I ran into my roommate Mike in front of the student union and he asked me if I was on my way to see the famous speaker there. I said I was interested in the guy’s work, but this was just a political rally. “You’ll be sorry if you miss the chance,” Mike said, so I went.
In 1967, Mike and I had materialized in the Ivy League from the arid plains of West Texas, lacking the strong anti-war sentiment then prevalent on campus. I thought of myself as apolitical. The military was emphasizing its air war and I pictured America’s adversaries as MiG pilots, vaguely sinister behind their oxygen masks. My memory is that when Mike and I heard that every enemy death was costing the U.S $10,000, we looked at each other wide-eyed — not with the indignation of fiscal conservatives, but with the ambition of budding entrepreneurs. I supposed that if our government was killing people, then they must have it coming.
In the Memorial Room that day I got a different picture — that America was killing subsistence farmers, not vanquishing an ideology. It began to sink in that we had no right to punish people for their nationality or even to tell them who their leaders should be; and that, as a citizen, I was responsible for my country’s actions.¹
A paper cup was passed around in the name of The Resistance, and I dropped my quarter in. The famous speaker, of course, was Noam Chomsky. He described a situation in which politicians, industries and institutions thrive on conflict and seek to perpetuate it. He would go on to impugn the media for their complicity in hiding the truth about those forces.
My two-bit contribution failed to end the war, but over the next decade the American people regained some control over their government. Two presidents left office before they might have. One was a public servant who admitted failure in conducting the war; the other had believed that his worth as a public servant justified illegal behavior. Americans began to understand that they needed to behave responsibly toward other people, and toward their planet. I thought I could relax a bit.
Six decades along, the U.S. is involved in a war that was unpopular even before its start. It is no longer just complicity that hides the truth. The public’s consent to the war in Viet Nam had been manufactured from ignorance of its particulars, by keeping truth away from the press. Walter Cronkite’s personal visit to Viet Nam, and the Watergate reporting by the Washington Post, helped to break the spell. Traditional media today can be silenced through the threat of regulation — or simply bought out. Neither the Post nor CBS is free of influence now. Social media shapes the beliefs of citizens. With the aid of Artificial Intelligence, Alternative Facts now fairly create themselves, and they’re amplified by the shouts of fictional users. Because lies can easily be made more interesting, or amusing, or infuriating than truth, they can command greater attention, and that attention is the product that Facebook sells.
The difficulty in locating the truth is a sign that something’s wrong. As long as our government treats its citizens like customers, and treats foreigners, wherever they are, like livestock, people around the world can see that we have lost our way. The Misinformation Age has left us with a president who would probably not consider himself a public servant at all. A leader who is immune to criticism is an autocrat regardless of election results. It would take many voices — in the streets, in Congress, and in the courts — to begin to undo the vandalism that our government has done to itself.
Joan Baez is still singing protest songs. Tom Paxton is still writing them.² And I’m marching again.
Note
1. Younger readers may be amazed to learn that, at the age of 19, in New York State, though I was old enough to buy alcohol, I was not yet old enough to vote.
2. “No Kings Here“