17 February 2004

The affairs of humankind turn on ponderous hinges. We are a disorganized lot, and fate has a lot of inertia. Mine did this morning. I awoke to the knowledge that the three-day weekend commemorating the Dead Presidents was over, and the mind-numbing series of meetings on the new contract were going to begin in a few hours. I contemplated the hinge beneath me in the Murphy bed, wondering what would happen if I upgraded the springs. Could I make the bed hinge upward by itself, and perhaps work a device to automatically slide the doors on the cabinet closed. Automate the process, perhaps leaving myself within.

If I attached a timer, perhaps I could emerge when the workday was done.

I opened the hinge on the new laptop, exposing the screen. It was as blank as my mind. I had not intended to spring for a new computer yesterday, but the dog looked up at me with his liquid brown eyes as I mashed the keys on the old IBM with the crappy Microsoft operating system. The screen died on me while we took the first of several canine constitutionals. It was working when we left, but there had been an ominous flicker the last few days.

Requisate im Pacem, old keyboard. Perhaps I can figure out a way to save something from the hard drive. Seems a pity to lose all that stuff. .

So that is how I found myself in the Best Buy super-store just after opening, spending money I don't have to get reconnected to the digital world. Another day older, and deeper in debt. I think maybe I should have just stayed in the Murphy bed, my weight holding the hinge of the mechanism open.

Which is one of the things I do best. I blinked in the darkness. Haiti appears to be conducting its 32nd coup. The French are contemplating sending troops, aparently having forgotten the results of the last armed expedition they conducted there. The new Mayor of San Francisco is issuing marriage liscenses as fast as he can to same-sex couples. Another two kids were killed in Iraq. The primary that will finish off Howard Dean's candidacy in Wisconsin will happen today, and there is snow coming to Washington.

I wondered if there was a hinge in all this disassociated information. I had so hoped that winter was over. The flowers are starting to poke tender green above the frozen soil. How do they know when it is time?

Fifty-seven years ago this morning the Voice of America opened a hinge, too. It began broadcasting to the Soviet Union. It was a pretty quick transition from the close alliance against Fascism to the beginning of George Kennan's doctrine of containment of the Evil Empire, but the thinking of the day was nothing if not agile.

Kennan was a career diplomat and his thoughts on how to deal with the Bear were published in what was called the Long Telegram. He wrote it in 1946, and controversial as it was, he signed it as "X." It remains the most influential statement of the Cold War. Kennan had been posted to Moscow in the time of the collectivization and the civil war against the Whites. When he wrote the document he was 44 years old and full of piss and vinegar. He was a member of the old school. He actually spoke the language.

The telegram article was updated and published in the Journal of Foreign Affairs in 1947, the same year that VOA began broadcasting to the Russian people. It was called in this iteration The Sources of Soviet Conduct and was widely circulated. Everyone in Washington knew who he was, but he had plausible deniability. As a serving diplomat he could not state his views with attribution. But he viewed his obligation to speak the truth as paramount. He gave the Truman Administration the intellectual foundation to assume leadership of what would eventually be described as the "free world."

The Long Telegram was issued in March of 1946. I do not know whether Winston Churchill was apprised of its contents, or the growing opinions of the American mission in Moscow. His speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the next month sounded the same vigorous anti-Communist themes. He growled in the same tones he used to declare the resolution of his nation against the Nazis. As he declared that an Iron Curtain had descended across the continent "from Stettin to Trieste."

If we wanted to put a date to the beginning of the Cold War, it might as well be that night at Fulton.

Of course, it would never have occurred to Stalin that a state of conflict did not exist. The dialectic of Karl Marx dictated that the bourgeois West would have to fall, and Lenin marveled that the bankers of the democracy were willing to lend him the money to buy the rope with which he intended to hand them.

For Churchill's part, he was as indomitable in peace as he was in war. He was accurate when he noted that "The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power."

If only he knew. What he had seen, as Kennan did, was that the grand cities of Middle Europe has disappeared into a mist as dark as that of the Nazi Night. "Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."

But as we began broadcasting to the Soviet Union, there was darkness equally profound a little bit to the south. Churchill could have included the metropolis of Money, Mississippi.

On August 24, 1955, a young African American man from Chicago was visiting relatives in that sleepy soggy summertime town. He failed to understand the cultural context of the Old South in which he found himself. He made a smart comment to a trailer-trash cute white woman in a grocery store that catered to the Negro trade.

It was a serious mistake. The woman had a jealous husband. Her name was Carolyn, and her husband was named Roy. The Chicago kid was named Emmett.

Three days later, in the dead of the night, two men, Roy and his brother-in-law dragged Emmett from the house where he was staying, brutally beat him and tortured him before dumping the mutilated body in the Tallahatchie River. They were as monstrous as an Commissar in the basement of Lubianka Prison. It was just warmer that night. Emmett's body was found floating in it three days later.

Roy and his brother-in-law had figured that the cotton-gin fan stone would have kept the body underwater. They were wrong. They were arrested and tried, and all of us alive listening to the radio and the flickering television became acquainted with the term "all white jury."

The two of them walked out of the courtroom free men, after the jury deliberated for slightly over an hour. The jurors stopped for a soda to make sure it didn't look like they had raced to a verdict. The murderers sold their true story to Look Magazine for $4,000 a few months later, and nothing whatsoever happened to them.

I have no record of what George Kennan thought about the murder at the time. I know Mr. Churchill would have been appalled at such conduct in the United Kingdom. But I do know that Emmett's murder was the hinge on which a society was forced to turn. A few months later a woman named Rosa Park refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus.

And on that refusal began a change so profound that we have not seen the end of it yet. It is a good story. They broadcast it now on the Voice of America.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra