| Essays & Ideas |
Conversation |
2008 & Older Politics |
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| About Me | ||||||||||
| My Journals |
Essays |
From the Memory of A Child |
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| I was raised to believe that freedom was the single most important thing a human, any being, could have. And that the United States of America was the jewel of the world. It must be defended at all costs. But my father wasn’t talking about military defense. He was talking about the Constitution, and the obligation of every true patriot to defend it and refuse to budge. Defend it with your life. Understand it, discuss it, stand by it and stay informed. I had a very political upbringing. I was 10 when he died. But memories include the day there was a knock on the door at our East Palo Alto home… must’ve been ’60 or ’61… I answered the door, and saw a man who I had just seen on the news. It was Richard Nixon. I said “What are you doing here?” I was never allowed to answer the door again. But we spent the following Easter with him and our family at the home of Shirley Temple Black. All I could keep thinking was “I thought that what I saw on tv wasn’t real, but here they are. Am I on tv?” I think people weren’t supposed to know of my Dad’s association with him, because apparently my father was in the John Birch Society. Or maybe it was the other way around. They used to catch me reading the official publication (can’t remember the name “American Opinion” ?), and they would take it away from me. After the assassination of President John Kennedy, he became a Libertarian. Question Authority became the watchword. I believed Look magazine was a Communist publication, and the only good red was dead. And then I started to form my own opinions. My father was born in 1908. I was born in 1955. He had an IQ above 160. He was 5’11” , 150 lbs with a chiseled look, lanky and lean, and a sort of look of serious intentions.
He had a 9th grade education. He designed the first land to air communications system ever used by the U.S. Military, and installed it along the west coast of the United States. He had been a stock car driver, and had the tenth pilots’ license ever issued (which got him out of a ticket with a police officer in Menlo Park… the officer said show me your pilots’ license and I’ll let you off, so he did.) He flew the mail long before that. Supposedly, he was one of the original founders of Ampex Electronics in Palo Alto California… he sold out after 2 years because he just couldn’t figure what people would possibly do with recording tape. It was for computers, and there were only a few. From what I can tell (nobody’s ever told me what my father did in the war), it appears he was in the Navy. He was wounded in the Korean War. At that time, he must have been around 40 years old. He retired as a civilian consultant from the Naval Shipyard at Hunter’s Point where I understand he was in charge of quality control and electronic design. All I know is every time there was a nuclear test, he was gone for 3 weeks. It was always preceded by a visit by a government agent. “Hi. What does your daddy do?” they’d usually say. I’d say “I don’t know, but he’s pretty important”. They’d say, “How do you know that, what does he do?” I’d say, “I don’t know, but he’s more important than you”. I had no clue at that time, really. But I knew something was up. And I could spot these guys a mile away. One time, I was sitting in the front yard, and this guy walks down the middle of the street, from a whole block away, straight for me, pulling a pony. He walks up to me, says “How’d you like a picture of yourself on a pony for your mom?” I said sure, and climbed aboard eagerly. He said “So, what’s your dad do?” I remember looking at him and smiling, as if I was going to get to play a silly joke on him. I said, “I don’t know, but he’s more important than you. This is a neat pony.” I never did get the picture. He said he’d send it to me. The last time I was visited by a government agent, that I know of was when I was 25 in Eureka, California. This was 15 years after my father’s death. I was a tv salesman. From out of nowhere comes this man claiming to be my father’s long-time friend. But I knew he wasn’t at the funeral, and I couldn’t ever recall hearing his name. He said to me “That was some interesting stuff your father did when he worked at the shipyard.” I looked at him and smiled. “Oh, I really didn’t know anything, I can only speculate.” Another customer interrupted. 10 seconds later, I turned around, and the man was gone. I thought to myself, “Wow, he must’ve been into some really heavy duty stuff”. I was not allowed to view the special album of photos that I once sneaked a look at. There were charred and oil covered bodies strewn along beaches, decapitated people… people who looked like they had mercifully expired after enduring a lifetime of hell. I understood that I was looking at war. I was dutifully trained to believe that America only went to war if they were attacked, and if they had a just cause, only to defend freedom or to liberate the oppressed. It was an end to an innocence, the innocence lost when you become aware of the mortal and tortuous danger in the world. It was during that period when he sat me down one day and told me, “Chuck, there are some things I want you to know. And you