An article by Gail Collins and another by Seymour Hersh this past week had me more excited than the arrival of spring itself.
The Collins article was about the effort to have a woman's face on a new US twenty-dollar bill, to replace Andrew “Indian Fighter” Jackson. She mentions some good possibilities – she would like to see Gloria Steinem there, among others – and her readers suggested many interesting and worthy women. Emily Dickinson – my own choice – was mentioned a few times. Can you imagine Emily Dickinson on the twenty-dollar bill? With a line from poem 788?
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price.
Then there was the appearance of the Seymour Hersh article in the March 30, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, entitled The Scene of the Crime: A reporter's journey to My Lai and the secrets of the past. The article is a review and update of that crime of 16 March 1968, which can never be “put behind us,” thanks to him.
Hersh tells how he once spoke at a college in Minnesota where Hubert Humphrey was teaching:
After my speech, Humphrey asked to talk to me. “I’ve no problem with you, Mr. Hersh,” he said. “You were doing your job and you did it well. But, as for those kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’” Humphrey’s fleshy, round face reddened, and his voice grew louder with every phrase. “I say, ‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’”
Humphrey's statement resonates with much of my seventy-year experience of living in the USA and thinking about its history. The US has committed these almost unimaginable crimes that are still here, beneath the surface. The Viet-Nam itself war is one of them, so egregious that very few now openly deny it. But there is some level on which at least half the country is still holding on to the Humphrey-like resentment toward those who did everything they could to stop the war and fought for the awareness.