It doesn't get much better than this. And that was precisely the problem with Marvin Gaye's terrible childhood.
“Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today – Ya”.
Marvin Gaye. What’s Goin’ On.
You know my favourite album of all time is Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On? The pulse is my kind of pulse, and it never ceases to reach out and in opening his supernaturally talented and expressive arms, Marvin grabs blue note after blue note and sends them hurtling off into the endlessness and into his audience and the world. Ah, Marvin. You know he used to sit and cry with a pal how the Vietnam War was er, “unnecessary". Sadly, it apparently never occurred to Marvin the Martian that Communism is unnecessary.
It’s a shame too, that Marvin apparently never had the empirical clarity to kick his insane religious freak of a child assaulting, pervert transvestite and criminal Father in the nuts, and never contact the mad swine again. Hey, we all die badly and learn too late, eh?
What’s Goin’ On is so very seamless, timeless, spectacular, dynamic and smoothly wonderful and yet...much of Marvin’s geopolitical analysis is like virtually every other celebrity, actor, musician, MSM journo and eternally tenured radical Leftard academic etc. As analysis it's totally off, to put it mildly.
I’ve known many South Vietnamese tub hikers and they all felt that after the fall of Saigon and the subsequent natural Communist total oppression, mass arrests, mass torture and mass murder, the caging of hundreds of South Vietnamese anti-Communists in multi-level boxes and then setting them on fire, the total collapse of the economy and medical system into a Socialist Hell, the massive spy network, the mindless and endless indoctrination via the enforcement of pointless soul crushing behaviour creating the biggest refugee movement in history, well, it just put a real damper on the joy of being “liberated” by Communist control freak totalitarians.
Yes, it ruined the peace fantasy's too. It's hard to really enjoy the hard protested for "peace" when you're starving, arrested, poverty stricken beyond belief, voiceless, unarmed, mired in total despair, toothless, screaming in agony or murdered. But hey, "peace!" Like that's gotta be good, huh?!
Peace...yeah...great...lovin' that peace. It's so right on. Yeah, go peace. No war. Like in Syria, the Maldives and Tibet etc. Nope, peace is not merely the absence of war, baby.
But don’t worry about ‘em, eh? They're just Asians like my wife and anyway, all those Vietnamese refugees were so ungrateful for losing their own country and everything else, that they never even said thanks to Jane Fonda and John Kerry.
“Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on
In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on”.
Marvin Gaye. What’s Goin’ On.
If only Marvin had escalated on his crazed viper-like Pop early on. Nope, only losing a war is not the answer. Though for Germany, Japan and Italy, being defeated and defeated utterly, was just what they needed to become decent capitalist democracies.
Dig. Millions of selfless trust funded hordes and many others too, protested how unhip and unfair the war was, and how it was going to be sooooo much better by default if the military forces and the people of the South, the US, Australia and so on, could just start diggin’ the groovy scene of dishonourale defeat and surrender. Then when the Communists straight out of a comic book acted just as expected, hey, what went wrong with the love and peace? And where were the laughs?
Oh, protesting university students meant how it was gonna be soooo much better by default for them after they graduated. Yep, never having to live in Vietnam enjoying the fruits of their own efforts was a masterstroke. Nope, the average Left Liberal was so selfless, that they wanted the Vietnamese to have it all for themselves.
And today, many of the tertiary and rich still lend a helping hand by hiring Vietnamese at minimum wage.
Yep sure, the war was a real drag in a thousand hideous, stupid and criminal ways, though not always in the ways many imagine. Only the gross errors and failures of the losing side linger. Thus 2,000 Catholics murdered by Communists in Hue's Citadel is largely unreported and not in the public mind at all. Ditto for most any of the massive, incredible and admirable achievements of the South Vietnamese military, civilians and their Western allies.
And in many, many more ways it was noble, courageous, effective and professional, filled with sacrifice and entirely worthy. Thus not a single plane or boat load of refugees during the whole war. Funny that?
Um, but all during the war there was a continuous exodus from the Communist North to the actually prosperous South. The war was prolonged by incompetence but largely of the US civilian authorities and hobbled by the phony ideas of the false dichotomy of war versus peace. “War” always bad. “Peace” always good.
The war like many, managed to be simultaneously beyond belief horrible and hyper "groovy", in the words of the truly great photographer Tim Page. Now it appears from a recent interview in Time Magazine, that old Timbo is in a few ways your as per Left. What can ya do? There's always trouble on Tu Do Street. Still, God bless Page and his incredible achievements.
