RECALLING REBA MAE

Reba Mae on her 50th wedding anniversary

 May is my mother Reba Mae’s month. Her birthday and Mother’s Day are within a few short days of each other. I began writing this on the eve of her birthday. The idea was to publish it on her day, May 16^th. But as often happens with a piece like this, it took a lot more thought and effort than expected, when the idea first popped into my head.

She would have been one hundred two this year. And she would have been aghast. She was already wondering “how she’d gotten so damned old” when she was seventy. In July, it will be twenty-two years since her death. I’ve always wished she had decided to stay a little longer.

It’s not like she was vain, though. I mean regarding the age thing. On the contrary, she was self-conscious, even self-effacing. She thought of herself as “so big and ugly and awkward” and felt that small-boned, petite women like my wife were really fortunate. She said she always felt like “such a big, clumsy, German cow” around them. At social gatherings, which she was loath to attend, she sought to “stay out of the way,” and blend with the wallpaper, unless she could be of use in the kitchen, in which case she would withdraw to that safe haven and remain there for as long as possible.

Her shyness garnered her a reputation—in general but particularly in my father Whitie’s patently verbose family—as “tight-lipped”. As in, “a tight-lipped kraut,” coming as she did from the Weber-Lenninger clan. They were hardy rural folk who were more prone to action than to talk. They knew what they knew and the rest was “none of their damn business.” Despite that fact, if someone managed to coax her out of her self-conscious trance, they would be surprised to find a woman with a fun-loving, even zany bent, somebody highly articulate, with a sharp wit and often even sharper tongue.

Age 18.

Reba Mae was beautiful. I mean that literally. Not because she was my mother. I mean, I’m not being a dutiful son here, not like some guys I’ve known who would say their mother was beautiful even if she looked like Winston Churchill. I’m saying it as  someone who has always been able to deeply appreciate the artistic and aesthetic value of beautiful women. Usually not the ones widely touted as beautiful—certainly not the plastic Barbies—but the ones with a rare natural beauty, with uncommon traits, and the ones whose inner beauty forms an inseparable part of their outer attraction.

She was, I suppose, a clear product of the rural Ohio of her time. A mix of the German and Scots-Irish bloods that prevailed in the state back then, but, according to accounts from her mother’s family, with a dose of Native American blood to temper her European genes. She put her prominent cheekbones, thick, dark hair, and almond-shaped eyes down to that heritage. Those eyes were indescribable. On her driver’s license they figured as “grey”, But that doesn’t begin to describe their color, which I can best depict as “varied”. They changed with the light, and the conditions of the surroundings—sometimes grey, sometimes green, sometimes blue and sometimes almost violet.

Reba Mae and older brother
Gene (right) with Father and
mother (Vern and Myrtle), and 
two younger siblings, Ken and
Marilyn

That Native streak was said to come from Great-Grandpa Job Cavinder’s side of the family. Although proud of it, no one in the family that I know of has ever produced proof of our ties to the Indians, nor is anybody very sure of the tribal origin of our alleged predecessors. But the most plausible story concocted so far has pointed to the possibility that Job’s mother, “Zura” (called that because she hailed from Missouri), who was a Kennedy, may have been the daughter of a Native American mother and an Irish immigrant father.

Whatever the case may be, Reba Mae ascribed to that family theory and said it was the reason for the apparent “Indian traits” in her Aunt Ruth, her Uncle Jesse, her brother Gene, and even her own mix of Teutonic and supposedly Native features. Whatever the case might be, it was a winning combination.

As I say, Reba Mae was of rugged rural stock. Folks on both her father’s side and her mother’s farmed for a living. Her father was a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Germany. As his daughter,  Reba Mae grew up in the rural Ohio of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when there were few frills. Even fewer since she was raised on a series of three tenant farms that her father operated for a major local landholder, also of German descent, Charles Herbst.

Oddly enough—thanks to relatively advanced telecommunications in the two counties (Auglaize and Shelby) where the farms were located—her family always had a phone, but never had electricity or running water until they moved to town when she was a teen. The toilet was “out back”, water came from a well through a handpump in the kitchen, meals were cooked on a wood-burning range, baths were taken in a tub in the kitchen with water heated on the woodstove, and Reba Mae did her homework by the light of a coal oil lamp.

That spartan lifestyle made Reba Mae cringe at any suggestion of things “rustic” throughout her adult life. She coveted modern conveniences and if she was traveling, she wanted good hotels with comfortable beds and proper linen sheets. The word “camping” didn’t form part of her vocabulary. And she found nothing “charming” about the log cabins we stayed in when we vacationed on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she was, of course, the only one who knew how to build a proper fire in the pot-bellied stove.

Despite that, she remained in intimate touch with nature, and made sure that her children developed a deep appreciation of their natural surroundings. She knew the names of every tree, plant and flower, and those of the many birds of rural Ohio, and she knew the traits and habits of a wide range of animals, both wild and domesticated.

Reba Mae (right of the teacher in the second row
from the top), with her class at the one-room
Lennox School in Auglaize County

Reba Mae was a good student and, like her mother, loved to read. She was an assiduous patron of the Auglaize County Library from the time she moved to town, and for her entire life after that. But she also frequently joined book clubs and loved to visit bookstores. In her latter years, she read upwards of fifty books annually.

Before she moved to town and enrolled in Wapakoneta’s Blume High School, she received her education at a series of one-room schoolhouses. These were typically sturdy red-brick buildings about the size of a small family home. Prior to the advent of regular school bus routes, schools went to the children rather than the children traveling to schools. With the proliferation of buses, bigger more centralized schools could be built and rural children could be bused to them. But from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the one-room schoolhouse was the solution for ensuring that rural children received basic, compulsory education.

