Too Long

In response to How Long by Jackson Browne

When you look into a child's face

And you're seeing the human race

And the endless possibilities there

Where so much can come true

And you think of the beautiful things

A child can do

How long would the child survive

How long if it was up to you

How is it possible to look at a child’s face, and take away all their free will and options and make them become killers. Children are always seen as the faces of innocence and all that is pure and holy, they’re supposed to have their whole life ahead of them to make decisions and become the person they want to be. But during this era of the Vietnam war, all their possibilities are stripped away from them because they have to fight in a war that they aren’t sure they believe in. This could be related to present day extremists who brainwash their children to believe that destruction and death are imminent in their mission to spread their beliefs.

  

When you think about the money spent

On defense by a government

And the weapons of destruction we've built

We're so sure that we need

And you think of the millions and millions

That money could feed

At this point in time the government was more concerned with how far their weaponry could advance. It was a race of who could build the scariest defense mechanism, and there is so much money being put into things that are meant to destroy when this money could be going to better and more pertinent things. It makes no sense that they are children and families living in poverty and starving to death because the government is more concerned in finding ways to keep their pride and show others that we aren’t someone to be messed with. Everything about this is still relevant today. The government will let people live and die on the street because they are too busy building a nuclear arsenal which will never be used because if it is the whole world will end.

Words That Are Not my Own

inspired by Beat Poem book titled Scattered Poems 

Cut my thought of my days which are

not filled with love and

roses

woe my open doors

drink me

only when you are ready

Bite the craze

Milk my words

My name

My mouth

My mind

Stay

My angel

Your life is full of pity and disgust of the normal

you are

composed of words

which are not your own

Woe your closed doors

Bite the craze

Milk my words

Until you have found your own voice

Drowning in the ecstasy of free thought

1000 words of your inner self

Coming out in waves

Of subjects that make others

Sick

And

Shake

It’ll be unwelcome and sweet

But what is left of a man and all his pride

Buy bones

And bathtubs of liquor

And the cries which others refuse to here

Let yourself be reborn

Free of the rotting body you have been given

Distasteful

Crimson red and blood orange

Crumbling in the hands of all those who sought it

With collapsed breaths

And shaky steps

Going in out in out

The broken minds and shattered dreams of those

Who were maddened by freedom

A freedom they so desperately craved but knew

They would never receive

They are locked in cages

Savage animals

Waging wars on those undeserving

The bone will be clean once they are washed

But the torso will remain black and blue

And the memories you try to neglect come in waves to you

Like an ocean of torture

Each tide bringing about a new stab

Destroying everything it can swallow up

Mounds of bodies

And  children

And minds

Which will never again have a chance to breath

In and out

The Poem That Changed America

Analysis of Howl by Allen Ginsberg

Howl is one of the most information packed poems I have ever read. In this two part beat poem, he uses allusions, metaphors, rants and rhetoric to compose “the poem that changed America”. There is so much meaning behind every part and line of this poem, so for time's’ sake I’ll only be analyzing the first stanza.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

    madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at

    dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient

    heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the

    machinery of night”

By the best minds of his generation he is referring to people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robert Duncan. These were all poets who came about after WW2 and people who inspired and lead the San Francisco Renaissance. All these artists sought to bring attention to political affairs and to inspire people to speak out on their beliefs and not be a “conscientious non-objector” as Ferlinghetti called them. They were seen as rebellious and non-conformists, which is where the “angelheaded hipsters” come in. They seeked out to be intellectuals in every sense of the word. They wanted to be well informed about the world around them, and wanted to be able to speak on everything around them that was unfair or wrong. They did this by sharing ideas, writing to bring attention to them/the movement, participating in protests, and even experimenting with things such as LSD. Which is where the “looking for an angry fix” and “burning for the heavenly connection to the starry dynamo..” come into play. These men were driven crazy with the idea and want for change. They believed so wholeheartedly in what they do that they almost became considered mad because all of their time and energy was invested into this movement. Their old selves were destroyed by the madness of hope and knowledge that there was a better way to live.