won’t understand why, but I want you to know. But, when it’s time, you’ll know what to do.” We laughed at the whimsy of his words. And then he was silent. And then he began to tell me of his greatest concerns about the future and the security of this great nation in the years to come as we fought the cold war to defeat the Soviet Union. He was that kind of guy. They say I’m just like him. He told me, “It’s your job to fight and die for freedom if need be. Not just from people in other countries. If your government starts breaking the law, you are required by the law in the Constitution to stop it. Whatever it takes.” He asked “Remember what Patrick Henry says?” He knew that I read 4 or 5 books a week, mostly biographies about our founding fathers. I replied with a smile, and acted out the phrase like a Shakespearian actor bellowing out his cry of war “Give me Liberty or give me death!” And he’d say “That’s it!” and he’d give my head a Dutch rub and send me on my way. I remembered the pictures in the special book and feared what he might tell me next. He opened the “T” volume of the 1961 Encyclopedia Britannica… a set of 26 or 32 super fine print thin-paged volumes of information… of which he read every page before allowing his 6 children to read it, because he wanted to verify that the information it contained was accurate first. He turned to a page and pointed his finger at the words Tri-Lateral Commission. It read “In 1958, James Earl Carter and He said he wouldn’t read it all to me, because I wouldn’t understand it. But, that I was to promise to read it years later. I did promise. And I did read it again. If you look up the tri-lateral commission on the web, you’ll be informed that they started in 1973, and the head of the U.S. delegation is Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Its presentation is of a sleepy administrative and consulting organization. It doesn’t say anything about its being a master influence behind the Council of Foreign Relations, another organization funded by the Rockefellers with a membership list of politicians (Democrats and Republicans) and media personalities and newscasters that reads like a who’s who list of American history. Carter, as it turns out, was the original Director of the Council of Foreign Relations when it was incorporated by the Rockefellers in 1973. Other famous presidents who were head of the Council on Foreign Relations included George HW Bush, Sr. And you probably thought the New World Order was Bush SR’s idea. Other current member include Bill Clinton, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell…
And then, of course, there was Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor. Brezinski’s latest book is The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives The idea was to break the world up into 3 sovereign regions, but still subservient to a central world government which would administer the world’s resources… providing the peoples of each region what it needed, in quantities for trade in products of equal value. The central government would be based in Constantinople Turkey, now known as Istanbul. And it depended upon the ability of the United States to become the super-power. The United States would control all of the Americas and Russia. The European Union would control Europe. And Japan, possibly China, would control all of Asia as well as Australia. He said it was like communism. It was a very good idea. But it was doomed to failure, because it relied on people to be honest. He said, it’s not that they’re bad people, it’s just that it’s so tempting. When you think of all the things you want and all the things you want to do, and the wealth and power of the world is at your fingertips, it’s impossible to resist. Humans can’t resist. That’s why our Constitution is so special. That’s what makes America so great. Checks and balances. People working together, not afraid of other people knowing about what they were doing because they were a team, respecting each other’s differences, sharing each other’s experiences, committed to making the right decisions together. He said “The people need to control the government, not the other way around. You pay taxes to pay for your government. You know the President? You pay the president. You’re his boss. And if enough people get together and decide they want to do something, you get to tell him what to do.” I said “Wow. Can we tell him the people in Russia look nice?” He looked at me in an odd sort of way as if to say “Where in the hell did you get an idea like that?” He brushed the sweat from his brow as he always did when he didn’t quite know what to say. “There’s something else. And this is the part that really worries me.” He said “One day, when Communism has been defeated, the government may become corrupt because it won’t have an enemy to keep it in check. The people will rise up against the government, and the government won’t care about them anymore, because they’ll own the world, and they won’t have to.” He said “Stalin always said that the way to defeat America was to surround it with communism, feed it with drugs, divide the citizens with it’s religion, treat them to prosperity, make them feel safe and secure, and then when they’re off on their picnics, not keeping an eye on their government, the government can do whatever it wants. That’s when they’ve got you.”
