OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: Poor dumb people of the past

My family didn't take a lot of photographs when I was a kid.

Most of them were taken for an occasion, often by a professional. There are the Olan Mills family portraits from the mall, the mock baseball card from the San-Ri Little League, a couple of faded Polaroids, and not much else. There was a Kodak Brownie in the house when I was little, and later my father had a Nikon--a camera I'd eventually lose to the Atlantic Ocean while climbing Pão de Açúcar in Brazil--but my parents weren't into snapshots. I take more photos in a month than they did all the years they were together.

I wish I had more photos of my father, but my memories are probably more interesting and agreeable than documentary footage might be. I think we all want the freedom to re-imagine the past, to interpret it in ways that fit our chosen narratives. It's so easy to tell ourselves lies about history; nostalgia is a comfortable default mode.

It's only fairly recently that I've acquired the ability to remember events that happened 50 years before. It feels like a strange power, something thrust upon me as an obligation. I have no recollection of the 1950s and can imagine them as sepia-toned and calm even though I've read about Joe McCarthy and the Beats and intellectually understand the restlessness of the decade. But I remember the '60s pretty clearly from the JFK assassination onward.

And it feels so odd to relive the decade, through serious-minded films like Ken Burns' 18-hour documentary The Vietnam War or a coming Netflix Robert F. Kennedy documentary (which I can't say too much about because I agreed to the network's embargo in order to see it in advance) or a coming HBO documentary which looks to be all about reframing Elvis Presley as a serious artist. Once again I see footage that I saw when it was new--when it was news--and the echo is disconcerting, an artificially induced deja vu.

I was 9 years old when Robert F. Kennedy was shot. I remember waking early in the morning, before anyone else in the house. That Thursday, I did something I had never done before; I walked straight into the paneled room we called the den and snapped on the television set. I heard a newsman's voice and before he could say what had happened I somehow knew. I woke my parents. I told them the news.

"It's happened again," I remember myself saying, though at the time I probably didn't connect RFK's murder to that of Martin Luther King Jr. or JFK. At the time I only thought that was what happened, that people who were on TV a lot sometimes were murdered and not everybody mourned.

And sometimes there were riots. I worried about riots. Fifty years ago there were riots in April in Memphis after King was shot. Then Kansas City, Detroit and Washington; Trenton, N.J.; Chicago. I watched the police and the protesters on TV. There were riots all over the world, in Kingston, Jamaica, and Grosvenor Square in London. Students rioted in Japan. I didn't know this until later; I didn't understand politics, all I knew was that some people hated the president and other people hated the people who hated the president. (The more things change ....)

I worried about riots in our suburb, on our block, in the air base housing where we lived.

I worried about Vietnam, which my father had something to do with. He brought back that Nikon from one of his trips to southeast Asia, along with a 15-speed Peugeot bicycle and a Hitachi cassette recorder/radio for me. We lived in the flight path, "under jets," my fellow Air Force brat Murray Attaway would later sing, beneath F-14s and Flying Fortresses that striped the sky with vapor trails. I didn't know about the military-industrial complex or American imperialism, cultural or otherwise.

In 1968 I loved Bob Gibson and Johnny Unitas. I spent weeks that summer in San Francisco, where my uncle took me to ball games where I watched Willie Mays (still magnificent at 37 years old) and to Haight-Ashbury, where I saw real hippies. Every summer was a different order of experience, clearly demarcated and roped off. It was a long time from the summer of 1967 to the summer of 1968, a full 10th of my life back then. Maybe the hippies looked older and more tired to me, sad-eyed and jaded and less disposed to let it be.

I listened to AM radio and heard Simon and Garfunkel singing "Mrs. Robinson." A lyric there struck me the way I imagined poetry was supposed to: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?"

I didn't recognize it as an extraordinary time. It was just my childhood, just the way things were. But from this distance, I can see that 1968 was as dangerous a year as our country has experienced since the Civil War. And the fact we somehow emerged more or less intact from that horrible year--where murder was routine and the world quivered with war and war's foreshocks--makes me think that recent events might not be fatal to the American experiment. Our progress has always been fitful and whiplash-inducing, but 1968 was the year the center almost didn't hold.

And while my family didn't take pictures, a lot of people did.

So now it's coming back, usually in black and white but sometimes in that grainy saturated color we immediately recognize as dated these days. It's strange how the past--which no longer exists, which might as well have been a collective fever dream--manifests itself in dots of light that predate pixels. Even the early 2000s look antique to us now. I wonder how the iPhone-shot 4k video that now proliferates will look to people 50 years hence (if there are people 50 years hence).

No doubt we'll seem as foolish and as helpless as those poor dumb citizens of the past.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Editorial on 04/08/2018

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