Back then, there were about two hundred one-room schoolhouses in Auglaize County alone. The idea was for schoolkids to never be more than two miles away from one. Most kids made their way to class hiking cross-country or on horseback. Reba Mae was one of them, depending on the season, either walking with her older brother Gene, or riding her Shetland pony to school.

She loved school, and excelled in her studies. Today it almost seems incredible that anyone could get even a basic education in a school with a single classroom, where one teacher taught six to eight grades. But when Reba Mae entered Blume High School in town, her teachers and fellow students were amazed to find that she had no catching up to do. She was always grateful to the incredible rural schoolteachers she’d had, such as Miss Yvonne Cannon or Miss Jessie Rue Crawford, women who would still be teaching in Wapakoneta City Schools by the time Reba Mae’s own children were in grade school.

Reba Mae got saddled up young with a husband and family. Married at nineteen, her new husband off at war, she took on the task of saving for their future. She waitressed at first, taking a job at Lyman’s Restaurant—which would later become a self-service cafeteria—in downtown Wapakoneta. But she eventually got a better-paying job in the defense industry, working on the line at the Tank Depot in nearby Lima, Ohio, where the M3 Sherman tank, the M5 light tank, and the M26 Pershing tank were all being manufactured for use in World War II’s European Theater. 

It didn’t take long for her bosses to figure out that Reba Mae was smart, industrious and meticulous. And before she knew it they had promoted her to inspector. Very shortly, she was promoted again, this time to line supervisor. All very daunting for an inexperienced young woman who was barely twenty years old when she stopped being a simple line operator.

According to the journal she started keeping in her senior years, the responsibility of the supervisory post got to be too much for her. Especially the part of it that involved giving orders to her peers. Ever shy and self-critical, far from making her feel empowered, ordering her workmates around made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. She apparently asked to be put back on the line as a regular assembly worker but her request was refused. She was needed where she was and her bosses had every confidence in her.

So she quit, went home to her parents-in-law’s house, and tried to figure out what her next move would be. She had secretarial and bookkeeping skills. Perhaps she could find a job like that.

But before she even started her job-hunt, her immediate boss from the Tank Depot showed up at her door. She was sorely needed at the plant, he told her. She had to come back. Her country needed her, and so did the boys overseas. Besides, he told her, there was a new assignment waiting for her. He couldn’t tell her about it, except that it would mean more money and a higher position on the organizational chart. She would be briefed if she took the job, but the details were top secret until she decided.

Known as "the duck" this was the secret
amphibious craft Reba Mae was to work on for D-Day

He argued so convincingly that she said she would  take the job under one condition: that it didn’t involve giving orders to others. No, no, he told her. It wasn’t a supervisory job, but a key post in a top-secret project, in an isolated sector of the plant. According to her journal, however, two weeks after taking the post, she was already being placed in charge of specific production teams, something to do with weather-stripping and waterproofing. But it was too late to back out now. Reba Mae’s guiding rule was that, no matter how tough the going got, the worst thing you could be, once you’d made a commitment, was a quitter.

It is noteworthy that, even half a century after the war, Reba Mae refused to write in her journal about what the top secret project had entailed. She had taken an oath, had been sworn to secrecy, and for her, a secret was just that. If you had given your word not to reveal something, you died with whatever it was, and didn’t tell another soul. It didn’t matter that it had already come out in the post-war era that the super-secret project the Tank Depot had been working on was the building of advanced amphibious assault vehicles, specially designed for the D-Day landing. It might not be a secret anymore, but if it wasn’t, it was not Reba Mae who was going around blabbing about it. Loose lips sink ships, as they say. Her code was like that of the Mafia: two people could have a secret…as long as one of them was dead.

Reba Mae with Darla and Dan

From this sort of responsibility as a defense worker at a very tender age, when the war ended, she was out of a job. It was, “Thank you for your service, but the men will take over now.” But she took all of that sense of responsibility and put it into creating a home for her Army veteran husband and the three children that they would produce over the course of the next eight years.

Reba Mae was, obviously, a Taurus. Taurus, the bull. And she lived up to the name with her quiet bull-headedness. She was quietly stubborn and serenely passive-aggressive. And once she had made up her mind about something, there was no veering her off her path. The only one who could manipulate and control her was Whitie. And he did, consistently.

When we were still young enough to get too big for our britches, she was, like a lot of mothers of her time—obviously, she had been brought up that way as well—a great believer in the old adage, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” You always had fair warning, but when she picked up her yardstick, you knew she meant business and it was often too late to “fall on the mercy of the court.”

Our family (Whitie in the rear), Reba
Mae, Jim, Darla and Corky in the middle, 
Dan in the foreground

After a certain age, my older sister Darla had grown too smart to ever merit a whipping. My little brother Jim (Dennis to his friends) was just too cute and simpatico to spank. Eight years younger than Darla and five years younger than I, he was clearly, like a lot of youngest children, her favorite. He was, in fact, everybody’s favorite—a towheaded little guy that was a ringer (in looks and character) for the comic book personality Dennis the Menace, and whom my sister once described as “weighing thirty-five pounds for like four years.” So more often than not, his mischief (of which there was plenty) prompted laughter, while mine (as someone who was anything but cute—equally well-described by Darla as “never a child, always like a little old man”) tended to generate irritation. 

But as I say, at a certain age, when we got too old to cane and old enough to reason, her tactic changed. For me, it was when I grew taller than she was in about a year’s time, and when she once whacked me with the yardstick and it snapped in two. I laughed so hard that it infuriated her, and she grabbed her broom instead. And still, I laughed, so it was obvious I’d outgrown corporeal punishment—unless Whitie decided to dispense it.

