We had been together for the last seven hours, but I had not known Max very long. We were both in an anti-Vietnam War group in Paris. When the first deserters started coming over the border from the US bases in Germany, he said someone should go and see what was happening. None of us in our American antiwar group wanted to get involved. Some said let the French handle it, but Max maintained that we, as anti-Vietnam Americans, should see what Holland had to do with it; all three deserters had come over Amsterdam to Paris, not directly from Germany. I didn’t know why he just didn’t go by himself, but he said two were better, I was a woman and respectable and would make a better impression. Also, Max was not an American but Austrian, so I could represent the group. The group was lukewarm about the deserters anyway, because “aiding and abetting desertion” was against some law. Bombing Vietnam back to the stone age, our avowed war aim, must also have been against some law, but our group preferred to keep the issues separate. In the whole debate, insofar as we had one, I thought Max much more sympathetic than the others, so I agreed to the trip.
We left Paris at one a.m. I had left for trips early in the morning to avoid traffic, but why we left for this trip at one, I don’t know. Of course, we did avoid traffic. Maybe also an early border crossing was a factor, but I didn’t ask. I was still pretty obedient. Max told me to make sandwiches before going to bed and coffee as soon as I awoke and woke him, and I did that too. We wouldn’t even have breakfast but eat as we drove. He had a Hungarian thermos for the coffee. The nationality of the thermos was indifferent to me, but Max said it was important because it showed that the socialist countries could make things as well as the capitalist countries once they got organized.
The back of the car, a large Citroen sedan, had been folded down to provide room for a rubber mattress, several nylon sleeping bags, an empty sailcloth bag, and now our two suitcases.
--If you’re tired, you can go back there and go to sleep, he said. I like to arrange things so that there is really no need to stop driving. If I could only figure out some way to go on without stopping to pee, it would be perfect. I suppose I could put a can in the front seat, but it seems like going a little far.
So we set out and drove through the night, at first through the widely spaced white night lights of Paris, then under the wan yellow clusters above the auto route to the North, and then through the black countryside to the lowlands. After crossing the border, I went to sleep in the back. Max had been playing the short wave radio for the past hour; spurting and crackling, it gave out Moscow, Albania, and East Berlin. Apparently there was a program in East Berlin monitored by US deserters, but he did not succeed in finding it. No Moscow either. However, Albania came through, so simple they almost seemed exotic, like a child’s schoolbook on socialism: “the decadent capitalist countries of the West have started a new offensive in the beleaguered country of Vietnam.
I woke up about an hour out of Amsterdam, so I said okay to the four waves of political development.
--The first wave, said Max, was the heroic anti-fascism of the Second World War; the second was the anti-communist, conservatism of the late forties and fifties, the third was beatniks and provos, and the fourth a re-politization of youth. Grosso and modo. The trough of the second wave has turned into the upswing--can waves upswing?--of the third, which is being capped by the fourth, re-politization of the young, in case you’ve forgotten.
--Does that mean a commodious vicus of re-circulation? I asked him.
--I don’t understand.
--Vico’s theory of successive, circular or spiral ages.
--What do you know about Vico?
I said I had read about him in a book by James Joyce.
--Very few people know about Vico, said Max. I am one of them. But I don’t know anything about James Joyce.
I didn’t feel like giving a lecture on Joyce at seven o’clock in the morning, pulling into Holland, and I doubt Max would have listened anyway. For someone who talked so much, he did, surprisingly enough, listen carefully to other people, but I don’t think he felt like a lecture that morning either. So I asked him what happened to the Dutch provos whom we had left throwing bricks in the middle of the Dam.
--That’s where I left them too, said Max. But afterwards I got the story from my friends. The whole confrontation police/provos had begun on a Monday morning when the non-union building workers--who, funnily enough in Amsterdam, were the most militant ones, the only recognized unions are Catholic and Socialist, the Communists are officially considered non-union, a good trick if you can work it--where was I?
--Confrontation police/provos.
