sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2018-06-30 02:23 am

While the people were pressed into camps not called concentration

I have a protest in the morning, so I'm trying to encourage myself to sleep. I just finished reading Julian E. Zelizer's "A Template for 'Incivility'," about the anti-war movement of the 1960's and '70's; it reminded me again how thoroughly the Vietnam War appears to have been scrubbed from American popular consciousness. It's happened in my lifetime. I was born in 1981. I grew up in a house full of protest records. Everyone my parents' age had a story of the draft, whether they had been caught by it or not. There were veterans in my family. There were veterans on film. And now all that seems to remain of those decades is a vague contemptuous image of some ineffectual hippies, self-indulgently chanting and peacing out while the real business of the world went on outside their flower-decked circle of privilege, unless they cut their hair and turned coat to the establishment; either way, there is nothing to learn from that generation. It's a great way to cut today's activists off from previous strategies, make them reinvent the wheel. When you erase the memory of a war, you erase the memory of its resistance. You make people forget that for a full decade in American life it was normal to fight with the government: to scream at it, to scare it, to slow it down. There was a revival of that sentiment with the start of the Iraq War, but it was drowned in the hyper-nationalism of Junior Bush and his WWII cosplay. (I don't think it helped that the Dixie Chicks were all but destroyed for calling him out, which he still deserves. His reputation has been lately rehabilitated just because he's not 45, as if that's a recommendation as opposed to a bar cleared easily by pond slime. I wanted for eight years to see him on trial for war crimes.) This country's knowledge of itself is so fractured. We remember the nickname "Cadet Bone Spurs" and understand it is—incivil—of him to mock McCain for enduring what he dodged, but the rest might as well have faded into mythology, except mythology has fandoms and I am not sure Vietnam activism does.
thisbluespirit: (Default)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2018-06-30 09:28 am (UTC)(link)
And I wish you good luck with both! (Although one will inevitably be a matter of the past by the time you see this.)
poliphilo: (Default)

[personal profile] poliphilo 2018-06-30 10:48 am (UTC)(link)
I reckon Vietnam is mommy and daddy's war and mommy and daddy are- as always- not to be taken seriously. Maybe things will change when it becomes granny and grandpa's war.


cyphomandra: boats in Auckland Harbour. Blue, blocky, cheerful (boats)

[personal profile] cyphomandra 2018-06-30 11:21 am (UTC)(link)
All the best for the protest!

Your comments on Vietnam made me want to get out my copy of Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis - the autgor’s note states “although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened.”
selenak: (Sternennacht - Lefaym)

[personal profile] selenak 2018-06-30 12:22 pm (UTC)(link)
I maintain the Vietnam erasure has a lot to do with it going directly going against the story, or if you like the myth, of America which is so incredibly deeply entrenched in both right and left. And the way generation after generation (on the Allied side) falls in love with WWII is because among so many other things, it's the ultimate good vs evil roleplay for them, it has the correct outcome, and any alternative outcome that's usually considered is inevitably a worse one.

Now you could say that the way civil disobedience and protests were also a good versus evil tale with the right outcome, but: Johnson, and even Nixon, don't function as well as the big bads. Both weren't dictators, they headed an elected, democractic government. And where WWII fits right in with the whole "Band of brothers"/"our brave men"/"support the troops" dogmas and credo, Vietnam has screwed up vets at best and My Lai at worst. Facing the complicitness of such a large part of the population, from the generals down to the avarage soldier, in the wrongs before a right could be achieved isn't something the US was/is used to.
selenak: (Rocking the vote by Noodlebidsnest)

[personal profile] selenak 2018-07-01 06:55 am (UTC)(link)
Great comparison with pre-Code and post-Code movies, and agreed.

We would not have Vietnam-set movies with any nuance otherwise, and they absolutely and acclaimedly exist.

Absolutely, and they weren't all made in the 70s, either, but went on being made during the Reagan era. However, presumably it helped that the general cultural climate in the 1970s encouraged said nuance, and that of course most of the film makers were of that generation, with protests etc. a very recent memory lingering into the present.

Incidentally: it's a cliché that I've seen repeated not just by Republicans but by many Democrats that what ultimately cost Carter the election was that he talked about America's malaise whereas Reagan told the US about its greatness etc. Which, okay, but now you have the Orange Menace who swept into power by telling America how rotten everything. Presumably the difference is that Carter didn't blame outside forces and/or his political opponents?
dewline: Text - "On the DEWLine" (Default)

[personal profile] dewline 2018-06-30 12:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Good luck and good hunting!
thanate: (Default)

[personal profile] thanate 2018-06-30 06:14 pm (UTC)(link)
My child requested I sing her "a long song with flowers" last night & what came out of my head was "Where have all the flowers gone."

This makes me wonder what's in the books for the 1970 American Girl; she's definitely portrayed as a hippie, but I haven't looked at anything but the toy marketing.
alexxkay: (Default)

[personal profile] alexxkay 2018-06-30 10:31 pm (UTC)(link)
Off-topic: https://mobile.twitter.com/summerbrennan/status/1013048108329177089

(Came across that while amusong Kestrell prior to seeing Midsummer Night's Dream at Nathan Tufts Park.)
lauradi7dw: (Default)

[personal profile] lauradi7dw 2018-07-02 07:35 pm (UTC)(link)
I think I must be missing the point somehow. I've been thinking about this for days, not posting, not wanting to be the "but actually" person. Upon re-reading your post several times, I guess what you were expecting is some sort of parallelism in the popular culture between protesters against that war, and protesters against a whole lot of stuff now. I don't know that I think it's the right comparison. The comparison I've heard lately is that the people who are not being civil now are like the members of ACT-UP, in both cases trying to save lives. That seems about right to me, although of course all of the end-the-war actions were to save lives as well. Not surprisingly, there was a contingent of Veterans for Peace at City Hall Plaza on Saturday.
It is true that it's been almost a year since the airing of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's massive "The Vietnam War", which may have brought some stuff to mind anew, but it doesn't seem to me that that war will ever fade from view. I am at a VA medical center from time to time with my father, and of course that shapes my impressions, but there sure are Viet Nam era vets there. As you say, there are people we know. Thanksgiving partly means "Alice's Restaurant." I was amused by all the Star Wars jokes, but May the 4th will always be the anniversary of the massacre at Kent State to me, and I said so on the day. And just today, while I was waiting to pay for cucumbers, the street musician at the Central Square Farmers' Market was playing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," which is always going to be a VN protest song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4

John McCain shouldn't have been in that POW camp because he shouldn't have been flying that plane. During training, he made mistakes (including crashes) that would have washed out potential pilots who didn't have an admirals in the family. (this claim appeared in many articles, but I am not his flight instructor and can't say for sure). I don't admire much about him, but he did keep having town meetings with constituents after a lot of his colleagues quit, post the attack on Gabby Giffords.
Edited 2018-07-02 22:46 (UTC)