I was always respectful (scared spitless) of Whitie’s temper. Darla once said she never was scared “except when he moved really quickly.” That’s a good description, because once Whitie started moving like greased lightning, it was too late to get out of his way. And he remained dangerous like that for most of his life. When he was seventy and I was forty-four, I once said, “Y’know Dad, I must be one of the very few forty-something men who aren’t very sure they could whip their old man of seventy.”

“Oh hell, Dan,” he said, “you’re a helluva lot stronger than I am.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but you’re faster, and you’re meaner.” 

Anyway, from that time on, Reba Mae developed a wonderfully passive-aggressive way of making us do what she wanted us to. Whenever we hinted that we might like to do something that sounded like fun but that could be construed as morally, socially, or ethically questionable, she never prohibited us from doing whatever it was, never yelled, never grounded us. Instead, she would say, “I know I never have to worry about you kids, because I know you’ll always do the right thing.”

But what was the right thing? Was everything that was fun the wrong thing? Ah, there was the rub. If we went to her, it wasn’t for advice, it was for approval. And she knew that, whatever iffy thing we were thinking of doing, we already knew what the right thing to do was.

With Jim, well, it didn’t take. That boy was so full of life, and so free of convention, that he was going to do whatever the hell he was going to do and consequences be damned. In short, he was the healthiest of us all with regard to living life on his own terms as a teen and youth.

But for me, as well as for Darla, that dictum of Reba Mae’s weighed on us like a battleship’s anchor. Our mother was the person we most respected in the world, and knowing that she was expecting us “to always do the right thing,” made every secret adventure either of us chose to realize a source of profound guilt that was almost equal in the balance to whatever fun we derived from it. And that guilt followed us right into adult life, so that, at the backs of our minds, we imagined Reba Mae looking on as we did whatever we were doing.

I’m sure that helped me, at least, to be a somewhat better person, since there was no ethical code higher than Reba Mae’s. But it didn’t help me to be freer, or to live life as it came without regard for the moral consequences of my actions. It put a self-activated bridle on me that reined me in whenever I sought to step out of bounds. It made me a highly responsible person, but played hell with my narcissistic dream of living the artist’s life.

Still, it wasn’t like she was imposing anything on me that she hadn’t imposed on herself. For the decade that I made a living as a professional musician, she used to always say that she just didn’t know where I got my musical talent. “It sure didn’t come from me,” she would say. But that wasn’t true.

The Andrews Sisters

Maybe she didn’t think I was listening when I was a little boy and she told me how much she loved the music of the swing era, and how she’d dreamed of being in a group like the Andrews Sisters, a trio of three saucy chicks singing in the coolest of harmonies. She had a huge collection of 78rpm records with every major swing band and singer of her time. And she indeed had a nice voice and a good ear.

But if she felt like singing along with her records or the radio, she always kept it to a quiet hum and a random lyric, because she was, rightfully, afraid of the derision of her children, or comments from Whitie like, “What the hell are you so happy about?”  To which she would answer, “I don’t know. Just stupid I guess.”

Over the course of the rest of her life, Reba Mae was a mother, restaurant manager, school cafeteria cook, insurance agency secretary, and law firm office manager. She had a good and artistic eye for home décor, and always dreamed of starting an interior decorating business of her own, but it was a dream that was never to come to fruition. It was that enormous amounts of her energy were taken up by a consistent labor of love. Taking care of Whitie.

For more than forty years after returning from that war, Whitie suffered from what was known back then as “manic depression”. Reba Mae was always there to try and rein him in when he hit impossible highs and to attempt to catch him when he fell to abysmal lows. But it was a tough way to live. When a member of the family has severe mental health issues, the whole family suffers from the illness. And that was certainly the case at our house. But it was Reba Mae who lived it every minute of every day.

She followed him through a series of psychiatrists and a series of hospitalizations over the course of decades. It created a kind of symbiosis that they were both powerless to break. It locked them into a small, dark, secret world that only the two of them could comprehend. A world that shut out others including their children. In the end, they came upon a psychiatrist who was willing to call what Whitie had “a chemical imbalance”, and to keep him in a drug-based state of mild but tolerable depression for the rest of his life. By then, the psychiatrist had prescribed a “happy pill” for Reba Mae as well.

Whitie and Reba Mae, sixty years together

When Whitie died at eighty, after a prolonged illness, it was at home, alone with Reba Mae. I’ve often wondered what their last words a to each other were. He had always warned her that she couldn’t die before he did, because he wouldn’t be able to get along without her. His death seemed to release her to finally give in to her fatigue of years and die herself. Shortly before she passed away, six months after my father’s passing,  Reba Mae told me that she wasn’t sure how to go on any longer. She said that she “had been Whitie” for so long that she no longer knew how to find Reba Mae.

After a few months of progressively crueler illness, she was released into my brother Jim’s care at a rest home. Her stay was quite brief. Darla and Jim were with her when she died. All she wanted to do was rest. When Jim, her favorite, her baby boy, tried to talk quietly with her on her death bed, her last words to him were, “Just leave me alone!”

Clearly, she was ready to move on.

She seldom comes to me in dreams anymore. When she does, she’s quiet and aloof. She has nothing to say to me. I moved far away, and she moved on.

I try not to dwell on these things. It seems like such a waste of a smart, creative spirit, and it breaks my heart.

