Any emergency meeting of the UN Security Council is tense, but this particular one had the potential to be a bit extra. A very consequential game of Show and Tell was about to happen on that late October day in 1962.
The US Ambassador asked if the Soviet Ambassador denied that the USSR was placing missiles in Cuba. “Yes or no? Don’t wait for the translation: yes or no?”
Ambassador Zorin’s smug laughter answered before he spoke, informing Ambassador Stevenson that he would receive the answer in due course. The former Governor of Illinois and two-time Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson II shot back with a line that is now synonymous with Cuban Missile Crisis, “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision … And I’m also prepared to present the evidence in this room.”
And that is exactly what he did. Vintage mic drop.
President John F. Kennedy, who was watching the live broadcast from the Oval Office, reportedly said, “I didn’t know that Adlai had it in him.” Stevenson and the President had disagreed on how to handle the Soviet threat, with Adlai’s approach painted as appeasement. I’m pretty sure the Soviets didn’t feel particularly appeased that day. It was a moment that could have broken very badly for whole swaths of the globe, but it didn’t. Yet, despite his role, his iconic lines, the name Adlai Stevenson II doesn’t serve so much as a placeholder for an individual named Adlai as it does that moment and the events surrounding him. And any other import and meaning our particular social reality piles into it. Happens to Jesus a lot. And Charo.
I make this distinction because of a phenomenon I witness every time I mention the fact that Adlai Stevenson II is my fifth cousin, twice removed. Watching people’s faces, if they recognize the name at all, is instructive. I’m probably your fifth cousin, twice removed, dear reader. It’s not that close, so it’s absurd to even mention that we are related, and yet, it is also entirely true. That’s the joke. The fact that I’m from a rural area in central Ohio, working a blue collar job, plainly factors into folks’ reactions when I tell them this obscure bit of personal trivia/nonsensical flex. They may know little or nothing about the actual Adlai, but they probably know the moment he was most remembered for. Then they look at me. I can almost hear the computational gears clacking; looking for some signs, however dilute, of a weird ultimogeniture, some physical sign of important mojo stamped on my features. I blink at them, once, twice. Nada, nothing. Hilariously, some folks even seem a bit affronted by the news; rudely incredulous, which is usually where I blurt laugh.
Sometimes, reality simply does not compute.
(Self-serving humor aside, there is one perk to having a famous distant cousin; I clean up pretty decently in the cosmic edition of the Kevin Bacon game. Sing it Sufjan.)
The late great Joan Didion, that famous chronicler of the 1960s, gave a commencement address at UC Riverside in 1975, titled, “Planting a Tree Is Not a Way of Life,” and it is amazing. Because, of course it is. In it, Didion explores the disconnect between the symbols of the 1960s and their meanings. While the focus of her speech is the 1960’s, change out a few of the symbols, and it maps eerily well onto the present.
I’ve had to struggle all my life against my own misapprehensions, my own false ideas, my own distorted perceptions. I’ve had to work very hard, make myself unhappy, give up ideas that made me comfortable, trying to apprehend social reality. I’ve spent my entire adult life, it seems to me, in a state of profound culture shock. I wish I were unique in this, but I’m not. You may not be afflicted with my misapprehensions, and I may not be afflicted with yours, but none of this starts “tabula rasa.” We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what’s really going on.
Here is where I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.
I sometimes think that the most malignant aspect of the period was the extent to which everyone dealt exclusively in symbols. Certain artifacts were understood to denote something other than themselves, something supposedly abstract; some positive or negative moral value. And whether the artifact was positively or negatively charged depended not on any objective reality at all but on where you stood, where the polarization had thrown you.
Marijuana was a symbol. Long hair was of course a symbol, and so was short hair. Natural foods were a symbol – rice, seaweed, raw milk, the whole litany. I found myself in situations during the late ‘60s where my refusal to give my baby unpasteurized milk was construed as evidence that I must be “on the other side.” Probably an undercover. In fact, it meant nothing except that I had grown up around farms and I had known children who got tuberculosis and brucellosis from drinking raw milk.
But this was a period in which everything was understood to have some moral freight, some meaning beyond itself. And in fact, nothing did; that was the peculiarity of the decade.
In a way it was very touching, this whole society so starved for meaning that it made totems out of meaningless artifacts. The whole country was like a cargo cult. But it was also very destructive. Because nothing meant what it was supposed to mean.
If all of this sounds familiar, it is because it is familiar. It is now, fifty years on — or always.
It was a period in which some people began to wonder if the symbols didn’t mean anything and you couldn’t trust the words; if there was any objective reality at all. That was the question the ‘60s gave us — was there any objective reality? That was the question most of you grew up on. And you grew up, a lot of you, correctly suspicious; suspicious of ideologies and answers and easy symbols. And you’re probably not in too much danger of being blinded by those things.
I think what you might be blinded for, what you ought to watch out for, is the habit of saying no, the habit of not believing anybody or anything. You’ve got to watch out for moving into a world where you don’t think there’s any objective reality, where there’s only you and that tree you just planted. There’s an objective reality, there is an objective social reality. Take it on faith.
She’s right. There is an objective reality, social and otherwise — a point that is routinely debated today. I am genuinely related to Adlai Stevenson II, regardless of how unconvincing the claim might seem. The fact that our blind spots remain the same, despite her admonitions, however good her advice may be, points to an even deeper reality. Why, because in another fifty years, another sage will say almost exactly the same thing Joan did. And another. That doesn’t feel like progress, it feels like history.
***
Standing beside the river Jordan at flood stage, Joshua, knowing the Israelites were about to cross it, probably felt every bit as tense as that UN security council chamber. History could start getting squirrelly real quick. But the reality became ultra-real, more than real.
The waters coming down from above stood and rose up in a heap far off, at Adam, the city that is beside Zar′ethan, and those flowing down toward the sea of the Arabah, the Salt Sea, were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Jericho (Josh. 3:16).
For generations after, from Jericho to Adam, folks would tell you about that day — until your ears fell off if you stood still long enough. They didn’t have to take it on faith, dumbly staring at the transparent mountain of water in front of them. Once again, God cut through the confusion, illustrating in the most outrageously vivid way possible what ultimate meaning is. A raging river — instant death for any trying to ford it — and God, in spectacular fashion, fixes the unfixable, making certain death a pathway to life. “Here I am.”
Sound familiar? Sin and death, always at flood stage, have been pushed back clear to Adam, leaving dry land from the past to the eternity of the sea, as dry as the cheeks wiped by the risen Savior, Jesus Christ. You want to talk about reality? You want to talk about names, symbols, and meanings? Because independent of our “afflicted misapprehensions” that Name, above all the other names, symbolized by a cross and three days later, an empty tomb, folded his burial clothes over the pile of sin and death he left in the grave on a glorious morning. We might marvel, like those folks up and down the Jordan, at the sheer grace of it. Or we can ask the questions, and we will, repeatedly, decade on decade, but only has One permanently answered it. Meaning? We don’t have to wait for the translation, or hell to freeze over.
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Perhaps the objective vision of all decades, all moments, is to be able to see the One who does make hell freeze over again and again and again, and then translates it into the language of grace that each new, distantly related, generation can apprehend and plant trees of life upon.