The story of the 1968 “Fuck the Draft” poster
dangerousminds.net
dangerousminds.net
This poster time warped me. Recalling my father saying while at the wheel of our Impala, "Look at that girl," to upset my older sibling. The boy had long hair like in the picture.
Teens and young adults died in a war. The news machine was all citizens had. I suppose you could say it was all fake news to some point but we never new any different. The draft was a ticket to potential death.
Now, anyone with a keyboard can publish anything and anyone with a phone can read it. No more Walter Cronkite or NYTimes to dish out news in a manner they believed was fit.
Growing up in a midwestern university town life meant you believed your happily married parents; They were conservative. Voices that disagreed had to be sought out. And it was very hard to do so. Like if you really didn't believe in the war or wanted to learn more. Where could you get it? Look, Life, Time, Newsweek? The Library? All forces with editors.
Now, we don't need them. We have Facebook to get others' thoughts; we have email to direct connect; we have web pages of groups positions; we can meet virtually. Want to know history, Google is my personal librarian.
While certainly an improvement over legacy media, are you not trading one information curator for another?
Say, for example, you wanted to know how your representative voted. Or, you wanted to see how other universities planned for the March on DC January 20? Or, you simply wanted to know the preamble to the Constitution (which we now have on our phone but I know my family didn't have that at home).
It's just so easy to get deeper and deeper into an echo chamber of ones own choosing.
On the other, these days the subject would be identified nearly right away and left vulnerable to retribution and abuse (both from authorities and "cyber bullies").
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/fuck_the_draft_the_amazin...
His NYT obituary omits the poster, but adds that he was a nationally ranked Scrabble player:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/28/us/kiyoshi-kuromiya-57-fig...
I wonder how soldiers or police from that era feel about the documentary. The soldiers clearly were ordered into a terrible war. The police can't be proud of their role either.
In some ways the documentary made me feel better about today's America; they survived, so can we. The parallels between the Nixon administration (and, frankly, the pro-war coverup parts of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) and today's administration are just amazing. On the other hand, it makes me sad to realize how much of today's mindsets are unchanged knee-jerk leftovers from that era. My dad is a Vet, and was actually on a carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin during the incident; fortunately his active duty service was complete shortly thereafter. He later came to realize the war made no sense, but I'm sure that many of the things the anti-war folks said would still hurt to this day. He's also had friends he served with who he's lost friendships with because they can't accept that someone could go from being in the military to being skeptical of these kinds of foreign interventions, and that the government isn't always right.
One thing I found really interesting was how well-received Americans are in Vietnam. Maybe it helps that communism ultimately fell apart so it seemed like we were 'right' all along, and looking out for their best interests-- but of course it wasn't their interests we cared about, and communism would have fallen apart on its own, likely without millions of deaths, if we hadn't gotten involved.
Communism caused more deaths where we weren't involved than where we were.
This is confounded; the areas where we had no influence had much larger populations. But it is indisputable that if we hadn't gotten involved at all, communism would still have caused many millions of deaths.
I, perhaps oddly, do not know how my relatives feel about the war or the Ken Burns documentary. Most flat out refuse to talk about those years. Perhaps that's not so odd, given the times and situations they faced both abroad and on coming home.
The folks I worked with, on the other hand, were pretty uniformly proud of the job they and their men did. They did not all agree with the politics surrounding the war, both in recent years as well as at the time, but being professionals, they did as they were ordered. Several of them, now professors of U.S. History, thought the Ken Burns' documentary was very well done, and reflected reality in a way that Hollywood never did or desired to. A couple of those professors include the Burns' documentary as part of their courses' curriculum.
I don't know if any of that helps with your curiosity.
Because then you have to really start thinking on your own plus you don't get the benefits of the army anymore. Comfort zone.
Individually, I'm sure there's plenty to be proud of. But as a group, they did a lot of terrible and evil things extremely well.
Since starting that documentary, when I've been thinking about large protests, I'm struck by how often the protestors are right. I know going forward it's going to change how I see big protests.
You could say the same for many of the"anti-war" movement. Individually there was a lot of concern and desire to do the right thing, but the context of the Vietnam war was it was also a civil war, and many people in Vietnam wanted to fight back against communists who had been doing some pretty awful things. So collectively, there was some undermining of resistance to them, and which also resulted in millions? of refugees and hundreds of thousands in life loss after the war.
