VIETNAM
6<45
Asia, Africa and South America. They will bog down in the cultural
swamps of our old imperial wastes; their minds will rupture in the new
pressures on their cast iron formulations. For Communism contends with
an impossibility: one cannot bring a modern economy to a backward
country in a hurry, bulldozing through a wealth of primitive lore, without
manufacturing a horde of mass men. And mass man is equal to the
plague.
Nihilis~ic,
he is addicted to modern communications. Shakespeare,
comic books, .motors, electronics, jazz, plastic, fucking, frozen food,
are all equal grit to his dispose-all. He consumes whatever culture is
before him and is the secret enemy of any government which presumes
to rule him. His secret allegiance is always to the enemy. So let the
Communists rather than the Americans do the manufacturing of mass
men in backward lands, in order that the secret allegiance of those new
mass men be exactly
to
us.
For there is one way in which the West is superior to the Com–
munists, and without that superiority, mass man cannot live. Mass man
is an insatiable man, a malignancy of directionless greed at the mercy
of his secret addiction-which is art. No population ever on earth has
loved art so much as mass man for that is the only hope of his deliver–
ance: that he may encounter some great art before he is dead. Only great
art can penetrate into the tomb of the modern soul and bring a moment
of cease to the backed-up murders of the modern heart. Here, on this
violent spit, friends"is the place we are ahead in the Cold War. For our
artists are better, our writers are better, our jazz musicians are better,
our painters go further, our vision is more fierce, it explores more.
It is relentless we almost dare to think. It may even prevail
if
we do
not burn too many women and children fighting for Christ. Oh, Christ,
what ass-holes be Americans.
Yet it may be too easy to end on this fine proud and strenuous
moral note. For the sweet bloody truth is not so neat.
If
the Lord of the
Snopes went to war in Vietnam because finally he didn't have the moral
courage to try to solve an impossible mix of camp, red-neck, civil rights,
street violence, playboy pornography and all the glut which bugs our
works, if Lyndon Johnson finally decided
in
his fine brain that only a
war was going to get America off the pot (we were that mercilessly
screwed to the john by fifty years of smelling our national armpit every
time the truth rose up to kiss us) well, what he didn't realize was that
the war
in
Vietnam was not going
to
serve as cloaca for our worst
emotions but instead was going to up the ante and give us more camp,
more red-neck, more violence
in
the streets, more teen-age junkies, more