But then I remember the good times. A sunny kitchen where I watched her bake and ice beautiful Christmas cookies. A road trip on which we all played My Father Owns A Grocery Store and ended up laughing until our sides hurt. She and Whitie dressed up in clothes like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to go square-dancing with The Spinning Eights. Her cutting up with the girls at the sandwich and coffee shop she and my father owned together, or joshing good-naturedly with the men who came in to get their morning joe there. My mother and little-boy-me planting a garden together. Reba Mae pruning her roses. Everybody but Whitie working together to redecorate a big, beautiful house we once lived in on the main street in town. Reba Mae teaching me how to pitch a ball. Reba Mae, getting up at the crack of dawn on wintry Sunday mornings to cheerfully take me on my paper route when temperatures were just too low, and the snow just too deep for me to deliver my newspapers on my bike. Reba Mae surreptitiously slipping me her list for the liquor store whenever I was home because it embarrassed her to go in herself. She, Whitie, my wife and I driving down to Tennessee together for a weekend at Opry Land. Reba Mae and I shopping together, lunching together, having pie and coffee together. My mother and I sitting at the kitchen table, a pot of coffee between us, swapping stories about people and events in our small town, she, instilling in me my love of books, my love of storytelling, and my penchant for chronicling the past of personalities the rest of the world had never heard of.

I think about her almost every day. But never more than in May.

ETHNIC CLEANSING AMERICAN STYLE

Louise Erdrich

 I’ve just finished reading The Night Watchman, yet another masterpiece by one of my favorite writers, Louise Erdrich. To me, her transcultural books have always proven astonishingly honest, informative, insightful and revealing. This one, deservedly, won a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

I was first attracted to Erdrich's work in the 1980s, when I found her Love Medicine among the new arrivals at the Lincoln Library in Buenos Aires, an institution originally administrated by the US Embassy and later transferred to the Institute of American Culture (ICANA). It was a venue that was a real oasis for American expats as well as for serious Argentine students of English. I read a few pages of Love Medicine at the library and was immediately enthralled, so decided to check it out. Erdrich’s writing made easy, natural transitions between reality and magic, with the lines blurring between the two to such an extent as to almost make them one, parallel worlds traveling side by side in everyday life. Or at least that was the case, it seemed, if you were an Indian.

It was an episodic novel, written in quasi-short-story style, which related the loves and lifestyles of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The book was scintillating, replete with both humor and pathos, and almost electric in its sensuality. Its stories were moving in their deep understanding of passion and love, spell-binding in its mysterious blend of magic and corporeality. Its raw beauty led me over the years to read a very large portion of Erdrich’s extraordinary and highly varied body of work, and my fascination with her literature has never waned. Her craft and originality are impeccable and ever-surprising.

In The Night Watchman, Erdrich delves into a major transcultural issue—what amounts to the ethnic cleansing that Washington has carried out, and continues evidently to abide, among North America’s original peoples over the course of US history. Although there are several parallel themes at play in the book, the main story is a fictionalized account of the effect on the Chippewa Nation’s Turtle Mountain Band of a 1953 congressional bill that termed as “emancipation” yet another attempt in a long series by white America to divvy up Native American land and “terminate” once and for all the cultural heritage of Indian tribes and the federal administration’s links to its preservation.

Erdrich has exclusive insight into that termination campaign since her grandfather, Native American elder Patrick Gourneau, was chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation’s Advisory Committee at the time in which the government was seeking to disband the tribe, and the Advisory Committee that Gourneau headed was resisting those attempts. Patrick was a prodigious letter-writer, and, having inherited those letters and done extensive related research, Erdrich was able to piece together the full history of what took place in a new and highly civilized clash between the Jim Crow American society of the fifties and those particular Indians who were struggling for their own survival and that of their way of life.

Patrick Gourneau - chief of the Turtle Mountain Band

In The Night Watchman, Patrick Gourneau becomes Thomas “Muskrat” Wazhashk, the night watchman at a jewel bearing plant located on the edge of the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the chilly wilds of rural North Dakota. The night watchman’s job is merely an occupation, since Thomas’s real mission in life is as Advisory Council Chairman for his band of the Chippewas.

Already when the story opens, Thomas has come to understand that the so-called “emancipation” that the government is seeking to impose on them amounts, in fact, to a termination plan. The “emancipation” consists of reclaiming supposedly federal land “awarded” to the Indians in successive treaties, stopping all federal aid to their schools, health services and institutions, doing away with their tribal status, and “assimilating them” into white society by sending them to what Erdrich refers as “the cities”—meaning Fargo, Minot or Grand Forks in North Dakota or Minneapolis-St. Paul in neighboring Minnesota.

Erdrich also gives us a look at what awaits Native Americans in “the cities”. The other main protagonist in this story is Patrice “Pixie” Paranteau, Thomas’s niece. Patrice (who hates her nickname “Pixie” and is trying to get people to stop using it) is just out of high school. She’s smart and serious, the valedictorian of her graduating class. She’s not sure what she wants—maybe to be an attorney—but she knows what she doesn’t want (not kids and not a husband). She’s curious about sex and romance and wants to lose her virginity, but not with a man who might cling to her afterward if she isn’t particularly crazy about his performance and fails to truly fall in love.

Getting tied down isn’t an option for Patrice. She has bigger fish to fry. She is a precision worker at the same plant where Thomas is the night watchman. She makes jewel bearings, a job for which (the plant’s white owners have discovered) Indian women are particularly well-suited because of their delicately intricate manual dexterity and their resilience for long hours of tedious work. And Patrice is the best of the best at assembling jewel bearings. Despite that fact, she barely makes enough to support her mother and younger brother, since the other factor calculated in putting the plant next to a reservation in the middle of nowhere, is that Indian labor is non-union and cheap.

Patrice’s father figure is her uncle and tribal elder Thomas. Her own father is a mean drunk who only returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife—who sleeps with an axe handy—and children,  and to bully Patrice for money. Patrice’s mother, Zhaanat, on the other hand, is, on the most intimate of levels, her role model, even though she seeks a separate destiny. Zhaanat is a strong and spiritual woman, a psychic and a healer, and Patrice has apparently inherited her mother’s mystical gifts.  

