In my twenties I read a few books about the Vietnam war. It was the war of my generation, the audio-visual backdrop to my adolescence, the wellspring of much of its music and an early view, as a boy growing up in Apartheid South Africa, of what a generation’s courageous resistance to an old order looked like.
I read everything I could get: John del Vecchio, Philip Caputo, James Webb, and of course, the peerless Chickenhawk by Robert Mason – an excellent book about the war, and an even better book about flying in general, and flying a Bell Iroquois Huey in particular. I had read quite a few books about flying in the Second World War – Pierre Klosterman’s The Big Show and Fighter and Bomber by Len Deighton, and I thought Mason’s book exceeded them all.
This was the era of The Deer Hunter and Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and America’s efforts to come to terms with what it had done, and had done to it, in Vietnam. I am ashamed to say that my reading did not include anything written by a Vietnamese author, if any such literature was available – this was the early 1980s.
I came across the phrase “It don’t mean nothing” in one of the Vietnam books – I forget which. However, if you put it into Google now, you will see that it has become famous as the resigned everyman response of thousands of young American servicemen to the dystopia in which they every day risked death on the other side of the world, in a milieu in which they had no control over their lives. When the first mortar fell, or the attack came in, you would be quick and lucky, or not fast enough and unlucky, and dead or wounded.
In an outlandish conflict for which many of them had not volunteered and which claimed the lives of 50,000 US troops, it was a valid and philosophically logical response, in spite of its offhand spirit. The war machine driven by the US military industrial complex employed napalm strikes, agent orange and the illegal bombing of Laos and had no rationale except to shorten the war and reduce American mortality. The only thing that had any meaning to the soldier was finally sinking into a seat on the plane that would take them out of there. The phrase acknowledges powerlessness in the face the monolith.
This morning I watched a podcast by one of my angry US podcasters in which he read, in its entirety, an article from The Atlantic, to which he subscribes. The gist of the article was that in an age of internet memes that can reduce even the most complex event or concept to a piece of video that might only last a few seconds, nothing means anything anymore and all human discourse has been overtaken by nihilism. Sometimes this is laugh out loud funny – the digital wag’s wisecrack. Good humour should be irreverent and God knows, we have never needed it more than now.
But when this is done to humiliate, to overturn facts, or to overwhelm a well-made argument, it’s not so funny. “It don’t mean nothing” is still the sentiment but coming from a smartarse influencer to make some dubious political point it lacks the dignity of the same phrase in the mouth of a weary grunt loading body bags into a Chinook. It’s just words said by a cynic and a philistine.
I write this on the morning on which Andrew Moutbatten Windsor, the pustule on the flaccid arse of the British Royal family, has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. President Trump is said to be contemplating a massive strike on Iran because it will not fall into line with American wishes regarding its nuclear programme. The files about Jeffrey Epstein released by the laughably named US Department of Justice, even redacted, seem to have enough information to commence any number of criminal investigations, supposing that anyone from the DOJ or FBI had the will to undertake them. No sanction appears to threaten most of the people in the US at any rate, who may have committed horrific crimes against vulnerable children and young people.
I am struggling to come to terms with this death of rational thought, of a world in which truth often still had a consequence. I did not think it would crumble so quickly, and that so little would be done to defend it. I do not know what can be done now to save it. I do not think there is any way back from this.
This is a world in which facts have no meaning no matter how much they can be backed up empirically. Up is down, down is up and argument is parted from any constraint of logic. It is a world in which, as Ian Hislop said the other day, everything that Trump does is an assault upon reality. And he does something every single hour, of every day. It is our new world, a kind of relentless war, in which again, it don’t mean nothin’.
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