He went on. “What they’ll do is declare martial law – that’s where the government decides it needs to defend itself against the people - in the interest of national security. But they’ll have some reason to never take it off. And that will be the end of freedom. That will be the end of Democracy.” We both knew I had no idea what he was really saying. But I knew it was serious. And I knew he was telling me it was up to me to do something about it. My dad loved the program “Combat”, starring Vic Morrow. Combat was about the war against Germany, World War II, the Krauts he would say. It’s the show that turned me into a marksman, as I mastered the firing of a bbgun and 22, playing war in the hills of Santa Cruz, California. I got to the point where I could take a .22 rifle and hip shoot a beer can 20 feet in the air from about 50 feet. It would have been simpler with a shotgun. I bring that up, because there was one more thing important to him. He was like lots of Germans… at least that’s the way he put it. He said Ulysses S. Grant, a distant uncle, was just like the rest of the family. “When you drink whiskey, Germans get mean” he’d say, and I’d know he had one too many. “And if there’s a bottle on the table, we’ll sit there and drink it until it’s gone”. It was a part of our heritage he thought I should be aware of as well. And it’s a lot why I decided to avoid alcohol. “Germans can be a tough people. They did a lot of bad things in World War II. They killed a lot of people who didn’t do anything wrong. The Jews didn’t do anything wrong.” He would rant and rave and curse the people who would do such horrendous things. “You can never let what they did happen again. You can never forget. Not in Germany, not in America, not anywhere. You’re an American. That’s your job.” “And don’t listen to them when they tell you you’re wrong. When they try to tell you to go along. Conformity will kill you. I raised my kids to know the difference between right and wrong. Don’t you tell me you don’t. And don’t you give in to wrong.” I tell people about my father and his incredible repertoire of clichés and speeches, and they think he was an austere, highly disciplined, incredibly intelligent man who had difficulty relating to people of lesser intelligence. They were probably right, but everything made perfect sense, everything was logical to me. To me, it was order, and freedom. Freedom, because if everyone did what they knew they needed to do, and they did it well, everything would work, it would be easy, and there would be more time to play. But as he pointed out, that’s not human. He’d say “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it again.” And when he was in his political moods, he would throw in “Except in Democracy.” He loved Democracy. I didn’t spend a lot of time alone with my father.
But there was one final day we spent, just he and I. I’ll always remember. I was sick with a cold, and he proceeded to introduce me to Dixieland Jazz, taught me how to use an index in a book, and then, with the aid of a Childcraft book, he told me about putting boxes together, designing structural supports, the relationship between wing angles and responsiveness of an aircraft, and general avionics, so that the plane we built wouldn’t crash when we landed. He said “Taking off and landing is the most dangerous part. But any landing you walk away from is a good landing.” That day I felt accepted. Because that day, we started talking about John Kennedy, and I ended up dragging out an Encyclopedia and proved to him that he was wrong about the literal definition of Democracy. I must have grinned for hours. He just shook his head. He died at the age of 58 of what they then called hardening of the arteries. We were putting gravel on the road to our house, a former summer cabin remodeled to a home at the end of a fire road in the hills of Scotts Valley. About 20 minutes from Santa Cruz. He kept stooping down and resting on one heel, like a soldier supporting a rifle in a kneeling position. And then he said, come on son, let’s go home. And for the first time, he sat me in his lap and let me drive the old ’49 Dodge Pickup with a 4 speed and compound low… and I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of first gear, because I couldn’t reach the pedals. But we got there. He bravely stumbled into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed, and weakly yelled to get my mom. I hopped on my bicycle and rode like the wind down the dirt road to the paved road where I anxiously awaited the ambulance, so I could tell it how to get there and help them save my father. I counted on them with every prayer in my heart. As I waited along side the road, a friend happened along. I told JJ a funny story about my father. In the last years of his life my father wasn’t very happy. He had retired from his job at the Shipyard because we lived in East Palo when the Civil Rights movement began, and things were pretty rough. Not for me. But my older sisters and brother, and in the neighborhoods at night. I had no concept of prejudice for some reason. There were plenty of black people where I lived. I just thought their skin was pretty. And the only real question I had about black people manifested itself in