Yesterday, I thought out loud about this question; bit by bit, I’ll begin to answer it: How did an Irish-Italian Catholic kid from the Bronx break with the world of Marvel comics in the 1960s, discover philosophy, come under the influence of a notable communist, and a few years later follow an obscure dispensationalist Bible teacher and then a leading anarcho-capitalist theoretician—all while studying guitar theory under a jazz giant, working as Folk City’s doorman and later for a world-class architect?
A day later, I can think of at least a dozen major influences that I mercifully omitted from that already intolerably overlong sentence.
Sixty years ago, I could not ask, let alone answer, such a question for the simple reason that I was unself-conscious. It’s hard to recall what unself-consciousness felt like because memory tends to impose mature, reflective categories onto what we selectively remember. Yet, I must make the effort. There is a transition from directly experiencing what we enjoy to reflecting on how we might shape our lives and the world around us.
I had a notion that there were struggles, but also that they were all “settled” by authority—parental, ecclesiastical, social, or governmental. That made my world full of interest but, more importantly, safe. Dangers existed, but they were manageable. Unmanageable dangers belonged to movies and comic books.
That romantic sense of safety was hard to maintain after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, followed within five years (from my 10th to my 15th year) by the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. It was bewildering for a pre-teen and teenager to live through. And what I found confusing or unsettling, I put out of my mind. The world as mediated by movies and television was my norm. I vaguely sensed that reality could be different, but I couldn’t work up enough interest to pursue the idea. My unself-consciousness was a blissful state, one I subconsciously knew better than to disturb. It rarely, if ever, occurred to me that one day I would have to make my way in a world beyond the television or movie screen.
Thinking, however, was another matter. I mimicked the way others talked, and that imitation set off thought processes that gave me something new to consider. A turning point came as I approached the end of my eight-year Holy Cross School career and thought about what high school to attend. Two influences shaped my decision: my Uncle Joe and Captain America.
I loved the superheroes of Marvel and DC Comics, and the closest real-world equivalent to superheroes, in my mind, were the United States Army’s Special Forces. I was enthralled by The Green Berets, the 1968 John Wayne movie. Xavier High School, with its military training, seemed like a step toward that kind of adventure. As I did almost everything else that impressed me, I romanticized those soldiers. I obscenely hoped the Vietnam War would last long enough for me to get in on the action. Yet, one year into Xavier, I underwent a political conversion to socialism—at the feet of a long-haired anarchist co-worker at a second-hand bookstore—and not long after that, to Stalinism under the influence of Herbert Aptheker—thereby aligning me with the Viet Cong.
Uncle Joe Flood, my favorite of Dad’s brothers—at least he was the one I knew the best. He graduated from Xavier in 1953, the year of my nativity. I later learned that one of his classmates was Antonin Scalia, who grew up in Elmhurst, Queens, and likely rode the IRT No. 7 train to school. But that meant nothing to me then.
The proximity of Xavier to the Communist Party-run Jefferson Book Store proved fateful. Both were on 16th Street—Xavier at 30 West, the Jeff at 100 East (now a restaurant). Nearby was the Jefferson School of Social Science, on the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 16th, while St. Francis Xavier Church, abutting my high school, stood diagonally across the intersection.
The few things I’ve mentioned so far need context, not only for you but also for me. At the time, they were, for me, just current events, but now they’re the stuff of history. And beating the stuffing out of that history is the gift I’m giving myself and anyone else who’s taken a front-row seat near that ring.
[To be continued]
. . . that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine. Ephesians 4:14
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. Colossians 2:8