Home and Gone Again

At the end of January 1972, I came back to the US from an extended 18-month tour-of-dirty in the now defunct Republic of South Vietnam. I had agreed to serve an additional six months “at the request and for the convenience of the government.” In return, I got six months shaved off my penurious six year enlistment in Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club (a.k.a., the United States Navy) so that I could return to college in time for the Spring Semester. I had met (and fallen in lust with) a lovely Chinese lady in Taiwan while on R&R there; couldn’t wait to get back to her; and had a lot of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese credits to pile up in order to qualify for the Foreign Exchange Student program at California State University, Long Beach. One look at the political situation in the country of my birth only confirmed my eagerness to get the hell out of the asylum and back to civilization as soon as possible. “Why change Dicks in the middle of a screwing” seemed to explain the resigned, apathetic attitude.

So I watched from afar in November of 1972 as Tricky Dick Nixon and Henry “Der Bomber” Kissinger — the two sons-of-bitches who sent me to Vietnam two years previously — blew away the hapless George McGovern, their campaign promising “Peace is at Hand.” Naturally, once re-elected they bombed the living shit out of North Vietnam on Christmas Day. The entire world erupted in revulsion; some petty burglary and cover-up activities began to receive legal investigation; and The Mother Of All “-gates” (Watergate) began the inexorable process of running, first, VP Spiro Agnew, and then President Tricky Dick Nixon out of town one step ahead of impeachment and conviction.

Throughout his scurrilous red-baiting career, people had warned Dick Nixon: “Be careful whom you kick in the face on your climb up the greasy pole because you will encounter the same people again on the slide back down again.” Obviously, no one has ever dared to relate this timeless wisdom to Donald Trump. From the “unhelpful” activities of John McCain’s daughter and the Bush Clan this election season, it still seems operative to me. As Khan Noonian Singh said to his nemesis James T. Kirk: “Do you know the Klingon proverb that says Revenge is a dish best served cold?”

Trump didn’t create the rabid, bible-thumping religious cult that now calls itself the Republican party, but he did ruthlessly exploit its cultural grievances and Messianic longings when it served his own ambitions. Many political commentators now caution that ex-President Donald Trump will take The Trump Show back out into cable-tv land where he first learned to profit from America’s lowest entertainment “standards.” Perhaps he even expects tons of free media attention like he got in 2016. Many Republican politicians fear the political mayhem he might inflict on the two hopelessly corrupt right-wing factions jockeying for jobs in the inept U.S. “government” bureaucracy. Perhaps he can even get back to flogging conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s “missing” birth certificate. It worked for him before.

Personally, I think Gotterdammerung II: The Twilight of the Girls will prove far more horror-show “entertaining” as the doddering Siegfried, Joe Biden, finds himself surrounded by BroomHillary and the Vicious, Venal Valkyries eager to show they can bomb the shit out of foreign peasants even more viciously than the “men” ever could.

Pardon the “misogynist” in an old swab-jockey, but I can already hear echoes of 1972 four years from now: “Why change “damsels” in the middle of a “distress”?

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*Note: Also posted as a comment to the Bracing Views blog comment thread "Black and Blue in America" on November 9, 2020 at 4:53 PM