In December 1972, Joan Baez, American singer, went to Hanoi, North Vietnam, then at war with the United States. She happened to visit while the city and other North Vietnamese locations were heavily bombed by B-52s in Operation Linebacker II, an effort by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to persuade their longtime enemy to accept U.S. and South Vietnamese conditions at the Paris peace talks dedicated to ending the Vietnam War.
Linebacker II was thus a "big stick," in the Teddy Roosevelt sense, but the voice "speaking softly" in this case, Kissinger's, had a German accent. There were eleven days of bombings, thousands of casualties, and a woman heard wailing in Vietnamese on Baez's tape recorder, "Where are you, my son?"
Joan Baez, being a guest at a good Hanoi hotel with a solid air raid shelter, got safety during her visit as the so-called "Christmas Bombings" thundered, their sounds also picked up on her tape recorder. She came back to the United States and recorded an album, Where Are You Now, My Son?, released in March 1973. There are songs on the B side, but the A side consists of a twenty minute experimental audio track. Spoken word pieces and a song or two blended in, along with raw sounds of bombing, air raid shelter conversations, the snoring of one of the people in the shelter, and outdoor noises of a large city undergoing trauma from above.
In American football, a linebacker (these days there are four, backing a front line of three pass rushers) is positioned at the middle of the defensive formation in order to stop the running back or pass receiver carrying the ball from getting too far out from the line of scrimmage. Names of military operations often make no sense. These days they tend to have tough-sounding and ridiculous names like Noble Eagle, or Power Geyser. Linebacker II was the sequel to Linebacker, the name suggesting, if it meant anything, containment of the wishes of the North Vietnamese government (the running back carrying the ball, so to speak). Vietnamese on the ground in Hanoi and other locations in December 1972, so close to the war's ending, knew nothing of the arcane name printed on Pentagon documents "justifying" their injuries and deaths.
Once the United States removed its personnel, finally, from Vietnam in 1975 (Operation Frequent Wind), the general idea in the States was, "No more Vietnams." Don't get involved in the affairs of other countries, stirring up trouble, changing regimes. U.S. journalists and some government personnel, including politicians, began examining controversial actions of the CIA, including its "Phoenix" program, an organized torture/murder operation in Vietnam seeking to root out the enemy. The JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations were probed in the late 1970s, the Congressional Committee concluding that JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy, meaning the U.S. government has two differing official versions of that event.
Introspection among power brokers after Vietnam means the same may someday occur after the War on Terror grinds along for another few more years. Trump, whose personality rules out introspection, can't be expected, if elected president, to do anything sane or humane when it comes to America's responsibility to help end the war. Hillary Clinton, too, won't do anything to stop the war, but will probably escalate it. She has a heart of stone, and can't relate, like so many politicians and, frankly, citizens of this country since 9/11, to the basic needs of children, women, elderly people and world citizens in general, to not be bombed and used in lofty power games.
Joan Baez's Where Are You Now, My Son? is worth listening to as a curious experiment in sound design, but also as a poetic statement of support for those threatened by uncaring decision-makers.
Barack Obama, visiting Vietnam on his Asia trip (a journey having more to do with the Trans-Pacific Partnership than anything else), will not acknowledge to the Vietnamese that he, like Richard Nixon, kills innocent people. He also hasn't sent Henry Kissinger in a shipping crate to Vietnam for judgment and sentencing.
Joan Baez, like Jane Fonda--although to a far lesser extent than Fonda--may be regarded by some "patriots" as just some peacenik making trouble for her own country by visiting enemy territory and seeking to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of America's generosity. That Baez was bombed by Nixon and Kissinger puts her into a unique category of American musicians. That she returned to the United States soon after her ordeal and recorded an album about the experience suggests the true greatness of America, its freedom of speech and exchange of ideas quashing small-minded power-obsessed freaks and their works, which, like the American nation-building projects in Vietnam and Iraq, have toppled.
Vic Neptune
Linebacker II was thus a "big stick," in the Teddy Roosevelt sense, but the voice "speaking softly" in this case, Kissinger's, had a German accent. There were eleven days of bombings, thousands of casualties, and a woman heard wailing in Vietnamese on Baez's tape recorder, "Where are you, my son?"
Joan Baez, being a guest at a good Hanoi hotel with a solid air raid shelter, got safety during her visit as the so-called "Christmas Bombings" thundered, their sounds also picked up on her tape recorder. She came back to the United States and recorded an album, Where Are You Now, My Son?, released in March 1973. There are songs on the B side, but the A side consists of a twenty minute experimental audio track. Spoken word pieces and a song or two blended in, along with raw sounds of bombing, air raid shelter conversations, the snoring of one of the people in the shelter, and outdoor noises of a large city undergoing trauma from above.
In American football, a linebacker (these days there are four, backing a front line of three pass rushers) is positioned at the middle of the defensive formation in order to stop the running back or pass receiver carrying the ball from getting too far out from the line of scrimmage. Names of military operations often make no sense. These days they tend to have tough-sounding and ridiculous names like Noble Eagle, or Power Geyser. Linebacker II was the sequel to Linebacker, the name suggesting, if it meant anything, containment of the wishes of the North Vietnamese government (the running back carrying the ball, so to speak). Vietnamese on the ground in Hanoi and other locations in December 1972, so close to the war's ending, knew nothing of the arcane name printed on Pentagon documents "justifying" their injuries and deaths.
Once the United States removed its personnel, finally, from Vietnam in 1975 (Operation Frequent Wind), the general idea in the States was, "No more Vietnams." Don't get involved in the affairs of other countries, stirring up trouble, changing regimes. U.S. journalists and some government personnel, including politicians, began examining controversial actions of the CIA, including its "Phoenix" program, an organized torture/murder operation in Vietnam seeking to root out the enemy. The JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations were probed in the late 1970s, the Congressional Committee concluding that JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy, meaning the U.S. government has two differing official versions of that event.
Introspection among power brokers after Vietnam means the same may someday occur after the War on Terror grinds along for another few more years. Trump, whose personality rules out introspection, can't be expected, if elected president, to do anything sane or humane when it comes to America's responsibility to help end the war. Hillary Clinton, too, won't do anything to stop the war, but will probably escalate it. She has a heart of stone, and can't relate, like so many politicians and, frankly, citizens of this country since 9/11, to the basic needs of children, women, elderly people and world citizens in general, to not be bombed and used in lofty power games.
Joan Baez's Where Are You Now, My Son? is worth listening to as a curious experiment in sound design, but also as a poetic statement of support for those threatened by uncaring decision-makers.
Barack Obama, visiting Vietnam on his Asia trip (a journey having more to do with the Trans-Pacific Partnership than anything else), will not acknowledge to the Vietnamese that he, like Richard Nixon, kills innocent people. He also hasn't sent Henry Kissinger in a shipping crate to Vietnam for judgment and sentencing.
Joan Baez, like Jane Fonda--although to a far lesser extent than Fonda--may be regarded by some "patriots" as just some peacenik making trouble for her own country by visiting enemy territory and seeking to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of America's generosity. That Baez was bombed by Nixon and Kissinger puts her into a unique category of American musicians. That she returned to the United States soon after her ordeal and recorded an album about the experience suggests the true greatness of America, its freedom of speech and exchange of ideas quashing small-minded power-obsessed freaks and their works, which, like the American nation-building projects in Vietnam and Iraq, have toppled.
Vic Neptune
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