The Savage Innocent 2015

The galvanizing effect this 'Kent State Massacre' had on college students around the country was instantaneous, and for many, cataclysmic. At Berkeley, the effect was nothing short of explosive. In short order, student leaders at Berkeley began organizing a massive student protest that would, eventually, have a direct impact on hundreds of campuses and tens of thousands of students across the country and, indeed, around the world. Nixon and his aides soon began drafting plans to curtail civil liberties on a vast scale, and the nation quietly teetered on the brink.

All of this hit Rand and I pretty hard. First, we had learned of his mother's suicide just days before, and now it looked like America was on the brink of committing suicide just a few days later. In the echoes of that wasted attempt, families and lives all over the country splintered; splintered and fell into an icy cold sea.

Much like lookouts posted high above the Titanic's foredeck, Rand and I looked out over the prairie seas of Indiana, deep in America's heartland, and looked on helplessly as vast icebergs loomed in the distance. From our perch we saw a vast collision unfolding, a collision that reverberates to this day. Conservatives vilified protesters, called them communists plants sent from Russia; liberals mollified, saw Nixon surrounded by the 82^nd Airborne Division as callous and insensitive. So in May, 1970, the great ship ran into an iceberg, and seams broke open all across America -- black water engulfed the land, drowning dreams of both the righteous and the damned. Rand and I watched as our country, an almost always fractious land, a people who had just been united by depression and world war, as it slipped into the earnest business of caving in on itself, and eating it's young once again. Icy waters lapped at the decks, and I'm sure somewhere violins played. Women and children to the lifeboats first, if you please.

+++++

Madeleine was of course, as Tom Shipman put it, living in the eye of the hurricane, dancing on a volcano. She was vulnerable, and particularly susceptible to claims of being victimized by paternal authority. This too easily transmuted into rage against a paternalistic state. When she confronted such authority, she could muster such a withering display of righteous indignation that, well, she could have put any southern Baptist preacher to shame. Her anger came from a place deep inside, a hollow, burned out place few people know exists, and her anger was not the kind to seep out slowly. No, her anger was explosive, and at times, dangerously so. When she lost control of herself, she did so completely, and when she did her attachment to reality was questionable.

After Kent State, the organizers at Berkeley called on students from all over the country to head for Washington, D.C., for a day of national protest -- scheduled for May 9^th -- and my sister resolved to make the trip.

Unfortunately, Madeleine had her driver's license, and for some odd reason, God had seen fit to make sure she had an automobile. I guess history will smile on my grandfather some day, but giving Madeleine a car was perhaps the most idiotic thing he ever did in his life.

One of Madeleine's friends from the hospital got wind of her plans, and tried to alert her doctors. Too late. They found her room empty, clothing missing, and her car wasn't in the lot.

Someone called my grandfather, and he connected the dots: Madeleine was dashing cross country to join massive protests at the National Mall in just a few days. He found out she had made her escape in the shiny new Porsche 911E he had given her just a few months before. I'm pretty sure he didn't have the slightest idea what to do, so he called my mother. Mother was, it turned out, drying out at a rehab in the desert. Mother fumed, lost control, then called the only man in the world she knew to be absolutely trustworthy.

She called Tom Shipman, and more icebergs loomed in the night.

+++++

I remember that day fairly well; we were in the dining hall finishing lunch, and Lt Edwin G Crist could be heard rambling on about the basic goodness of humanity to the kids at his table. There was something about the way Crist was talking, the know-it-all condescension implicit in his words, his pretentious authority masquerading as the voice of experience, and I guess that set off a bomb in Shipman's mind. Sergeant-Major Tom Shipman, USMC, stopped eating and looked up from his plate.

One thing I do recall about Crist even now was that the kid took his religion seriously; that's not a bad thing in and of itself, but he was the type to try and shove religious edicts down your throat -- any chance he got. Anyway, I think Crist's statement -- that humans are inherently good -- got stuck in Shipman's throat like a fishbone. Shipman seemed to gag a bit, and turned a little red in the face. True to form, the Marine kept his mouth shut and let Crist bluster on until lunch was over.

