A Woman Non-WarriorOne Girl's Images and Memories Living thru Wars, Dubious Peaces and Politics at Home in Boston By Jane Holtz Kay My father's army cap hangs over the edge of my bedroom mirror. It tilts catty-corner, a perpetual doffing of the hat --and a half-century old memorial. A fitting shrine, I think, as I cast an eye on the jaunty shape, the leather strap and gold eagle pin. Now more than two generations old, its indented khaki crown seems almost anthropomorphic, saluting his life in two wars and his early death in peace time, six weeks before the granddaughter named for him was born, and named "Jacqueline" for his 'Jackson.' How this overage lawyer and politician, this family man who never raised his voice and "couldn't hit a hat with a hammer," as the saying went, wound up in Army Ordnance involved with munitions is one of life's, or war's, mysteries. But the fact that this political activist and American-born son of the holocaust volunteered for the post surprised no one who knew him.
Soon enough, the army defined my father's Boston duties as permanent and we settled into our own digs in Dorchester, a rather less-orderly two-family house-or, in the Boston vernacular, a two-decker. Here, a short walk from Frederick Law Olmsted's bucolic Franklin Park, my parents noted my growing inches as I posed against the trunk of an ample tree on weekends. Weekdays, he continued to make the daily trek to the long concrete spine of the Boston Army Base building, as he would throughout the war. As time passed, my lieutenant father would become a captain on the homefront and my younger sister's arrival would make our family a foursome a few months before Pearl Harbor. Still, war never entered my consciousness in any frightening manner, as I recall. Although my father could mix zany moments dancing and singing for his children one moment--and inculcate us in the forensic skills of his youth by insisting that we "Speak Up!" the next--he never talked about his own war work. Neither then, nor later, did his military occupation enter our lives, as I recall, except for a passing mention that he could buy soap and toothpaste in the army base canteen despite wartime shortages. Not til later did we hear of our Polish cousin in the French underground; only vaguely did we know of the fate that would have met his other relatives had my father's mother, our German-born grandmother, not fetched them to these shores. Perhaps, the silence was to shelter his family: home was home, war...war...and the angst and outbursts from his upbringing by this stern and intrepid immigrant (who later made her summer income playing poker with 'the boys')caused him to long for a far calmer wife and quietude at home. Either way, for all the injunctions of the morale-building posters of the period that "loose lips sink ships" and to "Buy War Bonds," we remained innocent of the world at war. Far less so, it now seems to me, than other, older Americans, persuaded to do their bit at home by the era's bold and colorful images and posters. Seen today, Yet, even these advertisements possess a cheerful façade, far removed from our own image-packed era of ferocity spread on the front page and made mobile by tv's cruel veracity.
Another world, indeed, from the modern media's gripping and explosive battle scenes marked World War II artists "drafted" for the job. Vogue's Alexander Lieberman offered a "United WE win" message while other posters showed Philco workers supporting the war effort. Even the fierce but static "Avenge December 7" posters marking Pearl Harbor seemed tame compared to the Middle East explosions brought into our homes and doorsteps so vividly. How remote, too, a second show: the Smithsonian's revival of World War II posters and postcards for buffs and commemorators, all primary-colored images, and injunctions that "We Can Do It." How different, yet again, their vivid stock of World War II visuals preachings that "loose-lips sink ships" compared to the patriotic sermons in this -what?-oil war? this war without cause or conclusion. For all the datedness, the coy nature of the images, they still appeal with their intense colors and husky Normal Rockwellian characters. For all the saccharine imagery (the portrait of a cocker spaniel resting his head on his bygone master's sailor uniform, gold star inscribed "...because somebody talked!")... the advertisements seem more reassuring than chilling. Yet, warmongering seems frightening eternal in the poignant and fearsome image of a group of youngsters standing on the grass under the shadow of a swastika with the injunction "Don't Let That Shadow Touch Them...BUY WAR BONDS." My sister and I, innocents of war--she a baby, then toddler; I not much more--were oblivious of even these calendar images. Not til later, did even the most memorable figure insistently pointing that "Uncle Sam Wants You" become a staple. We lived in what now seems a bygone age of non-media naïveté: neither knowledgeable nor fearful of events at hand. Like others with whom I have shared memories: it was a surreal age of innocence. In the same way that my mother pulled down the air raid blackout curtains with so little fanfare that fear never entered my memory, she and my grandmother managed to secure food from the butcher or gas for the car without imbuing us with a sense of scarcity. Although kindergarten started me and my classmates on the way to buying stickers, pasted in small cardboard books for war bonds, the grim news of the day was inaudible in our household, leaving neither wounds, nor memories of wartime