This is what was going on when "None Dare Call it Treason" was being passed out to high school seniors, courtesy of Brother John Birch. In those days, political indoctrination was not subtle, a hint and a smirk from lefty unionized teachers and PBS classroom films about the environment. It was blatant, out in the open, subsidized by the state.

This was also the time when the State of Florida decided to nip all of us budding Bolsheviks right down to size with a mandatory civics offering called 'Americanism vs. Communism'. I knew when I was taking this course that it would some day merit a mention in my memoirs. The text was predictably hysterical, although making no effort to take a serious critical look at Marxist-Leninist thought, it did try to summarize the main points, like the cyclic theory of history, class struggle and dialectical materialism. The only problem was that even though these concepts were roundly criticized in the text, the analysis always seemed very compelling in their favor. It all made sense to me, by the time I had finished the course I was convinced that Communism in theory wasn't that bad after all, it had just been taken over by bad people. Whether this was a result of the stupidity of the educators who put the course together, or the result of a colossal propaganda coup by an underground cell of Tallahassee Reds I will never know. Of course, I didn't need a right wing pep talk to convince me Communism was as hideous in practice as Nazism, the catalog of documented horrors in Russia, China and Cuba was enough for that. But the glowing description of the virtues of capitalism in that little book were so lame that I'm surprised the student body wasn't soon building barricades and waving red flags. It was about that time that I began forming my own political opinions and I like to think that course played a major role in defining my position. I realized that planned economies cannot be as efficient as a free market, not only are they unable to take advantage of natural self-regulation, but they fail to either recognize or exploit the unstoppable desire of every human being to live as well as he can, to work hard for it, and to risk everything to achieve it. Not only that, all-powerful governments lead inevitably to corruption and tyranny. On the other hand, I could also see that capitalism is inherently unstable and if left alone will lead to monopoly or depression, usually both. Neither is it immune from tyranny. The only way to put together a humane economic system is to do precisely what America has always done, let the economy run itself, but kick the businessmen in the ass every now and then when they start to get out of line. The truth, as always in partisan matters, is usually somewhere between the two extremes.
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Still, you have to take into account the times. During those days we had a local Tampa politician whose every campaign commercial ended with a solemn "...an' Ah will faht Cahmnism". I also fondly recall the time when the Soviets scooped us in the space race by sending a probe behind the moon and broadcasting back to earth a grainy and blurred photograph of the hidden hemisphere. A local minister published a lengthy article in the Tampa Tribune explaining in great detail just how the Russians had faked the picture. Now I wouldn't have put it past the Russkies to think of something like this, but even in my politically naive mind, I couldn't imagine how they could have hoped to pull it off. After all, sooner or later one of our spacecraft was bound to go there and expose the lie. I already knew my country could lie, I had been crushed a few years earlier by Eisenhower being caught red-handed during the U2 affair; everyone knew the Commies were evil, but they weren't stupid.
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Something else happened during my last year at Brandon; it was the year the Beatles came out. It is well
recognized today that the they were widely influential in the field of entertainment and popular music, but
I am convinced that their effect on the world was much more fundamental than that. They finished what Elvis started, they broke the back of the insipid pap that had passed for American music back then. I had heard a few of their songs on the radio and had not been too impressed, but when a girl I was sweet on at the time invited me to come over and listen to their first album, hot off the presses, I made it a point to go. I went to scoff, but came away a believer, I had never heard music like this before. The early Beatles were primitive musically, in fact, they weren't very good musicians at all, but they were able to use what they did know extremely effectively. The harmonies were unearthly, the beat hypnotic, and the lyrics captivating compared to the banal popular music of those days. I had been brought up with classical and Cuban music, and the rock, jazz, and country of the fifties was intolerable. I can't articulate just what it was about the Beatles that captivated me so, but the effect was electric. Subsequent albums followed, each better than the last and each eagerly anticipated. The rest of the package was irresistible as well, the long hair was a revelation, not just because they had the courage to wear it that way, but because of the irrational opposition it provoked among the older generation; for some reason, our parent's tribe found this incredibly threatening. I've often wondered why this was so, hair far longer than the Beatles wore theirs was not that remote historically, no one ever thought General Custer was a sissy. But I suppose the ferocity of the reaction convinced us that, just by luck, we had hit a raw nerve, and we weren't about to let up now. It wasn't just that hair was a symbol of rebellion and growing it long was a way to irritate our folks, although that certainly was one result of the new fashion. The truth was that once we realized our parents had been wrong about the music, and then the hair, we could suddenly see they were wrong about a lot of other things too.

Of course, thre years later, with the spark of Civil Rights and Vietnam to help bring it all back home, the red flags and barricades were ubiquitous. I've often wondered if the 60s would have ever happened if youth had not remembered the Right's lame attempts at indoctrination, and being youth, instinctively rebelled against it.