Soon after that sorry first Tuesday of November, a friend gave me a copy of an article written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. for Harper's Magazine. It was his report on the Republican National Convention. In Miami Beach. In 1972.
My friend is in her 70's, a generation ahead of me. I think she meant to comfort me with this. Sometimes history does that. Gives us some perspective. And as the Vietnam parallels multiply with each passing day, perhaps there is solace in thinking if we survived Nixon/Kissinger, surely we can muddle through Bush/Rice.
But the glimpse into the past can also be disheartening. Have we learned nothing? Or, worse, have we learned it too well?
One thing is certain. Vonnegut always shakes us up, takes us outside of ourselves, and asks the questions that need asking.
Below the fold are excerpts from the essay.
Given that the Internets were still a
DARPA dream in 1972, I have no link to the full text. Those interested will have to find it the old-fashioned way and ask their friendly, neighborhood librarian to dredge it up out of some musty basement archive. I think it will be worth the trip.
In 1972, Harper's Magazine sent Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to cover the RNC in Miami Beach. The result was an essay in the November issue titled, "In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself."
Discipline and the Media
Barbara Walters invited me to appear on the Today show. I told her that I had nothing to say. The convention had left me speechless. It was so heavily guarded, spiritually and physically, that I hadn't been able to see or hear anything that wasn't already available in an official press release. "It's Disneyland under martial law," I said.
Divine Right of Presidents
Dr. D. Elton Trueblood, a Quaker and Professor at Large of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, was the main speaker at the pre-convention Sunday Worship Service.
Dr. Trueblood's sermon surprised me at one point, because I thought I heard him say that the sovereignty exercised by American politicians came directly from God. Some other reporters there got the same impression. He was speaking extemporaneously, so no copies of the sermon were made available for a detailed check.
But I interviewed him afterwards, and recorded our conversation, which went like this:
"After your sermon this morning," I said, "I heard someone say that you had traced sovereignty from the President directly to God. We are usually taught that the sovereignty of the President resides in the people. I was wondering, since you are a theologian--"
"I said nothing about the President," said Trueblood. "I said the sovereignty is God's, not ours, that all we do is under Judgment. This is a way to have a non-idolatrous patriotism."
"So the circuitry would go like this," I said, "if we were to lay it out like a wiring diagram: the President draws his sovereignty from the people, and the people draw it from God. Is that it?"
"No," he said. "I would put it another way: that God alone is sovereign. I accept Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms of the Church and State, both under God. So that everything we do as a state is under Judgment, therefore derivative."
"So the President is simultaneously responsible to the people and to God?"
"But even more to God than to the people, of course," Dr. Trueblood replied.
I set this down so meticulously and without elisions because I think it proves my claim that on August 20, 1972, the Republican National Convention was opened with a sermon on the Divine Right of Presidents.
Greetings from Mr. Lincoln
I said to [Trueblood] that many peace-loving people must know that he had the ear of the President and that they must have told him, "My God, Dr. Trueblood, tell him to stop the war."
"Yes," he said, "and often in a most nasty mood, very judgmental sometimes. And I say to them, `Look here, he is trying to stop it. Don't hinder him in your self-righteousness.' I don't take any lip off them, you understand."
And this Quaker philosopher had even heavier news than that for the bleeding hearts. He was about to send to the President, a little-known quotation from Abrahama Lincoln, with whom Mr. Nixon in his wartime anguish identifies.
This was it:
We are indeed going through a great trial, a fiery trial. In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being an humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am and as we all are, to work out His great purposes I have decided that all my works and acts may be according to His Will. And that it might be so, I have sought His aid.
But if, after endeavoring to do my best in the life which He affordsme, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that, for some purposes unknown to me, He wills it otherwise.
If I had my way, this war would never have been commenced. If I had been allowed my way, this war would have ended before tis. But we find that it still continues, and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of His Own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though, with our limited understanding, we are not able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe that He Who made the world still governs it.
...It seems entirely possible to me, now that I have learned for sure that his spiritual advisers are so appallingly commonplace, that he honestly believes that he is serving God, no matter what he does.
Buried in Populism
The Republicans were as high as kites at their convention, of course, since victory was a certainty. The enemy candidate was buried up to his neck in Populism, whereas their own candidate was buried up to his neck in God.
Court Jesters
Every so often somebody tells me that it is a delicious fact of history that clowns have often been the most effective revolutionaries. That isn't true. Cruel social machines in the past have needed clowns for lubrication so much that they have often manufactured them. Consider the Spanish Inquisition.
When the Inquisition was about to burn somebody alive in a public square, it shaved that person from head to foot. It tortured the person to the point of babbling idiocy, fitted him out with a comical hat and a lurid paper cloak. His or her face was painted or masked.
Hey presto! A clown!
The idea, of course was to make the victim comical rather than pitiful. Pity is like rust to a cruel social machine.
Sleeping Giant/Paper Tiger
We don't covet anybody's territory. We would just like to buy or rent some of it, if we can--and then everybody can get rich.
If I were a visitor from another planet, radioing home about Earth, I wouldn't call Americans Americans. I would give them a name that told a lot about them immediately: I would call them Realtors,
I've left a lot of good stuff out of an eight-page article. Reading this 32 years later, do we shrug and say plus ca change...? Or do we remember that a short 20 months later, Nixon was boarding a helicopter for the last time?