I Was a Teenaged Existentialist. #18: Vietnam, from Hubert Humphrey to Muhammed Ali

Why We Read the Paper Every Day

Hubert Horatio Humphrey is buried about three blocks from my house. But he seems to have evaporated from history and the public mind. They named the Vikings Stadium after him, but then it was torn down and re-made, re-modeled and re-named after a Bank. Humphrey apparently couldn’t afford the naming rights, being so dead and all. At the airport, they named a smaller terminal after him, the international departure one, and named the main terminal after aviator Charles Lindbergh, who is from Minnesota and a hero to his generation. But more and more news was coming out about how Lindbergh was a main very public leader of America First, the Nazi-sympathizing gaggle of crackpots that was actually trying to figure out how to violently overthrow FDR. Then we found out about Lindbergh’s second family in Germany, where he had kids with two sisters- that’s two German families, actually- and we aren’t even getting to the news about how he probably kidnapped and killed the Lindbergh Baby himself. That’s not getting much coverage yet. Old news. Be that as it may, the Airport Commission re-named them Terminal 1 and Terminal 2. Easier on everybody. No context. Less History.

Humphrey reached right into our living room, because through progressive legislation he got money allocated for the care of his granddaughter, Vicki, who was born with Down Syndrome. Their family also organized a non-profit housing project called the Muriel Humphrey Homes, named for his wife. The houses held about 12 people per house, and Vicki and my brother Gary both lived there. She was kind of his girlfriend for a while, but she took up with someone else, in that chaste, innocent sense of relationships that exists in that community.

Ask far as we were concerned, this is what Democratic Politics was all about; making sure that the disadvantaged, the least among us, have a place to live and food on the table and professional care. Social Security was originally created to keep senior citizens from starving to death in the Depression, which is why Republicans hate it. And remember what German-American politician Donald Trump said to his nephew about his medically challenged son, “You should just let him die, and then you can move to Florida.” Very 1933.

I’m telling you all of this because politics wasn’t just a hobby or a topic of conversation for our family; it wasn’t something we could ignore. It was life and death for a family of four boys facing the draft, and one Ward of the State. Death had reached our street, Pheasant Lane, and plucked Bruce’s best friend, the joyous, tall, vibrant, famously athletic Tom Schaefer out of our lives and into a box, in full-dress Marine uniform. He was in Vietnam for two weeks. He used to babysit me sometimes. So politics mattered. History was Current Events, it wasn’t abstract; and our history was also about Ending Segregation through the work of Dr. King, because we talked about that at our all-white Lutheran ALC Church church that believed that what King was doing really mattered. And in 1968 Dr. King was shot (FBI), and then Bobby Kennedy was shot (CIA), both when I was 13, so the news was cause for deep, depressing concern for a teenage existentialist. They didn’t have pills for that back then. As our great Auntie Bess (Torgerson) Shippey put it, “If you aren’t worried, you’re just not paying attention!”

As a 13 year old, I was pretty convinced that this system is fucked, this war was going on forever, that I was going to be drafted and sent over and killed, I had about 5 years to live before I had to choose between the Army, or Canada, or Prison, where you would “become a fag,” as the saying went. I did not even know what that meant, nobody talked about homosexuality, or prison rape, or even sex (except sex was exciting and very bad, unless you were married, and then it was Magical). The military-industrial complex was by then totally out of control (now Totally In Control) and would dominate the ownership of the means of production for the rest of my lifetime. Again, Frank Zappa defined American Elections as “The entertainment division of the Military-Industrial Complex.” I was a Peacenik, like John Lennon, I was a Freak, like Hunter Thompson. Hippies were too easy-going and genteel and uncommitted and passive and escapist for my taste. Freak Power like what Hunter S. Thompson was talking about, which I was reading about in Rolling Stone by the time we got to 1972, that’s what made sense.

Somewhere when we were in high school we read about The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, in 1964, where there was a guy who was arrested for holding up a sign that said “Fuck War” and he was arrested for obscenity- see, back then there were still laws that made swearing in public illegal- so the next day, about 20 of his buddies mimeographed “Fuck War” posters and got arrested, and so on, until the free speech movement, the freedom to say “Fuck War,” became the anti-war movement, which started to catch on from this unlikely tap root. There’s absolutely no documentation to back this story up, by the way. That’s just what we heard, it’s what I remembered hearing, and we took it to be true, so in that sense it Was true. And there were a couple times when we were 14 and we printed up a bunch of Fuck War posters in Print Shop, and went to a shopping center and put them under people’s windshield wipers as an anti-war action. This is in Republican Minnetonka, Rep. Clark MacGregor was our Congressman, he went on to be a major henchman for Richard Nixon. He was the Chair of CREEP in the ’72 election, which Nixon won in a landslide while Watergate was breaking wide open.

And so there was an air of feeling like we were being trained in, not for a normal decent life, but for a life of sham, a hypocritical life supporting what we now know to be Christian Nationalists, dropping more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in all of WW2, we were polluting the environment in order to have a huge, ram-rodded economy that could support a war that was killing Vietnamese civilians and drafting Black American men to die in a jungle at a higher rate than the white soldiers, to preserve non-existent rights for a people who did not want us there, rights that the Black Men could not get for themselves at home. Muhammed Ali rang a bell that could not be un-rung, when he refused to be drafted and said that “No Viet Cong ever called me N——-.” That’s a quote I heard, and it was like a spike driven into my skull. I Heard That.

And so when the opportunity came to try drugs, anything at all, I tried them. Eat, drink and get high, for tomorrow we will surely die.

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