Patrice scrimps and saves every penny she can in the hope of following her dear older sister Vera, who has moved to Minneapolis. But already in the early pages of the book, we discover that Vera may have gone missing. Patrice is worried because her big sister has not been in touch in months. She is rumored to have had a  child, and, having managed to save a little over a hundred dollars, Patrice is determined to go to the city and find Vera and her baby. It is while Patrice is on that fateful journey that Erdrich shows the reader different forms of exploitation and violence to which innocent young Native Women are subject when they venture off the reservation and into “the cities”, basically broke and on their own. Although the trip puts her life and virtue in grave danger, unlike Vera, Patrice manages to get away relatively unscathed after meeting up with a Chippewa prize-fighter named Wood Mountain, whom she knows from the reservation, and who heroically aids her in not only getting away and back to the reservation, but also in finding her sister’s child and taking the baby back with her.

Much of the novel focuses on Patrice’s search for Vera, her conflict with the responsibility of taking in Vera’s child, her confusion over her feelings for Wood Mountain, who immediately loves and cherishes Vera’s son and wants to make a life with the baby and Patrice. That might be an almost mundanely common story, were it not for the fact that it takes place against the backdrop of the harsh realities of life on an impoverished reservation, contrasting with the depth and variety of emotions, spirituality, tribalism, vulnerability and resilience of a Native people making a valiant last stand in the still natural corner of the world to which they have been pushed by the relentless advance of an aggressive, exotic white race.  

Much of the final part of the book is a fascinating look at real-life events, when a group of Chippewa elders accompanied by a college-educated younger member of the band and by Patrice—as well as a Native American ghost called Roderick, who accompanies Thomas almost everywhere he goes—scrape together enough funds to travel to Washington and testify before Congress, in a last-ditch attempt to save their reservation and their way of life.

They are pitted against their nemesis, the only completely non-fiction character in the story, Senator Arthur V. Watkins, who sponsored the bill—which, in one of his letters, Erdrich’s grandfather described as “about the worst thing for Indians to come down the pike”—a man whom Erdrich describes as “indeed a pompous racist.” Always objective if militant in her research, however, the author adds that “to give Watkins his due, he was also instrumental in bringing down Senator Joe McCarthy, ending an ugly era in national politics.”

The author also gives his due to later disgraced President Richard Nixon, pointing out that Nixon addressed Congress in 1970 and called for an end to America’s tribal termination policy. “Five years later,” she says, “a new era of self-determination for Native people began.”

Despite this fact, she is critical of the first Trump administration, saying, “Indeed, the Trump administration and Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tara Sweeney have recently brought back the termination era by seeking to terminate the Wampanoag, the tribe who first welcomed the Pilgrims to these shores and invented Thanksgiving.”

Turtle Mountain Reservation, land of the Chippewa

I usually am not a believer in “afterwords”. The story, I feel, should tell itself, and not depend on explanations after the fact. But in this case, Erdrich’s lengthy afterword is a succinct history of continual efforts to disenfranchise the native peoples of North America. Specifically, she summarizes in part: “In all, 113 tribal nations suffered the disaster of termination; 1.4 million acres of tribal land was lost. Wealth flowed to private corporations, while many people in terminated tribes died early, in poverty. By the end, 78 tribal nations…regained federal recognition; 10 gained state but not federal recognition; 31 tribes are landless; 24 are considered extinct.”

This is a sad legacy culled from factual American history and one that we would do well to incorporate and to seek to correct by holding sacred the Native cultures of a land in which all non-Indians are immigrants. But in this day of aggressively outlawing inclusion, equity and diversity, we can expect Native termination to continue to be swept under the rug or distorted to make Native Americans look like the aggressors and white Americans the heroes and saviors of America.

 

A RECURRENT NIGHTMARE

Last week marked the forty-ninth anniversary of the military coup in Argentina that would mark seven years of my career in journalism. I’ve been thinking about those times a lot lately. I’m unable to get the memories out of my mind. And, truth be told, I don’t want to. Because forgetting is how we repeat the same mistakes over again.

Argentine military junta 1976

Furthermore, by forgetting, we can never warn others of the same pitfalls when they crop up elsewhere. But then again, sometimes providing those warnings, admonishing the uninitiated, can be a thankless task. Because like children, those who have never experienced what you have, are often loath to accept that the same thing can happen to them.

You can tell a child again and again, “Hot! Don’t touch!” And I’m guessing that, nine times out of ten, they’ll have to personally put their little mitt in the flame or lay their tender palm to the hot iron before they’ll know what you were talking about, and why you weren’t just being a nosy, bossy jerk. In their tiny, barely reasoning minds, they just think they have a different opinion than yours and that you’re trying to impose your will on them. You’re not, of course. You’re just trying to spare them the pain you’ve already suffered.

But maybe it’s impossible to experience another’s awareness vicariously. Perhaps you just have to climb into the meat grinder head first yourself. Problem is, it’s usually hard to come out on the other end of that move alive or unscathed.   

My revived interest in that part of my life—which, until recently, almost seemed like another life—is twofold, although both stances are connected. On the one hand, I have finally decided to finish writing and, hopefully, publish a memoir of those years. The working title is A Voice in the Storm. Its meaning will be clear to anyone who eventually reads the book, the completion of which has been eluding me for the past two decades. That’s mainly because there are a lot of things that are personally very painful for me about that era, even while I have to admit that I have never felt more alive or more self-fulfilled than in those times.

Secondly, however, my renewed interest is also due to the fact that I’m seeing everything I experienced back then, everything I know to be the wrong road to take, coming full circle and happening all over again. But this time in my own native land, where most of us were brought up thinking anything like authoritarian rule was an impossibility for us. Where we were taught that US democracy was the strongest and most infallible on earth. And where we took that belief all the way to the bank, even as those who knew world history well warned us that democracy was only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. It was an experiment that was still being tested, and it was only as strong as the strength of conviction of those responsible for its care and practice.    

