Communism and Nationalism: A Love Story

In the pursuit of becoming a more well-rounded person, and because I have plenty of time on my hands, I've begun watching as many documentaries as possible. With my Netflix queue as full as possible with Frontline and PBS programming, I aim to understand a little more of the things I don't understand......whichever comes first, I think (I am trying to write while my niece and nephew play some motorcross game on the Playstation next to me, and my little brother and posse of duck hunters have returned to regale us with their torid narratives of near misses and feather explosions. I will focus.)

The first documentary I watched complied all the research done by Joseph Campbell two years before his death. With each segment I learned how conjoined our narrative traditions, as they concern separate cultures, societies, religions, nation-states, cities, peoples, etc, are, and how each attempt at myth making simply revivifies old myths and their narrative structures. Simply put: the stories we tell, the metaphors we live by and through, the remonstrated discourses of our lives are regurgitated, reused, recycled, self-reflexive plots derived from ancient and disparate people. It lends a bit of credo to the adage, "Nothing unknown is knowable."

Next I watched (or am watching) a three disc series on Vietnam. Prior to viewing, I thought I had a little knowledge about the subject. I was awestruck by how complicated and yet, how straightforward the sordid story went. A bunch of people were sick of being under colonial rule. They form a revolution which undermines American beliefs in "freedom" and "liberty" and "self-preservation." America gets involved and things go to shit. People are needlessly killed. Millions of tons of bombs are dropped. Landscape is changed diametrically. The narratives of an entire people shift. A newish, oldish story emerges. America leaves amidst cultural fear, communist wet-dreams, and antipathy to the hundredth power. The love of country starts the story and becomes its end. I struggle with that concept. Perhaps I have never really loved my country--even more---I believe I take a lot of things for granted. Yet, when I do something demonstrative of my rights (mere privileges) I do not think of the men and women who died in Vietnam as having provided me with some tenuous source of safety or patriotism. Instead, I just feel bad. I feel sad that we are so reductive and beyond a certain shame which becomes necessary in the face of narcissistic imperialism. Just a small hope.

I have more to come, in the form of documentaries. One on Lincoln. One on something else I can't remember, but I feel to be important. Maybe it is not the best for me to ingest such realism. Not good at all, but I still do it.