Reflections on a left-wing past

Am going to the Yemen tomorrow for a bit of excitement. Just hope your friend George W. Bush doesn't start his attack on Irak while I'm there. It must be an uplifting experience to swear allegiance to the likes of Georgie boy, hand on heart, eyes tearful looking at the flag of the Stars and Stripes, other hand on the Bible. Everybody needs to do it. I often get offers of getting me a green card through email; maybe I'll go the whole hog myself. It's probably better than sex.
Email (extract) from an old and dear friend

I grew up in a left-wing household in Australia in the fifties. Life wasn't meant to be easy, as a prominent right-wing Australian politician was to say many years later.

I was the only kid at primary school to take salami for lunch. This was before the large-scale Italian immigration of the late fifties. I used to have to open the butchers wrapping in secret, hiding behind a gum tree, far from the playmates who in good Aussie tolerant fashion were yelling "Catholic dogs jump like frogs" to the Catholic kids at the school across the road. God know what they would have said if they'd have seen my lunch.

For recreation, my mum and dad, when they weren't screaming at each other, and when they lived under one roof, would go to the city at the dead of night with buckets of white paint and brushes to paint political slogans on the bridge wall at Finder's Street in Melbourne. They did explain to me what it was all about but I repressed it. Names like The Petrovs and Rosenberg bring back hazy memories.

Normally an obedient child, I rebelled only twice.

Once I snuck off to Sunday School, which, along with comics and Remembrance Day was strictly forbidden. When I was discovered, I lied and said it was only for the free glossy stamp-like tokens that were given out by the Sunday school teacher. This was partly true. But the main reason was that I wanted to be like the other kids. I was smart enough however, not to admit to such a pathetic and miserable excuse. As far as the glossy pictures went, I had no idea as to who the people portrayed in them actually were. I didn't know who the man with the halo was, or of the identity of the serene-looking woman with the blue scarf around her head holding a baby. But I knew they were somehow associated with that dreaded place I'd been taught to hate, America no doubt.

On another occasion I actually said the words, "Lest We Forget" on November 11th memorial service at school, and spent my pocket money on a red poppy which I later hid under my bed. In this I was successful.

The sense of my parents teachings were brought home to me in the sixties when America invaded Vietnam. I marched down St Kilda road Melbourne to the US Consulate like the rest. But I didn't shout "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" like the others - my parents had taught me the dangers of glorifying a leader.

The seventies came and my dad, who had moved to New Zealand for the last decades of his life, visited me in Australia. By then I had a child. She was two and was sitting on the floor, when he turned up, looking at her Golden Books. She had a thing about Henny Penny and Peter Pan.

What COULD have possessed me to forget to hide these objects of American imperialism? After all, I had known in advance that he was visiting. But I remembered too late. Before I could snatch them (well-repressed memories of comic books being confiscated started to surface) from her pudgy bourgeois hands the sneering started.

"Yes dad, I know Barry wrote 'Peter Pan'", I tried to explain. "I KNOW Henny Penny is capitalist propaganda; but these books are cheap and kids like them..." To no avail. I was traitor to the working class. He'd seen it coming when I'd said I didn't want to go to Eureka Camp (for the children of left-wingers) when I was a kid. And so on and so forth.

My father is now long gone. He'd probably roll in his grave if he knew where I was living. Not that he has one, well at least not a marked one. There was you see, some confusion when he died. A life-long pacifist he'd dropped some of his convictions when the only place to get a drink after hours in pre-liberated Australia, was at the Returned Servicemen's League Club. He joined up. Not that he'd served in any combat unit. But the moral high ground can be a lonely and sober place.

So when he died in New Zealand, somehow he was entitled to be buried in the military part of the local cemetery. His mates and family knew his beliefs. We were confused as to what to do. He didn't believe in the military, or graves, or any sort of after-life, or pomp, or ceremony. So he was buried wherever, with no marker, as he would have wanted.

As I was saying, he'd roll in his grave. He wasn't happy with America, or Americans for that matter. His first wife had run off with a GI during WWII and my dad wasn't even serving overseas like all the other blokes who lost out with the over-fed-over-paid-over-sexed-and-over-here mob.

I've been remembering these events from long ago more frequently since 9-11. I suppose it is because of the repetition of my dad's sentiments in one form or another, from the mouths of some friends and acquaintances. The ex-husband whose first words to me post-9-11, to me, a New Yorker, were, "Ha, they got what was coming to them". The acquaintance who said "You have to realise, they HATE you?" I have to realise no such thing of course. They don't even KNOW me! ASIF! Last time I was in an Arab country was years ago when I was thrown off a bus because my Cornish surname, "Juliff" led the passport man to believe I was Jewish.

So I suppose I should have expected my old and dear friend's email reaction to my taking of American citizenship, as factually incorrect as it is. And it was with a sigh that I put it onto the shelf of unwanted memories, along with the forbidden Golden Books, capitalist Henny Penny, the salami under the hot Australian sun, and the Remembrance Day poppy carefully hidden under my childhood bed.

As the politician said, "Life wasn't meant to be easy".

Kate Juliff
New York
September 2002