Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The horror: Vietnam defines another election
By Julian Delasantellis
postulating that another big McCain win would drive Bush out of the race. In
desperation, Bush cried havoc, took the muzzle off his Texas political guru
Rove, let loose the dogs of smear.
According to many media reports, including voices from McCain's own staff, what
followed in the 18 days between the 2000 New Hampshire and South Carolina
Republican primaries was one of the dirtiest, most mendacious and underhanded
campaigns in modern American political history - all completely directed by
Rove.
In South Carolina churches, flyers were circulated that accused
McCain of being gay; the fliers used the one syllable pejorative for
homosexuality that rhymes with hag to describe today's unassailable war hero.
In 1991, McCain and his wife adopted an infant girl, Bridget, from an orphanage
in Bangladesh; that became rumors that, just like in the good old days of black
slavery in the antebellum US South, McCain had fathered an African-American
child out of wedlock.
Charges were leveled that McCain's heroic resistance to his North Vietnamese
torturers was all hype; in reality, McCain cooperated so obligingly and
completely with his captors as to represent treason. Others charged that
McCain�s years in captivity had left him mentally unbalanced, he was
said to be a modern day "Manchurian Candidate" ( from the 1959 book by Richard
Condon, made into a 1962 John Frankenheimer movie starring Frank Sinatra),
brainwashed in an Asian communist POW camp so as to be released to wreck havoc
on the American political system.
This all worked, and worked gloriously; Bush's South Carolina victory was the
turning point on his march to the presidency.
So it's not that any criticism of McCain is beyond the pale; it appears that
the degree of outrage expressed over alleged "attacks" on McCain is directly
proportional to how far on the left the attacker sits on the political
spectrum.
What is really going on here has little to do with McCain, even less to do with
Clark. Once again, this is a phenomenon that has resulted in response to
American society deciding to change the radio station playing the truth about
what really happened in Vietnam, to one playing more agreeable, less
disharmonious on the memories, easy-listening tunes.
In my June 6, 2007, Asia Times Online piece,
Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time, I explained how this phenomenon
was shaping and framing the debate over the Iraq "surge":
... as the
United States feathered its hair and discoed its way through the late 1970s to
the early 1980s, a gnawing ache grew and metastasized in the national
consciousness. The US lost a war. The US lost its first war. This was
unacceptable. Somehow, the truth of the Vietnam War had to be disposed of down
the memory hole. ... Since the nation no longer actually had to fight the
Vietnam War, the United States was discovering that it now actually liked the
Vietnam War. The revisionist-history project as applied to the Vietnam
experience was gathering full force. The war was no longer a bloody, fatally
mismanaged fiasco - it was now a "noble cause". More important, the war was not
lost by the troops - they actually won the fight - but by other forces in
society: first, the government, then other societal forces. The manhunt for the
real losers of the Vietnam War was on.
So, just who was
presented in the dock of the courts of revisionism as the real culprit in the
US defeat of Vietnam?
Not the self-serving politicians who led the country into the morass, nor the
bungling career-obsessed generals who mis-managed it, not even the corrupt
South Vietnamese officials who became rich over it. No, it was the anti-war
left in the United States, who, just as liberty and democracy were set to
forever reign triumphant in Saigon, snatched ignominious defeat from the jaws
of victory in Washington, on the nation's college campuses, and, especially, in
the media.
As I wrote last year, "Even with no Big Brother ruthlessly silencing the truth
with repression and torture, the US national consensus had sent the truth it no
longer wanted to accept about Vietnam down the memory hole."
But losing the war was only the first charge on the indictment of the anti-war
movement. They were also guilty, when the actual combat soldiers returned home
from Vietnam, of the worst manners of disrespectful calumny against the troops.
The common cultural image stereotype that those 40% of the American population
not alive then (including most of my college students here in very liberal
Seattle) have of that era is of long-haired, unkempt and unclean protesters
spitting on clean-shaven troops in uniform as they disembarked from the troop
carriers at the airport - even though sociologist and Vietnam-veteran Jerry
Lembcke, in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of
Vietnam, claims that no actual photographic evidence exists of these
supposedly treasonous expectorations.