Shipman was paid to teach us the intricacies of military science, things as varied as global geopolitical strategy to the intricacies of field-stripping an M-1 carbine -- with eyes closed. I don't think he ever considered himself obliged to share his opinions or experiences with us. Even when asked by eager students to tell war stories, Shipman seemed to slip away to a place of his own choosing, then would carry-on silently, teaching whatever he'd been assigned to teach. I think I mentioned once that Shipman had made peace with this world, and perhaps that frozen night by the Chosin reservoir had something to do with this. Whatever happened to the man, I think it's fair to say Shipman held no illusions about the basic nature of humanity. When a man can go from treating the victims of napalm attacks one day to taking care of the victims of an atomic bombing the next, when he has experienced machine-gunning five hundred Chinese soldiers one night, and helping a fifteen year old kid talk about being raped by his mother another, I suspect you develop a fair sense of the basic nature of your fellow man. I don't call that cynicism, either. I call that seeing your way through life with both eyes wide open.

When Rand and I came to his classroom after lunch, I could tell that fishbone was still lodged deeply in his throat. He was sitting at his grey desk, eyes cast down, lost in thought.

The man had something on his mind, something to say, and when Shipman talked, we listened. There wasn't anyone on campus who didn't respect the man, and many of the students, myself included, thought of him as a father. The man had a tendency to talk like an M-16, by the way. He shot his words in sharp, short bursts, each volley well-timed and on-target. You paid attention when he spoke lest you get your legs shot out from under you, for unlike a lot of people who have the capacity to maim with their words, Shipman knew exactly what kind of damage words can inflict.

"Lieutenant Crist made a comment at lunch," he began, "and it has been bothering me ever since." He looked around the room before he continued. "He said something that I think we need to talk about, and I'd like to do so for a few minutes, before we move on."

This was a real curveball, if ever there was one. Shipman wanted to discuss something. The flavor of the idea took a little getting used to.

"Lt Crist said, if you will excuse my summary, that man is essentially a well intentioned creature, good and decent. I want to know what you men think about that."

He looked around the room, his eyes a high powered radar tuned to track incoming ICBMs.

No one said a word.

He looked down at his desk and nodded, then looked around the room as a drowning man might look at distant shore.

"McDougall?" he asked a kid on the front row. "What do you think?"

Ian McDougall seemed to shrink low in his seat and Shipman turned to me.

"Mr McClelland?" he said to me.

"Sir?"

"What's your take on this? Is man basically good or evil?"

"I'm inclined to say evil, Sergeant-Major," I said quietly.

"Why?"

"I think human beings are, sir, for the most part selfish and insensitive to other people's pain and suffering. They focus only on what they want."

He nodded his head, turned to my roommate: "Mr Rand? What about you?"

I think Rand must have been waiting for somebody to ask him this question all his life, yet I think he was unsure of himself in that moment. His feelings for Shipman were complex, and this wasn't the venue he would have chosen. Nevertheless, he jumped in with both feet.

"I think the question itself is specious and irrelevant," Rand said as he leaned forward in his seat. To me it looked as if Rand had challenged Shipman to disagree with him, like he'd suddenly decided to pick a fight with the universe.

"Specious?" Shipman replied. "Why so?"

"What possible difference could it make? Good people do bad things, evil people end up doing great things. The point of Zarathustra is that there isn't a line dividing good and evil, sir. Nietzsche says good and evil reside on a circle. That all life is eternal recurrence, the widening gyre. Humanity is what it is, sir, what it always has been, what it always will be. We can't change human nature, so why get caught up in quasi-religious morality plays. Why not just accept that humanity is nether perfect nor flawed. We just are."

"Zarathustra?" Shipman asked. "Übermensch, and all that?"

Rand nodded, defiantly.

"And the widening gyre? You are referring to Yeats, are you not?"

Rand nodded: "And what rough beast, it's hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be reborn?"

"Yet, doesn't that sound like an affirmation of evil, Mr. Rand?"

"The first stanza, sir. The first line of the poem: 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre;' that's the key point, sir. History is cyclical, we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, all within the widening gyre of time. To paraphrase Santayana, sir, we can never learn from our experience, hence humanity will repeat it's failures over and over and over again. We are on a merry-go-round from which we can never get off. We can't, sir, because in effect, we are the merry-go-round."

Shipman nodded, trying to reconcile the kid's words with his own experience.

"I think humanity is flawed, evil," Shipman said softly, quietly, at long last. "And doomed to suffer."

