Real History

 

Reading Jill Lepore in the the New Yorker about plans for the Bicentennial, has given the Phantom pause to think about his prior bumps with historical commemorations.

In 1976, the Phantom and his new girl friend walked from the East Side of Manhattan to the wild and wooly West Side to see the "tall ships" sail up the Hudson, and then fireworks. 

The war in Vietnam was over by then, and the Republic seemed safe enough, apart from Cold War threats. But nobody was talking about the end of democracy or the collapse of the rule of law or apocalypse.

History seemed to have moved on.

Years later, the Phantom got into the habit of listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes, which played on public radio as he drove out to the nearest batting cages in Drainesville, Virginia, along Georgetown Pike, past the CIA campus in Langley.

Listening to those tapes, to Johnson's voice was living history, a backstage view previously unavailable to the Phantom, and it confirmed the inferences the Phantom had drawn about LBJ: He was just as clueless and unsophisticated as he appeared on T.V.

He had one conversation which stuck with the Phantom, as LBJ spoke with the one person he clearly trusted and liked, Richard Russell, a deeply conservative Dixiecrat. LBJ was thinking about his options about pulling out of Vietnam or trying to push the war to a victorious conclusion. He actually said he was afraid of becoming the first U.S. President to lose a war, as if Madison had not actually lost the war of 1812. On the other hand, he did not fully trust the rosy assessments of his generals, and he wondered how long the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would fight on.

"Well, you know, Mr. President," Russell told him, "You don't want to stay in Vietnam forever. We don't do colonies. We want to get out. Maybe do some business later. But, eventually, we do not want to be there."

"Yup," LBJ concurred.

"Well, those Cong, them boys in Hanoi--they know that, too."

And I thought, "Yes! You dumbass. It's obvious. So get out."

But then, on the other hand, there was a phone call from some young guy who had been sent to find out what was happening with a farm bill LBJ was interested in.  The young guy was out of the White House, some legislative liaison office.

"Well, you see, Mr. President, they are arguing over 3 cents a pound for beef and it's holding up everything. I mean, 3 cents! And neither side will give in, and the whole farm bill is being held hostage to the beef farmers, over 3 cents a pound!"

"Well," LBJ rejoined, "A head of cattle weighs maybe two thousand pounds, so that's $600 a head and you got a herd of 1000 head, that's $600,000, which is not chicken feed to a rancher."

When I saw my father I mentioned the tapes to him.

"I mean, LBJ sounded just dumb as a brick, when he's talking about Vietnam, but when it came to that farm bill, he was much sharper than this young staffer they sent over to Congress."

"Oh, Johnson was very bright," my father said. "I'd say maybe even brilliant."

"What? How would you know?"

"Well, they sent me over to brief him once, before a press conference, where they knew he was going to get grilled at length, and in detail, about some legislation concerning older workers, who, it turned out, were actually less likely to miss work, and who were more productive than most of the younger workers everyone was so eager please. 

And he listens and I keep pausing, so he can take some notes on his little index cards, but he writes nothing down, and just says, 'Yes, keep going.' So, I keep going and fifteen minutes later he says. 'Okay, got it.' And he goes out to the podium in the press room and they grill him and he hits them with everything I had just given him, no notes,  like it's all stuff he knows backwards and forwards. Mind like a steel trap. He was no slouch, mentally."

"Wait!" I stopped my father. "You went to the White House?"

"That's where he hung out. Sure. Had to go through all these tunnels with guys asking my name ever fifty yards."

So, it was no surprise to my father LBJ knew farm bills and anything else not foreign to his world.

But you take a guy who knows Texas ranches, cattle, domestic programs, and you put him on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam, and he is, figuratively speaking, lost at sea. He is just not smart enough to know what questions to ask, not widely enough read to think about a foreign culture.

When the Phantom picked up his wife at Logan airport upon her return from her holiday in Vietnam, forty years after the end of the American war there, she handed him her bag and she did not say, "Oh, good to be home!" or "I missed you!" 

She was, actually, the same woman with whom the Phantom had watched the tall ships celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976.

She said, first words out of her mouth, "There was no way in Hell we were ever going to win that goddamned war!"

Well, nice to see you back, too.

She had been given a tour of the underground "tunnels" outside Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City.) Tunnels is a gross misnomer: These were several levels deep, with hospitals and ammo dumps and plumbing and venting and HVAC and whatnot. They spread out in concentric circles for 20 miles. Those underground facilities were mute testimony to the determination of the Vietnamese to prevail.

After all, they knew Americans weren't going to stay. 

They, on the other hand, lived there.

As Richard Russell told LBJ, "And they know that, too."

The Monster and the Beast: Raising Boys

 

There wasn't much to watch, if you were from New England, during last night's Super Bowl, but the half time ads were something.