Very few folks decided to return their passports and emigrate. People liked to blame the Army but everything that happened was in the name of the American people and by their leave.
"I didn't know" and "I thought it was a bakery" are poor excuses.
If Burns' documentary is correct, the government and military lied about pretty much all aspects of the war. If that wasn't the case, I would agree that the American people are to blame.
> Very few folks decided to return their passports and emigrate.
Thank goodness for that. The people that fought the most against the war may very well be the best Americans.
In the first Gulf War when we (the US) were bombing Iraq to take out the supposed weapons of mass destruction, I supported the action. I remember arguing with my sister that even though it might be wrong for the US to invade another country, removing Hussein's offensive capabilities was too important. The ends will justify the means! Boy, was I wrong. Again though, it was lying by the government, failures of the press, and failures of officials I trusted (esp. Colin Powell) that was the basis of my support.
I saw the band, the MC5 or Motor City Five, in concert many times in the sixties. They were the only band that were proceeded by a hype man before they came on stage. A guy did a long angry soliloquy that was designed to amp up the crowd and get them fighting mad. Not the same thing as defined in today's rap, but I believe they just adopted the term.
You'd have an entire auditorium of screaming angry kids and then the band would start playing fast and amp everyone even higher. The MC5 as a band kind of supernova'd, they had a few hits in a short amount of time and then just folded. But to fully understand their impact you had to see them live.
Lots of later artists cited them as an influence. I personally think that it is sad that they never got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Course Iggy Pop of The Stooges was from Muskegon, Michigan and if I remember correctly while living in Ann Arbor shared the stage with members of the MC5.
I'm sure your example got the audience way more than "warm" but I don't think it's something stand up comedians, MC5 or rap can take credit for.
To me, it is striking how history has repeated itself with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A war with: (1) no clear goal or victory criteria, (2) endless spending and major profiteering by the war industrial-complex and (3) low levels of support from the American people. It was very sad to, very clearly, draw the parallels between the two wars as the documentary progressed.
Also highly recommended after watching that is "Fog of War" - direct interviews with a Robert McNamara who tells all prior to his death. Very interesting to have such a candid retrospective with such a vital figure during the war.
It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes many utterances to change culture.
There are different classes of things that are "known" in society. What class something is in depends on a lot of different things, and funny things happen when they change class. There's a fairy tale about it: The Emperor Wears No Clothes. In that one, a kid makes unavoidable what everyone is thinking but afraid to say. Before the utterance, it was unthinkable to say it. After, it was unthinkable not to.
You can see this in play right now - there's that dynamic about the Weinstein trash fire, for instance. I think that was part of what was going on with the poster. It was shocking enough to be an instant conversation topic ("went viral"), and greased the rails a bit for people to admit to their peer groups that they opposed the war, too.
Ah the days before everybody voluntarily carried a tracking beacon in their pockets. The FBI would have no problem tracking him down these days.
I suppose most of them also were only there because they were forced into it, so that makes sense.
For its own sake? If everyone was satisfied, what would be wrong with the status quo?
Wow, how standards have slipped over the years...
You mean, how the standards have been appropriated by the mass culture behemoths trying to simplify history into easily digestible ad ridden programs.
Somewhere on the web there's a collection of some artist's B&W photogaphs of San Francisco hippies during the early-to-mid 60s when young people began flocking there. This is pre-Jefferson-Airplane SF, when the cool band was the Charlatans and the aesthetic was 19th century retro. People dressed up in ornate Victorian and/or cowboy clothes and looked like what we now call hipsters. There were radical street theater groups like the Diggers and whatnot. (There's a good article about this period here: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/lsd-drugs-summer-..., posted to zero effect by yours truly in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123525).
Anyhow, there are tons of pictures in that collection of kids in sleeping bags, or playing guitar, or sitting on the floor of apartments in the Haight. Everyone's hair is short by later standards, looking much like the guy in the poster. The apartments look the same as they do now, except with less furniture. It's a brilliant collection. I wish I could see it again, but it's lost in the sands of my memory, and of course Googling for hippie photos just brings up layers of dreck.
I note that the musical Hair came out in 1967.
It's hard to fathom that what is now the normal-young-person look used to be so radical. Or that it was forged in a handful of years, an astonishingly short time. That's another thing about the photo collection I mentioned: to our eye, the kids all look normal. Deviant social experiment is the last thing that comes to mind.