Today, 45 years ago i had just returned from NYC, or was precipitously leaving from a two-year scholarship awarded to me by the Art Student’s League of NYC. Events get hazy this much time later. What i remember about that time is that i would miss the July 4th 1976 celebration by my decision to vacate my scholarship, and i remember a red haired model with a remarkably long curly mane who i had just broken up with for, probably really stupid reasons and who showed up at my door shorn of her locks just prior to my journey back to SoCal. This was not the first time a woman in my romantic life had committed such a determined act and then demonstrated to me her resolve. When I left England, some short 3 years earlier in early 1972 to what i told myself at the time, to finish my last semester of High School, again precipitously and after a quarrel, Ms. A_____ Potter showed up at the door to bid me adieu where i lived under the roof of U.S. Army Master Sargent Joe Walls and his English wife Peggy - Angela had plucked her exquisitely voluminous eyebrows into 2 hideously arched pencil marks, and if she had taken a dagger and stabbed it into my heart at that moment i had opened the door that day, she could not have done more damage.
Now, i am old and my passions are less hasty - and i am living in a land with far more weighty memories than my picayune whimpering. 45 years ago today the entire mass of U.S. Empire was evicted from the land i am now welcomed to stay - sort of. I rode my bicycle early today and was greeted by a mixture of tolerance and curiosity far more kind than that i know was proffered to their kin from this land of Vietnam when they landed on the shores of ‘merica 45 years ago. I was living in, or in transition to Santa Ana, CA from Costa Mesa, CA where i had grown up. I understood even then that the price of rents where i had been raised were out of reach for the money i could earn as an unskilled wannabe artist recently returned from the “Big Apple” and yet to be discovered by the Art Brahmas that constituted “good taste” then as now. I had no fear for i was young and had conquered the big apple with ease, though young and arrogant about how culture and “good taste” worked.
Empire media quietly used diplomatically approved pablum about “peace with honor” to explain the reversal of 20 years of purpose and obscured views of the evacuation of diplomatic staff airlifted off the embassy roof in Saigon, nee Ho Chi Minh City. The fact 45 years later is clear, Ho Chi Minh was correct, John F. Kennedy was wrong. It was not an issue of communism vs democracy, but people vs oppression. Today the United States has been overthrown and successfully occupied by the same economic forces that sent 58,000 ‘mericans to their death. Within the past 3 days that same number of lives, 58,000 ‘mericans have again been sacrificed to the same greed and self-interest cloaked in the mantle of democracy during my youth - only now it is “g_d” and christianity against whom we are waging war against nearly every other free nation on the planet - while Viet Nam quietly continues to grow the best food, produce the finest music and flaunt the most beautiful women on the planet.
I am beyond shaming my countrymen for their insurmountable stupidity, or point to the merchants of my country about how to follow cooperative socialism for real growth and social calm. I do not have that many years left to me. Even within the confines of a post Covid-19 planet there are fewer and fewer avenues available. The entrepreneurial wolves have already landed in the land of Victors and like some twisted Greek Mythology are singing the praises of “ profit is your friend, there is ‘money’ just for the taking - if they are too stupid to know, that is their problem.” all the snide self-serving exhortations one could find in post WWII ‘merica. What people are not told is the mechanics of such greed ultimately lead to smaller and smaller yields to a smaller and smaller segment of the population, while the amoral and soul-less of the population simply shift the killing gates to fewer and fewer and the expense of more and more.
Don’t believe me - look at who had been comrades, months earlier and who are now climbing over your shoulder for the smallest advantage. there is no future but that which cooperative love for each other’s well being will provide. i have just now spent 10 minutes in the hammer drumbeat which only a working community is capable of hearing or drumming to. i will regret no longer being able to sample the skepticism of a war torn population through simple correspondent hammer thumping. Where i live is already awash in the conceit of communication through texting and the bleaching of meaning that comes such monosyllable exchanges. What i do not want to leave is a memory of the insincerity and fakeness that comes from cultivating approval by “emoticons” or admittance into the right “clique” - i spit on your conformance and reject the notion that i will become whole once i have surmounted your collective approval - while at the same time i accept each and every warmhearted exchange i have with every new stranger i meet · put that in your pipe and smoke it . .. ··· :
jts 30/04/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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