http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0321-27.htmQuestioning Authority is our Patriotic Duty
by Judith Krieger
My sons have asked what it was like to be a child of the’60s and’70s, an era that precipitated the swing of the proverbial pendulum we are now living through. Fashion, of course, has come full circle and there is a resurgence of some of the sartorial blunders of that time. One generation often looks back over its collective shoulder to imitate a part of the past it likes. In this case, though, clothing may be the only thing they’ve found which merits imitation.
I grew up with the smoke, anger and euphoria of civil rights battles still hanging in the air. The nightly news was replete with scenes of the jungles in Vietnam and reports from journalists who still had the mud and fatigue of battles clinging to them. Kill ratios and body counts were part of the language of every broadcast. I used to wonder back then what filled the evening news before the war filled the screen night after night.
The women’s movement was gaining momentum and the ERA, ratified in 1972, got 22 of the necessary 38 state ratifications that first year. Girls finally got to play Little League Baseball and a black woman made the cover of a major fashion magazine. Religious leaders joined forces with Cesar Chavez to improve working conditions for migrant agricultural workers who earned Third World wages while working in this nation, the richest on earth. Students on campuses all over the world protested, and the term “anti-establishment” became the battle cry of youth. Colleges were citadels of broad-mindedness, then considered a strength, now regarded as tantamount to licentiousness and sometimes treason. The EPA came into existence under Republican leadership. Yet now environmentalists are tagged by conservatives as “eco-terrorists,” or “EPA Gestapo.”
One of the starkest contrasts in the “that was then, this is now” litany was provided by the Pentagon Papers and their revelation of government duplicity. Among other things, the papers revealed that 58,000 American soldiers and a million Vietnamese had died simply “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat” rather than for the sake of the Vietnamese or in the name of the prevailing Domino Theory. Though Daniel Ellsberg was charged with violating secrecy laws for releasing these papers to the public, his actions affirmed the essential principle of government accountability and the defining importance of an electorate that routinely questions authority.
And in a chaser to this event, Lt. William Calley, notwithstanding his plea that he had simply followed orders (and in deference to laws now considered quaint and outmoded), was imprisoned for killing 22 Vietnamese villagers. Headlines about Abu Ghraib 30 years later bear testimony that soldiers continue to be scapegoats for the failings of American foreign policy. Accountability remains a fluid concept.
Though we are once again waging war in a far-off land for reasons an administration has once again lied about, our screens are no longer filled with scenes of war and its consequences. Skepticism has been stifled in the name of supporting the troops and in deference to faux patriotism.
There are no more Daniel Ellsbergs. The investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein, of Watergate fame, has been replaced by the likes of Jeff Gannon, a fake reporter representing a fake news organization during a White House press conference. The press is not supposed to take the president’s word at face value. Reporters are adversaries, not advocates. The questioning of authority is an essential democratic value.
And last but certainly not least, whatever truth there is to be found will now be inaccessible. With executive order 13233, Bush has effectively sealed presidential records, the historical documents from the Reagan administration onward. Prior to now they were considered the property of the American people. Bush’s executive order has rendered them the private domain of presidents and their families and thus shielded from scrutiny by the public and historians alike.
For all their turbulence, those years of the’60s and’70s had the aura of a society that was working through some very hard questions, undeterred by fear and liberated from the constraints of convention. Now the questions are silenced by a society that seems ever more threatened by that most democratic of virtues, dissent.
Very true, this administration at first seemed to be effectively portraying criticism as unpatriotic, but it eventually has worn off, as opposition to Bush is SO strong right now.
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