The Eyebrows of Resistance

Remembering H. Bruce Franklin

Buried in the shitstorm of disastrous news, you may have read that 21-year-old Norwegian Karen Kyllesø has become the youngest person to ski to the South Pole unassisted. That’s pretty friggin’ awesome. I’ve been daunted by the cost and danger of a trip to Antarctica—or at least to see it from the sea and to visit several nearby islands, and pay respect at Ernest Shackleton’s grave—but lately, I am having a change of mind. I would likely have to wait until retirement, but who knows when that will be, given the political climate.

Speaking of: H. Bruce Franklin, the Rutgers professor who first made me question authority and mass media, died last year at the age of ninety. Bruce was far from ideologically pure and good, but his memoir Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War, which I am reading now, helps explain how he careened from being a navigator pilot for Strategic Air Command in the ‘50s to a Marxist who edited a collection of Stalin’s writings in the ‘70s. When I met him as a student at Rutgers in the late ‘80s—the only school that would employ him after he led Stanford students to overtake a computer lab that was allegedly assisting in the Vietnam War—he did not come off as extreme, nor did he express any violent political views. His New York Times obituary focuses on his antiwar activism, which seems driven by a sense of betrayal after learning the lessons of The Pentagon Papers about the spurious reasons for sending Americans to die and kill in Korea and Southeast Asia.

He left SAC after missions that led him to refer to the Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as “pretty damn realistic.” This wasn’t enough to radicalize him; he became a professor of English Literature and wrote a few books about Herman Melville, before the next betrayal: LBJ lying about “not sending American soldiers to do a job Vietnamese soldiers can do themselves.” When the U.S. voted against war hawk Goldwater, only to be led into an all-out war in Vietnam that killed millions, many felt helpless and turned to protest after the ballot box was ineffective.

This seems to be what the current administration—who appointed a Secretary of Defense who would not answer whether he would use the armed forces to kill American citizens—wants to goad the citizenry into doing. The U.S. has never handled protests very well, to put it mildly. I do not look forward to how protests, no matter how peaceful, will be handled. And I do not expect to see any pushback against his policies from the ruling class unless he cuts the defense budget, which has never been on the agenda. Federal workers seem to be following their oath to the country and refusing to follow illegal orders, which is hopeful.

The courses of Franklin’s that I took were “Science Fiction and America,” and “The Vietnam War and America,” both of which were eye-opening, but hardly radical by today’s standards. The first took the science fiction concept of a “superweapon” and followed how it led to the atomic bomb, and the Vietnam class focused on mythmaking around that war. One lesson was to simply read the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” on a printed handout. A song which Reagan and many others used as pro-America propaganda, without permission, and certainly without reading the lyrics. Not exactly radical indoctrination; I got more of that from Jello Biafra on my Dead Kennedys albums, thanks to Frank Ritacco playing “Holiday in Cambodia” at St. Mary’s parish Youth Group!

But it was enough. Some forget what the ‘80s were like; a resurgence of nostalgia for the ‘50s (and all that entails) and Reagan-worship brought in a new wave of reactionary politics, beginning with people smashing Japanese cars in the ‘70s because American companies refused to compete, racial hatred, anti-LGBT hate, and attacking anyone who refused to conform. I was a punk in high school and I still bought in to a lot of the propaganda, because there was nothing there to refute it.

Franklin refuted it.

Of course, reactionary students, including one old white guy, said that he “needed to be balanced.” Franklin responded that we got “the other side” every moment we were outside the classroom. It took me a while to realize how right he was about that.

Professor Franklin’s true work was teaching for the next forty years; and coincidentally, saving the whales. When he retired from Rutgers, he returned to the sea. He worked railroad tugboats on New York harbor before he joined the Air Force, but in retirement he became a sport fisherman. I can still see his somewhat goofy smile as he held up a nice striped bass. I haven’t fished much since I was a kid, but what we used for bait was called bunker: the Atlantic menhaden. Franklin turned his critical eye to this overlooked and important fish, and wrote The Most Important Fish in the Sea in 2009. According to the NYT:

The book raised awareness of the commercial overfishing of menhaden for fertilizer and animal feed, which led the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in 2012 to impose the first catch limits ever. The limits were credited with encouraging a rebound of menhaden along the Atlantic seaboard, and a return of whales, which feed on the fish, to New York Harbor.

Franklin was a lifelong, joyous nerd for the subjects that intrigued him: the brinkmanship of the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine of the Cold War, which began before the Soviet Union even had long-range bombers and ICBMs; the false narratives that killed millions in Korea and Vietnam, and killed nearly a hundred thousand Americans in combat; and the importance of an ugly little fish that humans don’t find tasty, but was the linchpin of the ecology of the entire Atlantic. You can learn more about him at his author website.

The violent rhetoric of his youth was less effective than his peaceful teaching and writing, which accomplished much. When you see a whale in New York harbor, thank H. Bruce Franklin and his magnificent eyebrows!