in this postered, but still pre-media, age. So, too, my wartime homefront memories would consist of a bright light cast on bad days in my father's cheerful dubbing of me and my younger sister as soldiers or, more precisely, as "Officers of the day" -a bonus for good behavior, uttered with a salute. Indeed, my first recollection of bad news, or, indeed, any news on the air waves came long after the end of World War II with the death of Roosevelt. Listening to the radio announcer describing people crying on the streets, my first media-bred tears came pouring forth at the still young age of seven, long after D-Day or the events on the killing fields of war. While my father commuted on the homefront, my uncle volunteered for the air force in 1943, partly to elude the army draft. Off he went with his young red-headed wife for 13 months of training, before service on the European front. Today, both in their mid-eighties, look like babe in arms when I survey their photo on my wall: my uncle in uniform, my aunt wearing a flippy skirt. It is hard to think that these oldsters standing before the fabled B17 bomber (then younger than my children and now too savvy and political to do other than decline the title of "the greatest generation") would be in the thick of the bloodiest air battles of the day. How could my uncle Mike, the calm-tempered, funny, political peer (and tennis player) of my adolescence, the thoughtful reader of my adulthood, face the roll call of his slaughtered unit, "the "Bloody Hundredth," in the vernacular of the time? How could his vibrant wife, my aunt Charlotte, still lively and nurturing, deal with the fiercesome casualties of his afflicted unit-- immortalized by Hollywood's Memphis Belle for its fierce combat, heroism and high death count. I can hardly imagine the wait and watch of these soldier-youngsters, these dwindling pilots whose planes he navigated and whose casualties he managed to outlive. How can I and others still enjoy black and white re-runs of Hollywood's black and white, bloodless-looking military cliché of "manly" movies-all those heroic "He"-man war films that deny that the boys of war are the true heroes and victims of the assemblyline of war -destined to never die for all their derringdo in the tales turned over and over on Turner Classic movie re-runs for the nostalgic and -what?--sentimental warriors of our media age? Although my father never left the closed circle of our Boston family as he served his obligatory years, the war lingered in his life. His version of "never again" was to become National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans....thereby demonstrating his race's eloquence, intellect and (should I say?) his "Aryan," or as we said in Boston, his "ivy league" features, to a nation scarred by its indifference (at best) to the fate of his co-religionists. Still, if my father was through with the army and heading back to the law, the army wasn't through with him. For his sins of volunteering, he was drafted, yet again, "as a critical specialist" in another kind of battle, the Korean War, from 1950 to '53 as a "critical specialist." A "critical specialist" at what we wondered, laughing wryly? It was yet another misfit term, weirdly at odds with his absence of mechanical skill at home, not to mention his sedentary schooling in journalism and the practice of law and politics. How he later became a "light" (i.e. lieutenant) colonel bemused my family even then--though this slight compensation seemed ironic payment for the stops and starts of his career to "serve his country," as the saying went. In a period that I can only call peace-at-home for us children of the hot war and that others call "the greatest generation," he did more than his share. Discharged at last, he renewed the long struggle back to the law. Picking up both his legal profession and the remains of his earlier political life as a state representative, this lone American-born member of his family of refugees (all of whom were deprived of American nutrition and hence heads shorter than he) resumed his pre-marital Democratic activism: first to help manage the campaign of the young World War II hero and Congressman in our district, John F. Kennedy. Performing his campaign duties after work hours, he had the dual jobs of undercutting the current republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's secure standing as a friend to Israel, while simultaneously undermining the anti-semitic stain left by the candidate's founding father, Joseph Kennedy. The young and glamorous Jack won the contest handily and the rest is history. (Still later, in my father's own campaign for congress, this heritage worked otherwise. When his Republican opponent, Lawrence Curtis, married to the heiress of the Hershey chocolate company paying the bills for the new political medium of television and the old-fashioned one of hand-painted billboards at $2000 a shot, nonetheless seemed near defeat, the Curtis campaign acted. Pursuing a pre-election day phone campaign, his hired callers dialed through the list of democrats in the wards of the Irish Catholic community in Roslindale, Hyde Park and Jamaica Plain, offering an early preview of the Nixon tricksters who had joined the Republican congressman's team. "We're calling from the Jackson Holtz congressional campaign," quoth they. "He was national commander of the Jewish War Veterans," they offered in those appropriate districts, thereby coding his religious status sufficiently to deprive him of the scant 2000 votes by which he lost the election.)
