that it should drop
dead of weariness and self-pity
in the calm of February, while
the chief target for its wrath,
the Vietnam War, raged out of
control.

Strange and sad. The paradox
was reasserted in Nixon's words
about a "new American Revolution,"
coming as they did in windy
gusts without mention of what
went on in Southeast Asia. Wicker
had called it "Orwellian" rhetoric,
although the impact of the fraud
would only appear in reports of
American bodies found in Laos clad
in South Vietnamese uniforms, and
in the truth that the Laotian
invasion had not, as Washington
earlier certified, been innovated by
South Vietnamese generals but by
our military masterminds.

I.F. Stone, the outsider journalist
whose Washington Bi-Weekly has
exposed the cleverest official
deceptions and lies, had some
remarks for a reporter who spoke
with him last week. "The American
people," said Stone, "have been
made moral imbeciles by this war."

And there was little coincidence
in the fact that the day Wicker
wrote in the Times of America's
"stained honor," this was the same
day a man named George
McGovern said of NBC's Meet The
Press, (Hostile) that with the new
war strategy Nixon had led the
country to a new low of
"barbarism."

Sen. George McGovern

Away From Old Illusions

Something in McGovern's style
reflected the paradox we faced or
fled. In his "tenor choirboy voice"
and with what someone called
"terrier-like" application
McGovern denounced Nixon's War
with the measured balance of Plain
State radicalism tempered in
Washington.

And earlier, when Stennis of
Mississippi suggested that U.S.
ground troops might have to
reinvade Cambodia, it had been
McGovern who spoke the unspeakable:

"I'm tired," the South Dakota
Democrat said, "of old men dreaming
up wars for young men to fight.
If he (Stennis) wants to use American
ground troops in Cambodia, let
him lead the charge himself."

McGovern had introduced legislation
to require a complete withdrawal
of U.S. forces from Southeast
Asia within the next year, to
stem "the drifting tide of old ideas
and illusions," which took us there
originally. "Vietnamization," he
added, "is a clear design to keep the
war going by ending criticism in the
United States."

As the scorn rolled in, much the
way it did when Eugene McCarthy
was wrecking the political career of
Lyndon Johnson, and then again
after New Hampshire and the last
frontier of the Kennedys, as
suspicion and disbelief in
ANYTHING piled high on the new
American midden, one liked to
reject such despoiled certainties.
One liked, instead, to hope again.

But hoping, as Time pointed
out, was never so hard, especially
for those whose roles in the
now-dead movement had probably
jaded their critical sense and
blurred their judgment. And
another fact was almost sure: Sen.
McGovern offered no easy answers,
no clear-cut options and contingencies
such as the pronouncements
of Richard Nixon or J. Edgar
Hoover. McGovern's "way out" was
easily as arduous a journey as had
been that of his ancestors who
made their way across a new
continent.

But for the hope which he
demanded be kept alive, NOT just
for the immensity of the challenge,
nor for the difficulty of the
mission, Sen. McGovern, the only
announced candidate for the
Democratic nomination, warranted
a close look by those who dared to
believe there remained a future for
America.

What became of the movement
to end the war was something to be
pondered. But what was to become
of the country which was duped
into carrying that war to an even
bloodier denouement was also
something to consider.

Reliable rumor has it that Nixon
loves few diversions more than to
have his advisor, Henry Kissinger,
entertain him with his brilliant
imitations of Doctor Strangelove,
when the world scene grows too
dull for men with bigger ideas.
Perhaps those who tire of what
they see, who languish in Heroin
Heights or Edge City, or even private
Love Stories, might do well to
divert themselves with the
laughable nonsense of a man from
the Plains who dares to hope again.