Ideological repression, Argentina 1976

Argentina’s March 24, 1976, coup had been rumored for a long time. While nowadays you have to search high and low to find anyone who admits to having supported it—except in circles close to the current administration of President Javier Milei, who, despite the general unpopularity of his stance,  has tried hard to vindicate the junta leaders of that era as misunderstood heroes—but back then, just about everybody except the staunchest supporters of the Peronist government in office at the time, was of the opinion that “something had to be done.”

Even the paper I worked for, the Buenos Aires Herald, which in the months and years to come would be, by far, the staunchest and boldest media critic of the regime, at first cautiously welcomed the coup. We ran an editorial in which we talked about the elected administration—which had fallen into chaos, violence and authoritarian designs following the death of its charismatic leader, President Juan Domingo Perón—as being moribund. The only thing left to do, we posited, was to drag the virtual corpse out of Government House.

Ideological repression, Argentina 1976

I was young and had little experience, other than what I’d read, with autocratic regimes. But over the course of the next decade, I would get almost doctoral experience, not only in Argentina but in several other South American nations as well, in how tyrannies are born and how whole nations give up their freedom and independence almost willingly, or at least almost unwittingly.

One important lesson I learned is that tyrants almost always march into office as “saviors”. They are nearly always “the only ones that can fix the mess” that whatever came before has bred. They present themselves as serious and organized, not as dictators, but as caretakers. They pretty much always promise to return the nation to its past glory, to make the country great again.

In Argentina, they proposed, rather convincingly at first, that they were only stepping in to save the nation from itself, to make it safe for democracy again. They claimed that they were partially suspending the US-style Constitution as a means of saving it. It had been sorely abused, they indicated, and now had to be put on ice for a while, until such time as it could once again be dusted off and brought back on line, fully recovered and ready to guide the rule of law in the future. In the meantime, the regime would be the law, the be all and end all of national life, for as long as it took to get the country “thinking right” again, and to get it back on track.

Ideological repression, Argentina 1976

Almost immediately, people started disappearing. Not just a few here and there, as had been happening in the horrific final days of the former government, which was locked in what amounted to an inter-party civil war, but in droves. There were assassinations in broad daylight as well, summary executions carried out by paramilitary hit squads. And there were semi-formal arrests, performed by details of heavily armed, clean-cut men in suits who moved around in plate-less, unmarked cars, and didn’t bother to identify themselves or to read anyone their rights.

A long list of books and music, as well as their authors and composers, were suddenly deemed toxic and subversive. Just the possession of any such literature or music was enough to warrant arrest or disappearance.

The people who actually became registered names on an official police blotter weren’t necessarily charged with anything. With the rule of law suspended, it wasn’t necessary. The Executive Branch, under a modified form of martial law known as the State of Siege, could hold people indefinitely and move them to any jurisdiction it wished, because there was only one power in the entire country: the Executive Branch, in the person of the military Junta.

Book-burning Argentina 1976

None of this was random. No. It was systematic, and was invoked under the Executive Decrees outlined in the master plan known as the National Reorganization Process, or Proceso for short.

It didn’t take long for us to figure out that the “caretaker” government was no such thing, not some benevolent elite of patriots bent on a quick clean-up of armed terrorism and the immediate restoration of the rule of law under new and favorable conditions in which it could thrive in peace. The military started making it clear that “the ballot boxes were well stored away” and that they would remain that way until the regime decided to get them out again. Suddenly, anyone who disagreed even slightly with the regime was marked as “a terrorist”. Dissent was often a death sentence, and organized protest a crime.

Party politics, union activity, university rallies, gatherings of more than a handful of people, public debate, all of these things were prohibited and considered subversive. The subjects of the most immediate kidnappings and murders were people with direct ties to armed anti-regime militancy. But it didn’t take any time at all for the net the regime cast to be expanded to include some of the country’s best minds—teachers, writers, artists, scientists, human rights activists, pacifists, democratic socialists, anyone who sought to nurture thought, analysis and debate. Anyone who raised their voice to defend human and civil rights. Just among journalists, nearly a hundred of our colleagues went missing or were murdered. Many more, including three from our own newspaper, chose self-exile over the course of the Proceso in the face of credible death threats.

With no rule of law to hinder them, the enforcers of the regime could take their time. In gloomy safehouses all over the city and country, people snatched on the sole suspicion of the regime were strapped to metal bedsprings naked and wetted down before being subjected to simultaneous electric shock torture and beatings, often combined with sexual abuse, and punctuated by demands for the names of others. On the say-so of torture victims out of their heads with pain and terror, hundreds of others were arrested, often people innocent of anything but having known someone who disappeared.

The president and head of the Junta, General Jorge Rafael Videla, at first posed as a “moderate”. He claimed, in a meeting with the editor of our paper, that none of the horrific things that were happening were part of the Proceso’s plan. Yes, certain rights had been suspended to make it possible to wage war on armed terrorists. But the abuses that were taking place parallel to that “dirty war” were the result of proper orders being given at the top of the chain of command, but then being carried out in improper ways by the rank and file.

Eventually, when the cat was already out of the bag, he no longer bothered to deny anything. It had become clear that the pact among the military was that everybody had to have blood on his hands. Videla went from pretending the Junta was looking into abuses, to tiring of making excuses about the “missing”, and finally, cynically, three years into the regime, responding to a question about the missing by renowned local journalist José Ignacio “Nacho” López telling the public, in a televised broadcast,   “I can tell you this in regard to the missing. As long as they remain as such, they are an unknown quantity. As long as they are missing they can have no special treatment, because they have no entity. They are neither alive nor dead. They are missing.”

