10. Man Without a Country: Death of a Patriot

A good day to die
My name was no longer Michael Bransome, and little did I know, waking up to a brilliant Ohio (was it Cincinnati? Toledo?) sunrise, Wednesday the 12th of August in the year 1970, that this would be the day that I die. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

Might sound like snitching from a cross between "Crank" and "American Pie", but Jason Statham's character wasn't to have his hair-raising hour-to-live for three and a half decades, and even McLean's song didn't get airplay until the day I got to Stockholm, Sweden, on June 26, 1971. That was Midsummer's Eve in Sweden, and Stockholm's Arlanda International Airport - wispy waif of an airport in those days - was nearly locked down, together with the rest of the country, preparing as she does at that time each year to re-affirm the rightful place of natural man and natural woman in Linnaeus' natural order of things, so honestly: how could I have been inspired by either of these, whether a year or half a life earlier...

Go (even further) North, young man
From Canada, preparing for my ascent into sub-arctic heaven, we hadn't a clue about Swedish Midsummer - midsummer schmidsummer - how could we know of the mountains of food and the buckets of mead, or the music and the dancing, not to speak of the wild cavorting of her blonde and blue-eyed minions that sunny day and sunny night each year? My friends - I mean my friends in the Canadian Friends Service Committee, Nancy and Jack Pocock principally (absolute saints, together with their daughter), but others as well - had prepared as well as could be expected.

Canada's Minister responsible for immigration had made clear to my lawyers and our allies in Parliament that the government would strenuously oppose landed immigrant status for me, and in fact would deport me if I openly asked. They were assured of success, then in the wake of the "FLQ-crisis", after which support for anything left of center was beginning to lessen, and the RCMP and the FBI were cavorting in their own way, as certain of our exiled number disappeared from Canadian streets, only to show up in American court-rooms and military stockades - so the only option appeared to be to leave Canada, most likely for Sweden.

Algeria was apparently on the map, and a ticket via Newfoundland to Cuba's sugar-fields was offered me more than once. But I'd heard that those sunny fields of cane and rum also contained Weatherpeople on the lam, and while it might have been somehow the same sort of struggle, the non-violent ethos to which I was dedicated was not their trip, and guns were not mine, so I skipped Cuba. And there were things about Sweden (not just that Noxzema girl) that got my attention, like being the only country outside of Canada which openly accepted Vietnam war resisters, including - unlike Canada at first - deserters.

My first attempt to flee to Sweden had been badly botched. I had no ID at all, and at the SAS desk in Montreal, they wanted my passport, something I'd neglected to get before the draft board demonstration, and probably couldn't get afterwards, not as things were in 1971. [Btw, a reminder, just in case, to those of you with a conscience and a possible future among the ranks of those without a country: if you have no passport, don't relax until you do - nobody could have convinced me in 1969 I'd ever need one...]

Anyway, I clammed up at the SAS desk in February, and though they apparently tried Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and several other sort-of-local languages (like Latvian), this was obviously not going to work, so we cashed in the ticket and returned to Toronto. For next time around in June 1971, getting a genuine false passport was somehow too difficult, but someone knew someone who put together a military ID that I intended to use, since American military ID passed as travel documents for American soldiers, at least back then. Funny thing though: second time around in Montreal, the SAS desk couldn't be bothered with passports or IDs...

Dying, over and over again
Anyway, back to the day that I died, a kernel it has taken a few years to flower. My demise, an event fugitive in the extreme, in the main scheme of things, that day decades ago, will surely come as a surprise to many, and might have been expected to bring a tear to an eye or two, though there are those who would delight in this confirmation of a conjecture they long have nurtured, not to mention propagated.

Even for those needy few lacking ethics or the brains to choose, this crumb is close enough to the lies they fantasized and spread, so that it must come as rather a relief: "There, you see!", or "Serves him right, grimy rat...", ad nauseum. I think of those two, one of them a childhood acquaintance, in the Einstein High School Class of '69, at our 10th reunion in 1979, the same one that appears to be in law enforcement in the D.C. area, who confided in our classmates that my absence at that affair was due to the unutterably regrettable fact that I had been killed in a drug bust in Chicago, a place I in fact saw in reality a single time in my life: in the middle of a November 1966 night, having just been retrieved by my father from the hands of a dutiful Schuyler, Nebraska sheriff, but that is another story...

