Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The Viet Nam War, part 7: “The Veneer of Civilization”

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched episode seven of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Geoffrey C. Ward documentary The Viet Nam War, “The Veneer of Civilization,” which began with stunning archive footage of a parade in suburban Wisconsin — the date was 1968 but it looked like 10 years earlier, with the parade headed by a local beauty queen riding in a cool-looking late-1950’s red Mercury convertible followed by contingents representing 4-H clubs, local high school bands and sports teams, and the like. It was a perfect time capsule into what had been called “Wonder Bread America,” and at first it reminded me of the sequences from the adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles stories shown as part of the Ray Bradbury Theatre TV series: all those Stepfordian images of an all-white (and white-bread) America formed by the Martians out of their mind-reading the white American astronauts who had come to their planet with those images of their ideal environment. Then it hit me: this is the America Donald Trump’s voters think was “great” and to which they want to return to “make America great again.” It’s an America in which the ideas that white people were better than people of color and men were better than women were just taken as incontrovertible truths, while Queer folk were at most darkly whispered about — “Watch out if another guy looks at you too closely in the locker room,” that sort of thing — and at worst actively sought out, arrested, harassed and beaten. In what’s been otherwise a pretty straightforwardly directed documentary in what’s been called the “Ken Burns style” — though since the Viet Nam war took place in the TV era he hasn’t had to resort to the kinds of expedients (panning over still photos while actors in sepulchral voices read letters written by servicemembers and their families) he had to when he did his star-making series The Civil War.

Instead, in this episode one deceased servicemember is depicted in his own voice, via tape-recorded letters he sent home to his family, and their replies. “The Veneer of Civilization” is a title that could be used for just about any documentary about war — an exercise that is quite good at stripping off the thin veneer of civilization and exposing the real barbarous nature of human beings (and how much we still are programmed evolutionarily from the time when we had to kill beasts and beat up each other to survive at all) — and in this one the title is especially appropriate, since the film covers the period from July 1968 to May 1969 (including the disastrous Democratic National Convention in Chicago — and the counter-protests that would have been a lot less damaging to the Democrats’ electoral prospects if Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Chicago police had just given the protesters permitted space to do their thing, picked out and arrested any who turned violent and left the rest alone — and Richard Nixon’s election as President) — indeed, one irony was that America was so unsettled during that campaign it almost seems like a relief when Burns and company cut from the home front to the relative kill-or-be-killed simplicity (for both sides!) of the actual conflict in Viet Nam. (One interviewee on the documentary is a Viet Nam veteran who returned to the U.S. during the turmoil during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and also while the Soviet army was intervening in Czechoslovakia to put down the liberalizing “Prague spring” movement: he made the same comparison between the images from Chicago and the ones from Prague I did at the time, which led me to coin the term “Chiprago.”) It also makes the fascinating accusation that the Nixon campaign and South Viet Namese president Nguyen Van Thieu cut a deal for an “October Surprise” — actually an early November surprise — in which on November 2, just three days before the election (in an era in which the vote at the actual polls was even more decisive than it is now because the modern laws permitting just about anyone in certain states to vote by mail ahead of the election didn’t yet exist), the South Viet Namese government announced that they were not going to attend the expanded Paris peace talks with the U.S., the North Viet Namese government and the National Liberation Front. This, Ward’s script argues, was the final blow that sealed the election for Nixon against his tainted Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey — tainted not only by the process by which he was nominated (essentially anointed by the party bosses without having contested a single primary) but his down-the-line support of Lyndon Johnson’s war policy and the chaos surrounding the convention, for which he largely got blamed. I think the film overrates the importance of the last-minute maneuvering around war negotiations; if anything sealed the fate of the Democrats in 1968 it was the intensity of the backlash surrounding the civil-rights movement and the anti-war counterculture and the determination of white, male, straight America to teach these uppity Blacks and ungrateful college kids a lesson they would never forget — reason enough why Nixon and Right-wing independent candidate George Wallace between them got 57 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 43 percent. 

