Madame Pickwick Art Blog Art and media blog of the unexpected

Blinded By The Darkness

Robert McNamara was a scientifically trained bureaucrat who introduced Ivy League statistical study and modern systems analysis into the sphere of public policy through his tenure as Secretrary of Defence in the United Stated between 1960 and 1967.

Vietnam was also the first war on television where the size of the media image projected by television and its impact socially and culturally fell into the McCluhan paradigm of the medium being the message and the content being incidental. His experience is an example of how a complete lack of imagination, creativity and absence of the poetic and intuitive can create more damage than the risk factor accounted for in the most perfect quantitative model conceived in the most pristine of ivory towers.

Eddie Adams, 1968

The media created a template wherby the Vietnamese could create events that could be sensationalized outside the broader narrative of the economic war,normative democracy and private property. This tactic, and its complicity with the media has occurred unabated with the Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban , Hezbollah et al.

Shine Your Darkness on Me

Brian and Terrance McKenna’s three part documentary ‘‘The Valor and the Horror” on their Canadian perspective on WW2 is not dissimilar to the long running popular televised docu-drama on the Vietnam war  by most media over the past half century. They are both a battle over the reinterpretation of history and the responsibility of the media. Both the McNamara story and the McKenna’s film show how gross incompetence, inexperience and mismanagement led to unnecessary lost of life. Whether for the Canadians at Normandy or the drafted G.I.  on the Ho-Chi-Minh  trail. The defoliation of Vietnam and concurrent carpet bombing were similar to the depiction in Valor of the blanket bombing of Dresden and Munich which created firestorms leading to appalling body counts.  It could be argued that the release of said ordnance in both cases did little to hasten the end of the war and had little tactical military significance.

The famous ”peace dividends” took some time to arrive in south east Asia, but like the lost generation that Moses lead out of Egypyt, 40 years later Vietnam is home to most of America’s leading multinationals, attracted by an industrious, educated population and favorable demographics.

By most considerations, the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Intel and Boeing seems to be laying the groundwork for future expansion and putting up some  nice numbers given the 8% annual growth rate of the Vietnam economy.By some accounts, the Vietnam war was far from lost, as the media failed to report; but rather a smashing success since Vietnam has adopted IMF doctrine and market oriented economy based on bilateral trade agreements.Vietnam is now considered a middle income nation, on the cusp of even greater prosperity. Pol Pot scared his people into the arms of Uncle Warren Buffet and his like.

T hen again, after the Vietnam War, Pol Pot and his own version of bloodthirstiness, sadism and stupidity resulted in the deaths of 20% of his own population, roughly 2 million people. He followed the Stalin school of quantitative methods of statistics, seeing his people as peasants and killing them similar to Stalin’s metaphor of creating famine like conditions and then eliminating what Kissinger would call ”the useless feeders’‘. . An unruly populace was like weeds and tall grass, you treat it with toxic weed killer and cut it. Pol Pot and Stalin liked short fairways and fast greens. Ditto for civilians.Knowing it would grow back eventually, albeit at a more traumatized slower pace of procreation

Digressions, ramblings and incoherence aside, Uncle Joe Stalin and Pol Pot didn’t bother with McNamara’s Harvard learned mathematical models and his nerdy study of quants and their probability analysis of collateral damage, troop loss and civilian death. They knew intuitively that ”shock and awe” begins at home. To quote Stalin, ”The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the lawnmower.”