"The Man" on the Moon
I graduated from college a year later than I should have, because I didn't get full academic credit for the "junior year abroad" that I spent in France. I had convinced my parents and my professors at Johns Hopkins, and myself as well, that I would be attending classes and doing "independent research" on the commedia dell'arte, which had captured my attention for some reason, but I didn't do either and only got credit for learning French. I also thought I was interested in the nouveau roman and felt pretty intellectual in my brown corduroy jacket, smoking Gauloises Brunes (but not inhaling) and attending lectures by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Ricardou. Once I took the bus from Aix to Marseilles for the showing of a new film by Claude Chabrol and was introduced to him afterwards, probably because I looked so intellectual, but I had nothing to say to him. I was only there to meet girls, which didn't happen.
I've often thought that things might have turned out better if I had just stayed in France. I was only 20, but old enough to find a job if I had wanted one. The problem was the draft. France, like all the European countries I knew of except Sweden, would extradite draft dodgers and if I had stayed I would have been a permanent fugitive as well as foreigner, not to mention the disappointment that would have entailed for my parents. I had disappointed them enough by not getting full credit for the year.
So I went back on to "Balmer" (as the natives pronounce it) and proceeded to spend a miserable two more years at Hopkins. The misery I blame entirely on the war. Maybe that's not entirely accurate but I'll leave it at that because that fucking war deserves all the blame it can get, and more. It was never mentioned in class, of course. It was business as usual in the Ivory Tower, even as the moat filled up with blood and corpses.
One scene in particular sticks in my mind. It must have been either April 15 or October 21, 1967, because there was a big antiwar demonstration in Washington on that day. It was a Saturday, and I should have had a better place to be, but I didn't. I was descending in an elevator to the book stacks of the new Hopkins library, which were all underground. There were several people in the elevator, including one of Hopkins’ most illustrious sages, Charles Singleton, who had devoted his scholarly life to Dante. As the elevator doors closed and silence enveloped us, I felt we must all be thinking the same thing.
Suddenly Singleton broke the silence and intoned: “I think there must be something about being an American that involves going to Washington.” There were one or two appreciative chuckles, and no more was said. But I thought the analogy of Dante descending into Hell was only too obvious. What the hell -- literally! -- were any of us doing in the library, when history was being made only a short drive away, in Washington?
After graduation I got a job with the Baltimore Public Schools, starting in the fall of 1968, and also a job that summer refinishing desks. I was assigned to a crew of about a dozen men, all teachers, and all black except me. All the students at the school and most of the teachers were also black, although the principal and my supervisor were white. There was something wrong with that picture, just as there was with me trying to teach French to those inner-city junior high school kids. I could speak French well enough, but I had no idea how to deal with the students, or any more idea than they did why they should be trying to learn French. The pedagogical method in vogue at the time and imposed on me by my supervisor was the “audio-lingual method,” consisting of memorizing dialogues and doing pattern drills, which was stultifying for all concerned.
The only glimmer of success I had was when I forgot about the curriculum and used a recording of French folk songs I had found in the teachers’ supply room and used it in one class of better (and younger) students to teach them a couple of songs. I had to screw up my courage to do it, since I was shy about singing myself, but it turned out that singing “Au clair de la lune” with those kids was the best thing I did all year. That should have told me something, and it did, though it took a long time for me to take it to heart. Only late in my teaching career did I dare to try it again, teaching English as a foreign language, and again it turned out to be the best thing I had ever done. It worked with advanced German university students as well as with those inner-city black kids. “Learning by singing” is the best way to learn a language, I think.
The summer desk-refinishing job involved spending a week or so at various schools around the city, sanding down the graffiti-engraved wooden desks, first with big belt sanders that were a little tricky to control, then with smaller vibrating sanders. After sanding the desks went into the varnishing tent, which was the sole dominion of a huge man called “Tiny.” Ben Tillman was the boss. Once he remarked to the group during a break that it had been nothing to come across a dead black man in the woods. I don't remember what state he was from.
At lunch time we broke up into smaller groups, usually in different classrooms, and I gravitated toward the smallest one, consisting of another young teacher named Daniel and an older man that everyone called "Mr. Barrett," who was a preacher in his spare time. I enjoyed listening to Daniel pepper Mr. Barrett with questions about the bible and sundry matters of morality and spirituality. They seldom if ever talked about the war or politics. One time somebody (I suspect Tiny) set up a projector and screen in one of the classrooms and showed a pornographic movie. Mr. Barrett and Daniel did not attend.
The second summer, in 69, Daniel had changed. He was still interested in learning about the bible and deferential to Mr. Barrett, and our lunch hours remained intellectually challenging and interesting, but he was more agitated, more inclined to argue. Occasionally he brought this attitude to the whole group, challenging us, for example, to say whether Gamal Abdel Nasser was a white man or a black man. Did he have dark skin? Yes. A broad nose? Yes. Thick lips? Yes. Kinky hair? Yes. Then, said Daniel, he's a black man. I realized that he had a point. I had always thought of Nasser as an Egyptian “white man.”
On the morning of July 21, we all sat around watching the coverage of the moon landing on TV, nobody saying much. I assumed everyone felt the same way I did, captured by the moment and in total awe of its significance. Man walking on the moon! On the moon! "One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind," just as Neil Armstrong said. Even if it was Tricky Dicky on the earth end of the telephone, he was talking to -- a man on the moon! This was something that transcended politics. A historic moment. Sacred, even. Something we could all share and feel good about, even proud of, as Americans.
In the midst of our awed silence, Daniel suddenly leapt to his feet and started talking excitedly. "How can you believe this shit?” he exclaimed. His brow was flecked with sweat, he was talking fast and loud and couldn’t keep still. I had never seen him like this.
“How do you know it’s coming from the moon? How do you know they're not filming it in a studio right down the street, or in Hollywood? You don’t know. All you know is what you see in that box!"
Some shook their heads. One said, under his breath, “Oh, man, what’d you smoke for breakfast?”
“I mean, what do you see, man? Two people walking around in space suits and they tell you it's the moon. And you believe it. Why? Do you believe everything you see on TV?”
No one contradicted him, but we all went back to work, I suspect, with the same thought in our minds. Daniel had lost it. He had gone off the deep end. The events of the previous summer, especially the murder of Martin Luther King and the riots that ensued, had “radicalized” him. He was no longer that clean-cut young black man trying to make sense of the world via reason and religion. He had become a raging bull, like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton et al. Ok, he must have thought, "the Man" is on the moon. Another giant leap for Whitey. Another honky step forward in a racist world, with the black man no better off. What was there to celebrate?
Poor Daniel, I thought. He just couldn't get past the race thing, not even for this.
But I was the one who didn’t get it.
I was against the war, not a Marxist or a "radical" or even particularly opinionated on other political issues, but still as alienated from the reigning powers and the "silent majority" as -- I thought -- one could be.
I was angry, but that was all. I thought the war was just a stupid, collosal mistake, and it made me even angrier that "smart" guys like McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean, could be so stupid, when it was so obvious to me that they were wrong. I couldn't even get into Harvard. (I had tried.)
It simply did not occur to me that they were not stupid at all, that they were lying.
The murders of JFK and MLK, and then RFK two months later, had gone by me not unnoticed, but without any impact, like a bad weather report.
Daniel was right to smell the snake oil. I wouldn't get it for another quarter of a century. I still don't know about the moon landings, but I do know, now, about the Kennedy murders and MLK. And 9/11. All of which are just dripping with snake oil.