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.
