Caveat: this may not be enjoyable.
“It has gone on for a long time, it is maddened now, the love it has had it has squandered too often, its young no longer naturally feel it; its past is in its streets, ungrateful for the fact that a hundred years ago it tore itself apart in order not to be divided; half of it believes the war it is now fighting is taking place twenty-five years ago, when it was still young and it was right that it was opposing tyranny. People say it is isolationist, but so obviously it is not isolationist: cine it asserted its existence in a war of secession and asserted its identity in a war against secession it has never been able to best its separateness. Union is what it wanted. And it has never felt that union has been achieved. Hence its terror of dissent, which does not threat its power but its integrity. So it is killing itself and killing another country in order not to admit its helplessness in the face of suffering, in order not to acknowledge its separateness. So it does not know what its true helplessness is. People say it is imperialist and colonialist, but it knows that it wants nothing more. It was told, as if in a prophecy, that no country is evil which is not imperialist or colonialist. So it turns toward tyranny, to prove its virtue.”
(From Stanley Cavell’s analysis of America and the vietnam war in his essay on King Lear, “the Avoidance of Love,”)
The two vibrantly absurd thoughts that crop up whenever I read another headline about people dying Over There are a) most of the troops are younger than myself. b) when soldiers came home from Vietnam, some of them were spit on and ridiculed. These facts are hard to fathom, in part because of the incongruous relationship formed when one is set against the other. I can’t imagine having anything but mute/inarticulate sympathy for people Over There, soldier or civilian, and if I ever met a returning soldier who had seen the shit Over There, I would awkwardly attempt to convey something that would not come close to cutting it. Actually, I did meet a Marine on leave while in Montana, but he did not like me in the least, b/c I was not from his hometown but I was at a bar in his hometown. The only memorable feedback I got from him was a threat – “I’m going to skullfuck you till next Tuesday” – which would’ve made me laugh if I hadn’t expected him to make good on the threat. He was an asshole, but the fact that he was a soldier mitigated, to some extent, the contempt in which I held him. So how was it that being a soldier forty years ago was reason enough to earn contempt from some people?
Granted, we’re not dropping napalm on women and children today, which is one thing my father pointed out to me as a distinction between then and now when I asked him about veterans getting spit on and called “babykiller.” The conversation ended there, as do most that hearken back to the time he was about my age. Fact is, other than through Oliver Stone, Francis Coppola, and other text-providers, I can’t imagine anything about the 60’s. There’s so much caricature and fetishism involved, too many mediating images and rocknroll epitaphs to ignore. Fittingly, I will now resort to quotes. First off, Philip Roth, circa 1960, says this:
"The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."
Case in point: heavy metal guitarist Dime Bag Darrell is gunned down by a fan whose motivation seems to stem from anger that Pantera no longer exists. Secondly, a thirty something strangles a mother-to-be, carves out her baby, takes it a nearby town, calls her husband, and proclaims something to the effect of: “you won’t believe it. I’ve had a baby. Come meet me at the Long John Silver’s to see.” But we are fastforwarding beyond the purview of the current inquiry. In the words of a reviewer of Hippie, the new book on the era, put it:
"The marketing of the 60's has come to necessitate the blending of quite discrepant images: the dogs of Selma and the bearded Puritans of the Cuban revolution, along with the moon-faced narcissists and dropouts of Haight-Ashbury and the groupie-draped avatars of rock."
Nixon’s call to the Silent Majority was a promise to restore order, and his appeal was proportionate to the degree the Vocal Minority was seen to be a legitimate threat. Now the Vocal Minority is expected and accounted for, an ensemble cast whose individual characters have been scripted, personalized, and individuated beforehand. The absence of the Vocal Minority from our television screens would upset, rather than restore, order.
The theatrical character of our national dialogue, with so much coverage devoted to the relatively few individuals seeking refuge in Canada as one example, informs our response to events in which we have little to no involvement. Whether the feeling is culpability for or willful distancing from what happens Over There, a strange psychology is at work. Cavell, the philosopher, describes the condition like this:
That, for example, editorials and public denunciations of a government now have consequences which are accommodated by that government is something we have grown accustomed to . . . we no longer know what is and is not news, what is and is not relevant to one’s life. The newspaper tells me that everything is relevant, but I cannot really accept that because it would mean that I do not have one life, to which some things are relevant and some not. I cannot really deny it either because I do not know why things happen as they do and why I am not responsible for any or all of it. And so to the extent that I still have feeling to contend with, it is a generalized guilt, which only confirms my paralysis; or else I convert the disasters and sensations reported to me into topics of conversation, for mutual entertainment, which in turn irritates the guilt.
Guilt? I guess we should specify the species of guilt that arises upon buying a newspaper and glancing at the events it has chosen to cover. First off, we can feel guilty about the 18 year olds being blown up by insurgents we can’t hate enough to suppress. We can feel guilty about the pre-teens who die in drive by shootings, even if we have to reference a movie made last decade to get the proper image in our heads. But it takes little insight to realize that the guilt does little else but pacify the hurt that comes with reading newspaper headlines. In other words, what good is it to feel bad about something over which you have no control? Is it not self-aggrandizement to bemoan the loss of something in which you had absolutely no investment? Treating cynicism as the absolute copout, we nevertheless feel chagrined at making concrete estimations of how severely fucked we all are in terms of complicity/responsibility/accountability. This, of course, is a truism that borders on a lie: we all don’t feel it in the stomach we have to fill day by day. If we did, and continued to want to match the moral estimations we’ve assigned ourselves, the fetal position would be the stance of engagement for every self-respecting conscientious observer. Conscientious objection no longer seems tangible or concrete; there is no jail to which we may sentence ourselves in lieu of the terrifying impotency the front page news presents. Instead we take refuge in lip service progressivism that makes no claims on changing anything, because it acknowledges its own marginality and celebrates it as a condition worthy of the informed observer.
What seems worse than self-applied guilt is the predominance of a politics of scoffing, combined with a self-preserving love of satire/irony, that holds sway over many of us. We all know so well how absurd is the idea of a war of liberation, and we embrace the notion of absurdity rather than taking on the task of rendering the absurd comprehensible. And of course by "we" I mean me.
