Music From My Generation That's Stood up with Me


Brant Gaede

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  • 2 months later...

I reject and rebuke my generation. When I am in a grocery store and they play The Doors, I leave. Sure, the first two albums were innovative, but then what?

I celebrate the Eighties.

Blondie on the Muppet Show here.

Patty Smyth and Scandal Good-bye to You

Train: "Drops of Jupiter in Her Hair" (here) [A special song for me, an unrequited crush on a much younger woman in my graduate geography class in 2010... You gotta suffer if you want to live...]

But I do honor and respect the past, those days when I was young because it is true, the rooms were colder and my father was a soldier and times were hard...

That said, as we live, we grow, and as we grow, we change. The core must remain, but the socially active component acquires new expressions.

You never know what will resonate with you as you acquire new skills, new abilities, and take on new challenges.

Each of us in the Texas State Guard is prepared to support ourselves for 72 hours when deployed. (The National Guard needs seven days to be deployed.) So, I went to buy a rain pancho at a local "army/navy store" and there ahead of me, were three Mexicans, in their 20s, buying camos and other gear. Clearly, these were boys that my own would meet on the border later. I never went back to that store. I understand the "Ferengi Rules of Acquisition" and in the fact that it is profitable to supply both sides in a war -- except when one of those side is my own.

Sometimes, it is just complicated and you have to wonder what an Objectivist could see in East Germany.

But mostly, the memories remain crystal clear.

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Posted this in my thread. I think it deserves a quick repost.

Rooster

Ain't found a way to kill me yet

Eyes Burn with stinging sweat

Seems every path leads me to nowhere

Wife and kids household pet

Army green was no safe bet

The bullets scream at me from somewhere

Here they come to snuff the rooster

Yeah here come the rooster, yeah [2x]

You know he ain't gonna die

No, no, no, ya know he ain't gonna die

Walkin' tall machine gun man

They spit on me in my home land

Gloria sent me pictures of my boy

Got my pills 'gainst mosquito death

My buddy's breathin' his dyin' breath

Oh god please won't you help me make it through

Here they come to snuff the rooster

Yeah here come the rooster, yeah

You know he ain't gonna die

No, no, no ya know he ain't gonna die

A bit of background, the "rooster" in the song is Jerry Cantrell's [Alice in Chain's guitarist's] father who served in Vietnam. His nickname was "rooster" during the war. He is seen in the video with his son, both reflect on the war and the time they spent together.

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Not bad of The Deer Hunter influenced. Neither that movie nor Apocalypse Now were about the Vietnam War except for literalists. Not many good movies, except Good Morning Vietnam and maybe a minor flick, title forgotten (The Boys In Company C?) and We Were Soldiers I know of about that war. Some very bad movies were made, from John Wayne's The Green Berets (but hooray for our side!) on the right--I guess the only one from there--to a real piece of crap staring Michael J. Fox about an American patrol taking along a young Vietnamese girl as a rape object raped and murdered.

Of course there were atrocities. My Lei being the archetypical example. Not supposed to have happened. The Viet Cong were putting Montagnard babies up on sticks as early as 1960. They deserved to be hunted down, shot and killed. Most of them were. While I have to put the North Vietnamese soldier into a different category, I have little good knowledge of what its combat policy in the field toward civilians was. There's some reading I've not sought out.

That war was a gigantic cluster fuck. Even North Vietnam hardly knew what it was doing and how to best get what it wanted. It used the Red Chinese model sanctioned by Mao himself. That was in response to the American intervention of 1965. Using up as many soldiers you had to/have to is communist military strategy conceit. They got used up all right. About a million--just the NVA.

--Brant

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