The first World War was a war at home with America's backyard gardeners growing the nation's produce, all those rows of carrots and trellises of tomatoes. The second World War was a war of rationing as well as garden plots and shortages. A war at home, as well, of women replacing their brethren at work (think Goldie Hawn on the assemblyline in Swing Shift). Recall, too, the news in two-dimensional headlines (think newspaper articles not explosive images lighting today's tv screens). Korea seemed a distant battle, Vietnam an atrocity made immensely visible. But Iraq? After 9/11 and WMDs gone missing...glut amidst an oil war...home-bought Hummers...purchased by the world's super-spenders in a starved universe. How describe these new days and ways? Terror from a battle without name, how do we label these desperate and destructive hours? What war? Or, more pertinently in this hour: when and what peace?. If ever... The smog of peace? The fog of war? Or is it the reverse. The great social divide of the Vietnam war plucked the poor and left the cozy middle classes quietly at home, barely noting that those doomed youngsters in that desperate battle had little in common with their age peers in this skewed age of affluence and poverty. The non-college-bound home boys from "the projects" not far from our last home in comfortable Brookline...the recruits looking for a check to college or a career, have their heirs in the new Middle East war recruits coaxed by visions of cherry plum colleges, technical training and brief stays. Unlike the veterans of the "greatest generation's" battle, they will be unlikely to find a GI Bill for school or mortgage benefits for housing in the pockets of their flak jackets at the end of a tour of duty. Nor even a near end, as demands for their renewal and lures for re-enlistment grow. As the nation celebrated this last Memorial Day, such questions prevented much commemoration of a new "Good War"-- World War II-as marketed by today's Washington's warrior regime. Gone was any sense of the evil-doing enemy of prior wars. Shattering the Silence, Illuminating the Hatred, Arthur Miller had called even World War II, our most sanctified war. "Wherever one looked, the straight lines went crooked," Miller called the doings of the "greatest generation." "World War II was several wars," he went on. It was complex-- not all stars and stripes, as the posters suggested, when Roosevelt, the "friend of the Jews," ignored a ship bearing 100 refugees from Germany, the minimal allotment under the two percent "Slavs" slot, to enter America, Miller wrote. Yet, the images of the veterans memorializing last spring made an even more complex battle in Iraq still more complex. For the times they are a' changing through the newly diffused imagery of battle. The Iraq war's observers, young and old alike, were awash with far more striking and immediate visual matter. The explosive shots of planes high in the air and smashed to smithereens; the vistas of tanks on the ground and Humvees tipped over culminated in the violent acts and attacks on prisoners of war, flashed on the tv and the newspapers. What once seemed a distant televised toy war of planes without victims; and tanks and smashed palaces and idols in picturesque flames on the ground dissolved into the images of horror and torture as the lenses closed in on Abu Ghraib's victims. Those tortured men. Those naked warriors from the other side pulled, animal like, on the ground. Those fierce perpetrators, male and female, those views of limbs and wired bodies capped with a sorcerer's black magic hat. No greatest generation, no good war or "war to make the world safe for democracy" but a contrived oil war whose horrors were set before the eyes of all the little children at the tvs...of the families...the concerned parents, the angry "patriots" or partisans via the new age of imagery from abroad. Forget the rebuttals and reassurances from a president chosen by fraud and the will of the minority as the election nears. The duplicity and denial from above does not blind the new audience to what it sees. We need no memorandum to remind us of Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message," to add to the vicious re-play on television for the young and oldsters watching atrocities from their Lazy Boys. Once, we had, and enjoyed, the imagery of John Wayne and the "Battle of the Bulge," then, came the Brits in the "Bridge over the River Quay." Even "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Apocalypse Now" were kept to the movie screen. Not til late in the saga of wars abroad, did the nightly news on television and its ghastly images bring the face of this war to today's nation