Title: Life After America: A Memoir about the Wild and Crazy 1960s
Author: Joseph Mark Glazner.
Toronto. Copyright 2017
Pages: 234
Price: $12.99 (paperback)
Joseph Mark Glazner’s Life After America: A Memoir about the Wild and Crazy 1960s is at once a standalone memoir that can be read on its own or as part of his three memoirs about the Vietnam War era and the beginnings of the North American counter-culture.
Published in 2017 in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Glazner’s own anti-war odyssey that saw him become one of the first Americans to become a war resister and leave the US (in 1967) for Canada in protest over the war, the memoir fits neatly in between his two other standalone anti-Vietnam War and early counter-culture memoirsCalifornia: 1963 – 1967 Spaceship Earth(2022), and his latest memoirWhen War is Over 1969 – 1975: Flower Children, Futurists, and the Last Surprise of the Vietnam War: A Memoir (2023).
Life After America, which tackles Glazner’s first two years as a draft resister, exile, and immigrant to Canada, was published first for two reasons. Although most of the other two memoirs were nearly finished as was a fourth and still unpublished memoir, the fiftieth anniversary of John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Montreal Bed-In for Peace (1969) was approaching and Donald Trump had just been elected president (2016) and entered the White House (2017). Glazner rightly predicted at the time that Trump would become the Vietnam of today’s America.
Originally titled Midnight, John Lennon and Me, Glazner changed the title to Life After America on the Day Trump was elected to reflect his own life in Canada when he chose to fight the Vietnam War in the only way he thought would make a difference, and how America that had evolved since the Vietnam War was likely to become unrecognizable with Trump at the helm.
While all three books hold special meaning to those of us who lived through this period and that awful war they also serve as a poignant warning to Generation Me, Millennials, and Generation Z that all wars rarely produce any lasting good and most only make life on Earth worse for humanity. So why do they occur? Hubris, greed, hatred – all the hallmarks of totalitarianism.
Life After Americabegins on November 10th, 1967, when Glazner’s plane touches down in Montreal, Canada. This is it. There is no turning back. The future is undefined, bordering on tenuous, and he’s low on money while staring into the jaws of a Canadian winter. In a way, he’s a pioneer being one of the first “draft resisters” to adopt another nation as opposed to going to Vietnam and risking all for what? That was the penetrating question concerning Vietnam. What was America even doing in Vietnam? Our young men were being sacrificed for what? Glazner wrestles with his conscience (as did we all), even going so far as to consider if he’s a coward. Merriam-Webster defines a coward as: “one who shows disgraceful fear or timidity.” Well…there’s a lot of room for interpretation here, and I submit to you that picking up and leaving the comfortable confines of home for an unknown future in an unknown land requires a resolve far removed from timidity.
Deep in the marrow of its bones, this is a book about the nervous years, that period in life after college graduation when the job market seems to be a cruel immersion into numbing reality if you even get to be immersed into your desired career at all. War or no war, Glazner had other pressing issues to deal with and was still faced with the prospect of eking out a living as a writer, an artist, and a free thinker. Next on the list was that the predominant population and language in Quebec Province was French-Canadian who spoke French, a language he struggled with. No matter, there was no turning back. He had a place to stay and would achieve landed immigrant status after five months of sweating it out. And besides, life wasn’t all that bad, because if it’s one thing Canadians know how to do well, it’s how to party, and Montreal had several lively bars inhabited by some of the city’s foxiest models who were very modern concerning their views on sex.
Upon leaving the airport’s customs desk, with the exuberance of youth, the author sums up his immediate situation:
For the past three weeks, my only plan had been totally focused on getting out of the US, getting beyond the state of undeclared war, and starting life over. I had only a vague idea of what I would do once I got to Montreal. How hard could it be? Get working papers. Get a writing job. Find a place to live. Figure out the meaning of life (p. 4).
The thing about writing, when you’re good at it at least [that must be nice], is that it’s fun, it validates your intellect, it can cause you to swell with immense pride and satisfaction when you see your words in a respected print publication or, better yet, between the pages of an actual book. Then, the only problem is that a whole lot of other people want to feel that way also. Competition in the literary world is stiff. Good writers can be made but great writers are born and Glazner experienced difficulty in realizing his birthright. By economic necessity, he was forced to accept a position as a staff writer at Midnight which was Canada’s answer to The National Enquirer. Temporarily swallowing his pride, he dove into the world of schlock and sleaze making the best out of what he had to work with by rationalizing his situation as follows:
I had gone to literary hell, I told myself. How could I possibly prostitute myself to write such a story? I wondered if I really didn’t deserve to be in Vietnam getting shot at by Viet Cong.