The one which struck the Phantom most was an ad showing a boy, maybe six, maybe eight, who was giving a pep talk to his stuffed animals, a talk he had clearly heard from an adult male who coached his youth football team. The ad was sponsored by the National Football League, a sort of recruitment piece, like the Army's "Be All You Can Be," ads.

"I am a monster!  I am a beast!"

This prepubescent boy was telling himself, "I'm a monster! I'm a beast!"

He was performing a self stoking ritual of dominance. 

He was parroting what he had heard from an adult male. A coach. He had been told about aspiration. 

What struck the Phantom was how very prepubescent this boy was. Clearly, his muscles had not seen a lot of testosterone yet, nor his larynx either. 

It made the Phantom think of how he had caught football fever as a six or seven year old, seeing football on TV and going out to a field with a boy, his only friend in the neighborhood who reliably wanted to throw and catch and run a football any time of the day. He would kick or pass the Phantom the ball, and the Phantom would run it at him, and he'd try to tackle the Phantom,  and the Phantom did the same for him.

The difference between lamb and mutton is puberty and neither the Phantom nor his friend were powerful enough to do much harm.

Later, post puberty, the Phantom joined his high school's wrestling team, where they built strength by having the wrestlers pull themselves up a twenty-five foot rope to the ceiling of the gym, using no legs, only arms, hand over hand. Of course, all the boys pumped iron, lifted weights in the off season, building muscle mass and power.

Wrestling is a contact sport, and in fact it is constant contact, violent, scientific and fast. You cannot be successful as a wrestler without a modicum of muscular strength, although flexibility is probably more important, but aggressiveness, tolerance for pain and relentlessness are helpful.

One of the  Phantom's sons started wrestling at age 7, which the Phantom did not encourage, but an adult--oh, those adults!--who wrestled in college, was organizing a wrestling club and he picked out this son. "He's got something to prove," he told the Phantom.  That son proved to be a hundred times better wrestler than the Phantom ever was, in part because he was trained and drilled, from age 7, by someone who actually knew the science of wrestling. 

Domination

"I really love destroying those super jacked [muscular] guys, who look so  nasty," this 15 year old told the Phantom. "They step out on the mat with this smirk but I wipe that off their faces."

The Phantom remembered that feeling. After one wrestling season was over, the Phantom had to return to regular physical education class, and the unit he returned to was wrestling. The physical education teacher, not the brightest bulb, stood in the middle of the mat with his students sitting in a circle around him, and he announced that a well trained wrestler could take a bigger, stronger opponent because of his training.  

He then told the Phantom to stand in the middle of the mat, and he pulled up Mack Shuff, a fearsome looking giant, who had a five o'clock shadow by 2 PM, a brow ridge of a Neanderthal, already balding at 17,  and he was the defensive tackle on the football team, 220 pounds, well over six feet tall. The Phantom was 145 pounds, but he was a varsity wrestler.

Of course, the Phys Ed teacher was right about one thing-- training mattered--and the Phantom pinned poor Mack in fifteen seconds. 

But what that teacher was too dim to consider is that drubbing might not be received cheerfully by Mack, who demanded a re match the next day. The Phantom could see immediately how much this meant to Mack, and it meant nothing to the Phantom, so he just rolled over and allowed Mack to win.

The Phantom, at that point, had nothing to prove.

The Phantom knew the truth, and likely so did Mack, so what was the point?  

The fact is, the real athletes, the boys who were potent and trained, and who knew what real combat demanded, did not stalk around telling themselves they were monsters or beasts.

Another son did not wrestle, but he did white water kayaking.  We lived hard by the Potomac River and this son spent summers at a camp run by members of the U.S. Olympic team and they quickly saw something in this kid, age 10--he could flip his kayak and pop it upright without using a paddle, something which usually takes adults many lessons over weeks to accomplish and many never can. Even using a paddle, it's not easy. But more amazing, he could do a "combat roll" which is to say he could go under and pop up in class 4 rapids.

The Phantom was not at all happy about this son's choice of sport. Wrestling was agonizing enough to have to watch, but you could easily die kayaking on the Potomac.

He expressly forbid his son to go off Great Falls, which is something 15 year old boys were daring each other to do, and people regularly died trying that, but, of course, one day the Phantom found on his desk a framed picture of his son doing exactly that.

Great Falls, Potomac River

Neither son ever strutted around the house barking, "I am a beast! I am a monster!"

They needed enough  testosterone and likely the encouragement of their friends.

Now both sons have children of their own--both have daughters, no sons.

Watching these girls grow up, the Phantom is struck by how very different they are from little boys. 

They rough house with their fathers and they are wonders to behold, but they are clearly not boys.

They never call out, "I am a monster!" or "I am a beast!"