So-called “third world clerics” were particularly targeted, as were social workers. Anyone who sought to help the poor, whom the regime considered their enemies. Despite its almost carnal relationship with Catholicism and the Church hierarchy, the regime had no problem violating the sanctuary status of churches harboring those considered “subversive”, including priests and nuns who served the material and social needs of the poor and unprotected.

Twelve people, including two French nuns, disappeared from the Iglesia de Santa Cruz, a church that provided a meeting space for human rights activists. Some of their bodies later washed up on remote shores of the South Atlantic and were buried as unidentified NN’s in a local small-town cemetery. Decades after the end of the regime, some of those bodies, including those of the two nuns, would be identified. All had been de victims of brutal torture and summary execution. 

Already in the second year of the Proceso, seven Roman Catholic priests and seminarians equated with terrorism by the regime because of the social work they were doing with the poor, were shot to death inside of the church to which they were assigned while they were in the midst of their daily prayers.

One of the “lucky” ones was nineteen-year-old Patricia Erb, the daughter of American Mennonite missionaries, who, while studying at a Buenos Aires university, was carrying out social work in an underprivileged neighborhood. Paramilitary thugs under orders from the regime kidnapped her. She later turned up imprisoned, at the disposal of the Executive. No charges were ever filed against her, and the combined pressure of the US Embassy under Jimmy Carter’s administration and the Inter-American Human Rights Committee eventually secured her release and return to the US. But  not before she was held for a month at the Campo de Mayo Army base, where she was subjected to multiple torture sessions and repeated sexual attacks.

Her congressional testimony about her treatment helped draw international attention to the brutality of the Proceso. She wasn’t an exception in terms of that treatment. It was standard operating procedure under the regime. What was exceptional in her case was that, for others, this continued indefinitely, and, more often than not, ended in eventual execution and secret disposal of their bodies.

The Proceso’s most powerful supporters were the corporate wealthy, those who benefited most from the prohibition and persecution of anything and anyone who stood in the way of “business as usual”.

I recall once at a luncheon hearing an executive from British and American Tobacco who was talking in glowing terms about how great it was to do business under the “Proceso”. Then, he added praise as well for the cruel dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in neighboring Chile. Specifically, he said, “You know, I’ve just come back from Chile. What a breath of fresh air!” I was unable to eat when lunch was served.

To this end, the courting of international business, the regime countered its barbarous political actions with what was considered a “serious” economic team, headed up by a Cambridge-educated lawyer, businessman and economist from one of the country’s wealthiest cattle-ranching families. His plan to “insert Argentina into the global economy” and his sound contacts in the IMF, World Bank and international business community were an attempt by the Proceso  to legitimize the regime on the world stage. And for quite a long time, it worked.

At the other end of the de facto government’s policies, however, was an unprecedented level of repression and violence, best summed up by one of its top generals who once said during a military camaraderie dinner: “First we’ll kill all of the subversives, then we’ll kill their collaborators, then we’ll kill their fans, right after that those who remain indifferent, and, finally, the faint of heart.”

It was a pretty accurate description of what actually happened. Once one person’s rights could be suspended, no one else had rights anymore either. Everybody became fair game. And some thirty thousand people were to perish.

Ideological repression USA 2025

So why is all this top of mind right now, as I watch in horror at what’s happening in my native United States? Because what I am witnessing is reminiscent of how the authoritarian regimes I’ve studied, close up and personal, all began.

I’m seeing rule by executive decree in my native US. I’m seeing people being snatched off US streets, paramilitary style, by unidentified government agents. I’m seeing those imprisoned with no due process being spirited off to other jurisdictions, or even other countries ruled by cruel dictatorships. I’m witnessing  an Executive power that is daily violating the Constitution and legal precedents. I’m observing official disregard for human and civil rights, including, besides the right to due process, the right to freedom of speech. I’m watching in shock as the Executive Branch grossly invades the jurisdictions of the other two branches of government and makes a mockery of the checks and balances that guarantee a healthy democracy.

Ideological repression USA 2025

What I’m also observing are the ever-increasing attempts by the Executive to “dehumanize the other”—a hallmark of dictatorial regimes. A trend in which anyone who disagrees with official executive policy is labeled “a leftist lunatic”, “the enemy of the people”, “enemies from within”, “communists”, “terrorists”, and even “vermin”. And another sure sign of authoritarian rule is a regime that governs only for itself, imposing its policies, without consultation, on its followers, while ostracizing and persecuting its detractors.

This is already looking like a reign of terror, in which universities, cultural institutions, think tanks and other forums—the very venues where debates, belief-questioning and dissent should be cultivated and encouraged—are being extorted into submission and compromised by the official story. Political opponents and journalists are being pressured and pursued and vengeance is being sought against anyone who has ever opposed the head of state.

The most frightening thing, for someone like myself, who has lived through it all before and knows the progressively worsening consequences all too well, is that this is only the beginning, in which far too many remain convinced that “maybe extra-constitutional action is the only way.” What they don’t know that I do is that, breaking the rule of law is easy. But picking up the pieces and gluing them back together again is a painstaking and all too often impossible task.

More chilling still is the fact that there are already plans to extend this cult of personality beyond its legal term, in violation of two constitutional provisions. This fear of mine is underscored by the fact that this is the same regime that toyed with the idea of imposing martial law to avoid an election loss in 2020.

Knowing what I know, being able to compare with a previous life experience that few other Americans share, I’m worried. I’m very worried. And any American, regardless of race, creed or party, who values his or her freedom should be worried as well.    

UNINSPIRED MALAISE

 I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately. Actually, a lot overwhelmed. I think a lot of people have. Indeed, I know so.

This—this space, this cyber-venue—is where I concentrate on a more philosophical look at things. Where I avoid politics and stick mostly to the common ground of nostalgic memories. Places in the mind where we are all more alike than different. Places where “what we are” is human, with no “isms” or “ists” attached.  

