Remembering students with commitment

In all the depressing excitement, I forgot that 4th May was the anniversary of the Kent State Murders. My institution's Students' Union refuses to join local protests against Nazis. Kent State students turned out to protest their country's destruction of Vietnam, and four of them were shot dead by the National Guard, which fired randomly on the crowd.

Here's Ohio, the song Neil Young released a few days later to commemorate this evil act. Full story here.

War - condemned to repetition

Bablylon Wales republishes an interview with the great Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths. It's fascinating anyway, but I've just taught a session on the Vietnam war, and this question is stuck in my head:

In light of the recent 'torture' pictures coming out of Iraq how well, in your view, did American troops treat the civilian population in Vietnam?

When Lt. Calley was questioned during his trail for the My Lai massacre he was asked, "You threw babies in the air and shot them on the way down?" The reply was, "Yes sir, in the air." Iraq is only different because every soldier seems to have a digital camera.

Conversely, there are fewer people like Griffiths around: hounded out of war zones by press officers intent on making sure no atrocity photos appear. But, as Griffiths implies, the loss of a moral compass is so profound that the soldiers take their own photographs of atrocities they commit. 

Valete, Ted Kennedy

So Ted Kennedy is dead. His life, as summarised in this obituary, is a classic lesson in the complexity of mankind. Monstrous son of a monstrous Nazi-supporting bootlegger, brother to two assassination victims, he juggled a cruel and selfish private life, leading to the death of a young woman, amongst other things, but he was also a principled liberal leader who reached out from a position of the utmost privilege to the poorest and most oppressed in his country.

Seymour Hersh's Camelot is a no-holds-barred examination of the Kennedy dynasty, well worth reading, but the Kennedy mystique is as golden as it is appalling. JFK started the Vietnam war, but RFK would have ended it, had he not been shot dead. It was RFK who took on the Mafia, despite the fact that his brother's election (opposed by Nixon) in 1960 was achieved through widespread vote-rigging and corruption. Edward Kennedy would have been one of the best presidents had he won the nomination in 1980 - but his alcohol, sex and drug-fuelled private life put paid to that, and nice Jimmy Carter went on to lose to that evil hack Reagan.

So Ted Kennedy - proof that bad/good co-exist in us all…

Don't worry - there's already at least one of the next Kennedy generation in power: Patrick is a state senator in Rhode Island, and Caroline ran for New York, unsuccessfully. Arnie's wife is a Kennedy too!

I Get Reviews

Occasionally I post on Chronicle.com, an American higher education website. A while ago we were talking about the Vietnam War, something I teach. I noticed today that a university teacher, no less, left this charming response to myself and 'one who served': Needless to say, I'm surprised by the claim that the media should be 'loyal', especially as it totally contradicts his objection to Baudrillard's point that mediatised war can't convey the 'truth' of war.

Hey, “one who served,” ever consider how the disloyal press manipulated film footage to undercut our efforts in Vietnam (as in Iraq) and ennoble the campus cowards who protested the war in Vietnam? And “Plashing Vole,” faithfully invoking the patent Baudrillard rubbish that the Gulf War didn’t happen makes one wonder why you are allowed to teach anything, even in a shameless pc-ridden nanny-state like what the UK has devoled into.

Needless to say, I'm surprised by the claim that the media should be 'loyal', especially as it totally contradicts his objection to Baudrillard's point that mediatised war can't convey the 'truth' of war. He doesn't seem very keen on evidence, intellectual coherence, grammar or reasoned argument - and yet according to him I'm the one who shouldn't be teaching!

Hailing Frequencies Open

I guess, as a man with a blog, that my attendance at Star Trek last night was somehow predestined. Despite being a bit rushed, and depending heavily on Oedipal themes (wit elements of The O. C. and 'bromance'), I loved it. There were plenty of in-jokes without excluding new viewers, the plot was suitably familiar but still well done, the action and effects were impeccable. I've long dreamed of a decent space opera on the big screen (some Iain M Banks? M John Harrison?), and this is the closest I've seen for a while.

I also particularly liked Hikaru Sulu, who volunteers for a mission demanding personal combat skills. Once on board, he confesses that his skill is fencing (though his fight showed little grasp of the discipline, partly because a good fencing bout is over in seconds without any blade contact, while a film fight demands clashing, to-and-fro etc.).

However, I received a considerable degree of ridicule, even from fellow nerds, for professing my preference for Star Trek over Star Wars. I certainly wouldn't want to defend Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation and haven't seen Enterprise, but the original series, some of the films and perhaps Voyager and all the themes tackled are so much more grown up and culturally significant than Star Wars.

Partly this is because Star Trek was a TV series, though it didn't last long. It could respond to current affairs that much more quickly than a film series, and it appeared in a tense moment in history. Through the two series of the TV show, you can detect themes of international relations (hence the presence of Sulu, a recent enemy for Americans and Chekhov - a current one), race (Uhura - black space secretary who gets kissed by Kirk) and war. Star Trek dealt with Vietnam while the war was going on - moving on from being reluctantly in favour to eventually strongly against. Sometimes the franchise has been plain wrong, at other times embarrassing - TNG was horribly touchy-feely bollocks, and sometimes interestingly countercultural (capitalists look very old-fashioned in Deep Space Nine), but it's never claimed that anything is simple and clearcut.

Which brings me to Star Wars. Appearing in the late seventies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that plucky rebels fighting a crushing, technologically superior Empire led by a corrupted leader was a parody for Vietnam with the Rebel Alliance being the North Vietnamese and the Empire being the US, lead by disgraced Nixon and the other presidents.

But no: it's an attempt to kick the Vietnam Syndrome by recasting the Americans as leaders of a disparate band of freedom fighters, looking back to the only time this was even vaguely true, the American War of Independence. There's something in the American psyche that clings on to this despite all the evidence piling up that it is an Empire in the mould of (but even more powerful than) the British and Roman versions. Having had their bottoms kicked by the peasants in Vietman, Spielberg appropriates the Vietnamese narrative to help the losing side feel better about itself.

In doing so, the universe is reduced to the moral equivalent of an old-fashioned Western of children's parable. Nobody ponders their actions, nobody possesses shades of grey - they're Good or Bad, give or take the odd deathbed repentance (which itself is desperately hackneyed). Say what you like about Star Trek's hokey liberal idealism, characters face difficult choices, often fail, and have to come to terms with the ramifications of their actions. This film lives up to those ideals (and has genuinely good jokes)

Given the choice between America as Star Wars and America as Star Trek, I say Beam Me Up.

More books

Jessica Mitford's The Trial of Dr Spock… - in which lots of old square guys realized that the Vietnam War was a bad idea and joined the long-hairs on the street, got themselves arrested then put on a great performance in court.

Also: Bonnie Prince Billy's Beware. Feels a bit weird to buy it on CD as I've got the previous twelve on lovely vinyl.