CAMELOT AMERICA by
Timeri N. Murari.
Once upon a time America was a
sunny country. By ‘sunny’ I mean its disposition towards the world. The reason
I remember that sunny America
is because a friend and I talked about those days. We’re both of that age when we
were drawn to America
– not to make money but because it seemed a magical place- and it does not seem
that long ago. We both come from older civilisations, tired ones even then, and
America
then was a cool, seductive breeze blowing through our minds and hearts. Of
course I saw America
from a great distance too and I will try to remember what I saw that so drew me
to that innocent country. America
had the values of justice, goodness, ethics, morality, freedom, even happiness,
that all men have cherished and searched for. No one had any ill-will towards America, with
the exception of the USSR.
It was a heroic country. There is
little doubt that without America
throwing its might in with the allies in WWII, the world would now be a
different place. It wasn’t really America’s war, being fought in
distant Europe, and it was safe behind the
formidable barriers of the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans. Of course I wasn’t there but my father was and he spoke
affectionately of the American soldiers he had met on the battlefields. And of
course when the war was over, we saw the Hollywood
films with heroic Americans – John Wayne, Audie Murphy, Robert Mitchum, Errol
Flynn- battling the enemy. Though I was later told that Hollywood did exaggerate when Errol Flynn won
the Burmese front single-handedly and British soldiers duly protested. But that
was to be expected, and we knew it was just a movie. Death in those movies
wasn’t bloody and real, except for ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ but that
was from WWI and the more realistic German view of the carnage. The American
heroes were clean cut, always clean shaven, uniforms immaculate, they may have
smoked, but they were always courteous and polite, even to the enemy, and
treated their Prisoners of War strictly according to the Geneva Convention.
Europe
had been ravaged by the war, and America once more showed her
generosity and kindness. The Marshall Plan helped re-built the destroyed
cities. America
pumped in $13 billions – on the conditions that the European nations acted as a
single economic unit and that all the necessary material be bought from America on
American ships- and by 1953 Europe was back on
its feet. Long before WWII, Mohandas
Gandhi had been campaigning for Indian Independence and America had
always supported his campaign. America wanted
an end to colonialism and the suppression in the colonised nations, as it did
genuinely believe in both freedom and democracy.
These were events of the past before
I even became aware of this country. I suppose my introduction to America and its
value came first through the magazines that entered my house. There was the
Saturday Evening Post, a glossy, cheerful magazine about the American way of
life. Often as not the covers were the paintings of an artist called Norman
Rockwell. He painted a happy America
– kids playing baseball or basketball, a cop with a kid in a soda parlour, a
boy in a doctor’s surgery, a family in prayer over a thanksgiving dinner. His
subjects were white as far I remember, and their world seemed seductive and
serene. No other racial colours intruded, and because of that I wasn’t aware
others existed in that America.
Life magazine was equally glossy with a
vision not only of America
but the world and it had a stark black and white reality that was powerful and
moving. At times it revealed a darker side of the nation.
American movies captivated not only
me but the whole world – ‘Made in Hollywood’
was the end credit. In Madras
we sat in darkened theatres – Roxy, Minerva, Midland, Elphinstone- and watched America unfold
before our eyes. Cartoons, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, slapstick
comedies Laurel & Hardy, Bud Abbot and Lou Costello, the great Marx
Brothers movies and gentle comedies like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with James
Stewart, ‘High Society’ with Cary Grant, the most urbane sophisticated star.
And if you were male those Hollywood Westerns – ‘Shane’, ‘High Noon’ and even
the run-of-the-mill Cowboys and Indians- mesmerized us. No other nation could
make Westerns like a John Ford. And who
can forget the sensual innocence of Marilyn Monroe. But it wasn’t all sunny in
American movies. There was the dark underbelly of injustice on the screen.
Henry Fonda in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (made before I was born but I caught it
somewhere as it took a slow boat to India), ‘I was a Member of the Chain Gang’,
and film noir gangster films ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘Double Indemnity’ to name a few
that came to the city. And even such Westerns as ‘The Searchers’ were dark. The
cult film of that time was ‘East Rider’ with its tragic finale. These films
were in a different universe to the Saturday Evening Post and yet they still
revealed the American heart that such films could be made. America wasn’t
all apple pie.
There was the music too reaching us
across the radio – Sinatra, Crosby, Damone, Page- and the exciting jazz of
Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, MJQ, Davis. The best novelists were American –
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, O’Hara- writers to be emulated.
When I finally arrived in America in the
60s, it was as I’d expected it to be. It was the age of the baby boomers, those
70 million teenagers conceived after WWII. They were changing America from
its staid conservative past with their eager revolutionary idea on art,
education, life styles and in politics.