of children and grandchildren to tarnish the glow of the maple leaves and be-ribboned pins on the khaki jackets. And one thing more: As Memorial Day came more images tried to stamp a new space to celebrate the old "good" war, World War II. Alas, the events celebrating an older era of military commemoration staged in Washington this spring with the opening of a new Veterans Memorial seemed sculpted from a kit of Nazi parts, a neo-fascist mockery of monumental art. The media sated with the real war looking for some glorification of past wars, the soldiers seeking another Vietnam Wall, perhaps, had only the clunky, bombastic artifact created for the celebrating generation's "Good War." Those who cared about imagery found the monument by Friedrich St. Florian, reminiscent of the work of the imperial fascist symbols of Albert Speer, Hitler's own architect. In the midst of the Iraq mêlée that no one calls a good war or even a real war, World War II vets got a new monument to celebrate bygone heroes in an aesthetic form which could only cast aspersions on the "peace-mongers" among us. The veterans came to Washington on Memorial day for the celebratory reasons of any reunion, of course; but more formally, to pay tribute to this new National World War II Memorial. Be damned the aesthetician's criticism of the structure's architecture that stands as far afield from the Vietnam war's beloved wall as democracy from totalitarianism. This semi-circle monument of hardedge stones turned the landscape of the nation's treasured Mall-its spacious lawn into an obscenity, destroying the historic legacy of America's most important trio of buildings at each axis: the Capitol, and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. A public space formed by a triumphant trio re-playing Mein Kampf militarism filled the hallowed space.
Wars are won, the cliché says, in the hearts and minds of beholders through images and slogans. Perhaps, it is the singular contribution of this odious war to bring the bestiality abroad to our hearts and minds through cyberspace... There we are flopped on our livingroom sofas. There they are: the exploded tanks, the rent walls, the Humvees, the planes in flame, the victims of war's inevitability. But more: the victims of torture depicted and spread before our eyes: all hoods and wires and coiling heaps of bodies in the prison camps...for an oil war, the black gold of a technological society destroying the planet it fuels through global warming. "Where are you going in your shiny car in the dark night," Jack Kerouac asked Americans in the classic utterance. Where are we going in a way of life and war that fuels us and creates an environmental destruction so deep that it outweighs the grim cruelty of war itself. In my collection of slides, I have a picture of an automobile driven by a derbied citizen sitting in a convertible. Next to him, the white outline of the Fuehrer is sketched out: "When you drive alone, you drive with Hitler," says the poster promoting the saving of gas. The slide always draws a laugh, if a slightly horrified one, when I show it. But what we get from these new photos on our tv screens, is the screaming horror of the true crime of war. These shrill visual statements are unforgettable, an ironic reversal of the movie "shots" and Hollywood stories when our parents and grandparents sat glued to films of the war abroad in railroad station movie houses now gone. Unlike the images of wartime lovers meeting in the lofty terminal of Grand Central Station --or the nostalgic posters, the photos and khaki cap that fill my home---these images on the tv screen and in the press tell the real tale in this intervention for oil abroad and an Oligarchy at home. No smog of war, no fog of a faux search for peace or Iraqi autonomy can alter the image of our oil nation as anything other than the myopic and villainous maneuvers of the head of state. World War II's imagery was famous for the much-replicated statue of the men raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The Iraq War's surreal visual commemoration was the Los Angeles Times' Memorial Day editorial page. Its cartoons of pseudo-memorials included a crumbling arch draped with a row of slabs titled "Holograms of Weapons of Mass Destruction," a memorial column topped off with "bronze chicken hawks," and a "quicksand reflecting pool." The caustic comics are the new reality, light years away from the heroic sculptures and commemorations promoted by the White House war gang and the Diogenestic search for more oil to feed our fat four-wheel lifestyle through this carbon war. Will this escalating geopolitical, pictorial reality hit the "home front" and reverse the