I felt humiliated.
I also felt strangely frightened – after my boasting could I actually produce a story that they would accept?
I read and reread all the copies of Midnight that John Vader had given me. I repeated the mantra that nobody could possibly take the articles in this newspaper seriously. It was, as Zeke said, journalism’s answer to professional wrestling. It was nothing more than a lowbrow version of The Realist or any of a dozen other underground papers (p. 71).
Glaznerexcels at this job consoling himself that he is at least honing his craft. No writing is bad writing if it helps you to improve, and he did rapidly improve, not only as a writer that could perform under pressure but in the capacity of editing and production all of which would aid him later in life in procuring literary agents and publishing actual books. He and his contemporaries dreamed up fantastic stories with none being more sensational and better selling than shots at Jacki O. The reading public just couldn’t get enough Jackie O scandals. By now, he is at peace with the sleaze knowing that none of it’s real, but other issues conspire to force change upon him.Midnight gets sold, and Glazner is out on the street because he was aligned with an executive that the new ownership didn’t like and also gave the boot to.
An emotional upheaval in his love life causes him to look inward for answers concerning who he is when one of Montreal’s most beautiful models dumps him for mildly baulking at her infidelity.
The only consolation was that the end of the affair sharpened my determination to find what I wanted. I wanted to:
…live a gentle, quiet, ethical, creative life,
,,,be able to have sex whenever I wanted it,
…be in love with the person I wanted to have sex with,
…have enough money to write, paint, and play music full-time,
…write/paint/compose something amazing, something other people would tell their friends to read/look at/listen to, and other writers/painters/musicians would say, I wish I created that,
…I wanted the war to be over (p. 93).
Well…the war wasn’t over and wouldn’t be for another six years, which was one of the primary reasons that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were coming to town on May 27th, 1969 to conduct their famous or infamous (depending on your point of view) Bed-In for a week-long stint at the swanky Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Glazner was blessed to cover one of the most coveted assignments in all of hippiedom and became friends with the couple which adds color to his eventual article entitled: Seven Days in Bed with a Beatle which ran in Cavalier magazine that November. Glazner marveled at Lennon’s poise and media savvy and was impressed with how Yoko Ono, despite being reviled by many hardcore Beatle fans, obviously loved and protected her husband.
Yoko Ono was on to something half a century ago which is the tendency of the righteous to become self-righteous and look down upon others that they don’t feel live up to their social and moral standards. Today we call this woke, and here’s why woke didn’t work then and doesn’t work now: it promotes the very thing it claims to be so vehemently against – exclusion. A hippy then and a woke person now oftentimes fall victim to an intolerance that they didn’t and don’t recognize; that being if you’re not at where they feel you should be (which is where they are at) then they assume that you never will be and thus are less than them. Whenever someone feels that someone else is less than they are the door swings wide open for all manner passive-aggressive intolerance all the way up to out-and-out oppression. Yoko Ono’s simple statement, which she repeated innumerable times, said it all: “The trouble with the hippies and the Yippies is they are snobs about peace. Peace belongs to everyone.”
Covering this event would constitute a seminal moment in any writer’s career, and pretty much serves as the book’s conclusion. The author sums up its significance to his life in this passage:
Where did this little moment in history fit? World peace and ending the war were competing with a lot of other pressing concerns at any given moment. Any sane person also knew that we should be saving the planet from toxic pollution and environmental destruction. We should be righting the disparity between rich and poor, and finding God, nirvana, and enlightenment. We needed to solve the racial, cultural, and social conflicts in the Middle East, Quebec, the ghettos of America, and hundreds of other hot spots around the world. We should be supporting abortion, equal rights for women, sexual freedom, throwing off the shackles of lingering seventeenth-century Puritanism, legalizing pot, and denouncing authoritarian regimes– all while earning a living, paying the rent, trying to eat healthy, exercising, finding someone to love, and worrying about the bomb, VD, unwanted pregnancy, bad trips, rip-off artists, and other evils and potential dangers and apocalypses of our times(p. 189 – 190).
From the Bed-In1969 to this very moment in time; has anything really changed? Kudos to Joseph MarkGlazner for writing this memoir highlighting how things could have been if only we had heeded the message emanating from those times. And the warning is even more perilous now than it was then; that being that we are running out of time. When will we finally absorb the message?