What better definition of the age of innocence than the Barbie doll
which was created in the 60s and swept America, and the world. I decided to drive across this nation and
took a car out of Detroit
heading towards Seattle.
It was a Pontiac Bonneville, powder blue convertible the size of a small ship
with fins like a shark and it drank gas like an alcoholic booze. Pontiac is now as extinct
as the dinosaur but it raced like a silken dream. America reeled out like her movies
and magazines, the landscapes were so familiar, the music on the radio still
evocative. The air was electric and heady with the wide open space and the
freedom from time and identity.
I passed through small towns where ‘A Wonderful Life’ could have
been shot and saw the buttes and plains of John Ford’s westerns. Wherever I
stopped – to sleep or eat- I was met with both curiosity and kindness. There
was a mood of calm and boundless optimism in the society. The Americans I met
later in the suburbs and invited into their homes were boundlessly hospitable,
contented, and if I can say so from this distance, happy with their lot.
The population was then around 177 million and the average salary
around $4700 per annum. And of course they were the affluent society that
Kenneth Galbraith wrote about. There wasn’t any greed and the measuring rod for
wealth were the Rockefellers, (immortalised by Cole Porter in a song) worth a
few hundred million dollars back then but it sounded astronomical. Only the
American budget ran into a few billions. The people were quietly religious and
respected other religions. Billy Graham
was the most popular preacher but he never breathed out brimstone or
invectives.
It was the days when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show,
the first time seen live ever in America, and the ratings went
through the roof. The Beatles even elbowed out Elvis Presley and other white
singers like Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka and Jerry Lee Lewis. It would seem the true
creators of the blues and rock would never be acknowledge but Motown Records
introduced Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, the Supremes and other black artists
who, for the first time, rocketed up the music charts. The drug culture changed
the music again and America
invented psychedelic rock and new bands like The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson
Aeroplane pumped out high decibel music. And of course there was that legendary
Woodstock a
three-day festival that drew 400,000 young people to sing, dance, smoke pot and
zonk out on acid. No, I never got to Woodstock.
I had meant to but I was on the other side of the continent. This was counter
culture age of the hippies who had originated in San Francisco and spread across the country.
Long hair and beads and chanting mantra became popular and Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi giggled his way to a fortune. I never followed him though I wrote about
those charlatans. In sports a young
light middleweight boxer, Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) won a gold in the 1960
Olympics and came to dominate the sport through the 60s and 70s and was the
most famous man on the planet.
Eisenhower had finished his term in office and America had elected
JFK. He was young, he had a sense of wit and purpose to make America a more
just country with his plans for desegregation. He and his administration – ‘the
best and the brightest’- were admired in America and around the world. All
seemed right both in America
and the World with his coming. Though we all lived under a nuclear nightmare
than nearly came too real in the Cuban missile crisis. One of my all time favourite novels ‘Catch-22’
and ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, one satirising WWII and the other
American society were published during this time. While on television
‘M*A*S*H’, a satire on the Korean War, was a hit series. It was also the time of the Civil Rights
movement and the black people invisible in those Norman Rockwell paintings were
pushing their way onto the canvas. I was on the steps of my university hall
when I heard of his assassination. And despite the mourning, America hadn’t
yet lost its verve. But gradually, the Vietnam War, that original quagmire,
began to take its toll on the American spirit. And changed the world’s
perception of this marvellous country. A
protesting student in Kent
State University
was shot dead. The My Lai massacre and the napalming
of children soured my perception of America. The war had it’s terrible
toll – over 58,000 American, many of them conscripted through the draft, 230,000
South Vietnamese and between 1.5 to 3 million north Vietnamese died in that
war. The countryside was devastated through Agent Orange and other chemicals.
The American government was starting to flex its military might around the
world, even invading tiny Grenada
when a few American students were roughed up. In Chile, the CIA assassinated the
legitimately elected president, Allende and replaced him with the monstrous Pinochet.
The moral compass that had guided America began to swing away. The
first Gulf War may have been justifiable but the sanctions that followed on Iraq killed
thousands of children. The Secretary of State under President Clinton, Madeline
Albright, callously called that ‘collateral damage’. I suppose that was mild in
comparison of what followed. America
squandered all the world’s compassion after 9/1 with its reckless might. The
reason for second invasion of Iraq
was built on a quicksand of lies and deceptions of the American people as the
War on Terror. Today, America
is Kafka country – illegal detentions, torture, renditions, secret prisons,
wire tapping, spying on its citizens, the Supreme Court perverted, rigged presidential
elections. Any cheap dictator would be proud to exercise such powers. And
America found one – Donald Trump.
My friend and I remembered that once upon a time America dreamt
of Camelot.
(www.timerimurari.com)
