Tag Archives: Vietnam

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Dorm Love

Ours was daily mysterious,
sometimes near mystical,
rapture;
a sensual yet platonic
dorm-mate love affair,
within the only male grad student corridor
at SFSU.

He was the presumably straight Vietnam veteran
southern white good ol’ boy,
athletically studying Japanese,
with a gentle passion for young Japanese women.

Did his all things Japanese culture love
precede his Vietnam War experience,
or was this a response to West-East violence,
inviting vulnerability and compassion?
Embracing romantic remorse
and male responsibility for technology’s aggressive habits,
but,
regardless,
knowing constant passion for peace.
I don’t recall ever asking which came first.

I do recall his first words.

“Hi. Delighted to meet you,”
in a Louisiana-slash-MilitaryOfficerSchool
creolic mashed-up engaging smile
up across and through his raised blond eyebrows,
guileless,
or ruthlessly contrived,
“Ensign Jake Ruford,
Eastern Language student.”

Hi.
just Jerry,
gay epistemology student,
wondering why we are roommates
when I specifically said
“Anyone not homophobic.”
You would think Student Residential Services
at San Francisco State
would know what the word means.
Including probably not a straight Louisiana
military officer
even if he is Navy.

As he turned back toward his desk,
where he had been reading something that looked like a textbook
in an encyclopedic hard-bound scale
of inscrutability,
“Do you agree human nature
must have evolved from a bottom moral line
of eat or become stew?”

It seems we have this old reptilian thing
about eating our young and vulnerable under duress,
overpopulation or starvation
of a struggling to hunt and gather species,
especially before we figured out the matriarchal gathering part.

“I want to come back to those matriarchal parts later.
But why, do you think,
do we continue to see Golden Rule cooperativity,
WinWin strategies,
as contrasted favorably to WinLose
sacred MightMakesRight Traditions
of
Always eat others before they eat you?”

I don’t think WinLose,
much less LoseLose,
Eat first and fast,
because we all fall prey to death
in our not quite foreseeable future,
is authoritatively sacred,
or exegetically scriptural,
or fundamentalistically spiritual,
nor even evangelically Christian,
which was supposed to be about Good News
of a God defined most ecologically,
and satisfyingly,
as love and beauty
and polycultural Eden’s Original Creator.

“So you would give divine grace credit
for why we beg for multicultural Golden Rule self-governance
through WinWin inter-relationships,
rather than continue eating our young?”

No,
I think premeditated organized violence
through conscripting young adults
is how we continue eating our young.
I give God credit for non-patriarchal Golden Rules,
which do not include mutual assured violence,
nor Better Ballistics Bureaus.

But, I give the Sacred Gaia Hypothesis
and matriarchal creation stories and parables and paradigms
credit for existing
and any future
and most, if not all, past WinWin abundant inter-relationships,
rather than Mother Earth
eating Her DNA regenerative
Left and Right BiLaterally Balanced CoIntelligence,
synonymous with EcoLogical,
and oxymoronic as Military WinWin Intelligence.

“Left and Right,
like Yang and Yin.
Which is kind of the opposite
of LeftBrain dominant ideas like
Maybe it’s OK for hungry single Moms
to sell their children into slavery
to invest in better dying
through chemistry.”

Yes, and other xenophobic behaviors,
paranoias like homophobia
and patriarchal “just war” theories.

“How do you feel about Japanese ladies?”

Hopefully about the same way you feel about radically dipolar gay gentlemen
at the beginning of an AIDS epidemic.

“That’s an interesting, but dark, analogy.
Are you coffee or tea?”

I don’t think I intended an analogy.
Perhaps more of a eulogy
for continuing relationship
with much of anyone ever in risky futures.

Coffee.
If I have any idea where this inquisition came from
or might be heading.

“Oh, that’s good.
See, we already have something in common.”

Something.
Yes.

And so we went on from that first moment,
as if resuming where we had just left off,
or last eaten,
with an Ensign I had never hoped to meet,
much less eat,
and would never wish to know a last farewell.

Two travelers
along love’s mysterious,
sometimes mystically ambiguous
journey,
soldiering on.

Better thriving together,
than surviving inscrutable textbooks
apart.

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Summer of ’67

My canopy of early summer sounds
in 1967
was as intimate as adolescent knowledge
might ever become.

My sixteenth summer
sweetly smiled with driver’s permit,
my first job,
economic promise while the Beach Boys
and the Beatles sang a rainbow
of boy band diversity,
sang stories of straight white male revolutions,
evolutions of June firefly evenings
resounding bullfrog and cricket background vocals
on our family farm,
where good Christian Republicans
longed for good old Eisenhower years
when Father was wise
and always knew best,
and Vietnam was no more than an acrid draft
of wasted social
financial
political
environmental
nutritional capital,
not yet fully present.

This summer of 1967
was when I knew both anguish of embodied defeat,
hopelessly homosexual,
an yet poignancy of emerging mystical wonder
about what this could mean
fifty years from now.

