Shades of 1972
The second shade:
The second shade of 1972 is John Kerry. It is Vietnam and Iraq, and it is America's failure to recognise how the Vietnam adventure, its conduct and America's inability to recognise itself has led to an inability to conduct progressive politics, with all the dangers that such a condition implies.
In A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese mocks Kevin Kline with America's loss in Vietnam. The pungency of the scene is lost on international audiences, but the American consensus has not recognised the loss in Vietnam as inevitable nor experienced it with the relief that foreigners did. Many people have said that LBJ was wrong, or McNamara was wrong, but not that the hippies were right or that the draft-dodgers were right. The furthest anyone has gone is to concede that they had principles. The stark truth is that the counter-culture was right.
Instead of an understanding of how the counterculture came about - where did they get their information from, how did they learn to organise, how did they erect their own understanding of America's place in the world to put against the official version - conventional wisdom brought us a series of ever more ridiculous framings of the military myth, whether it is Kenny Rogers, proud to go and do (his) patriotic chore, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo justifying continuing into the 1990s America's cowardly economic vengeance against the Vietnamese or Clint Eastwood's ludicrous invasion of Grenada.
It has got to the point that Matthew Yglesias can write: "The Republican brand has been built up over a series of decades, while the Democratic brand was dragged through the mud by the events of 1968-1972." With the exception of the 1968 convention, it didn't look that way to anyone outside the country at the time. And why, pray tell, would the events at Kent State, for example, constitute the Democratic brand being dragged through the mud? Is Yglesias saying that Governor James A. Rhodes' (R- Ohio) interpretation, that the murdered protestors were "worse than brownshirts", is now the conventional orthodoxy? And that no-one challenges this?
It could be argued that the U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War amounted to a series of war crimes - the bombing of Hanoi, the bombing of Cambodia, and the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange are all good examples. If history is written by the winners, and America didn't win, then we need a reason to see why it was never established that these were crimes, even if prosecutions could not be enforced. I see softpower as being that reason and that the perhaps unintended consequence of the activities of the antiwar movement was to reestablish America's honour by articulating its internal strength as a pluralistic democracy, and therefore to confirm America's diplomatic strength.
Yglesias uncritically accepts this as mud; I don't. Because I don't, I see the cultural history of the US, post-1974, as the manufacture of a convenient series of myths. One of these myths has to do with the conflation of defeat in Vietnam with Watergate. Another concerns the elevation of wannabe-military vainglory over practical measures. And a third concerns the decadence of Hollywood, and the creation of a culture of consolation that substitutes for a culture of inclusion. What the narratives of these myths are I will have to leave for another time.
The second shade of 1972 is John Kerry. It is Vietnam and Iraq, and it is America's failure to recognise how the Vietnam adventure, its conduct and America's inability to recognise itself has led to an inability to conduct progressive politics, with all the dangers that such a condition implies.
In A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese mocks Kevin Kline with America's loss in Vietnam. The pungency of the scene is lost on international audiences, but the American consensus has not recognised the loss in Vietnam as inevitable nor experienced it with the relief that foreigners did. Many people have said that LBJ was wrong, or McNamara was wrong, but not that the hippies were right or that the draft-dodgers were right. The furthest anyone has gone is to concede that they had principles. The stark truth is that the counter-culture was right.
Instead of an understanding of how the counterculture came about - where did they get their information from, how did they learn to organise, how did they erect their own understanding of America's place in the world to put against the official version - conventional wisdom brought us a series of ever more ridiculous framings of the military myth, whether it is Kenny Rogers, proud to go and do (his) patriotic chore, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo justifying continuing into the 1990s America's cowardly economic vengeance against the Vietnamese or Clint Eastwood's ludicrous invasion of Grenada.
It has got to the point that Matthew Yglesias can write: "The Republican brand has been built up over a series of decades, while the Democratic brand was dragged through the mud by the events of 1968-1972." With the exception of the 1968 convention, it didn't look that way to anyone outside the country at the time. And why, pray tell, would the events at Kent State, for example, constitute the Democratic brand being dragged through the mud? Is Yglesias saying that Governor James A. Rhodes' (R- Ohio) interpretation, that the murdered protestors were "worse than brownshirts", is now the conventional orthodoxy? And that no-one challenges this?
It could be argued that the U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War amounted to a series of war crimes - the bombing of Hanoi, the bombing of Cambodia, and the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange are all good examples. If history is written by the winners, and America didn't win, then we need a reason to see why it was never established that these were crimes, even if prosecutions could not be enforced. I see softpower as being that reason and that the perhaps unintended consequence of the activities of the antiwar movement was to reestablish America's honour by articulating its internal strength as a pluralistic democracy, and therefore to confirm America's diplomatic strength.
Yglesias uncritically accepts this as mud; I don't. Because I don't, I see the cultural history of the US, post-1974, as the manufacture of a convenient series of myths. One of these myths has to do with the conflation of defeat in Vietnam with Watergate. Another concerns the elevation of wannabe-military vainglory over practical measures. And a third concerns the decadence of Hollywood, and the creation of a culture of consolation that substitutes for a culture of inclusion. What the narratives of these myths are I will have to leave for another time.
posted by Looter at 10:10 am
1 Comments:
Hollywood a culture of consolation? I'd love to hear more on that. I felt they were a culture of extreme narcissism, with its own beltway mindset, out of touch with the world beyond a mostly young adoring fan base.
--Kevin Hayden
The American Street
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