Intellectual Rant

Analysis of John Kerry’s Speech - Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement

The Vietnam War is seen as one of America’s biggest mistakes - at least to anyone who has a brain. Everything that happened after the war ended, all speeches and movements led by the government were only done in an attempt to hide how badly America has just put its own foot in its mouth. John Kerry goes on to further explain how terrible this war really was and how much everyone who was forced to partake in it hated it. He says, “They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.” All of these things were - as he later mentions - actions that this soldiers were forced to commit because of their country. The social norms were so shifted in that time, that people had no humanity anymore. They became animals because there was no morality. America wanted only one thing in this war and that was destruction.  They did not care who they hurt or how they hurt them, they just wanted to justify their actions and feel as though they were winning something, and the only way to do that was to make it seem like they were fighting these tretorous battles with the Viet Cong where they were forced to act like this or had to do this to defend themselves. But the reality of the situation was that America was well aware that they did not have an actual reason to fight, if they won they wouldn’t actually win anything and if they lost they wouldn’t actually lose anything besides their pride. “We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.” The only reason this war was blown so incredibly out of proportion was because of America’s big ego and its incapacity to admit that it made a mistake. John Kerry’s whole speech is just a very well worded document that just exemplifies how much idiodicy was necessary in the government’s head to continue and fight a war which we had no business fighting. He of course uses better strategies and words everything more coherently than this rant, he uses examples from experiences and plays on rhetoric a lot by bringing something up that would seem logical. He brings in allusions which one would be educated to know to provide evidence that he is knowledgeable and understands what he is talking about at a deeper level. And, lastly, he plays on pathos by bringing up the horror stories of what these soldiers saw and what they had to do while in this senseless war.

The Madness Behind Ambush in The Things They Carried

The ID is the part of the brain which controls and contributes all of the primal instincts one is born with. It is responsible for things such as need for food, sex, etc. This segment of the psyche is normally balanced out with the super ego by the ego, but in some cases it can act too quickly for the rest of the psyche to even notice what is happening to the rest of the body. In the chapter Ambush, Tim shows prime examples and implications of this.

Ambush starts by continuing the story from “The Man I Killed” (TMIK), except it switches the narration. In TMIK, the story is told from someone else’s P.O.V, while Ambush is told from Tim’s P.O.V directly. In this he states that they were all taking turns watching the camp, and that it was finally his turn and he remembers that the night was very hot and foggy. He watched and watched for hours but nothing happened and everything was all right, it wasn’t until the sun began to rise and the fog finally started to lift a bit that he saw a figure walking towards him, it appeared as if it was coming out of the fog. His immediate reaction was that he just wanted to make the man go away. He did not want to kill him, he just simply imagined him vanishing. He then goes on to explain that once he threw the grenade, he didn’t even think about it. “The bomb went off before I even threw it.” It was his primal and gut instinct to protect his own - and everyone around him’s - safety. It was never a moral dilemma of, is it right or is it wrong, it was do it before you can even process what you are attempting to do because once you think about it for too long you won’t be able to follow through with it. In this state of mind, he surpassed his own morals, and thoughts and is a clear example of how the ID can overpower the ego and superego in times of do or die situations.

Themes of War in TTTC - Mary Anne

When Mary Anne first came to Vietnam, she was a dainty and fragile 17 year old girl. She had just graduated from High School and come to join her High School “sweetheart” - Fossie. She was the classic embodiment of femininity at the time, “Mary Anne Bell was an attractive girl. Too wide in the shoulders, maybe, but she had terrific legs, a bubbly personality, a happy smile… at times she gave off a kind of come-get-me energy, coy and flirtatious (O’Brien pg 95). The longer she was there the more hardcore she became. She lost her femininity, she cut her hair, she stopped caring about hygiene, she lost her bubbly personality. She was so overwhelmed by the idea that she could be something more than just a girl. She was in a new environment where all the old social norms that she had been boxed into where now gone and nonexistent. This completely shifted her super ego's perspective of life and what she needed to do so she snapped. Instead of her ego balancing out her ID and superego she now completely gave over to her primal self. We see her beginning to admire this lifestyle once Fossie takes her around the villages and she refers to the life they are living as simple, and she can’t stop talking about how much she admires it and wants to become it. Her major shift of characterization brings importance to the fact that she is a female. It was a way for O’Brien to express the fact that everyone became an animal from this war. This mentality that took everyone over had no preference, it would envelop anyone whole who would let it. Being around such savagery and being ripped away from everything you know to be true and right can have a monumental effect on everyone. There’s a part in the section where Dobbins is interrupted while telling the story, because the way he says it doesn’t flow and some of his comments ruin the story and he responds by questioning him why the flow matters. The only important part of this story is that she became an animal, just like everyone else.