University of Virginia Library

Rod MacDonald

Our Dishwater
Legacy

"Rally round the flag, boys" used to be a
big deal. But, as David Harned said in a
Religion 28 class once, "words become
cheap and no longer inspire belief when
they are overworked or used when
inapplicable."

So it comes as no surprise that many
people are today considered unpatriotic
because they fail to rally behind the flag and
so many other concepts that have been
overworked in the past few years.

The background seems to lie mostly with
youth, our own generation, for perhaps
nowhere is the generation gap so
pronounced as in the distance between our
parents values and our own. We have been
raised in an era replete with Negro
revolution. We have been brought from
birth under the apparent worldwide
challenge of communism to a day when it is
merely a representation of another world
power's foreign policy.

And our growth has only been eclipsed
by that of the military, whose budget now
exceeds that of the whole U.S. ten years
ago. This has been the legacy of our youth.

And our legacy has been met as affluent
America often meets shifting and changing:
with a desire to, above all, preserve stability
and good old normalcy. We bought, after
all, General Eisenhower, who only promised
to stop stirring things up the way his
predecessors did; and Richard Nixon, after
eight years of Democratic progress, albeit
sporadic, was elected under the same
banner.

Not that normalcy is all that bad. The
unfortunate fact is that those with a vested
interest in the status quo have perverted our
patriotic language to justify their reaction to
change. Throughout the fifties we held the
legacy of McCarthyism that communism
lurked behind every corner; its repudiation
by Eisenhower was more a statement that it
didn't exist in his government than that it
was not a fearful thing.

Perhaps it was; but the sad fact is that
everyone from civil rights workers to labor
officials to Earl Warren was branded a
communist, always to justify defense of the
status quo. until fear of communist
subversion has become a faraway thing.
Indeed, even old red-baiter Nixon forced
Spiro Agnew (remember him?) to repudiate
his "soft on communism" accusations in the
campaign.

Other words and phrases have become
next to meaningless. "Loyalty to America"
is fast cracking as a viable phrase under its
weight of justifying the war in Vietnam or
building the ABM; to hear Gerry Ford or
Lyndon Johnson, opposition to a partisan
policy is synonymous with disloyalty.
Preferring to challenge this interpretation,
those in opposition have faced charges of
"disloyalty" rather than remain in abject
silence; some, such as Benjamin Spock, have
gone to jail. As a result, loyalty is a watery
phrase.

What about "God," "national interest,"
"security," even "democracy?" God has
been used to justify censorship and
anti-contraceptive laws (still on
Connecticut's books as late as 1966); we
hear "it is in the national interest to build
the ABM and "we must fight in Vietnam to
protect our security;" and it is an even more
unbelievable fact that we have intervened in
Vietnam and the Dominican Republic "to
protect democracy" when we ended up with
Diem and the Nhus, or a military junta.

Such words inevitably become dish-water
when one faction of a combative conflict
invokes them to force its opinion on the
populace.

Many people feel the ABM is not,
contrary to Gerry Ford and Litten
Industries, in "the national interest," but
only represents the efforts of big industry to
get bigger. Faced with America's millions of
empty stomachs, one can easily feel that the
money could better be put "to the national
interest" in domestic spending. Such a
conflict, and false usage of a generic term,
reduces the spirit of "interest" to little more
than a political platform. Mike Zweig of
Stoneybrook (SUNY) summed it up when
he said "There is no national interest —
there are only interests within a nation."

The point should be clear where words
are used generically but in fact only
represent one faction's opinion, the word
will become more irrelevant as the faction
goes down with it. As Americans are sent to
fight for sham democracies and to "protect
our security" in a small bog 5000 miles
away they will lose faith in "security" and
"democracy." It will be a tragedy should
America waste its ability to mobilize its
populace because its leaders cried wolf too
often.

This, then, is the legacy of our youth. It
is by no means our monopoly, but we are
the first generation to spend our
adolescence in these turbulent years; and we
are continually met with mere opposition to
normative change bathed in "Americanism."
We who strive for Negro equality, help for
the poor, or a more sensible foreign policy
are concerned with the real thing; offered a
facade of words, it should be no surprise
that we fail to be impressed with them any
longer.