The graduate and world history

 

I was around 15 when Watergate became TV. I was brought up in a conservative Republican household and considered myself a very conservative little chirp, so much so that Nixon’s trip to China made me think he was a bad man – China was communist! I hadn’t yet shucked all of that bullshit, although by the end of my teen years I was a Marxist – so there you go. I was helped on the way, though, by Watergate. The President (back then, it was in Capitals that I thought of the mook) had so obviously and painfully lied, lied, lied – and I swallowed the press narrative that this was the worst crime a President could commit.

Later, however, I began to see that there was, to say the least, some disproportionality here. The lie that the president told that resulted in the secret bombing of Cambodia and the horrific spread of the war was skipped over nimbly by the press. The lean towards Pakistan that encouraged a genocidal civil war in which a million were killed in Bangladesh was also as nothing. It was the coverup of the break-in to the Dem headquarters (and not, say, the eternal spying and placing of agents provocateurs with the Socialist Workers Party, which, as Noam Chomsky pointed out back then, was simply considered normal and unscandalous by the press) that undid him. Undid him for months and months of wonderful worldtheater.

History, like all cold cases, depends a lot on trivia. As I grew into your average paranoid loser leftist, I began to get this. I also began to get that conspiracy theory might not be true, but it was a great vehicle for spotlighting the weirdness of ordinary life among the American elite – and even among the American lumpen. Whether Oswald was or was not a lone assassin is one thing – but the very social possibility that was inhabited by his friend, the hairless David Ferrie, was a more important other, at least as far as the American circus was concerned. The Watergate scandal was absolutely full of kooks and eccentrics and wheeler dealers.  As well, it ultimately made no sense.

I recently re-saw The Graduate, a movie I also associate with my biologically misspent adolescence. I must have watched for the first time on our tv set in the basement of the house on Nielsen Court in November, 1973 – I looked up when it was shown on CBS and the date was November 8.  Seeing it now, I wonder if my misspending biology absorbed that beautiful California landscape – the 60s landscape, before it was swallowed up by a tide of housing, and that beautiful red Alfa Romeo speeding Ben towards Elaine at Berkeley – and had any premonition that the American wanderlust and wonder of the postwar prosperity would not last my lifetime. I know I wanted the life I saw in movies, contrasting it with the soggy Georgia hills of my suburban Clarkston neighborhood, where everything seemed so slow. Now, of course, I return to Atlanta and marvel that the metro is so multi-culty, so arboreal, so pretty, and I read my lifeline into the trees I see. And somewhere in that lifeline was Watergate, as it pinged on the radar of one little white male adolescent.

This is the personal sublime, the comparison of the tiny firefly light of my existence with the impersonal grandeur of a politics that I can, I know, do nothing about. Ben in his diving suit is still a striking image from The Graduate, but my empathy, my identity focus, is much more on Mrs. Robinson and her eyes, the way she looks there, lying on her side in bed, listening and not listening to Ben’s nasal patter.