This is a tale of two “tarps”. But it is also a tale of two collaborators, Colleen and myself. The Nelson line is unmistakable and very strong. But what makes it a tale of two artists is that I think we see it in very different ways. If I understand Colleen right, she sees it as a tale of people who suffer and of people who are greedy, callous and oblivious in the face of that suffering. So far, so good. No doubt about that. (Well, maybe there is. Angela?) Does that mean that if we had better people running banks it would be different? I think this is where we diverge. To me, this is a tale of how the gears run in the machine we call our society. Banks and the making of money have very high leverage in this machine. Hunger, disease, poverty, not so much. Some 80 or 90 years ago, W.E.B. DuBois pointed out that since the early 1800’s we have had the knowledge and installed industrial capacity to feed, clothe and house everybody. (With population growth, that now hangs in the balance.) At some point, that has to become the central problem — not “Why don’t we do it?”, but “How can we re-order the machine so we do?”
Well, that’s art. Lotta different views.
Unfortunately, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a horror. Americans sometimes remember that we lost upwards of 50,000 American lives there, and more than that to suicide and drugs once the soldiers came home. Estimates of Vietnamese deaths are upwards of a million, though less often mentioned here. People who lived through the era remember the insanity of all this going on in a place that America had nothing to do with. And when it was over? Nothing happened. America licked the wounds of its national pride. The economy went catty-wampus with war debt. Vietnam went its way, slowly rebuilt and is now a capitalist economy run by a Communist Party. In short, a giant, “So what?” on the world stage.