http://www.newsdissector.com/blog/
I remember watching most of this coverage on the news. There are some scenes not shown, which were the last flights out of the airport or air base... People racing after the jets taking off, in cars, jeeps, motor bikes. Other scenes inside the plane where people were being pushed out the back door to go spinning and rolling off on the runways.
For weeks the stories out of the south were bad and getting worse and worse as the large central provinces fell to the NVA and the ARVN were pushed east toward the coast and then down south on highway one towards Saigon.
What was falling apart was fourteen long years of lies. I was thirty-three married with wife and kid, day job and studio space at night. I remember thinking what a waste. Most of my youth was eaten up fighting my way through school, resisting the draft, and so on, then the first years of marriage, and all for what?
The difference between 1961 and 1975 was startling and epic. It was the sort of time that really needed a big novel, but none ever came out. I mistakenly thought that the last weeks of the war would be able to expose the utter depravity of what went on in the US. The revisionists were already busy with their re-writes, so the history I lived was already being erased.
I kept trying to figure out some visual metaphor, for this erasure which was far more thorough that just erasing a few marks. Robert Rauschenberg had already done the art version, Erased De Kooning. So the concept was there, the poetic concept was there. But I could never figure out how to get that and the idea of a larger history, erased by simultaneous and continuous revisions. I thought of Rashomon also. Telling a story from different points of view. I tried some photography projects with narrative audio readings of Robbe-Grillet in Snapshots and In The Labyrinth but that didn't work. Nobody understood the technique and I wasn't very good at them. The method requires a contradiction, first to make something appear stable or real, then eroding that stability through a narrative that is an imaginary place that could not exist. This is way far gone into the mirrors of art.
I noticed today that Oliver North wrote a short piece for Fox News on the heroic rescue of ambassador Martin from the roof top of the US embassy in Saigon, with small arms fire nearby.
In highest tradition of erasure, North forgot to mention that Ford and Kissinger kept Martin in place to the last minute when it would take very risky maneuvering to get him out. He could have been ordered out without much fuss a few days before. Thieu resigned the week before and was flown out by the US Air Force. He left the VP, who appointed a general to take the fall.
So why wait? Why wait until the NVA could shell Tan Son Nhat? Saving face, saving the lie, saving the idea that millions of lives extinguished, the country in ruins, was a job worth doing?
I am thinking this way, because of the double talk of the economy, war, Wall Street, Goldman, fraud, government complicity, and contradictions between some theoretically objective truth, and the obvious lies in the hearing on Wednesday. This creates or reproduces a very similar state of mind and its disjunction or jarring contradiction---from the now forgotten era of Vietnam.
I believed back then that the disjunction was so great, that it could not be erased. Obviously I was wrong. This was the importance of the concept of erasure, that you could not erase a breach this big. Well, it seems you can.
Now it sure feels like a similar state of my mind. The lies are so large, the state of affairs so precarious, that how can these be erased?
The financial sector and the government are going to keep up face, no matter how stripped they are of their pretense. I think that is the lesson for April 30. But here is the problem. If you keep denying the obvious, if you keep stalling, soon or later events will come bite you. There will come a day, when the wolf will be at the door. Day after day, week after week, month after month the Obama administration has been following the paths of its predecessors when clearly these policies have led to ruin after ruin after ruin.
I can't shake the feeling of doom. It seems like each and every move this government makes, only insures some bad end sooner and sooner.
CG