NOTHING MATTERED IN THE END

187 . 'NOTHING MATTERED IN THE END' - (nyc, 1969, Vietnam War):

The time I'm writing about here was the time of some short golden era of American predominance which in the 1960's was both beginning its glory-phase and at the same time winding it all down with a large crashing noise of despair and misdeed and it was the time of people like this Taylee fellow I mentioned previously hopping on jet planes to cross the Atlantic or visit France and such places on whims it was the time of BOAC American TWA Pan Am United Delta and Eastern Airlines - carriers which boasted of air-prowess and swift efficiency - when vacation travel and seeing the world became easy and was still cheap and guilt-free and without oil-crisis scares and terrorist echoes and all the rest and yet at the same time during these years there was a jagged and horrific scare of firepower and violence beneath everything America did - unusual war in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Thailand too and the entire Southeast Asian subcontinent convulsed with death and anguish prodded by the sequestering and drafting of endless streams of American soldiers setting out to kill and be killed and it all eventually ended up into a crazy-insane-bizarre absurdist spectacle of madness and lies from the very top down from the hideous Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon spectacular of mad insanity to pot-smoking irreverent grunts in the rice paddies shooting at anything which moved : by the mid-1970's it had become pure madness with every utterance in reference being crazier and more absurd than the one before it to the point where IT COULD BE SAID and philosophers did say it 'there was no longer any Good nor any Bad - just insanity and spectacle on riot' and the streets were becoming slowly filled with anger (at least in NYC anyway) as most of the rest of the nation seemed able to simply IGNORE what was happening or even support it all without saying and without knowledge of what they were supporting and it became an idiot's-time of war movies and cheer-leading for war by such mighty fools as John Wayne and those sorts who just went on over and over pushing the nobility and valor and glory of the war they fronted for - planeloads of skittish Bob Hope entertainment types boorishly singing for troops giving scantily-clad burlesque shows of lascivious intent to sex-crazed and over-charged soldiers wheedling on the edge of death - cheering lustily and savagely applauding the sex-kitten Ann-Margarets of that world - it was TRULY insane maddening and offensively senseless on its face - but WAR was somehow given a cast of nobility and rightness and patriotic bullshit once more and it all just continued and then simply began to rot from the inside out SLOWLY at first and then more and more swiftly as it took hold and the nation itself fragmented and children went crazy in the streets : 'nonetheless I digress' (my very first rhyming couplet) : the seeming insipid and mind-numbing stupidities by which the 'War' was advanced were unending and always in control - even the rioting and screeching of hundreds of thousands past a point remained ineffectual and - face it - that 'war' didn't end nor wind down until the very moment that 'THEY' decided it should and the billions of dollars which were meant to be made on that war were made - contracts payoffs money laundering money transfers money being hid and vast amounts of taxation squandered (ABOUT ALL THAT there was NO mystery) - and at the same moment that things were getting most dismal the voices in consort were raised to pretend to a more solemn nobility about the 'cause' the war the fighting- men's generosity and spirit the high aspirations and the dedications to Freedom and Liberty : ALL absolute BULLSHIT HORSECRAP lies and mischaracterizations and no matter WHAT else is said one must never overlook the following -- a true war story is never moral it does not instruct nor encourage virtue nor suggest proper models of human behavior nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done - if a story seems moral do not believe it and if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie and in the historical rhythm of that dynamic the great English war poetry of Isaac Rosenberg Siegfried Sassoon Wilfred Owen responded to the Great War by exposing their culture's delusory poetic idea of war as chivalric noble or glamorous (an American substream of this for the modern day has become to invent a surreal dark and comedic strain for the same outlooks - thus Joseph Heller's Catch-22 for example - which rectified the heroic tight-lipped efficiency and unreal upstanding know-how of WWII movies) and in either case some form of illogic and delusion was being pierced for the over-riding concern of both of these genres was to show the true assault of war for what it is and has always been - a grievous and age-old fusillade of sickness violence and twisted perversion in the service of the usual lies and false motivations of propaganda and falsities of rulers and kings of whichever sort and that's what I was thinking about as I painted the white walls too just thinking back over my own life in front of a great wall of human noise in the streets outside - some thousands with signs and bullhorns assembled outside from St. Mark's in the Bouwerie church yard all cobble-stoned and crumbly to Washington Square Park a the bottom of Fifth Avenue and the entire ensuing area of designated 'Free Space' between - thousands of placard-carrying yelling waving and bullhorn carrying activists at once refusing and rejecting any 1968 war machine effort then underway (huge growing violent and effective effort that it was) but to NO avail as Humphrey replaced Johnson to McCarthy to Kennedy and than (alas) back to Nixon and it went all over again and nothing changed and I watched and waited without a second thought nor a wondering of what to do and what it was about - Martin Luther King dead and then another Kennedy too - and nothing mattered in the end and we all went on our way.