a compulsion to always be beside this one little girl in my Kindergarten class at Costano Elementary School when we had to hold hands to play dodge ball. I wanted to know if her skin was different, if it felt different. It did not. I was surprised that it didn’t, but accepted it in stride, like a piece of candy in a flavor I’d never tried, but chose as my new favorite. My father took a job working for the Parks Department of Santa Cruz, doing gardening and mowing lawns in the various playgrounds and government buildings around town. He was always bringing home bicycles that had been discarded, baseballs and bats and tennis balls and all sorts of things you couldn’t imagine. And hula hoops. Hula hoop, after hula hoop after hula hoop. One night, working at the Civic Auditorium, the mayor of Santa Cruz made a remark to my father that was condescending and humiliating, after all, he was there to sweep the floors and fix any electrical problems that might pop up. A laborer. So my father took the bronze placard from the Mayor’s booth in the auditorium, and affixed it to the outhouse by the rabbit pens at home, the only toilet facilities we had. It said “Mayor’s Box”. He said it was a tribute to a man “worthy of such a throne”. My father was the type of man who took his responsibilities seriously. He gave up the work he loved and the intellectual stimulation he thrived on for something greater than himself. He was a family man. In time of war, he was a patriot. He was what he needed to be to do the right thing when he needed to do it. Every time. He never flinched when the responsibility fell on him, even when he had to give up his dignity and sign up for welfare, something he vehemently opposed, because mowing lawns didn’t pay as much as making nuclear weapons or whatever it was he actually did. But his family was safe and healthy, and that was most important. Finally, the ambulance slowly ambled around the corner on Lockhart Gulch Road, nearly 2 hours later. My friend flagged it down. “Hey, let us in. We can show you how to get there faster”. The ambulance driver rolled down the window and peeked around his partner and announced “Oh, no problem, we’re not in a hurry. Just some old fart that kicked off..” I ran up to the door of the ambulance and yelled at the man “God Damn you that’s my father, I thought you were supposed to care”. And he hit the gas and sped away without saying another word. It’s odd. I remember the funeral, and everyone was crying, and people were crying and kissing me on the head. And my mother lead me to his coffin, and told me to kiss him goodbye. I did, but I didn’t know what I was missing. I couldn’t cry. I acted like I did because it seemed I was supposed to. I knew something had been lost, but I didn’t know what. And for a time, I would be walking somewhere and look up and swear that I had seen him. I fantasized that he was so important, that they faked his death so he could go on some secret mission, like a government agent that no one could know still existed. Years later, I still wondered what it was I could have learned from this brilliant man if he had survived to watch his namesake grow. I’d like to think he’d be proud of me. It was important to him that everyone pull their weight and to serve their country. It was important that people do their job well, and not avoid the part that’s most difficult, because that would be the part that makes it all the more worthwhile. Overcoming the seemingly insurmountable for the satisfaction of doing what’s right That’s what I most remember about my father. It’s no wonder that I feel the way I do about America. I remembered all this because I saw a picture of that man in Tienemen Square today. There was one solitary man looking down the barrel
of a tank that could And I was once again awed by the courage of a man who would face certain death alone rather than submit to oppression. That’s patriotism. That’s commitment. That’s people standing for the common good. That man truly understood what the words “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” mean. Without freedom, little else seems worthwhile. And in the midst of all this thought, I realized that whatever my father taught me, it was what I needed to know. As I look around the world today and see what is occurring I pray that I am wrong, I know that he has taught me what I need to know, he has taught me what I need to do, and he has empowered me to take on the responsibility I know I have to take on, though I don’t want to, and wish I was wrong. And I know there are people who feel responsible like me, who don’t want to, and wish they were wrong. But we’re not wrong. So we will take on the responsibility. Because we should. Because as citizens, it is our duty. And we know what could be lost. After all of this, this search of the soul, the quest for an answer, I am taken aback by the power and the richness of the training and education that I had and the heritage that was passed along. And that a picture of courage could cause me to relive the moments that defined my character and life, and remind me of the things that I must do to be true to my ideals. And it was all from the memory of a child.
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