Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Witness to War, American-Style
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There's a special offer linked to today’s piece! For a contribution of $100 (or more) to this site, you can get a signed copy of Frida Berrigan’s vivid new memoir, It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. You’ll get a taste of what being raised in a world of protest most of us couldn’t imagine is like by reading about Berrigan’s remarkable childhood below, and if you do donate to read about her life then and now at book length, you’ll also help keepTomDispatch rolling along in 2015. Just check out our donation pagefor the details. Tom]
It’s a structure we've seldom taken the true measure of, since ground was first broken for its construction in September 1941. With its 6.6 million square feet of floor space, it ranked as the largest building in the country until the World Trade Center came along in 1973 -- a position it regained, despite Flight 77, on September 11, 2001. It has five sides, five floors (and two basement levels), and 17.5 miles of corridors.
It’s hard even to absorb how big the Pentagon is. Boston GlobeColumnist James Carroll vividly described it in his appropriately monumental book, House of War, as he experienced it in his 1950s childhood. (His father, an Air Force general, was the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and as a boy the Pentagon was his playground.)
“There were eighteen dining rooms that served sixty thousand meals a day. There were two barber shops, a drugstore, a vaccination clinic, five ‘beverage bars,’ each with more swivel stools than even a swift lad like me could set to spinning. There were six hundred drinking fountains, and I sipped from most of them. A clock room had the right time for every place right down to Moscow, Russia. Grown-up men rode three-wheeled bikes with baskets, messengers with their bells blasting -- make way for secrets! In corners stood faded battle flags attached to spears, with streamers flowing from the blades. On the walls hung paintings of warplanes and horses, tanks and dead-eyed men. Parthenon, Pantheon -- I couldn’t keep the words straight. Call it Paradise. It was not so much to want for a lad of ten.”
Today, 23,000 civilian and military personnel (as well as 3,000 “non-defense support personnel”) work in that building. Think of that cast of 26,000 this way: the total is larger than the active militaries of, among other places, Burundi, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ghana, Hungary, Kenya, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Zambia. And of course, the Pentagon presides over a global “baseworld” (as Chalmers Johnson once called it) with a size andreach unprecedented in history, and over a war state, as well as a state of permanent war, in a fashion that should (but doesn’t) stun us all.
The Pentagon has become a fixture, a given, of our American world, as around it has grown up what, since President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address of 1961, has been known as the military-industrial complex. And yet, except at rare moments, few of us know that it has been the target of, and site of, almost continual protest since the 1960s. Frida Berrigan grew up in the heart of that ongoing protest and in a modest community of mainly religious radicals who, in and out of prison, kept it alive (and to this daycontinue their unending protests against our state of war). That small group -- her parents and others -- never lost track of the Pentagon’s world of war-making and what it has meant for this country and the planet (even when the rest of us did). Berrigan has written a striking memoir of that world, It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood, and today, in a particularly vivid fashion, she plunges us into her childhood as a witness to war, American-style. Tom
It’s a structure we've seldom taken the true measure of, since ground was first broken for its construction in September 1941. With its 6.6 million square feet of floor space, it ranked as the largest building in the country until the World Trade Center came along in 1973 -- a position it regained, despite Flight 77, on September 11, 2001. It has five sides, five floors (and two basement levels), and 17.5 miles of corridors.
It’s hard even to absorb how big the Pentagon is. Boston GlobeColumnist James Carroll vividly described it in his appropriately monumental book, House of War, as he experienced it in his 1950s childhood. (His father, an Air Force general, was the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and as a boy the Pentagon was his playground.)
“There were eighteen dining rooms that served sixty thousand meals a day. There were two barber shops, a drugstore, a vaccination clinic, five ‘beverage bars,’ each with more swivel stools than even a swift lad like me could set to spinning. There were six hundred drinking fountains, and I sipped from most of them. A clock room had the right time for every place right down to Moscow, Russia. Grown-up men rode three-wheeled bikes with baskets, messengers with their bells blasting -- make way for secrets! In corners stood faded battle flags attached to spears, with streamers flowing from the blades. On the walls hung paintings of warplanes and horses, tanks and dead-eyed men. Parthenon, Pantheon -- I couldn’t keep the words straight. Call it Paradise. It was not so much to want for a lad of ten.”
Today, 23,000 civilian and military personnel (as well as 3,000 “non-defense support personnel”) work in that building. Think of that cast of 26,000 this way: the total is larger than the active militaries of, among other places, Burundi, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ghana, Hungary, Kenya, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Zambia. And of course, the Pentagon presides over a global “baseworld” (as Chalmers Johnson once called it) with a size andreach unprecedented in history, and over a war state, as well as a state of permanent war, in a fashion that should (but doesn’t) stun us all.
The Pentagon has become a fixture, a given, of our American world, as around it has grown up what, since President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address of 1961, has been known as the military-industrial complex. And yet, except at rare moments, few of us know that it has been the target of, and site of, almost continual protest since the 1960s. Frida Berrigan grew up in the heart of that ongoing protest and in a modest community of mainly religious radicals who, in and out of prison, kept it alive (and to this daycontinue their unending protests against our state of war). That small group -- her parents and others -- never lost track of the Pentagon’s world of war-making and what it has meant for this country and the planet (even when the rest of us did). Berrigan has written a striking memoir of that world, It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood, and today, in a particularly vivid fashion, she plunges us into her childhood as a witness to war, American-style. Tom
Uncle Pentagon
Growing Up in the Shadow of the American War State
By Frida Berrigan
The Pentagon loomed so large in my childhood that it could have been another member of my family. Maybe a menacing uncle who doled out put-downs and whacks to teach us lessons or a rich, dismissive great-aunt intent on propriety and good manners.
Whatever the case, our holidays were built around visits to the Pentagon’s massive grounds. That’s where we went for Easter, Christmas, even summer vacation (to commemorate the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). When we were little, my brother and sister and I would cry with terror and dread as we first glimpsed the building from the bridge across the Potomac River. To us, it pulsated with malice as if it came with an ominous, beat-driven soundtrack out of Star Wars.
I grew up in Baltimore at Jonah House, a radical Christian community of people committed to nonviolent resistance to war and nuclear culture. It was founded by my parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister. They gained international renown as pacifist peace activists not afraid to damage property or face long prison terms. The Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Plowshares Eight, the Griffiss Seven: these were anti-Vietnam War or antinuclear actions they helped plan, took part in, and often enough went to jail for. These were also creative conspiracies meant to raise large questions about our personal responsibility for, and the role of conscience in, our world. In addition, they were explorations of how to be effective and nonviolent in opposition to the war state. These actions drew plenty of media attention and crowds of supporters, but in between we always went back to the Pentagon.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
