St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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% Once the symbol of triumphant homecoming for American servicemen from a job well done, San Francisco’s Golden Gate soberly welcomed a new generation of soldiers from a job that... well, was simply done. 199 sigiereres ELST SSF

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With Not A Cheer, But A Sigh Good evening. I have asked this radio and television time tonight for the purpose of announcing that we today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. A nd so it was over. With Mr. Nixon’s spare words from the White House and two brief ceremonies in Paris, the nation began at last to extricate itself from a quicksandy war that had plagued four Presidents and driven one from office; that had sundered the coun- try more deeply than any event since the Civil War; that in the end came to be seen by a great majority of Americans as having been a tragic mistake. It was a wound to the spirit so sore that the news of peace stirred only the relief that comes with an end to pain. A war that produced no famous victories, no national heroes and no stirring patriotic songs, produced no memorable armistice-day celebrations either. America was too ex- hausted by the war and too chary of the peace to celebrate. In Wayne, Michigan, Mayor Patrick Norton interrupted a debate of the city council to ask if the councilmen would like to hear President Nixon’s speech on the set- tlement. They preferred to continue dis- cussing a proposed apartment building for senior citizens. “I thought it all very strange,” said the mayor. “We waited all these years for the war to be over, and then we were too busy to hear the announce- ment.” The Boston Globe commented that the war was concluded “not with a cheer but a sigh.” Its tension afflicted every corner of American life. It inflamed relations between the White House and Capitol Hill: the —President Nixon, January 23, 1973 leaders of Congress gave Mr. Nixon a stand- ing ovation at a briefing on the truce—and went back to an agenda including legislation to keep him or any other President from waging an undeclared war again. It infected the political process, reducing the Democrats from the landslide LBJ majority to the factionated and gloomy minority that went down with George McGovern. It ignited riots on the campuses, sent draft resisters in exile to Canada and deserters in flight to Sweden, produced a series of showcase conspiracy trials from Dr. Spock to the Chicago Seven to the Berrigans. It accelerated the growth of a counterculture turned off on America and turned on to rock, drugs, love, alienation and, sporadically, violence. It debased lan- guage, destroyed civility, reduced debate at moments to a shouting match between those who wore flags and those who burned them. It eroded the authority of institutions—not just the government but the universities, the churches and the military itself. Most of all, Vietnam drained America’s confidence in its ability to master its own problems. The Great Society was already a flickering dream when Mr. Nixon inherited it; the one sustaining hope of its architects was that it might be revitalized and advanced when the “Peace dividend”—the money America had been sinking in the war— became available. But the peace dividend has already disappeared into Mr. Nixon’s tight budget, and the pinched mood of America after Vietnam no longer favors spending for social change. The war has been even more chastening to the nation’s sense of what it can achieve in the world. The U.S. arrived in the °60’s committed by John Kennedy to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hard- ship ...to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It entered the 70’s with the Nixon doctrine—the greatly scaled down declaration that America will meet its obli- gations abroad but will expect its allies to do more for themselves. The Cold War assump- tions that involved the nation in Vietnam— the perception of Communism as monolithic and relentlessly expansionist—have yielded to the thaw with Moscow and Peking and an emerging three-way balance of power in the world. “We are not as omnipotent or as omnivictorious as we had been able to think we were up to now,” said historian Daniel J. Boorstin. The discovery may be a risky one if it leads America into isolation and retreat: it will be happy indeed if it means no more Vietnams. It was fitting that America’s celebration of the peace was not dancing in the streets but the cadenced tolling of church bells at the hour of the ceasefire. “How,” asked one saddened liberal in the ashes of America’s longest war, “do we accept the fact that, as a country, we re not innocent any more?” Compiled from reports in Time and Newsweek, February 5, 1973.