"But isn't suffering a choice," Rand said, and the words tore into Shipman like the blast of a mighty bomb.

"That sounds to me, Rand, like the thinking of a person who has never had to peel dead, irradiated skin from his arms, after having an atomic bomb dropped over his back yard."

"Yet even so, sir, the choice to suffer remains the same. That person can suffer in an existential sense, or they can accept their fate as they accept their own humanity. Suffering will not change the outcome, nor will it prevent future outcomes, but acceptance might. Yet Man finds acceptance difficult, almost impossible to attain. As a result, Man cannot learn from his mistakes and is doomed to repeat them. If we choose not to learn, sir, we are in effect choosing to suffer."

Shipman blinked several times as he tried to digest Rand's words; finally he shook his head and turned away, opened a textbook and turned to the chalkboard. We spent the rest of the hour covering the creation of the National Security State in 1947.

+++++

Madeleine drove east on Interstate 80 in her 911, accompanied by a bespectacled, long-haired protester who went by the name of Frank Lloyd Wrong, perhaps because he considered himself an architect of anarchy. While Frank had a flare for making spontaneous speeches, he often did so while stoned out of his mind, and these incoherent ramblings had seen his utility to the movement diminish. He was bright, however, and understood the mood sweeping the nation. He'd graduated Cum Laude from Stanford, and was at Berkeley now, at Bolt, studying law. When Nixon reinstated the draft, Frank Lloyd Wrong decided to get involved. He burned his draft card, attended rallies, and began cultivating political allies. He'd decided, after watching the ineffectual efforts of protesters around campus, that the only way to change the system was to get inside and tear it down from within. He wanted to go to Washington, wanted to attend this huge rally because, more than anything else, he wanted to be a part of history. He also wanted to see how the system responded to such a direct attack, and how the power elite in Washington would respond when confronted directly -- in their own backyard.

Frank was also dead broke. He lived with friends, bummed money for food and pot, and didn't have anything like a functioning car. Leaving an SDS organizing session after news of Kent State broke over the campus, he ran into a really angry girl, and she interested him. He listened to her, asked her questions, then they started talking about going to D.C., to 'really make a difference' -- and when she said she'd do it, she would go, he asked if he could bum a ride with her.

So, fuck irony, fuck Nietzsche, fuck eternal recurrence and fuck that goddamn widening gyre, fuck the whole universe -- right up the ass. History had come calling at Berkeley that morning, and damned if History hadn't found the one wide-eyed idiot in the world who had absolutely no clue what was really going on. And so History claimed this girl as her own, and then decided to use this girl to shake up the world a little.

Because History has a way of coming around again and again for nasty little visits, and usually when she's least expected, because she hates being ignored.

+++++

Rand was raking himself over the coals and fuming and hissing all the while like a snake about to be stepped on. "I shouldn't have said shit, man. Not to Shipman. I just shouldn't have..."

"Come on, Rand. He asked you, didn't he?"

"No way, Todd. He didn't ask me to cut open a vein and let him bleed to death."

"What makes you think you did, Rand? I mean, he's a pretty tough mother..."

"Yeah, but something's happened to him, amigo. Why'd he get so torqued up over some silly bullshit Crist said. No. Something's up with him, man. I can feel it."

Wasn't too much I could say about that. I mean, either there was, or there wasn't. How would we ever know?

Then there was a knock on the door. History calling once again, I guess you might say.

+++++

Shipman came in, leaned on the heavy metal chair by my desk, then he looked slowly around the room, and finally, at me.

"Todd, your mom just called. Apparently your sister has gotten tangled up with a group of anti-war protesters at Berkeley, at least that's what your Mom heard. She's on her way to Washington right now, driving, we think. Someone's with her, some guy and Frank D'Magio."

"What?" Rand said, sitting bolt upright on his bed. "What do you mean, some guy?"

Shipman shrugged. "I don't know the whole scoop, guys, just that the FBI thinks this D'Magio character is a bad actor. SDS, real radical. They've been tailing him for a while, and they think he's a bomb maker. Long story short, guys, the feds think this guy D'Magio has gotten to your sister, and he's using her. Using her to get to D.C. They think he's going to try to plant a bomb, use your sister to help him get close enough to use a bomb."

"What the fuck!" Rand said.