--Well, the left wing or non-union workers are anything but provos. Anyway, they held a demonstration in front of the statue of the docker. A demonstration about their vacation pay.
--The docker?
--You know, the statue celebrating February 1941 when Amsterdam tried to protect its Jews from deportation.
I didn’t know but nodded, not wanting him to get side-tracked again.
--Anyway, the cops charged, hit them with their swish sticks, and killed one of the guys.
--I thought you said the swish sticks only hurt?
--Well, maybe they used something harder than a swish stick. A newspaper, the Telegraph, that must have shared my opinion about swish sticks only hurting, wrote that the worker who was killed died of a heart attack. Some of the building workers went to the Telegraph and asked for rectification. The Telegraph called the police, but the first policeman who arrived didn’t like the mood, or the odds, and went away. The discussion at the Telegraph became rather heated and somebody even threw some typewriters out of the window. The cops returned in force, and Amsterdam began to take on a new look.
Now I never found out exactly who called the protest meeting at the Dam the next day. When I got there, there were many of the young people of Amsterdam, long and medium hairdo, not usual on building workers, sitting on the steps of another antifascist war monument, this one on the Dam. Apart from the hair, they were very Dutch and orderly, and I don’t suppose anything would have happened at all if it hadn’t been for the cops with their tri-cycles and swish sticks. But after the tenth police charge, people got tired of being hit with the swish sticks and started throwing bricks at the cops. Then they build barricades. For the first time, in Amsterdam. The fourth wave had begun.
Max paused and looked at me.
--Let’s see how well you remember what I told you. What is the fourth wave?
--Political provos?
--Give the lady a banana. That’s why waves is such a good term; while wave four, the political provos, as you put it, is coming up, wave three, the unpolitical provos, and other similar youth groups, has by no means run out. To be noticed: though provos had certainly been in on the beginning of the Dam demonstration, you can’t talk of “the” provos, despite their attempts at an organization newspaper from time to time. In fact, I don’t think that the whole period of the third and fourth waves is one of “tight organization.” Those days went out with the first wave.
He turned to me.
--What was the first wave?
--Heroic antifascism of the Second World War. I don’t see what that was to do with tight organization.
--If you are in a resistance group in an occupied country--by the Nazis, for example, you are heroic, but your group must be well-organized or you will get caught by the Nazis and killed. Which many learned too late.
--And that’s all over?
--The more I see of the development of modern industrial society in America, western Europe, and now in the socialist countries, the less I think we will see tight, centralized “rally round the flag, rally round the leader” type organizations again. On the left, that is. The right is always rallying round flags and leaders and expecting everybody else to do so.
It’s not an accident that the Communist Parties have so little luck in rebuilding obedient youth groups. Little luck in America, in France, in Italy--none at all in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. Groups like the SDS in America, in Germany, are perfect examples of non-flag, non-leader, non-obedience, non-organizations. They get things done, they grew out of the second and third wave, the silent and then the beat generation, but they resemble not at all the Young Communist Leagues of the thirties and early forties. Just imagine expelling people for deviationism from these fourth wave outfits. In the thirties and forties, people who were expelled sometimes committed suicide. Now they just go off and start another organization, as happy there as elsewhere.
I listened and nodded. By now we were in the autoroute restaurant on the Dutch side of the border.
--Here we have, Max went on imperturbably as he sat down with his white coffee in a white mug. It is part of a phenomenon, not an isolated event. Because, in a larger situation, a seemingly meaningless incident may have its place and indicate something fundamental. It suffices to read it correctly. The Amsterdam riots were a striking example of the passage from the third into the fourth wave. The provos, for example, were typical examples of middle class kids revolting against the tulips in the window, if you follow me.
I followed him. George Orwell had written a book called Keep the Aspidistra Flying where at the end, the hero had gone back to the tulips, i.e. aspidistras, in the window,
but I forget why.
but I forget why.
--Drugs, dirt, sex, long hair were hallmarks of the third wave, continued Max, and even if I don’t dig this, I do prefer the third wave to the second. The political revolt came from a social revolt.
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment