AFTER VIETNAM

robert rauschenberg

 

Vietnam has been an enigma in my lifetime. The communist hysteria, the domino theory, all of it propaganda attempting to make popular a war with the intent of keeping the American economy going, an economy created by the boom of WW2. The Cold War kept economy going pretty good with "defense" contracts, making jets that cost multiple millions unto billions. Vietnam came along to keep economy going. It started with a presidential lie on television to the American people, LBJ, one of the great liars of history. He showed me nothing at all where integrity as a man was concerned. His integrity was to the rich only. His only legacy for me is liar, like Reagan and W Bush. Can't leave out Nixon. I don't understand the present urgency of the right wing being in control. I do not know of a time in my lifetime the right wing was not in control. I found the English even further to the right than USA. I found them in 1972 going through the political agony of adopting a health care system that would benefit working people, everybody, even the poor. No way. That's socialism. How will people have incentive to go to medical school to work in socialism? It was the same as here now, only English style instead of American style. They like their healthcare system now and wouldn't have it back the old way.

robert rauschenberg

 

The propaganda in the time of Vietnam had been anti-communist for at least a decade to the point that even today, half a century later, communism is a loaded word. It could make a fun short documentary film to interview different kinds of people asking them questions about communism and hearing all the different explanations of why communism is evil. Evil is where many of the answers would start. We have not had communism yet. It comes after capitalism. Soviet Union's communism I interpreted militarist socialism. And we do militarist capitalism, fascism. This is what I mean by the right wing control in America is not new. I recall fundamentalist preacher harping about communism, atheism, evil, lake of fire forever and ever, eternal agony for being born into one economic system instead of another. It never made a lick of sense to me. In my childhood I wondered in bed at night how it could be that a kid my age born someplace behind the iron curtain was doomed to hell just by where he was born. I thought of the people in the very remotest parts of the world that never saw a Bible or heard of Jesus. It failed to make sense to me that God, omniscient, the knower of our hearts, made such a crazy rule that anybody dies never having opportunity to get saved automatically goes to hell, mandatory sentencing.

robert rauschenberg

Vietnam brought out love-it-or-leave-it. A lot of people left it. It was also the time of Are you a boy or are you a girl? With yer long blond hair you look like a girl. American establishment is not kind to outsiders. It was the time of white college students discovering marijuana realizing they wanted to live their lives, not go kill gooks and get killed too. The San Francisco sound took pop music to a new level. We had a whole generation of the college age white kids divided over Vietnam. The majority was for it. We saw photographs of demonstrations on big campuses. It looked like a lot of people, but the percentage was low. Most of the people in college in that time did not want to endanger the possibility of a career because their picture might appear in the paper with a demonstration against the war. Too, if a corporation were in somebody's sights, that person is careful not to commit to any cause or controversial point of view. Stay away from the controversial. We knew that in the corporate world, the world we were expected to look to for good-paying jobs, disobedience was not held a virtue. Gotta be squeaky clean to be a corporate somebody. I realized young that I would never succeed in this world.

robert rauschenberg

I will not give up my humanity, no matter how self-defeating it may be, to make big money and have big things. I hear Peggy Lee, If that's all there is, my friend, let's keep on dancing. I won't give up my inalienable basic human rights for a job, position or status. I learned early on that the higher I go on the money ladder the farther away I go from my humanity. No, it doesn't have to be that way. It is not ultimately true that war is a force that gives us meaning, either. But in this world, war is a force that gives us meaning. In the time of Vietnam, to commit to being against the war was the same as being against America to everybody who was not a protester. The protesters knew they were acting out of patriotism. They were saying don't send us to a disastrous war that is about big money for some big corporations at our expense, to end up homeless begging on intersections of American cities to get through the days in our later years, Vietnam vet statistics. I had the personal good fortune to slip under the wire, did the limbo, got out of Navy just in time. The ship's next destination was Vietnam. What a joy in my heart it was to leave that Navy base the last time. Then I watched Vietnam happen on the news and watched a great big split happen in America, a major gap between the older people and the younger people. It seemed that the leftover belief systems since WW2 were laid to rest with Vietnam. It kind of summed up what went before, tied up the loose ends and got on with what was next, destabilizing Latin America

robert rauschenberg

 

 

 

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DEMOCRACY WHEN

        christopher wool, untitled

Heard a news report from corporate media via NPR that the US Congress came together in agreement and voted almost unanimously, with 4 against, to make political protest illegal with stiff penalties in prison (of course). Prison is the answer to everything in the land of the free. Serious prison sentence for protesting now. Funny this would come up at the same time Russia is visited by the question of what to do in a police state about people who are out of control. I remember a time when a law made against protesting would be called "Communist," the word in the 50s and 60s for police state, which we so obviously have here that the entire Congress votes to outlaw political protest. Not a whimper of opposition. During the Bush administration protest became illegal, keeping them in cages, and now in the Obama administration protest is officially declared against the law in "the land of the free." It's the end of that phrase ever being used again except as intended irony. I want to be for Obama, but cannot. He has shown me nothing but appealing to the masses with silver-tongued "I'm gonna," and what he delivers is billions of tax dollars from the working people to the corporate greed machine that brought us to Depression. And the billions the people of the middle class were banking on, gone with the wind to the tax-free Cayman Islands.


Obama has shown me nothing over the last four years but giving in to republicans, talking big about what he's doing for We-the-People, but when it comes down to business, we get passed by and the assist goes to the Bank. More of the Reaganista "trickle down" smokescreen, a code word for funnel up. Continuation of taking from the working people and giving to the rich. For us, We-the-People, it is a disgrace that in "the land of the free" there was no outcry, not even a whimper about the travesty of the entire Congress curtaling a basic freedom of the democracy that used to be. I hear talk about Arab countries, getting them involved in democracy. Save a heathen for Christ. The country enforces democracy by pre-emptive strikes that ultimately destroy defenseless countries of colored people in a colonialist will to genocide for their resources. The country playing King of the World has thrown democracy out of its government and goes on preaching democracy around the world. It's like Kansas fundamentalists whose duty it is to browbeat others about Jesus and have no idea what they're talking about. Jesus who really did not die, died for your sins. How can that be? Never mind. Believe it or you'll go to hell. :D


Looking backward at Democracy in America, what used to be, if it ever was, from the time of WW2 truly active democracy, the real thing, has become "radical." Take at look at the tv channel Democracy Now. The people on there look like serious radicals of the 50s. They look like people who read books, even. It cracks me up to see these serious people, who used to have radical left wing socialist ideologies, now are serious about democracy as a losing cause. Democracy is the next new thing, evidently. Like Gore Vidal said in an an interview I saw from Democracy Now, he did not see it coming that the republic was so easy to everthrow, and the public never noticed. He appeared to be a bitter old man in his 80s seeing his precious nation he's studied and loved all his life go down the drain into a corporate police state. In photographs of him in his later years, bitterness had fixed itself in his face. His writing was outraged that the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta took over the government by coup. Obama, like I said, isn't showing me anything at all. He has a charisma in his talk that calls one to come along, but I've never seen what he calls us to of any real benefit to We-the-People, but more subservience to corporate absolute power, which is what he obviously "represents." He sure does not represent We-the-People in any way I read his actions. Words are cheap. He sometimes strikes me a republican in democrat clothes, like Joe Lieberman.


I'm seriously thinking about joining the American left wing, the half of the population that does not vote. Heretofore, I've voted as an act of protest, to say I want democracy. Now that protest is against the law, I think I'll just drop out. That's what the "corporate elite" want me to do. Makes me want to stay in and keep on voting just to defy them. But it's nothing to them if I vote or if I don't. It only matters to me. I feel like I'm participating in democracy by voting, even though I know my vote counts for nothing at all. In 1968 when Johnson hoodwinked the American people (again) by telling the American corporate press what to say of the Vietnam March before the event started. The press faithfully reported the lie. Obviously, it was a lie. I read NY Times, Wash Post, AP, Time, Newsweek, US News, and they all reported the very same story, none of it true. Then, I think it was Nat Hentoff who wrote an article for the Village Voice (before Rupert Murdock bought it to silence it) telling about Johnson's press conference and the truth of what happened at the occasion. Norman Mailer wrote about it Armies Of The Night and he, too, told of the Johnson press conference. I went to the event. I looked at the various news sources the next day. That day I swore off any involvement in politics. Today, Obama is inspiring me to swear off voting. I can't vote for either him or nit-wit Mitt. I can't vote FOR anybody in the election chain of command, top to bottom, have never had the opportunity to vote for anybody. All my voting has been against. I think in French it's je refuse.


Voting is a sham in a police state. We may not have many more years of voting. Another saying from Gore Vidal in the Democracy Now interview, "If the American people can't read stupid, we're out of business." Meaning, we're out of business. The republicans are dead set collectively on destroying our government, out in the open sedition, unto self-destructively dead set against democracy. My hope is they will self-destruct sooner than later. I don't hope anything politically in a police state. Another problem I have with Obama is he has come on to us like he's Mister On-our-side. I see him dancing the jig to get votes, but his allegiance is more to the Bilderberg Group than it is to thee and me. Or so it appears. Given that the republicans control the democrats and have since Reagan times. Republicans move to the right, Democats move to the right. Step by step, the republicans have walked the Democrats all the way over into the right wing, unto the legislation of the last few days, democrats in league with republicans making protest by the electorate illegal. I think I'm done voting. As of now, voting looks denial of police state.


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