A President Humphrey in 1969 would have been the old-style liberal president of a country whose Right and Left had both decisively rejected old-style liberalism — just as, had Hillary Clinton squeaked out an Electoral College victory in 2016, her presidency would have been largely ineffective because she would have been positioned between two political extremes, a Right who would have thought their movement had been robbed of the victory they deserved and a Left who would have blamed her for destroying the progressive side of the Democratic Party. (I think Donald Trump is absolutely right — for a change — when he says that the accusation that his campaign colluded with Russia to affect the outcome of the 2016 election is an excuse cooked up by the Democrats to explain why they lost an election they should have easily won. The reason Hillary Clinton lost was that she was, well, Hillary Clinton, representative of a Democratic Party that under her husband and again under Obama had engineered so-called economic “recoveries” that actually only benefited the wealthiest people in society; also she had been successfully demonized by Right-wing propaganda for literally a quarter-century — reason enough for Trump to say that he didn’t need to go to Russia for dirt on Hillary since he had enough already, albeit mostly made up by previous Right-wing propagandists — and a lot of working-class Americans have blamed the Clintons for the destruction of America’s industrial jobs base since Bill Clinton had forced the loathsome North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress and into law in 1994.) There were some interesting bits of irony — including one woman who had lived in North Viet Nam through the war and who recalled that it was mostly poor and working-class Viet Namese who got drafted into the North Viet Namese army while the children of the elite were protected — a lot of the leaders of the North Viet Namese Communist party kept their kids out of the army by sending them off to college in the Soviet Union (like general party secretary Le Duan’s kids) or China — which was a fascinating glimpse on how the world’s 1 percent, capitalist or Communist, are brothers (and sisters) under the skin since one of the key criticisms of the war from the U.S. anti-war movement was that the children of privilege in our country were largely exempt from the draft (either they had rich families paying their way through college or they found other ways to shield their kids from the service — can you say “George W. Bush and the Texas Air National Guard”?). 

There was also a segment on the sheer amount of money floating around in Saigon thanks to the enormous amounts of supplies the U.S. were shipping in, ostensibly for the American troops, much of which was diverted to the black market (one picture of a shipping crate with a hole crudely punched in to extract its contents said more than all of Geoffrey C. Ward’s commentary!), and how a lot of women from the countryside came to Saigon to work either as B-girls or prostitutes (though I suspect a lot of that was less voluntary than Ward made it seem and they were probably being human-trafficked). But the most important part of this episode by far was how much it showed the role of the Viet Nam war and the other cultural conflicts of the 1960’s in determining the political and social conflicts that have riven our country to this day. One interviewee who participated in the anti-war protests in Chicago in 1968 recalled that the cops seemed especially venomous when they walked into the crowds, billy clubs out, beating everyone in sight, and he got the impression that the police simply objected to their existence — even though surprisingly few of the street protesters in Chicago in 1968 actually wore their hair long or looked in any way hippie-ish or countercultural. As a lot of people who weren’t around during the 1960’s for whom the decade is a matter of history don’t understand, there was actually a divide between the political movement and the hippie counterculture: the political young Left saw the hippies as lazy ne’er-do-wells who weren’t interested in the serious task of building and carrying out the Revolution — an ironic inversion of the way mainstream America saw them as lazy ne’er-do-wells who weren’t interested in making something of themselves and earning their way into the American dream — while the hippies frequently rejected political involvement and the “bad vibes” it brought. The two groups really clashed on the issue of drugs, especially drugs stronger than marijuana, which the hippies eagerly embraced and the politicals not only often opposed, they argued that drugs were being deliberately brought in by the U.S. government to turn people away from political involvement and get them to destroy themselves — a bit of Left-wing paranoia that has appeared in future generations as well. 

One particularly poignant story was told by Matt Harrison, the son of an Army family who recalled his parents moved every year or two because both were in the service; he more or less eagerly joined to do his duty to his country, while his brother Bob — whom the family nicknamed “Robin” — turned against the war, though he had a funny way of showing it: he defied the family’s tradition by joining the Marines, then went AWOL, then Matt bailed him out by signing up for a second tour in Viet Nam (during which he was shocked at the general breakdown in discipline compared to what it had been his first time “in country”) because he’d learned there was a regulation in the U.S. military that two brothers couldn’t be in active duty in combat in the same time. Assured that he wouldn’t have to serve in actual combat, Bob returned to his Marine unit — only he went AWOL again, and when his unit was doing some training in Washington state he took advantage of the border’s proximity and fled to Vancouver. A decade later, after the war, the family learned that Bob had fallen into drug use and died of an overdose, ironically enough, in Hong Kong — not that far from Viet Nam. (I’m using the word “ironically” a lot in this post because it seems more than any other to sum up the weird contradictions and convolutions of the Viet Nam story.) Overall, the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Geoffrey C. Ward film The Viet Nam War has been an excellent history, avoiding the obvious traps of either glorifying the war or damning it — given its auspices (not only the PBS umbrella but also the huge amount of sponsorship from corporations like Bank of America and wealthy individuals like David H. Koch — the presence of one of the two hated Koch brothers, whose name has become this generation of progressives’ personification of the ruling class the way “Rockefeller” and “Morgan” were to previous generations, might have led one to expect, or dread, a Right-wing justification of the war, but fortunately that didn’t happen) it could easily have turned into an “official” history instead of a thought-provoking and relatively even-handed look at an event in American history that is still a touchstone of controversy.