I could not help fantasizing
how Paul and Art
might not only sing,
but dance, in poignant harmonies.

And,
as much as I laughed and loved and longed
to hear Stevie Wonder wondering
and Otis Redding wanting,
Marvin Gaye worshiping,
I so wished they could sound even better
with me.

Joni Mitchell
and Joan Baez
and Judy Collins,
like John Lennon,
were compelled to write and speak and sing
songs of love as freedom
growing transcendent
yet deeply fertile
Aquarian promise.

A promise bombed out
by uncivil wars
bound by fear of egocentered failure.
Fear our parents,
and half of my junior year classmates,
found compelling enough to throw away dollars
to build and buy
and transport
and explode bombs and bullets and boys,
nearly oblivious to hundreds of thousands of innocent men
and mothers
and children wiped out
by a mere strategic choice
to cover partisan ass
as the biggest baddest bully
on Earth’s shrinking block.

I didn’t blame him,
but when I called James Taylor
to rescue the Johnson and Nixon White Houses,
he did not come,
as promised,
to rescue me,
to remind us about our friend and family connections
across cosmic time
and Earth’s regenerate space.
A great ballad was just not enough.

In June of ’67
I was singing both “I Believe”
and “Love is Blue”
with equally honest passion
and thriving off a translucent vulnerable cover song
between these two impossibly incommensurable positions,
surrounded by straight evangelical predators,
sniffing for pinko faggot weakness.

I was so guilty
yet so in love with rightness
and ripeness
of my generation’s possibilities
for revolutionary integrity,
drawing together economic health
with political wealth
in some new golden ruling age
of relentlessly cooperative incorporation
and association
and ownership
and self-governance.

In this early summer of 1967
Martin and Bobby still walked with us
and one still dreamed he might see
someone who looked and thought and felt like him
as President one day
and the other I dreamed would become President
while I was still a high school junior.

So much devastation and disappointment followed.
It took at least a decade
and hundreds of thousands of human lives
treated like conscripted fodder
for nationalistic hubris of false pride
to arrive at the very treaty
our Vietnamese opponents had originally demanded.
And long before anyone from the U.S.
had been drafted and killed
for this offensive cause
of nationalistic non-defense.

Other health care and defense abuses
and losses
followed.
Neglect of women’s health.
Pedagogical loss of children’s deep ecological listening opportunities
to nondually co-arise with Earth’s polyphonic voices,
resources of multiculturing nutrition.

Yet I have these summer of ’67 memories
when,
for one diastatic season,
my revolutionary age on planet Earth
stood between despair of guilt
for what and whom I could never become
and celebrating hope for joy
of what we might yet reweave
timelessly singing and dancing
chanting and drumming
revolutioning and evolutioning together.

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Health Loss WarGames

As I transitioned from high school
to the University of Michigan,
one of the leading national health and safety issues
was painfully violent loss of Vietnamese and U.S. lives,
and hundreds of thousands hurt,
maimed for life,
if only on our now insane war-torn insides.

President Nixon
and his Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger,
when pushed by my peers
to get out now,
once and too often said
“I don’t disagree with you
as to the wisdom of our original involvement,
but we cannot leave in a way that would cause dishonor,
loss of credibility…”

My own Republican parents seemed to agree.
What they and Nixons and Kissingers could not hear
was our morally imperative challenge:
We agree with each other,
and with our most patriotic ForeFathers
and ForeMothers,
and our Vietnamese and U.S. grandmothers,
as to the health hazards and unsafe indefensible original involvement
in shooting each other
to continue not resolving legitimate economic and political issues.

Because of these historical precedents
to procure and protect mutual health,
happiness,
and prosperity,
we cannot stay in Vietnam
in a way that would cause even further dishonor,
loss of health and dwindling wealth credibility…”
political credibility
ecological credibility,
just plain rational credibility,
or even both Left and Right sacred integrity.

It saddens me to hear,
as my children are now of about that same adolescent
through young adult time,
vulnerable to full health care choices
accessible only for those with deepest pockets,
to hear Republican leaders
responding to recent overdue Affordable Care actions
with:
“I don’t disagree with you
as to the wisdom of health and safety
original constitutional intent,
but we must leave behind Democratic Obamacare
improvements toward this sacred federal mandate
or dishonor our partisan public disservice,
and further muddy our loss of credibility.”

Again,
they are not listening
to voices for secular health
and sacredly defended safety of all lives:
We all,
Republicans and Democrats,
U.S. and non-U.S. residents
with democratically cooperative original constitutional intent,
must not remain the only wealthy nation
without a clear culture of health federal mandate
to protect economic
and ecological
and physical
and mental health
and safety of all lives,
now,
and those yet to come,
or we will continue to bring dishonor upon ourselves,
and an even longer pathological history
of decreasing global credibility,
not just among humane nature
but with
and for
and of all Earth’s health-wealth optimizing natures.

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