AtDTDA 32: Fantasia on a Fantasia of Thomas Tallis Pt. 1

[grladams at teleport.com]

I stand corrected. The camera is a powerful thing. It brings images of the
flamboyant to the masses, and it's propaganda then, to say that all the
hippies were lazy, self absorbed junkies. That stuff sells, just like
whenever there's a gay rights parade they love to zoom in on the chicks
with beards and mullets, and the guys with ass cheeks coming out of their
chaps. In my parents' late 30's, dad was a working physicist for the
postwar Oak Ridge atomic industries. I only knew pro nuke concepts as a
kid. Now check the Gaia Lovelace fellow by the way on that... As in ENERGY
not BOMBS. Mom and Dad's friends had hippy parties, where they'd dress up
in robes with flowers wigs and protest signs, tape x's to their foreheads
and toss back beers, their own ironic outlet as they probably had become
inundated with images of Vietnam and the general building sickness of that
time. We are from different trees but our roots comingle. I am going to
extend this to the concept of authenticity. I have taken friends out to the
country to visit, city kids, who actually have concern over whether the
food they're gonna eat is organic. 'It was just picked' I feel like saying.
It was probably volunteered from a compost pile! It's a qualilty of
authenticity that Tallis wrote about -- and there are people on this list
who "get it" -- about that know I'm not picking on them. Thanks for the
lively thread here by the way! 

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Monte Davis monte.davis at verizon.net
Date: Sat, 10 May 2008 09:10:42 -0400
To: kelber at mindspring.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: AtDTDA 32: Fantasia on a Fantasia of Thomas Tallis Pt. 1


Laura sez:

>  We never spat at returning vets...

As far as research can determine, neither did anyone else:

http://www.amazon.com/Spitting-Image-Memory-Legacy-Vietnam/dp/0814751474/ref
=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210424409&sr=8-1

Except: "the only documented instances show members of the VFW and American
Legion spitting on their less successful Vietnam peers" [in VVAW]

The bulk of the "vets were scorned and abused" meme comes from several
decades of "stab in the back" propaganda aimed at rewriting history to show
that we had victory in our grasp before the America-hating hippies and news
media snatched it away.

(By the same token, the "every WWII vet basked in parades and settled
happily into the American Century" was a back-projection; there were quite a
lot of mostly noir-ish books and movies in the late 1940s about those who
couldn't readjust.) 



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