Frightfully Askew
Masks have always had a rich role. Function varies widely, but the urge to transfer or hide our identity, to alter our face to the world, seems global.
MY FATHER’S GENERATION endured worldwide depression and war, one catastrophe after another, and in consistently predicting further disaster, he attempted to toughen my tender skin in anticipation. But I was young, my new president was boyishly handsome and funny, and violence and privation were invisibly elsewhere—things I had only read about. Sitting in an eighth-grade class one day, I heard the announcement over the loudspeaker that the president had been shot. I assumed he would recover: there’s no way, thought I, that Lyndon Baines Johnson would be president. History wasn’t that arbitrary and capricious.
By the time I was in high school (and of draft age), LBJ had gotten us waist-deep in the Big Muddy, and the damn fool was pushing on. To blow off the steam of dread, I would make little heads of LBJ in oil-based clay—caricatures, really, with big ears and droopy nose—then throw them against the wall as hard as I could. The crushed, lopsided faces gave me some satisfaction, but the voodoo never kicked in, and the escalation continued. In retrospect, I would understand his accomplishments, such as the Voting Rights Act, but Vietnam remained his Achilles