The Vietnam anti-war movement resided almost exclusively on the political left.
Barack Obama is a man of the left, as is, now at least, Wesley Clark, although
he leans more to the center. What the American media did this week, in contrast
to the disconsonant janglings of reality, is to play an oldie but a goodie, the
revisionist song of Vietnam.
Like a 60s rock band dressing in their old flower power garb to go on tour here
in the new millennium, this week we saw McCain being dressed up by the media as
a returning soldier from the war, and Clark, four-star Army General Wesley
Clark, dressed up as an anti-war protester spitting on him.
But the reason these old shibboleths continue to work so well has little to do
with any supposed superior media skills of the right's polemicists. These are
more akin to research monkeys in a cage; they see that pressing a button - in
this case, accusing the left of disloyalty - gets them a treat, so they keep
whaling away on it. It's not that the right makes the charge so effectively;
its real power comes in the fact that the left never really answers back.
If you're a political functionary on the left side of the ideological spectrum
in America aged over 55 or so (in other words, almost the entirety of the
leadership of the Democratic Party) there is an overwhelming probability that
it was as an anti-Vietnam war activist that you first cut your teeth as a
political operative. In this, you can see the core motive of the right's
disloyalty charge - to disqualify the Party's leadership cadres from being
morally worthy of participating in the nation�s political affairs and
debates.
So why doesn't the political left fight back?
What gives the charge the full fury of its power is that, ever since the early
1980s, the left has been attempting to deny its heritage in the anti-war
movement with a vigor that would have impressed even the apostle Peter denying
Jesus in the New Testament's Book of Matthew.
Andrew Lloyd Weber, in Jesus Christ Superstar painted the scene this
way. "You've got the wrong man, lady
I don't know him
And I wasn't where
He was tonight
Never near the place
I tell you
I was never ever with him
I don't know him!!!"
In similarly denying their role in the anti-war movement, the modern day left
implicitly accepts the lie of Vietnam revisionism - that the anti-war movement
lost the war. In treating their past as a sort of madwoman in the attic that
they will be eternally ashamed of, the left makes itself vulnerable to the
right's attacks, which the right is more than happy to oblige.
Early this year, part of the Obamamania that spread across the land was a
feeling that, with the Illinois Senator being too young to carry the baggage of
the debates of the past (he was 11 years old when South Vietnam fell in 1975),
perhaps his ascendency to political power might finally represent the
conclusion of America's endless internecine exsanguinations over Vietnam.
That now appears less likely. Not wanting to be in the least bit tarnished with
the stain of Clark's alleged perfidy, Obama disassociated himself rapidly from
the General. In the current American political jargon, he "threw Clark under
the bus" - one of the many that this week have deposited their wide tire tracks
across Clark's now lifeless political carcass.
On Thursday, the US Department of Labor will release the data on the
unemployment rate for June. Expectations are that the rate will continue its
ascent towards 6%, up from last year's numbers around mid-4%. If you think that
the seriousness of the situation in the present will end the debate on the
past, you are sadly mistaken. If anything, as current conditions deteriorate,
the political interests who midwifed the present difficulties will redouble
their attempt to refocus the public's attention on the past - anything to
deflect attention from the present.
In 1969, the US science fiction TV show Star Trek presented an episode
entitled "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", a futuristic adaptation of Victor
Hugo's 1884 novel Les Miserables. In it, a stern and unyielding police
official (played by Frank Gorshin) pursues a political criminal (played by Lou
Antonio) across all the oceans of space and time. When the policeman finally
catches the criminal, they discover that their home planet has been destroyed
by the hatreds symbolized by their eternal chase.
Perhaps that is the future of America's endless debate over Vietnam. It will
continue on ad infinitum - past the time when the original contestants are all
living in old age homes (some are getting pretty close now), past the time when
they are all cold in the grave - for generation upon generations to come. For
all eternity, it will be the revisionists and their descendants chasing the
anti-war activists and theirs� - the anti-war activists condemned to an
eternal flight from both their pursuers and their progenitors' pasts.
What could break the cycle, cut the Gordian knot? Well, for me, the first thing
that comes to mind is the truth.
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and
educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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