Thomas Lunde wrote,
>I'm sure and so is Noam Chomsky . . .
Speaking of Chomsky, I came across an interesting quote, referring to an
anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon in 1967,
"Dan Ellsberg later told me," Chomsky recalls, "that he'd been
standing next to McNamara up in the Pentagon somewhere, the two of them
ridiculing the tactics of the protestors and talking about how they would
have done it more efficiently. Hate to think how." (Barsky, _Noam Chomsky:
A Life of Dissent_ p. 129)
Thanks to the magic of memoirs, Chomsky's "hate-to-think-how" may be
answered "In Retrospect" by McNamara himself,
"I watched the whole thing from the roof of the building and other vantage
points. Years later a reporter asked if I had been scared. Of course I was
scared: an uncontrolled mob is a frightening thing -- luckily, in this case,
frightening but ineffective. At the same time, I could not help but think
that had the protesters been more disciplined -- Gandhi like -- they could
have achieved their objective of shutting us down. All they had to do was
lie on the pavement around the building. We would have found it impossible
to remove enough of them fast enough to keep the Pentagon open." (McNamara,
_In Retrospect_, p. 305)
There is a sublime irony to McNamara's talk of discipline and effectiveness.
By the time of the Pentagon demonstration, McNamara had become convinced
that the war was unwinnable, that it had taken on a pathological momentum of
its own and that the U.S. should get out of Viet Nam. He was also aware that
the pretext upon which the U.S. had escalated the war three years earlier --
the Tonkin Gulf incident -- was a fabrication.
All McNamara would have had to do to "shut down the war" was to walk out of
the Pentagon, join the protesters and lie down on the pavement. If the
protesters' ineffectualness resulted from a lack of discipline, McNamara's
stemmed from an overabundance of discipline.
"All McNamara would have had to do . . ." is, of course, easier said than
done. To cross over to the other side would have been to lose everything
that was Robert Strange McNamara and to risk becoming instead some kind of
high-level Forrest Gump.
Ah yes, from the subject line -- "Some hard questions about Basic Income" --
one might suspect one has stumbled across a digression. Not really. What I'm
pondering is not so much the historical content but the dynamics of
spontaneity and popular mobilization -- of policy, personality and sublimation.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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