Tim Page was the first and maybe only journo I know of, who actually researched and reported the vicious back story of that most famous picture of the street administered gunshot to a VC head. See my old post on this here for the unpleassant details. Then consider what it means for millions to know the image, and almost zero know even a single piece of essential context.
What were the Communist North offering again? Oh yes, totalitarian Communism. Great! Nothing says peace like mass graves...
Sure, quite a few of the more hideous folks in the South Vietnamese Saigon leadership should have been arrested. I'm so tres cool with it, baby. Oddly though, for corrupt and disgusting freaks, they didn't really stop all the people from leaving, earning a living, or getting medical attention per se, eh? Total control of every aspect of the life and soul of all the people, are par for the course in a Communist love land.
Largely the facts of the war are invisible to most people, raised on the uniformally bogus movies allegedly about said war. I've never seen a single film that actually rings true, cos they sure ain't about the war. None of 'em. They're all about Hollywood.
Peace is for the strong.
Well, did the Vietnamese get “peace” as advertised? Nope, not at all. So all those protesters, no matter what their alleged “good intentions” can only be wrong and possibly regards the whole conflict then, can’t they?
Yep, all those millions of saints and “artists” cared so much about the Vietnamese that once the war ended so badly, they never gave a flying fuck about the Vietnamese again and never shared the royalties. How many hippies went to Vietnam to help out after the war, you know cos’ now things are so much better? At last count it was zero. Hey, they had peace! Peace from war!
Ah, peace. An utterly meaningless word. As I have said before, they have “peace” in Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia ad nauseum.
Yes, it's so peaceful there, except for the endless screaming.
“Peace kills”. P.J O’Rourke. [The title of a great O’Rourke book and I also I recommend the wonderfully titled Give War a Chance, All the Trouble in the World and Eat the Rich.]
From a review of Peace Kills at Amazon: “[P.J] concludes that we will never have Peace, but we will have a war where we talk about our soldiers [and] we can say "They are our Heroes".
“Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Oh
Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on - Uh
Right on baby
Right on baby".
Marvin Gaye. What’s Goin’ On.
But I digress. I just wanted to talk about Marvin and I got distracted. Hey, all failure is a lack of concentration. Thus Marvin thinks only love can conquer hate. Nice for a desk calender, but it’s utter balls. And hey, as for war is not the answer? That depends entirely what the question is.
“Get me the Police! My husband is attacking me with a knife! He’s killing me! Quick! Send some love immediately!”
Such questions can be how can I stay alive, when will they kill me and how can I get the Hell out of here? It’s the fakeness, bankruptcy and utter stasis of much of the world that’s the problem. Within a hundred and more states, their phony “peace” is an eternal and multi-layered war against their own people. Virtually every Islamic state, Communist totalitarian and African cannibal gangster fiefdom is a permanent living Hell of “peace”. Thus the millions who escape ASAP to the free West.
Like ignoring a gangrenous leg, it’s the avoidance of war when the currently offered version of “peace” is so thoroughly rotten that absolutely guarantees war eventually.
"And so castles, made of sand, slips into the sea, eventually..." Castles Made Of Sand. Jimi Hendrix.
Thus we get the canard that any peace is groovier than war. Nope. Most of the wars in the world are crummy little wars against the people by their own authorities or the cruddy authorities just next door. Few are major conflicts, but they will be and due entirely to the alleged masturbatory fantasy not of war but of peace. Yes, it all worked out nicely for Cambodia and Laos with their fun with Communism...
Ooh, New Peace! Now with added status quo! Gotta love peace. It’s always good. It says so on the label. If only we could all get along and be nice to each other? Er, no thanks. I don’t want to get along with murderous bastards.
And the final irony is that while Marvin kept on trying to get along and live in er, peace with his arrestable Father, he made his own violent death inevitable. His hideous and criminal Father had waged a psychological and physical war against not only Marvin, but his entire miserable family for decades. And nobody inside or outside of it had the guts to do a damn thing.
Marvin had an incredible and awesome sense of rhythm, sound, tone and melody and much so much more. Oh yes he did. Gaye could improvise like a God. Hey, peace in our deluded, wilfully naive time and out of time.
2 comments:
Another awesome post by the master!
Having a monster crush on you, absolutely had to link :)
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