VLVL(6) - The Joint in the Plaza

[Doug Millison]

At 12:39 PM -0800 12/4/98, David Morris wrote:
>The Miracle of the Joint in the Plaza:
>(206.4) other states of mind all at once seemed possible [...] all from the
>same bag of [...] "extremely potent" Vietnamese buds [...] brought in by
>somebody's brother in the service.
>
>The conflict in Vietnam exerts its karmic magic.  No hiding your head in
>the sand anymore.  Consciousness sneaks in through the back door, almost
>accidentally.  Vietnam, so absent in the pages of VL, is the genesis of the
>new era breaking, but so indirectly that the exact chain of events is hard
>to trace by "the authorities."

The "Vietnamese buds" also represent a telling period detail with a dark
side -- in the 60s, there was always somebody with a "brother in the
service" who supplied them (also the wonderful Thai sticks that may have
first found their way back from that land of wonders via GIs on R & R) and
getting to smoke some was always a gift of pure grace-- but we didn't know
until many years later that in addition to the odd duffle bag-full carried
back by a GI, the real volume of those " Vietnamese buds" was smuggled into
the U.S. in body bags of dead soldiers (the TV series "China Beach" devoted
an episode to a fictionalized treatment of that real-world scandal if I
recall correctly).  If you read "buds" for "buddies" you can link arms with
the Viet Cong in fraternal anti-imperialist struggle, too.


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