Blue Sky Dream (27 page)

So it was that one morning that spring, members of my family were sitting in a cappuccino café on State Street in Santa Barbara, having just attended Mass in the old mission, now passing time until the graduation ceremony would begin a few hours later. Like an apparition, an ugly man appeared behind my mother, a man with a matted beard and dirty clothes and a crazy air about him, a homeless man who had wandered into the café from the encampment of fellow homeless on the nearby grounds of the courthouse. He wanted some money, and I, the person in the direct line of his vision, turned my head from him, choosing
not to encourage, waiting for him to move on. But he did not. He lingered and forced his way into the reverie of togetherness at the table. He insisted on saying, “I can do something none of you can. Wanna bet?”

“No, we don’t,” I said. For some reason I wanted to assume the role of family voice, to move to take control of the moment and thereby protect my mother and father and brother and sister from any further discomfort. “No, we don’t. No, thank you.”

With that, the man reached up to his right eye and removed it, holding in his outstretched hand a staring glass marble. He was laughing then with his good eye winked closed, which made the sudden hole in his face all the more dark and empty and unforgettable. He was still laughing as he turned and left us, just the crazy laugh of one of Ronald Reagan’s homeless if you wanted to hear it that way. Of course, he needn’t have been crazy at all to have enjoyed taunting us with the fact of deprivation in the midst of casual affluence, and our self-preserving weakness in the face of it. He could, in fact, have been a mystic who saw into the souls of nicely dressed people in cappuccino cafés, and who found a particularly interesting case in my own. He could have known that, try as I might to pretend otherwise, as a child of aerospace I had grown up favored by every Congress and presidents Democratic and Republican alike, had been designated a winner in America’s militarized economy from the day I was born, had traded on that privilege all through my young adult life, which happened to coincide with the era of Ronald Reagan. As one of the favored I had been free to slip in and out of the worlds of ghetto students and Maya refugees and Caribbean dirt farmers and soot-inhaling foundry workers, free to wander that landscape of misfortune and then step away, whenever I wished, for a Zen Buddhist brunch by the Bay or a coffee with my family in a Santa Barbara café. Perhaps the homeless man with one eye saw all this and particularly enjoyed my belief that mine was a life that refused my patrimony, he laughing at so absurd a notion, as I do today.

NINE
 SEEKING CONVERSION
 

“I
was in it so deep. I was in it so deep that, well, I just didn’t have the moral compass to say to myself, ‘Sure you’re in it deep, but get out of it now. Cut your losses.’ ”

My father was making one of his confessions, one of his self-lacerations in my presence that each time had the unspoken effect of bringing us closer together. As if handing me pieces to the tantalizing puzzle of himself, he had been saying such things to me for several years by the spring of 1990 when I was thirty-two and my father had been an aerospace engineer for more than three decades. Those years had made me less his child and more his friend, he and I liked to say. As friends we talked of shared interests, something he’d read or something I’d written, some absurdity of modern life we perceived alike and enjoyed having a good laugh about. The less I was his child and the more I became his friend, the tighter my father seemed to grip me in his bear hugs of greeting and the less abashedly he would say to me, “I love you, son.”

“I love you, too, Dad,” I would answer. And then, if my father happened to slip into one of his confessions, one of his ever more harsh appraisals of how dull and suspect had been his working life, I would love him all the more. For I accepted that self-negation as a kind of gift, coming as it did from a father who had once seemed all-powerful to his child, powerfully charismatic or powerfully fearsome depending on the moment, but an enigma self-enclosed, self-sufficient. “It gives me
supreme
satisfaction that you did not follow my example and become an engineer,” my father now liked to say to me, his friend, and whenever he did, I knew he wanted to share with me some more regrets and doubts, more glimpses of what a life spent in the military contracting bureaucracy had cost his spirit.

What gave this conversation in the spring of 1990 a different color, however, was the fact that the Cold War was won, having been ended by the revolts in the Eastern Bloc. Because of this, life in America’s military contracting bureaucracy seemed to be ripe for change. The nation was abuzz with expectations of a Peace Dividend, a windfall to come from the now indefensible $300 billion defense budget. Perhaps some of that Peace Dividend would pay people like my father to make blue sky technology for the new age, magnetic levitating trains and electric automobiles and a space station or two for monitoring the earth’s ecology. What a difference a Peace Dividend could make, not only in the life of a nation but in the heart of a soured aerospace engineer—assuming, of course, that the aerospace industry could be, in the popular term of the day, “converted” to peaceful pursuits. That is what my father and I were discussing in the spring of 1990, the possibility of conversion.

Days before, I had given my father a taped speech by the leading evangelist of conversion, Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University. Melman’s mixture of technicalese and hellfire preaching was different from peace marchers moralizing against “merchants of death.” Melman found his sins in waste and inefficiency and needless drag on the mechanism of the American economy, sins from an engineer’s
book, sins that went straight to my father’s qualms. Melman’s accusation against the military sector was that it siphoned off too much capital and brainpower from vitally productive sectors in the economy, a critique he made as early as 1965 in a book called
Our Depleted Society
, which he followed with
The Permanent War Economy
(1974),
Profits Without Production
(1983) and
The Demilitarized Society
(1988). Never in all those pages had Seymour Melman relented in his damnation of aerospace culture, its bloated bureaucracy and guaranteed profits hidden behind a curtain of black budget secrecy, sins bringing punishment upon all citizens as America’s productivity rate declined and the Japanese whipped us in the commercial marketplace. And now, with the Cold War over, the lone rationale for so pernicious a culture, “national security,” was evaporating.

Seymour Melman’s vision of conversion looked far beyond the new products that must roll off aerospace assembly lines. The very culture within aerospace plants must be converted to the doctrines of the commercial marketplace. The United States government (which had, after all, fostered the military contractors’ mindset) would force this great reformation by requiring Lockheed and its ilk to immediately create conversion committees made up of rank-and-file workers as well as management. Those committees would chart each company’s new, peacefully productive future. Who should be laid off? Who should be retrained? What now should be invented and manufactured by this firm? You couldn’t let stockholders and top management decide those things, Seymour Melman argued, because their interest was short-term profit, and so they would likely sell off assets and fire employees en masse and otherwise stick to making as many arms as possible, leaving America a nation weakened economically and technologically. But if ordinary workers could be given a say in their fate, they would map long-term profitable—and
productive
—new missions for their companies, transforming the shape and culture of those firms while insuring jobs for themselves in the process. The keys to their own salvation would be placed in their hands.

I found myself very much wanting to believe in this vision of a saved and reformed Lockheed, this idea that the blue sky good life I had known as a child need not end just because the market for blue sky weaponry was disappearing. I wondered if my father could himself believe, and so, after he was done hearing Seymour Melman’s gospel, I decided to tape-record his reaction.

He came to me with a yellow pad full of notes in hand, saying, “Yes, I agree that Melman’s ideas are going to have to be addressed. Will they come to pass without some kind of convulsion in the military-industrial complex? I think not. The first thing Melman’s ideas will have to endure is an incredible, entrenched resistance by those whose careers are at stake. These are powerful men with very powerful interests in the status quo. Now someone like Melman comes along and says, ‘The game’s up, guys. You are obsolete.’ The first thing someone is going to think of when he hears that is, ‘I’m not gonna settle for that, because if I agree with what he’s saying, that makes my whole
life
irrelevant.’ You are going to have to literally blast these guys, blast these ideas, out of their economic foxholes.

“That’s the ambivalence of it for me,” said my father. “I realize I am one of those people to whom it would be announced, ‘Your adult working life has been spent in a futile pursuit. You’re not needed anymore.’ That would be a bitter pill to swallow. But, to tell you the truth, the idea’s been creeping up on me for a long time. The more I asked myself, ‘What the hell is this doing for the species?’ and the more I saw of dissipated energies and squandered talent, the less enamored I was with the aerospace industry.

“By the time these ideas began to dominate my thinking, though, I was in it so
deep
. I was in it so deep that, well, I just didn’t have the moral compass to say to myself, ‘Sure you’re in it deep but get out of it
now
. Cut your losses.’ ”

Never had my father revealed to me so much of the burden carried within, no longer merely hinting at a career uninspiring or even unworthy of his potential, but voicing the fear that he had traveled too far along a path morally doomed. Of course, never
before had there been a Cold War finished, a Peace Dividend coming. What I took from my father’s latest confession was that we two suddenly shared an interest in exploring the potential for conversion, and in it, a kind of redemption.

E
lectronic mail from a graduate of Arizona State University, class of 1990:

A
series of vignettes will tell how my father and I fared in our search for conversion, a quest that ends, some four years later, back in the living room of my parents’ home.

In the first scene it is the spring of 1990, still, and I am in the basement of Columbia University’s industrial engineering department. Seymour Melman bursts through the door of his tiny office late for our appointment, yanking off his cap to reveal a snowy thatch, landing in his chair with a wild grin. Melman is
rejoicing at a recent
New York Times
editorial telling President Bush to get busy cutting the defense budget in half by the year 2000. After that ran, a
Times
editor invited the professor over to hear his gospel of conversion, which Melman has delivered just this day. “It’s the missing link!” Melman is fairly shouting at me. “The editor owned up that what’s left open is the conversion issue! Conversion is the missing link! What’s the use of talking about budget reduction, and what you’re going to spend it on, if these bunnies in between are scared to death!”

By “these bunnies in between,” Melman means the politicians who want to vote a Peace Dividend, but not if it costs too many jobs in their districts. The solution is his conversion approach, Melman promised the editor as he is now promising me. In fact, Congress could easily surpass the cuts called for by the
Times
, saving the country well over a trillion defense dollars by the year 2000. And, in a twist on Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics, Melman calculates that reinvesting the savings into infrastructure, education, and R&D would create more than enough wealth and jobs and tax revenue to erase the deficit within a decade.

With the Red Menace kaput, Melman is busy these days evangelizing peace groups and labor unions and Rotary clubs, drawing enthusiastic applause from all. A conference of mayors has given him an ovation and a unanimous resolution calling for conversion. Seymour Melman has even preached to Bryant Gumbel on the
Today
show. The logic is inescapable. Surely anyone who stands to gain from government spending on butter over guns—teachers, librarians, road workers, police, medical researchers, the homeless—represents a natural constituency for Melman’s plan to phase out the military economy. Congress cannot for long ignore such mounting political pressure and so it is only a matter of time before the bill in Congress that Seymour Melman has helped frame will be passed into law and the great reformation can begin.