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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.
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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.
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I agree that's part of it: it was a war that did no credit to its country, accomplished nothing of value in another, and conspicuously abandoned its veterans when they came home (a tradition that continued with Iraq and Afghanistan). It could not be made to fit any kind of heroic narrative and it was eventually, uncomfortably edged as far as possible under the carpet, although I agree with Mike Dawson and Chris Hayes that the major shift occurred post-9/11; the War on Terror needed a mythos to fuel its saber-rattling and it had one ready to hand which has come to dominate American consciousness ever since. I think
Facing the complicitness of such a large part of the population, from the generals down to the average soldier, in the wrongs before a right could be achieved isn't something the US was/is used to.
Generally, no. But it has beeen better at it than it is now. We would not have Vietnam-set movies with any nuance otherwise, and they absolutely and acclaimedly exist. This was not just a head-in-sand refusal to acknowledge the reality from the start. It was a regression and it has happened since protest songs of the late '60's were common currency among kids in my high school graduating class of 1999. I think that's why it makes me angrier.
[edit] It's like pre-Code movies. They're not perfect, but they can feel like a gift from another universe just because they admit the existence of heroes with drug habits or heroines who survived sexual assault or openly queer protagonists or non-tragic Jewish families or Black people with any agency at all. And then the Production Code did its best to scrub any traces of that world—the real world—away in favor of pure hegemony, white straight Christian heteronormativity with a chaser of sugared misogyny and American exceptionalism on top. And we have still not gotten out of its censoring shadow.
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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?
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Thank you!
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.
I was thinking first of Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). Kubrick was working from a novel by Vietnam veteran Gustav Hasford; Stone was a decorated veteran himself. I agree that Vietnam stayed speakable through the '80's and even into the '90's. The musical Miss Saigon, for all its faults, does not heroize American involvement in Vietnam; it opened in the West End in 1989 and transferred to Broadway in 1991.
On the other end of the scale, of course, we have things like the first film version of The Quiet American (1958), which I link every time I want to talk about the damage of which Code-era Hollywood was capable, not just to source material but to the American capacity for self-awareness.
. . . I just remembered that the second film version of The Quiet American, the one that is actually faithful to the book and which I have been meaning to rewatch since I wrote that review, was held up in release for a year because of 9/11. It was considered unpatriotic. That's what we've been talking about in action, that's the scrubbing of the memory of Vietnam. God forbid we prosecute a new war with any consciousness of how the last major one (skip the Gulf War) went down. Now I will have to rewatch it. It's my smoking gun. I wonder how many other projects during that period just died.
Presumably the difference is that Carter didn't blame outside forces and/or his political opponents?
Yes, I think so. Carter didn't provide scapegoats. I don't know if you read David Schraub—have you seen his latest, "Racism Is a Productive Ideology"?
"Racism is a productive ideology.
"It builds things. It makes things happen. It motivates voters, it lubricates alliances, it stirs up passions. There are times where one can't do certain things one would very much like to do unless one is willing to harness a bit of racism.
"That's why standing up to racism requires real moral fiber. Not just because racism is 'wrong'. But because standing up to racism, in practice, means not availing yourself of certain opportunities and benefits that one greatly desires and which are in your grasp if only you agree to play with some racism.
"It's no great thing to oppose racism when it's hurting you. It's not even that difficult to oppose it when it's only hurting others. But it takes real strength to know for a fact that opposing racism will cost you – will mean losing elections you might otherwise win, will mean that the other party might get a Supreme Court seat that you'd otherwise appoint, will mean that your cherished tax policy won't see the light of day in Congress – and nonetheless say 'no.' It's so easy to console yourself with the fact that you 'don't like it', that politics 'is about making compromises', and that the ends justify the means. Racism flourishes in America because of what it can produce. For it to be rooted out, politicians and leaders must be willing to draw a line and decline its bounty."
I don't know if it cost Carter votes that he drew the line and declined. I would like to think not, at least not in isolation. But Reagan did not just tell America about its greatness; Reagan dogwhistled its greatness to white America. Reagan spoke of states' rights. "Welfare queen" was a recurring note in his campaign speeches. He invoked the restoration of America, the recapturing of its destiny, implicitly led astray by . . . well. You know. Those people. And he won in a landslide. He made racism produce for him.