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| The Ennui of Resistance |
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| holding breath and turning blue in Ohio |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 04, 1998. There is a touching aspect of noblesse oblige about the new anti-war protesters of late. You had to give them A for effort as they tried to shout down the Secretaries of State and Defense a week ago in Ohio. They had carefully rehearsed their television expressions, their chants, and their performance. While it elicited no clenched throat of damp eye with me, it did send me back to those days of yore when I got nailed with red paint listening to Al Haig, or when you could lose yourself in a crowd and chant obscenities to no actual purpose, in no danger, and to no avail. Still, in its own way it was good to see people rev up the engines of protest again. Clearly, those people felt the need to do something, and since the only good aspects of their music harkens back a quarter century, apparently they felt they can do no better than mimic Hoffman and the Yippies. It really is sad, because while the establishment has learned from the febrile years between John Kennedy’s death and the final wave of Richard Nixon, the anti-establishment clearly did not. They produce endless self-congratulations on how they stopped the Vietnam War and won Civil Rights and changed the world. In reality, they only tweaked the establishment a smidgeon, and made it safe for Robert McNamara to, almost, eventually confess, and for the U.S. and Vietnam to barely stop short of diplomatically copulating, so fevered were they to open trade some years after the War sorta ended. Many of the heroes of the Vietnam Resistance faded away or sold out utterly. For many, like Jerry Rubin, it had been something to do. For others, like Abbie Hoffman, it apparently filled a spiritual void. Without it, they faded to hucksterism and suicide. Has anyone done a real study of the motivations, the fears, and the purposes of those rebellious lives with the same objectivity that now seeps into our histories of the Vietnam War? Not that I know of, and I am sure it will not emerge from the political left, now so flaccid and silly and rudderless. Watching those Ohio protesters saddened me greatly. In the age of the Internet and email, protest has edged off the streets. It’s fun to protest political policy, especially in the U.S. where political fires can politely be called banked, but I disagree with many of my peers and still do not see that the Vietnam War ended one day sooner than it would have without the public clamor. Only when our military realized that the war could not be won did we pull out. Only then. Are the new protesters any better informed and motivated than my generation? Hardly. What side will they protest when Iraq uses gas again on the Kurds, Iranians, or Israelis? Well, let’s see what they did last time, in 1992. Nothing. Where were they? Oh, rainforest preservation was big that year. It would be a cruel irony if the only people who learned in and from the 1960’s were the people who hated those years. |
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