Jumping the Albino Alligator

(Or, How I Learned to Embrace Boomers’ Mortality & Appease One Last Chorus of Vietnam Nigglers)

In general, it’s rude to wish someone’s death. Some would say it’s bad karma, which is to say, given the notion ‘thoughts are things,’ it’s not sound to send such malice into the air, fearing it might boomerang.

Amnesty, naturally, is granted to anyone crossing a New York intersection when a cab driver arbitrarily jolts into the crosswalk, ejaculating something antic like, “I hope your mother dies, leprosy-ridden, in sexual servitude to a despotic regime!” And, of course, there are always Nazis; it’s always acceptable to wish a violent, horrible demise on Nazis.

The other exception, I’ve recently learned, is when one wishes a gentle, peaceful death for an old person who is already past ripe. This, essentially, is a proactive variation on the perennial ‘rest in peace.’

I’ve recently derived this bit of wisdom during a review of argumentum ad absurdum surrounding Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary. Eighteen hours more talk about a war we knew was lost in 1966… 1968 at the latest. And one of this documentary’s saving graces is its highlight of this very point. But do we really need another round of discussion on Vietnam?

Nope. Granted, Burns did attend Hampshire College from 1971 to 1975, and like so many of his generation, archiving their version of the Vietnam era is their life’s work. But Burns’ is neither as crazy nor as entertaining as Oliver Stone. Whereas Stone is the crazy grandfather toeing senility, Burns is the retired non-denominational pastor of a granddad who always speaks in parables but never mentions God.

Before abandoning the documentary—much like a middle-aged grandson getting up for a fresh cocktail while granddad again recites tales of his years ‘in the Orient’—I recapped the coterie of arguments for and against the war, chuckling how the argument had grown so tired (more than a decade ago) that the edgy POV had become ‘Vietnam was a necessary war’ in the name of winning the Cold War. On the other side, the usual suspects had long-since given over to silence on the point that the anti-war movement accomplished little more than electing Richard Nixon and prolonging the war. Oh, and yeah, it actually did inspire some of the best American music around, not to mention one-of-a-kind writers like Hunter S. Thompson. But there was a lingering silence surrounding the fact that LBJ, despised by the anti-war movement, was primarily responsible for the only monumental gains during the period, civil rights.

Add to this a compelling, revisionist assertion from no less than Christopher Hitchens:
"The option of accepting a unified and Communist Vietnam, which would have evolved toward some form of market liberalism even faster than China has since done, always existed. It was not until President Kennedy decided to make a stand there, in revenge for the reverses he had suffered in Cuba and Berlin, that quagmire became inevitable."

The documentary itself, like most of Burns’ work, is a careful, methodical, PBS-earnest survey of all top-of-mind sources. However, it starts to feel less like historical digest and more like the myopic meanderings of an old man unaware that the history since has vastly overshadowed the events he can’t stop recounting. His compunction to include all sides becomes the most mealy mouthed of relativism. And while the growing pains of a fledgling superpower on the world stage still obsess the self-obsessed Boomers, the rest of us have not only moved on, we feel an urgency to try and understand the four decades since Vietnam, as their ramifications are still playing out. This ongoing obsession with Vietnam, by now, is plainly and nakedly self-obsession. It’s naked narcissism. And the Boomers should damn well know by now something those flower-power films decreed frame by frame: please leave your clothes on.

This obsession with Vietnam smacks of Michael Chabon’s character, Professor Grady Tripp. Aging, vain, unable to write and increasingly irrelevant, his hopeless attempts at his second novel have digressed into a 1000-plus page volume consumed by minutiae, including but not limited to genealogies of its main characters’ horses. It’s sad, narcissistic, especially in light of contemporary woes.

Consider the displacement of Syrians alone. According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 4.8 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, while 6.6 million are displaced within Syria. Approximately 1 million of these have requested asylum in Europe. And this is only one of the fronts on which American policy has circled back serpentine upon itself. And what could be a more complex matrix of blame than the current threat of pseudo-Islamic terrorism?

