Throughout that tormented decade of our misadventures in Southeast Asia, Vietnam was a nonplace on primetime and firstrun screens alike--save, of course, the inspiriting spectacle of Anita Bryant singing her heart out for the troops on the "Bob Hope Christmas Special." Instead, what we got were plastic replicas of the counterculture on our Saturday nights out, and at home, the charming domestic adventures of Julia (Diahann Carroll). The showbiz consensus at the time assumed that the war was too depressing, its causes and legacies too controversial, to be packaged as commercially palatable fiction. Besides, the thinking went, media addicts were already over saturated by all that grim footage encapsulated by Walter Cronkite's stentorian monotone on the 7:00 news. It took many years for distance to lend, if not enchantment, at least a haunted fascination to the events that traumatized a generation.
On most levels, analogies between the Vietnam era and the AIDS decade are tenuous at best, save for the fact that the necrology keeps mounting and the final obsequies seem unimaginably remote. Yet the wake-me-when-it's-over mentality of the entertainment industry has been virtually identical in the face of both, and for similar reasons. Once again, with the newsmills doing their exhaustive if often execrable job on this malaise without end, why further spoil the consumers' collective digestion by shoving such a distasteful subject in their faces?
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Actually, the hypnotic allure of Vietnam and AIDS as newscast fodder--and the concomitant repulsion provoked in their respective eras as the stuff of "entertainment"--have proved remarkably alike, once you parse the difference between the ways the dispatches on the late war and present epidemic have been fed to us.
The Asian war was viewed as a continuous loop of the numbingly routine--we seemed to see the same footage of our soldiers stumbling cautiously through the tropical brush night after night after night. The dayglo nightmares only turned up in the movies of the late seventies and eighties. With AIDS, however, the apocalypse is now--closeups of AIDS victims chosen for their resemblance to Holocaust half-dead daubed by Jackson Pollock, lead-in headlines screaming rumors of infection from mosquitoes and such with film promised at eleven, scrupulously balanced by ten seconds of sotto-voce calm from the Center for Disease Control, shoved in just before the Sports Update. Yet in both cases the horror they've conjured up has been made delectably by its remoteness--the whole world is watching, if recoiling at the sight, but comforted somehow by the fundamental instinct that none of this affects them, not directly anyway.
From the day the war ended, Vietnam vets screamed themselves hoarse over so much fiction fobbed off as fact, and the silence that substituted for mass art. For the considerable number of people with AIDS I know, it's the same media funnyhouse-mirror image of themselves--first you're pulled taffy-like into some grotesque lampoon, then you disappear. The alternate depression and rage they feel at this spectacle is more than understandable, for as with Vietnam, the camera-eye distortion itself can't help but shape the outcome of the present crisis. Twenty years ago, the media-amplified views of protest at home and impasse in the jungle may not have been responsible for the outcome, but they sure made it seem like kismet. These days,
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