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The American Obsession With Fun I n John Barth’s The End of The Road, Jacob Horner describes a dream he once had in which, after several futile attempts to find out the weather fore- cast, he learns from the chief meteorologist that there simply will not be any weather the next day. He tells us about the dream in order to explain a particular state of mind that he often experiences, a state he has come to call “weatherless.” Though analogies be- tween moods and weather are commonplace, Horner questions their appropriateness in his case because a day without weather is almost impossible to imagine, and yet he frequently has days without any mood at all. At such times Horner is without a personality, is nonexistent in his own mind, except in the purely physical sense. He compares himself to those micro- scopic specimens that must be dyed before they can be seen: Horner needs to be colored by some mood or other in order to recognize himself. On his weatherless days he sits blankly in his rocking chair, rocking sometimes for hours until some external event colors him back into being . . . I have a friend, a teacher at a junior college in a large midwestern city, who sometimes suffers similar periods of weatherlessness. Her attacks are less severe and less pervasive than Jacob Horner’s: I think they are, in part, just a defense against being overwhelmed by modern urban living. Nevertheless, finding your- self in the company of someone who is in no mood at all is an unsettling experience. You just plain don’t know how to act, since nothing you say or do seems to matter. There is nothing to interact with, no mood, emotion, or viewpoint to oppose or compli- ment. You can’t cheer your friend up, because she’s not sad; you can’t convince her of anything, because she’s all too agreeable; and you can’t make her feel better, because she doesn’t feel bad. A few years ago, when I was visiting my friend during one of her weatherless bouts, I became exasperated and then saddened by my own helplessness in the situation. But as the weekend wore on, my sadness, interest- ingly enough; dissolved itself into moodlessness, too, so that finally the two of us sat there staring vacantly into space and feeling quite at home with each other... Well, the coincidental relationship among my friends and me and Jacob Horner and weatherlessness and Pepsi-Cola ads all came together in an intriguing way when I recently reread The End of the Road. | began to listen carefully to Pepsi ads and then to Coke ads, and, as is usually the case when advertising is analyzed, I learned much less about the products than about the public for which the ads are de- signed ... My friend and I knew instinctively to turn on the television that weatherless Saturday night, although neither of us is an avid viewer. I would venture to guess that the difference between us and many full- time TV addicts is that we were quite conscious of our moodlessness because, for us, it is a sometime thing. Those who lack the strength to live lives of | feeling, and in whom the sense of self is always ill- defined, are no doubt much less conscious of that state, although they may vaguely sense that some- thing is missing from their lives. The price they pay |. for avoiding the pain of being fully alive is that they are excluded from the pleasure of it as well. They are, therefore, always tempted by any promise of | pleasure, hoping that perhaps this time it will not elude them. I understood the most sinister aspect of the phenomenon Vance Packard termed “hidden persua- sion” when I began to consider what it might mean to be weatherless most of. the time and not even realize it. There is nothing obviously “hidden” about what the Pepsi ad is saying; in fact, upon close examination it is hard to believe how straightforward the words are. But the psychological success of the commercial depends upon a lack of self-awareness in the viewer. For while it gives the impression of appealing to the “living” and those with a “‘zest for life,” the ad is actually aimed at the “dead” who experience so little pleasure that they need something to help them “come alive.” A complex and subtle use of the concept of love lies behind the familiar Coca-Cola commercial in which young people from all over the world are brought together on a hilltop in Italy, where they sing (in perfect harmony): I'd like to teach the world to sing In perfect harmony. I'd like to buy the world a Coke And keep it company. I find the appeal of this ad, the music combined with the idea of buying the world a Coke, almost irresistible, a fact that disturbs me when I consider its implications. For one thing, the ad embodies the all too American theory and practice of buying good will, friendship, or even love. This notion is so pervasive at every level of our society that it is pretty much taken for granted—and for some reason has always been neatly associated with Coca-Cola. I remember that when I was in junior high school, if a guy bought me a Coke it was the first sign he was “interested” in me; later, if the relationship turned out to be “the real thing,” he might ask you to go steady with him. The ad illustrates perfectly, if unintentionally, how this economic aspect of court- ship is projected onto the global plane in American foreign relations. We are always happy to buy the world a Coke if we believe that this will keep it in our “company ” rather than the Soviet Union’s or China’s. (I am incidentally reminded of that outrageous scene