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Human Beings are Fundamentally Unserious, Part 1.

November 27, 2013

I had just turned nine years old when the Iran hostage crisis began.

For over a year it was the topic of dinner table conversation. Often we would eat dinner on trays in front of the television. If I remember right, the station we watched for national news had a little ticker on the lower right hand side of the screen which showed how many days we were into the crisis.

Radio stations started playing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" multiple times a day in honor of the hostages, and everyone in my neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama put in extra work to maintain nice looking ribbons around their trees (I don't remember if they were oak or not). When the rain and whatnot had made the ribbon too frayed you had to cut it with some scissors and put a new one up.

The Iranians were uniformly portrayed as barely human in their fanaticism (often in contrast with our "moderate Muslim" allies in Saudi Arabia) and I never got a satisfactory explanation as to why they might want to take the hostages (google "President Mossadegh" and "Savak"). This didn't bother me too much at the ages of 9 or 10. They were bad guys and we were good guys, and the whole thing was intensely humiliating day after day, especially after the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in April of 1980.

And then, in November of that year, Ronald Reagan was elected. As a six year old I had voted for Jimmy Carter in my first grade class election, because I liked his smile. In the months of nightly news coverage following Eagle Claw, my ten year old self had learned a lesson. I even had a Ronald Reagan t-shirt. And I was right to wear that shirt, for he was so powerful that a mere twenty minutes after his inagurural speach, it was announced the hostages had been freed.

The hostages are free! The hostages are free!

For some reason I was at home that day and my mom was at work. With shaking hands I dialed, for the first time, her phone number at the prison (long story for another post).

"Hello."

"Mom! Mom! Mom!" Hyperventilation. "They. They. They! Freed! The." Hyperventilation. "Hostages!"

Long pause.

"It's all on the T.V. The hostages are free! The hostages are free!"

An unnerving amount of silence, and then. "Jon. You are not to call me at work unless it's important." Click.

It was a rather rude way to be pulled out of the cave and into sunlight, and I think I'm still grappling with how something can be a national obsession and yet not be "important." But one thing is for sure; human beings are simply not to be taken seriously. Just look at what we say, and then look at what we do. Would you take someone like that seriously? Honestly.

Posted in Jon Cogburn

6 responses to “Human Beings are Fundamentally Unserious, Part 1.”

Brock

November 27, 2013

Apart from the part about phoning your Mom at work, I could have written this myself. I voted for Jimmy Carter in my first grade class election because I liked his smile. I was nine when the hostage crisis began. For some reason, I was home from school on January 20, 1981. I must have been sick. And I remember watching the inauguration, and being in awe as the hostages were freed right afterwards.
Okay, I didn’t have a Ronald Reagan T-shirt, either. Still, reading this is uncanny.

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Jon Cogburn

November 27, 2013

Well. . . we’ve never actually been seen together. Just saying.

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Mark Lance

November 27, 2013

I was enough older than y’all to be crushed when Reagan won, and to realize that I had to launch into an activist career big-time.
Mark

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bzfgt

November 27, 2013

I must have been 12, I remember sitting in the principle’s office waiting for my dressing down and seeing it on TV. I hated Reagan, I guess because my parents were staunch Democrats…the spin was that Reagan was so scary they didn’t dare mess with him as they did with Carter, not even for a few days worth of his presidency I guess. Later of course we found out that Carter had negotiated the release and the Iranians delayed it until he was out of office as a kind of “up yours.”

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Ed Kazarian

November 27, 2013

I totally bought Reagan hook, line and sinker for a chunk of his first term. When I finally broke out of it, it was over. But there was definitely a late childhood / early adolescence period where I was sold.
The thing I find kind of amazing about the anecdote is how as children we more or less unproblematically allow ourselves to identify with the interests that get represented in these kinds of political dramas, but that by the time we become adults, that identification has been drastically curtailed, even if we don’t shift away from the terms of it at the level of behavior (watching tv every night) or the political sentiments we articulate.

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Patrick S. O’Donnell

November 27, 2013

Everyone’s sharing, so…I’m old enough to recall the televised accounts of the demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was that, together with TV images from the Vietnam War and listening to news accounts of civil rights protests on the radio late at night in my pre-teen years, that decisively shaped the worldview (such as it is: a motley) I identify with today.(My parents were lifelong Democrats until my father voted for Nixon in 1972, an act for which my mother and I never forgave him.)

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