momentum of the military honchos in the White House to deal with the real issues of the day. Will we address the inanity of this battle for black gold and sense of the fragility of the planet and battle spilling from the pundits and publishers, simmering through the culture as environmentalists and books like Red Sky at Morning, Feeling the Heat, and The Boiling Point raise the temperature of the simmering public consciousness to the cost of this oil war. No anonymous Vietnam Wall here to let each watcher find a quiet moment, no shared space where each may find his or her own lost soldier in the endless script. Instead, our imagery gave us proof of a cruel country and these schlocky and overblown stone symbols in a memorial that mutes the well-meaning and encourages the boisterous militants of the ruthless command team in the White House and the Pentagon. For the most part, the nation at home and the nation at war were in a less-than-commemorative mood as early summer's Memorial Day lapsed into still more memorials of lost causes and lost lives built or planned from mid-America to Brooklyn in these ensuing months. And the tip of my father's hat, and the tilt of our children's lives, lean towards an uncertain tomorrow. The above memoir/recollections, written in the spring of 2004, are in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
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Commuting daily to the South Boston army base from our home on American Legion Highway, the local Jewish landing port in Dorchester, clueless as to where the next command would carry him after Pearl Harbor launched the war, this new recruit moved our threesome to my maternal grandparents' home in upscale Brookline. All chatter and clutter, our arrival clearly changed my grandmother's pristine ways of housekeeping. A cleaner with a vengeance, her dust and polish pattern was so fastidious, the story goes, that she would retrieve the matches that my father deposited above the molding on the doorway to test her dusting skills. Every day was a veritable Sabbath day of scrubbing in her house.
A former art critic, I thought of the vivid, sometimes homey imagery of these early posters recently when our world was once more inflamed as the Iraqi war inflated Memorial Day and D-Day's television and newspaper coverage. "Revisiting the Drama of the Longest Day," and The New York Times played out the imagery of war in public. Not just in newsprint either. Moved by a new wartime, institutions hereabouts pulled out the old posters and art work for a new generation at war. "Inspiring the Work Force," the spring exhibition at the otherwise rather staidly historical Boston Athenaeum called its World War II posters. There in the venerable library, Norman Rockwell's folksy fundraising images depicted Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms." Sent traveling to 28 cities to raise funds for World War II bonds in their day, these homespun posters brought back a more benign invocation than today's ferocious visuals of war...and gore.
How-almost-quaint these gestures of private and public life, of war and peace, now seem. How immune we were, I think as I survey today's latterday militarism and politics in the oil war of the Middle East, the battle of the caves and catastrophe abroad. The violence and misdeeds sent spinning through the media and its images of Iraq a'flame devastated the nation in a new daily way of witnessing war creating a new kind of war at home as well. Even as we lived what might be described as peace on the home front, the slaughter immersed young and old with a new fierceness. A vivid, pictorial, televised war flashed from the screen's in the nation's livingroom, offering the most graphic images of the century, pictures that were bound to leave a-what?-- more hardened, more cognitive, more ferocious generation than its forebears?
Do such images matter? Moving into the new visual genre of the popular press and the still more pervasive television screen, a war founded on a thirst for oil, accelerated by a lie of "discovery" and marked by bloody mayhem has imprinted the grimmest, and most widespread public images of the face of war on our media nation. The black and white films, the outpouring images of Abu Ghraib's collapsed bodies, and coiled limbs, of hooded victims, and their abusers, are portraits drawn from a Dante's Inferno of real life. Way beyond the vague picturesque dirge of a grim Breugel village, these savage acts of sinful commission, impossible to hide from the homefront in times past, are now captured and transmitted for all. Alerted by the look of obscenity, will they repulse-and change--the nation's conscience or commitment?