Malaise - a feeling of discomfort or unease 

Maintaining that careful duality is the reason I have two different blogs, one “literary”, and the other, “political”. However, I have been prodding my muse to help me put together a lighthearted, mildly humorous tale of the “good ol’ days” to spin for you, but even she can’t seem to pierce this wall of resigned ennui that has taken hold. Or maybe ennui isn’t quite the right word. Perhaps it’s more like malaise—a restless discomfort and general feeling of unease.

Don’t worry. It’ll pass… I think. I hope. But for now, it seems like a stationary front, come to rest and holding until some chance refreshing breeze comes along to blow it away.

I feel tired a lot. Exhausted some days. I would like nothing better than to sleep soundly for eight, ten, or even twelve hours. But I go to bed bone tired, and awake every hour or hour-and-a-half after that, all night long, which, anyway, usually isn’t more than six hours long, with a couple of those spent reading whatever it is I’m reading at the time to distract myself, and a lot of time also spent eyes closed, but wide awake behind the curtain, with random, often apocalyptic thoughts ablaze in my bloodshot mind’s eye.

More than malaise—malaise-plus—it is a state of weariness and defeat. Twenty years ago, I might still have known how to deal with it, how to gather strength from adversity. How to stand my ground and fight. But at this stage, I’ve forgotten how. And it gets me down.

Given my lifetime of intimate connection with current events, my constant analysis of the news, my serious dedication to researching historical trends and the pendulum swings between democracy and authoritarianism, progressive and regressive, freedom and tyranny, good and evil, all bent on unveiling truths, I should be accustomed to taking tendencies like the present one as just another chapter in history to be studied, analyzed and pondered, without letting it reach down inside of me and rip out my guts. But, alas, I can’t.

I can’t because history has taught me that the living generations of today might think this is all new, but it isn’t. Those with a memory, those who know historical sequences intimately and value the  importance of learning history, of delving deep and not just scratching the surface, have seen this movie before, or have gained insight after the fact. They know that some of the most cataclysmic chapters in modern history have developed around ordinary people’s unrest. People’s often warranted feeling that things should be better for them. A feeling as contagious as a pandemic plague that spreads from one individual to another and ends up infecting whole nations, when not—gods forbid—the whole world.

When that feeling runs rampant through societies, people want change. They want it now, now, now! And they aren’t particular about how it happens. It’s a first cousin to a lynch mob mentality. They will take it, and they will cheer it and root it onward, no matter what the cost might be. And they’ll worry about the consequences later. When, of course, it will be far too late to halt and consider further. Too late for their perceived rivals (who are no such thing, since we nobodies are all in this together), and too late for them.

Because, wherever there is general unrest, there are always cunning, ruthless, violent, unscrupulous men, who know exactly how to tap into the raw power of that discontent and make it their own. They feed on it and grow huge from the malevolent nourishment with which it provides them. All the while their goal is simply more power for them, until it becomes absolute. But the art of their cunning is knowing how to make others believe that theirs is an altruistic mission for which they have been anointed by the almighty to be the people’s savior.

It is known as populism—i.e., movements of the people—and it comes in all flavors, from far-left to far-right, with the one uniting criterion being fanatical fundamentalism. But populism is something of a misnomer, because the power of the people is only such until they hand it over to charismatic leaders for “safe keeping”. Then, it quickly becomes tyranny.

Russia 1917, Italy 1925, Germany 1933, Spain 1936, they all began with popular discontent, followed with the embracing of a charismatic leader, and ended tragically and in tyranny.

It’s all just hitting too close to home for me right now.  Everything I’ve ever believed in (and that my father before me believed in and took up arms to defend), everything I’ve ever struggled for and sacrificed to protect, everything I’ve sworn an oath to uphold and care for, everything I have had occasion to literally risk my life for, is being intentionally set ablaze. And, like in the run-up to the worst war in the history of the world, it is taking place with huge crowds cheering deafeningly as they gleefully watch the bonfire of our best institutions, traditions, and ethical mores, kindled with some of the most valuable of our books.  

These are echoes of the perilous times, before I was born, that my father told me about. Times when we were the good guys who stepped in, across the sea, to show the bad guys that evil had consequences, that tyranny wouldn’t be tolerated, that authoritarianism would be crushed, that there was a strong, clear-minded, clean-cut and democratic new kid in the global village, who wasn’t taking any crap from bullies, and who would defend others against them as well.

You can never be silent again

Anyway, the only time I get some preciously sound sleep now is during an afternoon nap (a.k.a. “la siesta”), which will sometimes extend for a couple of hours or so, and during which, an Army regiment could march through my room and I would not hear them. Other than that, it is a permanent state of wakefulness. And it is exhausting. The feeling is so abysmal that it makes me try and imagine the sort of pain that I would have experienced if I’d been a fiercely patriotic, democratic and freedom-loving Parisian, on June 14, 1940, when hundreds of thousands of Nazi troops marched in rigid formation, confident and unafraid, wall-to-wall down the Champs-Élysées, in representation of pure evil, and with the ironic, if iconic, image of the Arc of Triumph in the background to the west.

But this is worse. It’s internal, intestinal, pernicious, and it is infecting the entire body at once. And those of us who see it, those of us who have lived it in a different time and place, are powerless to stop it, because this is a first-time experience for most, who think they´ve just got the flu when they have cancer.

The malaise I’m feeling isn’t for me. It’s for others, for the social body that is gravely ill and doesn’t know it. Politically and humanly speaking, I’m a survivor of this deadly virus. I’m immune to the deceit of its symptoms. But there is a major after-effect of having had it and survived: Once cured, you can never be silent again.

You’re like the proverbial tree in the forest. You still make a loud and resonating  sound. Even if no one else is listening.