One Bright Shining Moment

November 1972

I was six years old; my mother was 23. I remember vaguely (now from the many stories she has told me about that time in my life) that I had just completed the bulk of the physical therapy I had gone through after having contracted a near fatal case of spinal meningitis a year earlier. The stories of my five year old mind hallucinating about spiders and my tiny body bending backwards like a human crab are forever burned in my own mental legend.

I remember bits and pieces of my childhood - I'm not sure if others can clearly remember the details of their daily life as children, but my recollection is spotted with visuals, scraps of music, explosions of emotion, all reinforced by the stories my family would tell with glee (we're all very Irish in that way - we like to tell stories).

I remember election night in 1972. I remember that we had an orange, gold and brown striped sofa, light green shag carpet, and a yellow banana seat that I loved to sit on. I remember that I had a stuffed Underdog doll, given to me in the hospital when I was all drugged up a year earlier and we lived in an apartment on a street called Wild Wood Lane in Wichita, KS.

My mother had divorced my father when I was four and had remarried a man named Dennis (a man who became, or always was, a vicious wife-beater and from whom I learned to detest, despise, and be disgusted by any man who hits a woman for any reason). Dennis was a Nixon supporter. My mom was almost obsessively for McGovern.

I remember the argument, mostly spawned by my mom's iron-hot rage that "that motherfucker" had won the Presidency for another term. I remember thinking much later (when I was ten or eleven) that the savage beating she took that night was her fault - she wouldn't let up about Nixon and McGovern and Dennis finally snapped. As I grew older I came to understand that while my mother was perhaps overly zealous in her political convictions, she never deserved to have a fist raised to her.

Until the other night, I never had any genuine curiosity about why she was so in favor of the McGovern candidacy. McGovern has always been the guy that was the biggest loser in American presidential politics - even more pathetic than Dukakis. Nixon pummeled him in '72. We all know that Nixon was corrupt, paranoid and slightly batshit crazy - understanding my mother's distaste for Tricky Dick has never been hard. Until the other night, it never occurred to me that a great deal of my mother's passion was not against Nixon so much as for McGovern.

The other night I watched a documentary entitled One Bright Shining Moment, written and directed by Stephen Vittoria and released in 2005.

ONE BRIGHT SHINING MOMENT retraces George McGovern's bold presidential campaign of 1972 - a grassroots campaign that fought for peace and justice, and positioned ideas and people first. But what is remembered today as being the ultimate political defeat of the American Century may also have been its high watermark. The film poses this central question: what does the crushing electoral defeat of a man so well respected for his decency and intellect say about the electoral process, the American government, and more importantly, what does it say about the forces at work on the American people- then and now? Featuring interviews with the candidate himself, supporters and activists like Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, Warren Beatty, Howard Zinn, and music from Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Donovan, and Elvis Costello.

The documentary is eye-opening, to say the least. George McGovern was an honest man running a (at the time) uniquely populist platform - he was among the first men, of any serious political party, to advocate for gays, blacks, women and was, at the outset, vehemently against the war in Viet Nam. He personally challenged the Old White Men coalition, headed by Hubert Humphrey and Richard Daley Sr., for control of the country's oldest political party and won. A decent man in politics (an anomaly for our times), McGovern was 'the real deal' - legitimately one of country's best and brightest.

Had I been of voting age back in '72, I would've voted for McGovern and, after watching this film, I understand for the first time why my mother was so pissed at his overwhelming defeat at the hands of a corrupt Republican administration. It likewise provides light on a sinking suspicion that I've had for the last couple of years - that the United States 'jumped the shark' with Viet Nam. The beginning of the end came with JFK's assassination, followed by the political assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and RFK. The clash between those who believed that our government was run by the people vs. those who were actually pulling the strings culminated with Nixon's second term.

We've been battling ever since to reclaim an upwardly mobile status as a nation. If we're smart, we take the fall gracefully, like England, and press forth with a sense of dignity. If we're not, we destroy ourselves like Rome or the Aztecs and prove that representative democracy was just as effective as communism against the base natures of humanity and 'America' becomes a cool fable that future generations can marvel at in eighth grade history classes.

To survive, we need more cats out there like George McGovern. And my mom.