"Accenting" the News

Among the many letters, unpublished manuscripts, documents, and photographs I have found in the boxes and boxes --- cardboard boxes, shoe boxes, candy boxes! --- that make up the sloppy Peter Carr Archives currently housed in my extremely sloppy study, I found a commentary submitted by Peter to the Los Angeles Times. Naturally, its publication was declined. The 800-word piece, "Accenting the News," typed and sent from his CSULB address, is stapled to the rejection letter. I suspect Jeanie did the stapling, and carefully added it, broken-hearted, to a box which ended up in the garage of the home they shared, or a closet, or in the laundry room where so much of his art was stashed, too. The writing is very Peter Carr, a sincere, angry, appropriately sarcastic citizen-poet-activist assessing uninvited juxtapositions, noticing the absurdities of news and advertising, insisting on resistance and energetic engagement. All while driving in the rain southbound on the San Diego Freeway after attending a meeting. It's got deadpan wit, smart-ass humor, informed politics, and pathos. Peter really hates Reagan and (Secretary of State) Haig and Rockwell and banks and advertising and militarism and US intervention. "Are they ready to destroy some poor little country in order to prove that we really are the biggest bully on the block and to show the Russians that they better not invade Anaheim?" This is the absurdist vernacular, dark joke, provocation of a lot of his work. At its conclusion, some relief, some clarity, and some pathos. And, yes, for more pathos (a quality or feature which permeates my research of PC), please note the dates. The rejection letter reads February 25, 1981. Peter had died on February 12. The essay is finally published here, below the rejection letter, with a stubbornly, insistently self-celebratory cartoon illustration by Peter about whatever success might be, finally.

“It's just a matter of time before the Soviet army moves into Poland,” the voice announced from the radio in the car. They were Alexander Haig's words. The new Secretary of State had just told the news men and they in turn were busy telling us, as we drove through the rainy night on the San Diego Freeway between Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa. Jeanie and I didn't look at each other. The windshield wipers slapped. The announcer explained in his carefully modulated way that the announcement was the current principal news story and was a perfectly natural thing in every way. Then a Savings and Loan Company “accented” the news.

We were driving home on a Sunday night from a meeting of people who were trying to organize strategy for anti-nuclear peace campaigns. We are part of the movement, but we are also studying it. We are trying to document this grassroots phenomenon for future generations. Among other things we have been collecting oral histories of the diverse groups that have been organizing around the country in the struggle against nuclear weapons nuclear power plants we are all more apprehensive than ever. The new government seems to be bent on war or threatening and provocative. Why would Haig make such a statement? Either it's true and it's a very bad and severely threatening situation and shouldn't be dealt with lightly by either Haig or the radio announcer, or Haig is pushing us closer and closer to confrontation and is telling us these things to stir us up and keep our attention from something else that is happening. Or he's getting us ready for budget increases. Or he's getting us used to the idea that a serious struggle with the USSR is inevitable. For it's none of the above. Or it's all of the above.

Maybe tomorrow morning the weather will have cleared, and as I start back up the freeway to work I'll turn on the radio again and the announcer will tell us that the Soviets have moved into Poland, and we will have to buy neutron bombs and “re-arm” as the new Secretary of Defense said two days ago. Rockwell and Lockheed and some labor union managers think the B-1 bomber is going to be revived like an old Chrysler company that fell into hard times, then died, was buried with military honors, and suddenly came to life again because the president has the power of raising up the dead.

I turned off the freeway onto Harbor Blvd. and got gas. $1.38 per gallon. The rain came down in a steady drizzle. I wrestled with the new nozzle and paid the man and got back on the freeway again. I wondered if the two young men who manned the office were thinking about war and the real possibility of nuclear Holocaust. I doubt it. They probably were part of the half of the population who don't vote. They probably watch television. Politics for them is probably a dull game played out on the tube by corrupt salesman. I remembered the poster of Nixon: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

Do the people around Reagan know that when they threaten the Soviet Union they are threatening to destroy my life and all life on earth? Do the guys who work in the gas station know that their lives are being threatened? I try not to talk to the children about it. I'm not sure it's good for them to know that the heads of our government are threatening to start the mass killing again in places like the Middle East and El Salvador and maybe Korea. Should I tell the children that the heads of the government are ready to sacrifice them now or later to protect their business interests in some far-off place?

A four-wheel drive pickup truck ahead of me had a bumper sticker that said Nuke Iran. But the group at the meeting decided that the main thing we had to do was to educate the citizenry to the very real danger that we could be escalating in El Salvador, pushing politicians in Asia somewhere, and getting ready to help China with more nuclear technology which would mean more testing and more leukemia in the US and around the planet. There was an article in the Times not long ago pointing to a new axis between Taiwan, South Africa and Israel. Saudi Arabia just lent 800 million to Pakistan specifically to develop nuclear weapons. France just sent Iraq some new airplanes. India wants to be like us, a superpower, that can threaten anyone.

We decided to expand our outreach and build coalitions with minorities, labor unions, and anyone else we can find who will join us in trying to tell everybody that the government is behaving dangerously and threatening and playing chicken and escalating the nuclear arms race and backing the bloody junta and the torture and murder in El Salvador and other dictatorships around the world. Some of the people at the meeting expressed the feeling that they were worried about surveillance of their lives by police. Somebody said it's like an old movie about how it was in Germany just before World War Two. Only we can't escape to America.

We are working for peace. We still think most Americans think that that is a respectable thing to do. Most of us feel that we are patriots. We love our land and the people in it and we assume that even most Russians have the same feelings about their place. They probably have the same feelings about their government. But nobody thinks that Reagan and his cronies are as smart or as sophisticated or as interested I survival as Brezhnev and Co. We are trying to educate the people in our communities to the danger, and many of us feel that we share with a lot of other people in the world a kind of constant, low-level hum of anxiety about the crew that just took over in Washington. Are they ready to destroy some poor little country in order to prove that we really are the biggest bully on the block and to show the Russians that they better not invade Anaheim?

The announcer told us how good the Savings and Loan Co. was and once more told us it was very good business judgment and very very safe to put our money in their vaults. Then there was something about interest rates. The windshield wipers started to make a rubbing sound and sort of stutter. I suddenly realized that the rain had stopped.

Peter Carr (1925-1981) taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at CSULB and co-founded the grassroots anti-nuclear organization, the Orange County Alliance for Survival.  He was the author of self-published books and pamphlets, including Aliso Creek and In the Summer We Went to the Mountains, and produced thousands of drawings, paintings, posters and illustrations.  He lived in Laguna Beach with the community activist Jeanie Bernstein. A posthumous showing of his work was organized by the late Mark Chamberlain at BC Space in 2016. He is the subject of an October 28-December 13, 2024 show at Cerritos College Art Gallery (Director, James MacDevett) titled "Peter Carr: Artist for Survival"). Both the Jean Bernstein and Peter Carr Papers are held at the libraries of the University of California Irvine.