Viet Nam letters (v)
from the janitor at Viet Nam Literature Project
“Sooner or later you get tired of apologizing for those assholes.” A moment's conversation early this century at a summer colony of a socialist party of the 1930s, where their grandchildren the Students for a Democratic Society had met to strategize the 1960s.
I was speaking with one cadre of that democratic society long since gone into business as his parents, my parents' college classmates, already had done when he was born after victory in Europe and Japan. The prosperity of the United States of America, 1945-75, fulfilled every promise of socialism.
I was there at the colony presenting the poetry of a friend who did 30 years hard time for continually wising off to the Vietnamese Communist Party starting in the 1950s in Ha Noi. I already had been representing his work for 10 years when the chuckleheads barred me in 1999 from their country.
It is how communists do to anarchists, liberals, and socialists. You take your punishment, fine, your lumps are a membership card. It's what they do, beat on each other.
If they considered you an enemy they would keep you close and sweet talk you. Still a friendly, I took my opportunity as persona non grata to crank up my support for their detractors and rivals as well as our mutual friends.
After all, the reconciliation movement had achieved our goals. The Socialist Republic of Viet Nam and the USA are so damn reconciled I have gone to court to prevent the deportation to torture and murder of one of those we granted asylum after April 30, 1975, because he drove drunk after September 11, 2001.
About that time, while I was still banned for life, I started stating plainly what anyone who made the merest inspection of my public record would know, that I am an anti-communist. The kind who thinks most US anti-communists don't really mean it.
The National Association of Manufacturers just wants to make money. Capitalist totalitarians who want one-party rule and no backchat.
Everyone with my schooling is rather a true non-believer. All the establishment friends of Ha Noi here during the war were my kind of anti-communists.
At Yale alone, David Dellinger and Staughton Lynd. Our chaplain the Reverend Doctor William Sloane Coffin, Junior had been an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.
I enjoyed the benefit of his experience never to have anything to do with those assholes. By my lights, not really anti-communist either.
Just another government agency. The post office is more anti-communist: unionized and devoted to free speech.
For fuck's sake. Where was I?
Oh. “Sooner or later you get tired of apologizing for those assholes.”
A shibboleth. We two were brothers, or cousins. Also both Jews and very likely both of us consider that the Israelis have made their own bed and will lie in it no matter what we think one way or the other.
We are anti-colonialists in the manner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I don't recall the man’s name. No, really. Because the historians of our thing read the newspapers you might have the impression there were like 3 people in the mass movement.
No. And the ones you have heard about were the beautiful losers whose crash and burn made good headlines. The people who won kept their mouth shut. As you might expect a revolutionary to do.
Whoops. Lost it again. Right, there we were, 2 liberal Jews agreeing at a socialist summer colony. Now I no longer agree with him. I have rested up from my fatigue after apologizing for those assholes.
I have no plans to visit Ha Noi again, but that's just because I don't like to leave the block. Boss. Chickens. Dog. Kids. Anyways I haven't communicated with my collaborators over there since a few cops explained to me on the way out 25 years ago that it was illegal.
Okie doke. I never use cutouts or any spook procedure. I do everything in public. But I am once again writing up my Communist friends, and their lefty friends overseas. Enemies too. All I could ever really do for anyone anyways was to read them and write about that.
The Vietnamese Communist Party these days for their country is what my Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College and University of North Carolina are for mine. Apparat. Cadre.
We lord it over the brier patch, the life world we visit only on our own time. Books from all sorts report up from out there. Somebody needs to read them and the other cadre are too busy. Apologizing for all the assholes, untiring, America, I have once again put my queer shoulder to the wheel.
This is the fifth Viet Nam letter of 5 so far from the janitor about our work. The first posted on February 9, 2022, the second on May 14, 2022, the third on August 17, 2022, and the fourth on March 6, 2023.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.