January 2011

Set any group of adults talking about the good old days and it will not be long before someone brings up the subject of inflation. The good old days, apparently, were the days when a dollar was worth a dollar, and the general decline in everything from moral standards to sartorial respectability can be measured by the decline in the dollar’s power to purchase. If the adults engaged in the discussion date back any distance at all, each one will have his own little story to show inflation’s tragic ravages.

As a matter of fact, I have my own inflation story, and propose to tell it now.

Away back in the early years of the present century, when I was a good five years old, my older brother and I were walking down the village street one summer afternoon when we found a nice, shiny twenty-five-cent piece lying on the sidewalk.

Sicily had been a sobering experience. For years we had been told that our weapons were superior to any we would encounter. After all, we were soldiers from the most highly industrialized and the richest nation on earth. But that very preoccupation with our advanced technology caused many to assume that technology alone would win battles—more emphasis was placed on victory through airpotrer than better infantry. Yet this wasn’t the only error. Our problems stemmed very often from the lack of imagination, if not lock of intelligence, of those responsible for developing infantry weapons. The bazooka was a case in point. Its performance icas based on a phenomenon ßrst observed by a scientist working for the U.S. Navy, Dr. Cha ties E. Mu n roe. When an explosion was formed irith a particular shape, its energy ironld concentrate into a very effective jet stream.

Writing in 1962, Lewis Mumford noted that “The forces that have formed our cities in the past are now almost automatically, by their insensate dynamism, wrecking them.… The prevailing economic and technological forces in the big city have broken away from the ecological pattern, as well as from the moral inhibitions and the social codes and the religious ideals that once, however imperfectly, kept them under some sort of control, and reduced their destructive potentialities.”

The cities, according to this theory, have been killing themselves with growth. They are overwhelmed by monoliths of glass and concrete, riven by freeways; the middle classes flee to the suburbs, and the cities’ inner cores are left to the dependent and the desperate; neighborhoods disintegrate and with them the venerable buildings whose charm engaged the imagination and whose scale satisfied human dimensions. The cities become not places in which to live, but inhuman complexes where merchandise comes and goes and paper gets shuffled about behind the faceless glass of office towers.

When Polish peasant immigrants began to arrive in America in the 1870’s, there had been no Poland on the maps of Europe for almost a century. Few Polish peasants had a notion of a homeland broader than the district which had contained their village; fewer yet spoke a language which all Poles could understand. For many of them, the realization that they were Poles came only in America—which is what made the Polish peasant immigrant experience unique among all others.

He had the answer—he believed it, and he persuaded millions of others to believe it, too. Even today there are those willing to maintain that if the American people had just listened to him, we would not now be afflicted by a multitude of taxes like barbs in the skin—including the annual stab of the 1040 form.

Some units had regular “UD [Undesirable Discharge] days, “especially when stockades got overcrowded. An Army lawyer recalled making weekly trips to the stockade, offering an Undesirable Discharge to anyone willing to sign the forms: “They were so eager to get out of jail and out of the Army, we could clean the place out in a day.” Some soldiers never realized what they were signing.

Even the appearance of severity often included a private measure of leniency. In an open display of stern punishment, Tim Poirrot, the Marine deserter who surrendered on the floor of the 1972 Republican National Convention, was tried by general court-martial and sentenced to a year in prison. However, Poirrot had negotiated a maximum five-month sentence through a pretrial agreement. Out of the spotlight, the Marines reduced his sentence accordingly.

Matt Morris wrote letters to his draft board explaining his antiwar beliefs. “The draft board said that since I was a declared Quaker they were willing to exempt me. … I felt that even though I qualified, there were people whose feelings were as sincere as mine who could not. If I were to cop out and take the exemption. I would be leaving them in the lurch. This would have, been unethical.” Morris went to prison for refusing induction.

A Santa Barbara deserter was visited by the FBI and admitted he was a fugitive. He asked the FBI man, “What do you want me to do?” The agent said that since the man was living at home, he was not really “at large.” The agent closed his case file and went away without making an arrest.