"Swell," I seemed to recall saying. "Just what does dear old Mom expect us to do?" Rand was off the bed now, pacing like a tiger in a very small cage.

"She wants me, well, us, you and me, to go to Washington, help find her before this D'Magio can do whatever it is he plans to do. The FBI is on the lookout for them too, but they don't have a lot to go on. Just the description of her car...but..."

"Car?" I cried, "what car?

"Apparently your grandfather bought her a car, a Porsche 911."

"Are you fuckin' kiddin' me!" Rand yelled. "Madeleine's in a 911, out tooling around the country with a fuckin' bombmaker!?"

I turned away, coughed, almost started to laugh. "This is pretty rich," I said at last. "No one in my family ever does anything half-assed. I mean, no one could say we're dull or boring, ya know?"

Then Rand had one of his rolling epiphanies. "Wait a minute! She's in a 911, headed from San Francisco to D.C.? What the fuck? That's Interstate 80, like all the way across? How fucking hard can it be to find a Porsche on just one Interstate?"

"Oh, they found it alright," Shipman said. "Parked at the airport in Reno, Nevada. Nothing inside."

"So? They're flying to D.C.?"

"Flown. Two kids matching their description flew there earlier today. FBI assumes they're on the ground. The rally is tomorrow. We're flying there tonight, from Indianapolis."

"I'm going to," Rand thundered.

Shipman held up three tickets. "Of course you are. Now, pack light. I wanna move fast, and hit the ground hard!"

"Yessir!" we said, snapping to attention. Actually, I think we screamed those two words, but around that dormitory, well, nobody noticed, or even seemed to care.

+++++

The Allegheny 727 touched down at National just after midnight, and Shipman went for our rental car while I called grandfather.

"Gramps, any news?" I asked, clearly disturbing the old man's sleep.

"Todd? That you? Where are you?"

"In D.C., sir. At the airport."

"Not much new that I know of, but the FBI called an hour ago, said there's a huge encampment of protesters out on the Mall. That's where they're going to start looking."

"Okay, Gramps. Has she tried to call, or anything?'

"No, Toddy, nothing, not a peep."

"Anything else?"

"Well, one of Madeleine's classmates called a while ago. About this Frank guy. She said the guy is an idiot, a stoner, whatever that means. She said when the FBI approached them, told them this Frank fella is a bomb-maker, that everyone just laughed."

"Okay Gramps. We'll head for the Mall..."

"Todd, things are getting out of control there. You be careful. This Nixon has stirred up a hornet's nest, and I think they're going to try to make an example out of some of these kids. You get your sister and get her out of there, you hear?!"

"Yessir," I said. I think he knew just how vulnerable Madeleine was, how naïve she was about life on the street. I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was really shook up about everything he'd learned about these student protesters over the past few days, and that he was beginning to feel guilty about what was happening. "Don't worry, Gramps. This guy from school? Shipman? He's a pro. If anyone can find her, it's him."

"Todd! This is your job, son. You father's gone, it's up to you now. You hear me? It's up to you."

And he was gone. I was standing in an empty airport at one in the morning, and I really didn't know what to do.

So I turned around, and went looking for Rand, and Tom Shipman. A few minutes later we were in a tan Chevy Nova headed into D.C., and the Mall.

+++++

Madeleine and Frank Lloyd Wrong weren't at the National Mall that night. They were staying in a cheap motel near Georgetown, apparently under an assumed name. They had no idea law enforcement was searching for them, but no matter; the FBI had lost their trail.

As so often happens when rumors become stories, and stories become "fact", D'Magio's face now adorned post office walls and precinct house briefing rooms all over the District of Columbia. Described as a master bomb-maker, D'Magio's 'notices' also claimed this 'stoner' turned law school student was in fact "armed and dangerous" -- and not to be approached under any circumstances.

And as recently released records of the event shows, many radicals en route to D.C. had been labeled as such. You were against the war? You were a pacifist, a surprisingly dangerous label, as it turned out. You attended an anti-war rally? You were an anarchist. You belonged to an organized, student-led anti-war organization? You were a communist. If you stood out as an effective leader in one of these organizations, you suddenly became dangerous. You were tailed. Your phone was tapped. Suddenly, many of these people, hardly anarchists or communists, became 'enemies of the state'.