History

‘So it goes …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Humans of New York, a website of photos and interviews with New Yorkers, was created and is operated by one young photographer who calls himself simply “Brandon.” It features Sidney Offit today.

Offit is a writer, nearly 90 years of age, who is better-known as a friend of the famous, a memoirist, and a curator of great writing—he helped found the National Book Critics Circle, which gives out one of the top-level book awards each year.

sidneyoffit

Sidney Offit

The caption to the photo at left reads: “Vonnegut said we live too long. He said: ‘You had your children. You wrote your book. Now don’t be greedy.’ Yet we all live with this fantasy of recuperation. We see an old photo of ourself, and we momentarily feel like that person again. We think: ‘I’m going to get back to that place.’ And we never get back there. But that desire gives us the ferocity to hold onto life no matter how bad it gets.”

Offit was great friends with Kurt Vonnegut for four decades. Vonnegut’s birthday is tomorrow, November 11. He would be 92. He lived to be 84 and he considered what he told Offit to be a sort of ideal, but it was one he fell short of again and again, as he published fiction past 75 and opinion pieces until the end.

The accidental beauty of a pacifist writer born on November 11, which is Armistice Day—Veterans Day in the U.S. since 1954—was not lost on the novelist.

In “Breakfast of Champions,” Vonnegut reflected on the coincidence:

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Kurt-Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922–2007

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

The moment war ends is not a moment that ennobles the war effort that preceded it, or converts the two opposing sides into concrete moral certainties like right and wrong, but that one minute of peace is sacred. It may have been the only minute of serenity the world has known.

In Vonnegut’s work, remembering the past is sometimes the only way for a character to know that there even is a now. The past, the present, and the future may as well as be characters in his books. Three characters, each of whom considers the other two as being irritating and self-important.

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Here is a thought that I, Mark, visit and re-visit: I see an old photo of myself and I think I can return there. A previous year, another existence, is merely another place I have visited, lived in, breathed the air of. The 1990s are only as far away as a bus ticket whose price is a bit out of my reach; I think I can visit 1979 as easily as visit Phoenix if I would just save up for a couple months. I am going to see Vermont again, I am going to visit Iowa again; I have not seen the Pacific Ocean yet, but I know I will. Next year, maybe.

I know what the 1980s sounded like, what food tasted like then/there, just as I know what Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Poughkeepsie, New York, sounds like. The ability to visit one (Poughkeepsie) but not the other (1983) offends me.

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Now is all we have and Vonnegut knew this, better than most. Reliving the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 is fine, was necessary for him; coming to understand that February 1945 and November 1918 and November 2014 all co-exist in an eternal now is spiritual, somewhat; finding oneself frustrated at the expense of a bus ticket to 1983 is Hell in its exquisite pointlessness.

In one of his last interviews, recorded in October 2005, Vonnegut told public television’s David Brancaccio the point of it all. What life is too short and too long for.

He said that his wife asked him why he would go to the store for “an” envelope. Apparently he used to make his errands last all day: buy an envelope, bring it home, put the letter in it, bring it to the post office, and then treat the next letter with similar care. Vonnegut:

Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 10 asks, “Fill in the blank: ‘Life is too short to _____.’ Now, write a post telling us how you’ve come to that conclusion.”

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The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The demolition of the Berlin Wall started 25 years ago today, November 9, 1989. Nine days later, I turned 21, so every minute of my first 21 years except for a week was lived in the bipolar world of the Cold War.

Us versus them. It was served with our breakfast cereal, our school lunches, and the nightly news watched during dinner. The Cold War was a fact, a background noise, a tinnitus-like hum heard 24/7, sometimes from far away and sometimes next door. Its removal seemed to make us aware that it had always been there, how loud it was, and that it had been driving us all insane.

Since 1989, there have been many movies set in post-apocalyptic nightmare futures but by the mid 1980s our movies were starting to entertain the notion of depicting the apocalypse itself; in 1964, “Dr. Strangelove” ends with a sequence of images of mushroom clouds, which is shocking and direct—and very far away. On November 20, 1983, ABC television aired a made-for-TV movie called “The Day After” which graphically depicted the moment of apocalypse. In Kansas. (According to its Wikipedia entry, it remains the highest-rated made-for-TV movie in American television history.

A military build-up in East Germany leads to a standoff and diplomatic breakdown and both sides launch missiles. The movie does not dwell in the plausibility of the geopolitical story, though, since that really would not matter to innocent citizens on the ground; it shows the missiles exploding and the instantaneous and not so instantaneous deaths everyday people would experience. Conscientious history teachers sent their pupils home with requests that the students be allowed to watch in order to participate in discussions the next day; ABC announced at what minute the most horrifying scenes would begin (I seem to remember the broadcast was commercial-free).

My parents did not sign; I remain one of the few who did not see “The Day After.”

vilniusbBy 1989, it appeared that the end was beginning. In January of that year, I traveled to the USSR with a school group. We saw what it looks like when a country maintains borders not to keep people out but to keep its own citizens inside. In Vilnius, Lithuania, a truly beautiful city, an elderly woman approached us (our professor was Lithuanian, so he translated) and declared, “God bless Reagan!” In Kiev, Ukraine, something similar happened but the elderly woman did not need to be translated; she said it in English. In Leningrad, the same thing.

(I happen to be a liberal, a Democrat usually, and this love for Ronald freaking Reagan was not winning any points with me. But even I understood what was happening. I just wanted some love for Michael Dukakis, who had recently lost to Reagan’s vice-president, George Bush, in November.) Even I understood what was happening. Asked why the people we were meeting, both those speaking freely and the minders who could not speak freely, were not praising Gorbachev and perestroika, our professor spoke metaphorically: “When a jailer removes a prisoner’s head from a bucket of water, the prisoner is not going to thank the jailer for his kindness.” Maybe it wasn’t all that metaphoric.

I do not know if we were more or less closely watched than other groups usually were during our two-week visit, but no attempt was made to conceal watching us. The professor and I were given a personal last-moment tour of the inner workings of an interrogation room on our way out of the country.

From November 9, 1989, until Christmas 1991, when the USSR declared itself closed for business, the Cold War came to a sputtering conclusion. One side won or at least declared victory. It began with an exclamation point, the crowds atop the Berlin Wall, and many revolutions in many countries unfolded over those two years before the final chapter was written. For generations before, from the late 1940s on, the Cold War was the defining fact of life for citizens in dozens of countries on the two declared sides.

For people 40 years old and older, we grew up in an era in which the end of the world was a legitimate conversation topic. The images of the happiest people on earth breaking through that terrible wall 25 years ago today are a reminder of “The Day Before,” a period when “The Day After” of our cultural imagining was unspeakable horror.

Ever since, both sides have been working hard to replicate that bipolar worldview, that us versus them mentality. It makes for an easier foreign policy, which sometimes makes for an easier domestic policy. Looking at the 25-year-old images is like getting a message from a stranger letting us know that it is still all over, but we do not know who the caller is or what is still all over.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 9 asks, “Someone’s left you a voice mail message, but all you can make out are the last words: ‘I’m sorry. I should’ve told you months ago. Bye.’ Who is it from, and what is this about?”

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The War of 1812

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

November 3, 1814, fell on a Thursday. In a coincidence that can be seen only when one is wasting time, it turns out that November 3, 2214, will be a Thursday, as well. Today is the bicentennial of things that happened on this date, and two centuries from now, something taking place or yet to happen today might be bicentennial-ized. (As of this typing, there are several hours left for major history to be made. [Eastern time.])

What was important on this date two centuries ago? The U.S. Congress awarded eight Congressional Gold Medals, making November 3, 1814, one of the larger single-day award hand-outs in our history. Going back to the Revolutionary War, there have been fewer than 200 Congressional Gold Medals awarded, total; some were awarded to entire groups like the Native American Code Talkers and some of the medals were awarded posthmously, but fewer than 400 people in the history of the United States are Congressional Gold Medal recipients. Something important must have been worth commemorating that autumn day.

The eight medal winners were Captain Johnston Blakely, Major General Jacob Brown, Major General Winfield Scott, Brigadier General Eleazar Ripley, Brigadier General James Miller, Major General Peter Porter, Major General Edmund Gaines, and Major General Alexander Macomb. Here is the entire, updated list of Congressional Gold Medal winners from the U.S. House of Representatives: Gold Medal Recipients.

In 1814, the United States was at war with Great Britain, in our mostly forgotten conflict, the War of 1812. Every time one sings “The Star Spangled Banner” one is commemorating the War of 1812, but other than that, U.S. history classes skip over it on their way from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. The War of 1812 was unique, however; it was a war in which a U.S. mainland city was captured, as British forces occupied Washington, DC, in August 1814. They looted the Capitol Building, destroyed every book held by the Library of Congress, and burned the White House, leaving an empty shell of a building. The occupation lasted one day, as a sudden August thunderstorm forced the British back to their storm-damaged ships.

The war is a confusing one for cursory study, as its many causes are still under debate, its fronts covered every region in the young United States, Canada, and the Caribbean; and, all the worse for ease of understanding, in Canada it is seen as a Canadian victory, in Europe it is viewed as one portion of the larger Napoleonic Wars, and in the U.S. it is seen as a victory but one in which our national capitol was occupied.

Congress in November 1814 was meeting in a replacement building that was quickly built for it, so every recent victory and city liberation in the still ongoing war was viewed as a something to be celebrated in grand style. The Siege of Fort Erie, the Battle of Chippawa, the Battle of Plattsburgh, and the recent heroic exploits of Captain Johnston Blakely were deemed worthy of our nation’s top honor. These were the skirmishes and doings the Congress honored with medals; each was a recent action that contributed to the overall war effort but none was decisive; Blakely had died at sea less than a month before.

blakely

Captain Johnston Blakely

Blakely’s 1814 had been a successful one, in which his ship, the USS Wasp, had fought many times near Europe and in the English Channel. All told, the Wasp encountered 15 rival ships in two separate cruises, sinking three ships and capturing or scuttling the remainder. Fifteen for fifteen. There is a mystery about the Wasp that remains to this day, however: What happened to it. Its final encounter was with the HMS Atalanta on August 21, 1814, which the crew of the Wasp captured and considered valuable enough to keep afloat, appoint a captain and crew, and send across the Atlantic to the States. It arrived here on November 4. The Wasp was only seen one more time after this and on some unknown date, it, its crew, and its captain probably sank during a storm (September and October are hurricane season) as it was crossing the Atlantic. Blakely was about 33 years old.

These were the efforts and achievements that two centuries ago we commemorated as eternal and unforgettable. And we do not remember them. Winfield Scott remained famous for decades after 1814, won a second Congressional Gold Medal, and was the Whig Party’s nominee for President in 1852. In Navy history, three ships have been named the USS Blakely in honor of the lost Captain Blakely. The last one was active from the mid-1970s to 1990, a period of little action at all.

On November 3, 1814, our nation honored eight by listing them on a roll of the eternals, and two hundred years later we think of them not at all. Whatever we think we might teach those who will follow, two hundred years from now, whoever we deem noteworthy (“#AlexfromTarget, anyone?”), it, he, or she will likely not be.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 3 asks, “The year is 2214, and your computer’s dusty hard drive has just resurfaced at an antique store. Write a note to the curious buyer explaining what he or she will find there.”

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