To make a jump-cut to another fictional caricature—since we’re talking film—Walter Sobchak. Everything in Walter’s world threads through the eye of Vietnam. Even when he loses it in a diner, or at the bowling alley, it is somehow related to Vietnam. And for the sympathetic viewer, a sympathetic malediction is hatched. Walter’s way of coping with his experiences in Vietnam and re-entry to peacenik Los Angeles is by reminding all present of the grunt’s day to day eyeful. “I’m finishing my coffee.”

Two decades hence, we can imagine Walter as an elderly dude. And we can only imagine that the much-less physically formidable Sobchak increasingly emotes pathos as his complaints about Vietnam become less and less relevant, yet somehow increasingly plaintive. While his arguments become less sympathetic, his presence becomes the increasing face of pathos. He can’t get beyond his memories of Vietnam, but the world is decades past. And it’s difficult not to empathize with this long-since soldier whose valorous days have long-since expired. So like the dutiful grandson—cocktail in hand—we sit and listen to the long, prolonged dirge of pre-death, our host still seeking approval before the shuffle off.

But, in all seriousness, why have we indulged this endless rehashing of Vietnam for so long? Because, on one hand, and rightfully so, we think of Vietnam veterans as dupes who were further disrespected upon returning home. While indulging this sentiment, on the other hand, we must reject sentimentalism. Both the sentimentalism that indicts Vietnam vets and the sentimentalism that exonerates them as dupes. As James Baldwin described in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”:

"Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."

Threading the generational realities back through the honorific tone and sympathetic ear as grandpa recites his greatest hits… is tiresome. Nonsense is nonsense, and yet we sentimentally listen to its grating textures, somehow apologetic for the same. Apologetic, somehow, for our own revulsion at the insipidity of this oh-so American vanity, this sentimental back-slapping to which we’re prone.

Another satirical yet bitingly honest way of getting at this is through the culmination of Don Draper’s character in Mad Men. Faced with his own shallowness and unlikability, the tear-jerking yet opportunistic metaphor of an unwanted item of food that never gets picked, is dropped into Draper’s lap at a California retreat. In an uncharacteristically earnest moment, Don gets up from his chair and hugs the man, as they cry in unison. All the clichés of group therapy and hippie-era ‘I’m Ok, you’re Ok’ sentimentalism are present. And the handsome yet lost and utterly inauthentic Don Draper is faced with his turning point. What comes next?

Sitting atop a dramatic promontory on the northern California coast—blue sky and Pacific as backdrop—Draper chants “Om” with his fellow retreaters. New beginnings, new insights, the sheer tenacity of this character culminate in a thin smile on his face as we fade and cut to the most classic of Coca-Cola commercials, the multicultural harmonies of “I’d like to buy the world a Coke… and keep it company… it’s the real thing…” Once again, Don has turned a potentially personal breakthrough into a breakthrough commercial refrain, forsaking substance for a sappy, sentimentalist jingle that promises to make consumerist Uncle Toms of us all.

Because we are such a young country, a particularly impactful generation can leave a legacy that seems more like an archetype. This is heightened by the value we place on individuals, especially charismatic, dramatic and compelling individuals. In the twentieth century, the mantle was split between the so-called greatest generation and their children, the baby boomers. Boomers fought a failed revolution against Vietnam, then joined the ranks of devoted capitalists, having spent the majority of their mercurial energies trying to strike a movie-poster-like-pose in the mirror. As Hunter S. Thompson said of their so-called revolution in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971):

"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”

Watching Burns’ documentary, listening to yet another account of the war in Vietnam, I’m reminded of the psychotropic visions spouted from Dr. Gonzo and his attorney, of their hallucinatory musings that, like the best philosophical musings of a stoner, sound poetic and profound for a second or two, but their spell dissipates quickly into meaningless relativism and unsound philosophy. At worst, it’s the slavish narcissism of Don Draper, and at best it’s the crackpot poetry of Werner Herzog wondering if albino alligators in a zoo in France will somehow jump from their tanks and end up commenting on and remaking ancient cave paintings in nearby Chauvet. Amusing lunacy.

But, like dutiful grandchildren, we refill their cocktails knowing the end of the evening is nigh and a cab is on its way.

-MRM