Word: sackings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...days (vide Richard Nixon and his Watergate problems). After My Lai, the U.S. Army thought they had a pretty good sacrificial offering in Lieut. William Calley-until corrosion began eating its way up the chain of command. The Army's containment plan was not helped by Journalist John Sack, who moved in with Calley for one of those total immersions that have become the baptismal rites of the New Journalism...
...Sack, also the author of M, was not out to hang little "Rusty" Calley with his own words. Quite the opposite. The intention was to show that Calley was what Sack now calls a "brass instrument" through which the order to execute My Lai villagers was trumpeted. The blame is then pinned on The System, of course...
...Eating Machine Sack artfully enlarges his vision of the System as Superscapegoat for the Superstate. Basically the book consists of profiles of four Viet Nam veterans. But it is also a metaphor that has been duly certified by such thinkers as Marx, Veblen, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command). The theme is familiar, though no less enticing for having been subject to countless cliches. The oversimplified version goes like this: As technological systems grow more complex, individuals grow less responsible for controlling the consequences...
...Sack swallows these abstractions whole, yet the characters in his book are concrete enough, and very real indeed. Varoujan Demirgian is an ex-G.I. in Viet Nam who thought he had a problem-he was there for a year, says Sack, without ever killing a Communist. Robert Melvin is a black Viet veteran now totally committed to working his way up the executive ladder at a Madison Avenue advertising agency. Another black, Vantee Thompson, came home from search-and-destroy missions to find himself on riot-control duty in Baltimore, his own people becoming as hard to understand...
Chic Anarchy. Finally Sack trots out Calley again, this time interviewed before his trial while he was playing tourist in New York. Dressed in a brown tweed suit with a credit card in his wallet, Calley glues himself to a telescope atop the Empire State Building and looks for sunbathing girls. Downstairs it's a four-Bloody Mary lunch and reminiscences about Asian whores. "Normal, normal," says Sack, "like sugar in water, he had been dropped in a city street scene but he didn't displace anything." It is a little late in the century, though...