A lot of people are warning that under the unhinged President, we are inching dangerously close to becoming a fascist police state. Well, this is not the first time that the fear of fascism has raised its ugly head. Here is my retelling of a true story (now lost) that I posted in 2012 when I first started blogging. Enjoy.
In 1967 Embry and I were living in New York City. She was in her senior year at Barnard College and I was taking a year off from Union Seminary to participate in a program designed for worn out seminary students to give us a breather. It was long overdue for me and looking back on that year I count it as one of the best I ever had. I had several secular jobs, met regularly with a half dozen other seminary students in a program where we talked about our experiences, and we lived off campus in a rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive a short block away from 125th Street and Harlem.
We loved out tiny studio apartment. The one window opened onto a fire escape in an air well and the only way that you could figure out what the weather was like was to make a call to the weather lady. But it was perfect for us, and for the first time we were away from Union and all the angst that went with it. And we were still battle scarred from our summer working with SNCC in Southwest Georgia in 1965 in the civil rights movement and all the demonstrations going on as the Vietnam War was heating up and the various protests responding to injustice were continuing. One tends to forget that in those days the grass roots energy was from the Left, not the Right as is the case today. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weathermen, the Black Panthers and various other radical groups were getting all the attention. We were glad to be free from all this, to have a chance to live a normal life, and to take advantage of all the great things to do in the city.
Our apartment was in a five story aging structure, which was poorly maintained due in part to rent control (our rent was $75/month including utilities) and to poor management, and ruled over by a superintendent—or a “super” as they were called–who lived in the basement with his wife, and was feared by everyone who lived in the 40-unit building. His name was Joe Poitras. Poitras spoke with a heavy accent of unknown origin, was balding and overweight, probably in his mid 50s, had tattoos on both arms, an unshaven, perpetually frowning face, and always wore dirty blue jeans and a grease-stained undershirt. No one ever saw him smile but everyone in the building heard him shout, mostly at his wife, often accompanied by loud noises caused by pots and pans being thrown, which we could hear from our apartment on the fifth floor. He was such a feared person that hardly anyone asked him to fix anything for fear of being yelled at. The streetwise Episcopal clergyman that hosted the weekly discussions of our seminarian group gave me the advice to give the guy a generous Christmas tip, which I did, and from that time on, I did not get the scowl that most others got, who presumably did not understand the rules.
In the apartment next to us lived Don, a tall, skinny graduate student at Columbia who had a huge crop of very curly hair making him look a little like a young Art Garfunkel. Occasionally we would chat; and when his door was open, I could see that the only furniture in his room was a mattress and box springs. Except for a guitar next to his bed, there was nothing else that I could see in the room. Across from Don was Mrs. Finklestein, an aging widow who must have been in her mid to late eighties. She was very quiet, frail, and shy and left her apartment only to go shopping occasionally and to do her laundry in the basement. These were the only two people we knew in the apartment house.
In the spring of 1967, I smelled what I thought might be smoke and ventured out into the hallway to see what was going on to discover that smoke was coming out of the trash chute. Oh, my goodness, I concluded, the building was on fire! Don was standing beside the trash chute and looking down the stairwell trying to figure out what was happening. I immediately asked if he had called the super.
“Are you kidding me, call Poitras? He hates my guts. The guy would kill me, and besides the smoke seems to be dying down.” Then without missing a beat he turned to me and said, “You know, we live in a goddamned fascist police state.”
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“Yeah, a fascist police state. Last night around midnight I was not bothering anyone just practicing on my guitar and sitting on my mattress, and I hear a banging on the door. I opened the door and in come two cops. I go up against the wall, arms out and spread eagle, but there was not much to search since I was in my jockey shorts. The cops saw me but didn’t search me and went straight to my bathroom and started flushing my toilet over and over. Then they turned to me and said ‘you no good motherfucker, hippie creep, you try a trick like this again and your ass is going to jail. In fact, you are damn lucky we aren’t locking you up now. Then they slammed the door and left.”
“Good heavens,” I responded. “Sounds pretty weird to me.”
“Weird, maybe, but if this is not fascism, I don’t know what is. We live in a goddamned fascist police state. How else can you explain it?”
By this time the smoke from the trash chute had died down and I was relieved that the apartment building was not going to burn down after all. When Embry returned from doing the laundry, I immediately told her the story, concluding that America in 1967 was becoming a fascist police state. How else could you explain it?
She immediately broke out in laughter.
“What is so funny about that?”
She then told me her story about her experience in the laundry a few minutes earlier talking with Mrs. Finklestein, the elderly lady with an apartment directly across from Don’s.
“Mrs. Finklestein was in tears and told me that she had lived in New York City all her life but had never had such a terrible experience. In the middle of the night her toilet started to overflow, and she did not know what to do. She was afraid to call Poitras, so she called the police and pleaded for help. She waited and waited, flushing the toilet all night to keep it from flooding her apartment, but the police never came. ‘They had always come before,’ she said, ‘but not this time. The police just do not care anymore. Nobody cares. That is just what the world has come to. This is the way America now is. Nobody cares.”’
The next morning, she had gotten up her nerve and called Poitras, who begrudgingly fixed the toilet. As far as I know, neither told the other about their experience. Don apparently left the building for good the next day and Mrs. Finkelstein was either too weak or too afraid to answer our knock on her door. We departed from the city the next year for Chapel Hill where I would get a masters degree in city planning and Embry a masters in biostatistics, not having a chance to talk to either person, who presumably went through the remainder of their lives believing that that America was a fascist police state or a country where nobody cares.
If only the fears of a fascist police state that many think may be happening today could have a similar happy ending.