HERBERT MARCUSE
polite society gone ape, more of everything else Lyndon was trying
to
ship overseas.
Still, with it all, confess it, Mailer, the country is now in good humor.
A wild good humor-it has been the wildest summer in years from
Watts to Easthampton; it has been wild. The truth is, maybe we
need a war. It may be the last of the tonics. From Lydia Pinkham to
Vietnam in sixty years, or bust. We're the greatest country ever lived
for speeding up the time. So, let's do it right. Let's cease all serious war,
kids. Let's leave Asia to the Asians. Let us, instead, have wars which are
like happenings. Let us have them every summer. Let us buy a tract of
land in the Amawn, two hundred million acres will do, and throw in
Marines and Seabees and
Air
Force, Scuba divers for the river bottom,
motorcyclists for the mud-races, carrier pilots landing on bounce-all
decks in typhoons, invite them all, the Chinks and the Aussies, the Frogs
and the Gooks and the Wogs, the Wops and the Russkies, the Yugos,
the Israelis, the Hindoos, the Pakistanis. We'll have war games with real
bullets and real flamethrowers, real hot-wire correspondents on the spot,
TV with phone-in audience participation, amateur war movie film con–
tests for the soldiers, discotheques, playboy clubs, pictures of the corpses
for pay TV, you know what I mean-let's get the hair on the toast for
breakfast.
So
a write-in campaign (all of us) to King Corporation Exec
Mr. Pres; let us tell
him
to get the boys back home by Christmas, back
from Vietnam and up the Amazon for summer. Yours- readers-till the
next happening.
Unless Vietnam is the happening. Could that be? Could that really
be? Little old Vietnam just a happening? Cause if it is, Daddy Warbucks,
couldn't we have the happening just with the Marines and skip all that
indiscriminate roast tit and naked lunch, all those bombed-out civilian
ovaries, Mr.
J.,
Mr. LBJ, Boss Man of Show Biz-I salute you in your
White House Oval, I mean America will shoot all over the shithouse
wall if this jazz goes on, Jim.
Herbert Marcuse
I am grateful to the editors of PR for offering me the oppor–
tunity to comment on the "Statement on Vietnam :a·nd the Dominican
Republic."
The statement is outspoken in its opposition to the American policy
while at the same time making assumptions which all but invalidate this
opposition.
