I'm not sure if there's an aesthetic root to my admittedly rather sappy regard
for vets on this Memorial day in America. For people of my generation and even
those of earlier and later decades, It was an accepted commonplace that a young
fellow would serve in the armed forces, not by choice but by law. I served in
the Naval Reserve for eight years -- a sort of cop-out that enabled me to
continue my studies and civilian life so long as no military emergency arose.
By sheer luck, my term was up just weeks before the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis
and the call-up of Navy Reserves. Friends not so lucky had to leave their jobs
and families for more than two years to blockade Cuba and rattle swords. A
decade later I was teaching kids in a junior college, not the best students
around, who were drafted and shipped off to Vietnam if they flunked just one
course....and many of them went to war by that harsh rule. Once in a while a
few would return, totally
messed up or missing a limb. A colleague had a nervous breakdown and had to
quit teaching because he had flunked a nice kid who was then drafted and came
home in a coffin. I've known quite a few people who had to go to war,
unwillingly, but with resolve. I knew only one who talked about it (how he
shit his pants as a gunner in a B-29 over Germany) and even today a good
friend, in his eighties, won't discuss his personal horrors. Growing up in
WWII America had a huge impact on me and my generation just as the Depression
did for my parents' era. Everyone realized that something bigger and better or
worse and more menacing could and likely would affect them at any moment, no
matter what seemed to be. Life's bottom line had several forms: "no guarantee,
no free lunch, no privilege, no easy path, no me first. In military training
you learn to think as if you're the other guy, the one next to you or the one
aiming at you and so you're trained to love
the one and regard the other as a mute and inhuman target. That's a tough
paradox to keep in mind and it's shaped by all sorts of propaganda, weird
ceremony, plus God-centered duty and patriotism. This fosters an aesthetic of
paradox, a flip-flop bright side-dark side kind of outlook. So artists of my
generation are not convinced by any theory, sensing them all as just more
poop-deck propaganda that separates the good from the bad by the same insane
war-time logic that says this guy is good and that other guy is nothing but a
brainless, foaming animal. Like the vet I know, the eighty year old one time
private who had to kill his way across Europe, and now won't speak of it and
only wants to hear good music, walk the city and fields, and be a gentle and
modest person, many artists of my age are just looking for a good day in the
studio, the chance to glimpse order and create something with the good side of
the paradox showing first, but only first.
I honor my forebears who fell like lumpy sacks while shooting for America. I
know where they died and when, but not really understanding it was simply
ordinary, blind, bad luck. It's crazy to honor tragedy, as if to give proud
meaning to bad luck, but that's the only way to keep the dark side face down if
not absent.
WC
