Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

136. SERVING THE CANNON I REFUSED TO SERVE (nyc, 1968):

There was a terrible form of militarism in the air which everywhere had entered people's minds : the stand-America firsters had popped up everywhere with stickers on windows flags flying high construction sites and gravel trucks roared with lunchtime workers wearing decals on their hats - the fact is no one really knew a whit about Vietnam nor the war nor the French nor Ho Chi Minh nor the Viet Cong and Viet Minh Laos and the rest - but no one cared either - they just had staked out media positions and ranted and raved from those points and everywhere you looked there was someone scraping over something and using the words 'honor' and 'privilege' 'patriotism' and 'duty' and all that bullshit like it just dripped from a fountain somewhere in its richness : face it America had always been a garish country where people wore their styles and their bad taste somehow as badges of honor and now there were hundreds of thousands of old-timers and WWII veterans somehow colluding with each other and with the nation's politics and power-brokers that there was an equivalence between the Second World War and military effort and light and power with the Vietnam War or whatever they called it (it varied from 'crisis' to 'incursion' to 'assistance') and all those mid-life veterans and their wives now and the old veteran's groups had taken the side of power and might and right to facilitate a pretty severe divide in the country between the 'youth' who objected to the war (they were essentially the ones at risk the cannon fodder being scapped up and having their lives interrupted by being drafted in audacious numbers and thrown into that poorly defined cauldron) and if you went anywhere (for instance - McCormack's) you'd find these old guys sitting around with their beers defaming the war-resistors and their 'anti-American lack of patriotism if they don't like it here they should get the fuck put the over-privileged bastards when MY country called I went when I had to fight I fought all those lazy mother-fuckers want to do is dance make love and smoke dope') - all of which was untrue but whatever it meant no one cared - and if you weren't able to voice back some support for the bullshit just spoken you were pretty much out of luck or in trouble because the divide was that severe and it was really a break-off between not just generations and points-of-view but entire ways of life and ways-of-the-future too and soon enough everything became a parody of itself : garish TV shows taking off on the theme of that 'divide' and missing the point and politicians trying to specifically take one side or the other and use it for their own purposes and the efforts of so many went really for naught or for the negative so that before long the Great Divide had actually happened and materialized within the fabric of the very society we lived - at least in Manhattan proper as I knew it where in the main both sides were well-represented if not well-meaning BUT there were parts of the country too where one or the other sides pretty much went unrepresented and it was a lost cause one way or the other : not a pretty scene in 1968 and the years which followed and the result of course again was violence bullets death and other such tactics which eventually resulted in as much state-side rubble as you'd see later (yet to come) after debacles of villages like My Lai and things like that : both sides had intensified themselves so much that by term's end neither of them had any valid point nor leg to stand on and all that was left was a morass of noise and a horrid background hum to the nastiness of the everyday situation.