“The Child Buyer” is a clever send-up, with humor far from
lighthearted. Fifteen years after Hersey did firsthand research for his
book “Hiroshima,” the Cold War had America by the throat. The child
buyer (whose name, as if anticipating a Bob Dylan song not to be
written for several more years, is Mr. Jones) tells the senate panel
that his quest is urgent, despite the fifty-year duration of the
project. “As you know, we live in a cutthroat world,” he says. “What
appears as sweetness and light in your common television commercial of
a consumer product often masks a background of ruthless competitive
infighting. The gift-wrapped brickbat. Polite legal belly-slitting.
Banditry dressed in a tux. The more so with projects like ours. A
prospect of perfectly enormous profits is involved here. We don’t
intend to lose out.”
And what is the project for which the child will be bought? A
memorandum, released into the hearing record, details “the methods used
by United Lymphomilloid to eliminate all conflict from the inner lives
of the purchased specimens and to ensure their utilization of their
innate equipment at maximum efficiency.”
First comes solitary confinement for a period of weeks in “the
Forgetting Chamber.” A second phase, called “Education and
Desensitization in Isolation,” moves the process forward. Then comes a
“Data-feeding Period”; then major surgery that “consists of ‘tying off’
all five senses”; then the last, long-term phase called “Productive
Work.” Asked whether the project is too drastic, Mr. Jones dismisses
the question: “This method has produced mental prodigies such as man
has never imagined possible. Using tests developed by company
researchers, the firm has measured I.Q.’s of three fully trained
specimens at 974, 989, and 1005...”
It is the boy who brings a semblance of closure on the last day of
the hearing. “I guess Mr. Jones is really the one who tipped the
scales,” the child explains. “He talked to me a long time this morning.
He made me feel sure that a life dedicated to U. Lympho would at least
be interesting. More interesting than anything that can happen to me
now in school or at home.... Fascinating to be a specimen, truly
fascinating. Do you suppose I really can develop an I.Q. of over a
thousand?”
But, a senator asks, does the boy really think he can forget everything in the Forgetting Chamber?
“I was wondering about that this morning,” the boy replies. “About
forgetting. I’ve always had an idea that each memory was a kind of
picture, an insubstantial picture. I’ve thought of it as suddenly
coming into your mind when you need it, something you’ve seen,
something you’ve heard, then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out,
then maybe it comes back another time. I was wondering about the
Forgetting Chamber. If all the pictures went out, if I forgot
everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky?
Back home, around my bed, where my dreams stay?”
Suppression of inconvenient memory often facilitated the trances
that boosted the work of the Pentagon. But some contrary voices could
be heard.
Lenny Bruce wasn’t a household name when he died of a morphine
overdose in August 1966, but he was widely known and had even performed
on network television. His nightclub bits, captured on record albums,
satirized the zeal of many upstanding moralistic pillars. One of
Bruce’s favorite routines described a visit to New York by top holy men
of Christianity and Judaism. They go to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral:
“Christ and Moses standing in the back of Saint Pat’s. Confused, Christ
is, at the grandeur of the interior, the baroque interior, the rococo
baroque interior. His route took him through Spanish Harlem. He would
wonder what fifty Puerto Ricans were doing living in one room. That
stained glass window is worth nine grand! Hmmmmm...”
In what turned out to be his final performances, Bruce took to reciting
(with a thick German accent) lines from a poem by the Trappist monk
Thomas Merton — a meditation on the high-ranking Nazi official Adolf
Eichmann. “My defense? I was a soldier. I saw the end of a
conscientious day’s effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw
every Jew burned and turned into soap. Do you people think yourselves
better because you burned your enemies at long distances with missiles?
Without ever seeing what you’d done to them?”
We saw butterflies turn into bombers, and we weren’t dreaming. The
1960s had evolved into a competition between American excesses, with
none — no matter how mind-blowing the psychedelic drugs or wondrous the
sex or amazing the music festivals — able to overcome or undermine what
the Pentagon was doing in Southeast Asia. As journalist Michael Herr
observed in Vietnam: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with
total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was
devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” At the
same time that Woodstock became an instant media legend in mid-August
1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of
America’s war machinery. The gathering of 400,000 young people at an
upstate New York farm implicitly — and, for the most part,
ineffectually — rejected the war and the assumptions fueling it. Jimi
Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was an apt soundtrack
for U.S. foreign policy.
Days after the November 2004 election, while U.S. troops again moved
into Fallujah for the slaughter, a dispatch from that city reported on
the front page of the New York Times: “Nothing here makes sense, but
the Americans’ superior training and firepower eventually seem to
prevail.”
Superior violence, according to countless scripts, was righteous and
viscerally satisfying. Television and movies, ever since childhood,
presented greater violence as the ultimate weapon and final fix,
uniquely able to put an end to conflict. Leaving menace for dead — you
couldn’t beat that. But at home in the USA and far away, the practical
and moral failures of violence became irrefutable. In Iraq, sources of
unauthorized violence met with escalating American violence. In the
United States, war opponents met with presidential contempt.
In a short story, published one hundred years ago, William Dean Howells wrote: “What a thing it is to have a country that
can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”
Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with
America’s Warfare State” was published this month. For more
information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com
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