Make Love Not War / Love It or Leave It
More than one day in the late 1960s, I would be driving around Baltimore and see two bumper stickers on two different vehicles that both spoke to love. One read “Make Love Not War;” the other read “Love It or Leave It.” By that contentious point in time, I was used to living in a divided nation. Probably I didn’t think twice about the two messages, which had become part of the static around the war in Vietnam. Sometimes it seemed that static drowned out everything else that might be considered newsworthy. And when Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were murdered within a few months of one another, something like tragedy made itself known, something purely unbearable that dwarfed everything. Yet the cars and trucks with their bumper stickers kept going down the many avenues and roads. Business went on because what else could business do? I kept going to school because I wanted no part of that war. I knew, however, that the war wanted me.
Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 was a victory for “Love It or Leave It.” Nixon was not one to care about distinctions beyond the most patent ones: Reds versus good Americans, hippies versus good Americans, troublesome Black Power advocates versus good Americans, subversives of whatever stripe versus good Americans. Cold War clarity braced Nixon every day. Certainly the hippie slogan of “Make Love Not War” was to Nixon and many others downright disgusting. Didn’t the people who flaunted that slogan understand anything about how the world worked? Didn’t they understand the burdens that went with democracy and the free world? Didn’t they grasp that world affairs, to say nothing of wars, were serious affairs that demanded serious people? What kind of alternative was making love? A joke and not a good one, like some young woman sticking a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. Who needed such gestures when the nation was embroiled in a war that counted for so much in the standing-up-to-communism scheme of things? Nixon was surrounded by indecency, the home front being as much of a threat as the events in Southeast Asia.
I had studied ancient Greece in the university class I took in the history of Western civilization and had learned something about Sparta and how warriors fought to the death and how such warriors were heroes. The Greeks seemed to always be at war with each other over matters of territory, honor, and prestige. Tribal enmity was as natural as sun and rain. Patriotism—the demands the tribe made on your life—was also natural. Even through the distant lens of history, the Spartans seemed like tough characters who were schooled in adversity. Love did not figure in their tribal necessities. War, which was to say male force, was the ultimate test. Men proved themselves or didn’t. Women welcomed the victors home. Not much was said about the losers. The men might be murdered outright; the women and children would likely become slaves. Rape was never mentioned in my history books.
It was strange to be driving to school and hearing the news on the radio about another “engagement” with the enemy. Did anyone know what actually was going on? How was the United States going to win this war? What would “winning” represent? And why was love impossible as a public value? Perhaps because it was sweaty and intimate, but also because to recognize the primal place of pleasure undermined the gravity of nations. Making love was, after all, an intermittent activity, one that was often more about lust, hence the derogatory “fuck this and fuck that.” South Vietnam had brothels and freelance prostitutes, another fact that didn’t turn up on the news. Soldiers may not have been making love but they were aiming to do their share of fucking.
Poor Richard Nixon, assailed by lower claimants to the throne of power, almost Shakespearean in his existential isolation. His opponent, Hubert Humphrey, was tied to the war but seemed soft compared to Nixon, a vehement man who tried hard to show voters he could manage the animus that drove him. Nothing was quite as ghastly as Nixon smiling, yet American politics, since the disturbed psyche of the nation is so close to the surface, presents a sort of passion play in which real people play allegorical roles. Love threatened Nixon’s role in particular since love cannot be controlled, though it can be repressed. In one further turn of the ironic screw, Nixon spoke for the forces of repression almost lovingly. Repression was a savior of sorts. As a phrase, “getting tough” was music to many threatened, nervous ears. If you don’t love it here then you, as a malcontent, can leave.
“Bold as love” was a very different phrase, one from the playbook of Jimi Hendrix, a man who reveled in creativity and who could stand for Nixon’s antithesis, someone who was not running for any office but announcing via his guitar and lyrics the full-bodied cry of love. Hendrix could be wry and orgasmic in what seemed like the same moment. It’s fair to say Nixon did not spend any time listening to Hendrix, but the dire protests launched during those years were sparked by all manner of uncontrolled feelings that wanted to blow the lid off the repressive pot that only seemed to promise more wars, more hypocritical posturing, more consolidation of power, more fear and loathing. When Hendrix played the national anthem at Woodstock, one year into Nixon’s presidency, love announced itself in all its complex passion, at once avid and haunting. Who could accept that challenge? Many people but not Richard Nixon who had more pressing concerns.
Those concerns were a rub that has not gone away and may, as far as human annals are concerned, never go away. Yet those concerns had little do with the basics of life—people falling in love, having children, wanting those children to grow up and live in peace—unharmed by terrorists and armies. Again and again, politics would present manias as reasons, whereas men and women in their basic roles as men and women would prefer the sanity that would let them live with one another. To be sure, love can be crazy, as more than one songwriter noted and as Hendrix would aver. But crazy as wars? Crazy as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao? Crazy as overthrowing elected governments? Crazy as putting people in jail for the color of their skin? Crazy as minimizing the grace that went with the surprise and steadfastness of love? Nixon believed, and he was representative in that regard, in the primacy of control. What he, and others saw on the horizon, was something like anarchy, too much honest feeling that could only spell trouble. Nixon won and then lost because he couldn’t sort out his passions. Like many Americans, for all his staunch patriotism, something inside him cowered, something narrow and vindictive. Sound familiar? Much love remains to be made, not the least for the generous, bold earth on which we all live.
Such a historical reminder, Baron, about what’s truly important … still. Thanks for this.
Epic! Please keep writing and providing perspectives so relevant. Thank you Baron.