But, regarding the day that I would die: was it really when I entered Toronto airpace, clad in black, priest's collar in place, and the new moniker: Father Richard Lee Murphy, Detroit a few minutes behind us, the 12th of August, 1970?

Or was it June 26, 1971, in Sweden (remember: it was Midsummer, Sweden's biggest holiday), another day bathed in warm sunshine, when I surprised a 60-something-year-old customs official, who obviously hadn't seen this much activity in a while, with something on the order of this: "In accordance with Article such-and-such of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to which your country is a signatory, I respectfully request political asylum in the kingdom of Sweden"?

Might it have been in August of 1971, when Olof Palme and his cabinet managed to have me accorded Refugee Status in the sense of the Convention, thus according me political asylum, the only Vietnam era American exile accorded that in Sweden, a factoid I didn't learn until some 25 years later?

Or was it already in May 21, 1969, when I crossed the threshold to the Jesup-Blair Draft Board, not entirely unlike Tom Sawyer perhaps, a can of paint in one hand and a plan in the other?

Or might it have been that January morning on Inauguration Day in 1969 when a police baton intersected with my noggin?

Might it have been much later instead, for instance in September of 1980, when for all intents and purposes I had "lost it" (another story altogether) entirely? Was it when I re-emerged from that soul-ar conflagration, 3 years later? Or was it some other time? Was it simply after having imagined with John Lennon, that there are no countries?

Come clean
Coming clean though, a little, what I intended to write is just this: while for reasons an astrologer might wager a guess at, or an alienist might prescribe a powder or two for, I have (how shall I put it) more than once (habitually, even compulsively some have said) – Taurus that I am, though I can't blame only my stars, which are said to incite but not compel – not hesitated to lower my horns on the final direct approach to whatever material object, from governments to mountains, that happens to have located itself in my appointed path (“Chop it down, with the edge of my hand…”), yet on the whole I have learned after decades of false starts, unexpected stops, predictable catastrophes, and ultimate arrivals, that the ticket to survival, in this movie - particularly when death (the only immortal who treats us all alike, Clemens held) is the danger at hand, even if only apparently, for the moment - is to have really good cards in the hole, and to play them all as well, not to speak of play them well. I am advised that bluffing is pointless at that juncture, while outright cheating is supposedly not even possible. So I am advised.

Navigating the stateless state
In my youth, in the late 50s it might have been, or the early 60s, I was obviously touched by a movie I only recently re-discovered. Funny that it slipped my eye a few years back (late 70s), those years when thoroughly enjoyable studies at what is now known as the Dept of Cinema Studies at the University of Stockholm required me to imbibe several hours of classical cinema four to five days a week, 40 weeks a year. I might have looked for it then, sandwiched between The Heir to Genghis Khan and Kuhle Wampe, Cary Grant and Raquel Welch, Hitchcock and Bergman. Called "Man Without a Country", Warner Brothers released it in 1938, the year it nearly received an Academy Award for something or other - my birth was 13 years in the future.

The movie Man Without a Country, from a short story written by Edward Everett Hale who died in 1909, is an entirely fictional account of the vicissitudes of an American army officer who commits some relatively minor transgression. Hale's saga never makes it entirely clear, but intimates that his protagonist Philip Nolan committed a military transgression in cahoots with Aaron Burr, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson, perhaps to do with Burr's supposed treachery against the U.S. government, for instance his rumored plans to annex parts of the Louisiana Purchase and declare himself King, or perhaps invade New Spain in the West and declare himself Emperor.

Nolan is tried by a court martial. At the end of the proceedings, when it is clear he will be convicted, but of no particularly heinous crime, he is given a chance to lessen the seriousness of his conviction by indicating in what way he always had been faithful to his country, but instead he seizes the time, with a bold “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”

Hale's fictional figure is granted his wish, and the rest of the story, and the movie, show the carrying out of his sentence: he is exiled from the United States forever, and specifically is exiled to naval ships in official traffic, and is never allowed to set foot on American soil again. Not only this, but Hale’s anti-hero is allowed all the on-board luxury his rank would normally afford him - personal state-room, private weekly dinner with whatever Captain happened to have charge of him at the moment, access to visiting officers and dignitaries - while all who surround him, mostly other officers, are instructed never to mention the United States by name. Books, newspapers and the rest are available to him, though all go through an excision of all references to the United States.

Probably I saw it in a darkened cafeteria at Holy Redeemer in Kensington, Maryland, 16-mm quality and all, though I only vaguely recall the movie, which I think ended unlike the short story in dark images of the futile attempts of a relation, perhaps a doubly fictional wife, or sister, years later to get him a presidential pardon. That I know the details of the story today is because just yesterday I read Hale's short story in the original, for the first time, on-line here: Man Without a Country - not an incredibly compelling read, but pertinent here, considering how things have turned out. In fact I read it aloud to my partner of the past 25 years, and she gives it a robust "5 Tears".

Thread by thread
This ebullient re-discovery touches on two threads in particular: 1) my exile - in many respects self-imposed - and the quantity of let me call it dissatisfaction not to say displeasure, or sorrow, or even suffering in the extreme that has thus been engendered in my life - though as I write these lines, my mind's eye summons up the figure of Kim Phuc running, her napalmed limbs burning an indelible image in our hearts, who can be discovered today smiling at us 40 years later, and the figure of Nelson Mandela, himself a famous smiler despite decades of imprisonment, and such images put things quickly in perspective - and 2) my ultimately permanent disregard for anything reminding of countries, my fervent hope in fact that they might all cease to exist, now, please, or as quickly as possible, in as non-violent not to say peaceful a manner as can be managed, considering that they most likely - most of them - will not go without a struggle.

A reference to Point 1 figured in at least one incarnation of my various applications for presidential pardon or clemency, for instance the most recent instance in 2000, in which I related some ideas shared by my insightful and experienced mother-in-law, still, despite her retirement, on duty as a federal judge in Sweden. It was with regard to the goals her years on the bench taught her were implicit in sentencing a law-breaker to imprisonment, of which a principle one was to punish, to quite simply hurt, to cause suffering to occur in the actual perpetrator of the crime in question. Well, consider it done, even well-done. Though, once again, and recalling Kim and the multitudes of her Vietnamese kin, everything is relative.

Point 2 emerged into my sensorium only gradually, and in the beginning there was really rather a lot of resistance, having in fact entered teen-hood as I did determined to emulate my mother's brothers, both of them pilots and war heroes, one in the Air Force and one in the Navy: I determined early on that I would attend a military academy, train to be a jet pilot, and do my best to do my duty to God and my country, be square and obey the law of the pack - in short to help protect the earthly bastion of liberty and justice for all.

Point 2 ("Imagine there's no countries") faded in slowly, as unruly ghost-images of the snippets of facts about Vietnam first given me in 1966 and 1967 during History class at Loch Raven (see Rats in a maze and other sorrows) proceeded to distort the still unsullied picture as it were, back in the 60s, just before the first effulgent rays of my own adult morality exposed history to be unexpectedly ongoing, as the Vietnam war exploded into the American psyche, which back then included my mind, with specific unsavory future repercussions for aspiring heroes, your author included.

Makings of Good Soup
Between Christmas of 1967 and New Years Day 1968, hanging out with a group of people who changed my life, among others, in many ways (they know who they are: Bob, Craig, John, Jill, Bobby and Kathy, others too numerous to expose in this way), I found an issue of "Good Soup", an anarchist magazine from New York City that impressed me deeply. Only recently did I learn that I had read the only issue of that magazine to ever see print.

Its pitch (many strands, among them something on the order of War is over if you want it), together with that of Emma Goldman and other anti-draft and antiwar voices, began to simmer, and then percolate, finally reaching a rolling boil in my still-a-child's mind, and one after another they filed past: Albert Camus, Franz Fanon, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Spock for crying out loud, a litany of others, infiltrating my mind-set, and the patriotic veil was slowly and by stages penetrated.

At the first real mass demonstration I ever attended as a participant, in D.C., possibly the one protesting Nixon's inauguration (talk about unfair: not giving the guy an honest chance to prove what a criminal liar he was), a single not-so-gentle police-baton-knock-to-the-noggin during that demonstration settled it for me - no more flip-flopping here, and the last vestiges of blind patriotism were history.

I was now a new kind of patriot, intent on taking back the country from the gang in power. Little did I know that it would take decades, nor how many roads I'd have to walk down, before whose country it is or was no longer mattered, and I could in one respect at least simply let it be.

So, this is I suppose at least marginally and certainly long-windedly some background to the noted demise of your author, in his incarnation as patriot - it was short, it was sweet, and though I once loved it, and certainly did leave it, let no man hold that I did not do my best to save my country from going down the tubes - in this, clearly, I failed.

And so, nearing the beginning of my seventh decade, I rediscover myself finally and utterly, a Man Without a Country. Something to be.

Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome