history – PretenseSoup

Lazarus, Home from the War is out!

So first off, today is the day that Lazarus, Home from the War comes out! I’m very excited. You can find the book on all the main sites here, on itch.io here, or on my website here. It’s on Goodreads here. For those looking to order the paperback through your local stores, that should be available to order now or very shortly using the ISBN, which is 979-8988394433.

Second off, today is Hmong-Lao Veterans Day in Wisconsin. I just found this out yesterday! The Hmong were deeply involved in the Vietnam War and came here as refugees afterward, so I wanted to commemorate this, given the topic of the book.

Now, for those with longer attention spans or nothing better to do, a little essay.

LHftW is a very personal book in a lot of ways. I lived in Vietnam for a year and I have a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies, so I have a weird and probably outsized attachment to the whole region. But my connection to VN goes farther back than an impulsive decision I made in college.

(What, you didn’t decide on impulse to move to Ho Chi Minh City?)

When I was in college as an undergrad, I lived for several years at the corner of Bassett Street and Dayton, a block from the Mifflin Street Co-op. Mifflin Street was the originating location, in 1969, of the Mifflin Street Block Party, a political protest cum bacchanal that was where former three-time Madison mayor Paul Soglin got beaten by the cops and arrested. Or a place. These things as facts are all very well and good—and living in the area, I was relatively aware of them—but why choose Mifflin Street for the party?

Basically, this area was the heart of the hippie student neighborhood during the 60s/70s, and thus the heart of the antiwar movement in Madison. At some point, and I can’t quite work out the timing (except that it was before 1975), Bassett was nicknamed Ho Chi Minh Trail. I have no idea if this was a self-given title, or a bit of anti-anti war-movement vitriol; nevertheless, the locals embraced it, and put up a street sign.

Before I knew this was a real, actual street sign, my editor and I discussed whether the nickname was a dog whistle, and I removed a reference to it from the final version of Dionysus in Wisconsin because it was too difficult to explain all of this in passing. But I’ve since had it confirmed, not just by the photographs, but by long-time Madisonians as well.

In June 1975, following the fall of Saigon, the city council rejected an attempt to rename the street permanently “in a spirit of reconciliation,” and the sign came down.

(Click here to view a photo of the street sign and a newspaper article on Facebook.)

I still find the whole thing fascinating. But it’s also emblematic of how the US’s relationship with Vietnam has for many years been mediated by the war. I went to HCMC more than a decade after Clinton normalized relations with the country, and it was still such a part of the collective memory in the US that this fact—”Bassett used to be called Ho Chi Minh Trail”—was the main thing I heard from my peers when I announced I was going. (Maybe that says something about who I was hanging out with, too.)

Interestingly, learning about the war for the first time mostly from the Vietnamese side of things, where it’s often referred to as the Resistance War Against America, gave me a view that I now often see echoed in online discourse about it–that it was really a war fought between the United States and Vietnam. This was not, on the whole, a common view at the time–if anything, it was perceived to be not a war between South and North Vietnam that was not the US’s war to fight. It was also not the view of the South Vietnamese who came to the US as refugees. It’s interesting how the rhetoric has shifted.

That said, Vietnam is an amazing country. And so is Thailand, my other love, where Laz has also spent time. A few years later, after I’d been back in Madison for a while, I went back to school for library science and wound up also getting an MA from what was then called the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, wherein I mostly studied Thai.

So because of my own, uh, checkered past, Laz spent some time hanging around at Than Son Nhut (a base on the edge of Saigon, actually not far from where I used to live) flying Jolly Green Giants (search and rescue helicopters) before getting sent to a base in Northern Thailand, where he flew other things (the RF-4C Phantom, mostly) and also ~~did some light espionage~~ hung out with a monk he met.

And then he comes home, which is really where the novel begins. I can’t say anymore, because of spoilers. But I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I’ll catch you at the beginning of June with my normal newsletter!

Em oi! #392: Such Truth

I should clarify straight away that “Lupton Fact” is the term B uses for claims that I (and my brothers) claim that occasionally turn out to not be true, or not be entirely true.

Usually when I do comics about history or philosophy I fact check them pretty closely. This one, I did not–mostly it was a good story that I wanted to transcribe. To be honest, the word “mystery” in the term “Mithraic Mysteries” (or “Mysteries of Mithras”) means that you didn’t get to find out much about the rituals and so on until you had been initiated into the religion–it’s the modern-day equivalent of Free Masonry. Or Scientology. No writings from the Mithras cult survive, as far as I know, and all of what we know about them is based on supposition drawn from artworks, artifacts found in caves (where they held their rites), and a few contemporaneous writings, including one early church father. In short, we don’t really know what they believed or who they stole from. They were contemporaneous in time with Christianity, certainly, but whether they were contemporaneous in geography is a question. It seems that at least some of the similarities between Christianity and the Mysteries of Mithras may have been drummed up by the New Atheist Movement to score points on Christianity.

That said, it’s a good story.

I wanted to make this chat longer, but I’m really tired, so I’m just going to file this under BR128.M5 L86 2013, for Christianity–Relation of Christianity to other religious and philosophical systems–Special, A-Z–Mithraism. And now to bed.

OH, by the way. If you read my book, and you happen to be on Goodreads, it’s on there–you can leave a review! Exciting, eh?

Update!

Sean messaged me this morning to provide an alternate account of the connection between Mithraism and Christianity. It goes something like this:

The religions of Rome were very ritual-centric, rather than focusing on belief in a specific deity, so much so that late empire writers complained that no one understood the meaning behind or origin of the rituals yet had to fulfill them.
When Rome adopted Christianity as its religion, these people might have brought some of their rituals with them to Christianity.
A lot of religions make a connection between their deity and the sun [For perhaps obvious reasons, since you’d want to connect a life-bringing deity with the life-bringing sun.–Ed.]. In Islam, for example, the angel Gabriel appears to Mohammed (BPuH) as a giant in the sky. In the Hebrew Bible, G-d is frequently described with solar/light-related metaphors.
A lot of Roman cults had resurrection myths. But Jews (and especially the Nazarites) did sin offerings. [Ok, there are appearances of offerings all over the Hebrew Bible–for example, the “scapegoat” thing in Lev. 16:8 or Hannah dedicating her son in 1 Sam. 1:24. So I don’t know if this was just especially a Nazarite thing or what–Sean didn’t specify. Jews in general made offerings.–Ed.] It’s not a big step from an offering one person makes to clear one person of sin to an offering made to cleanse all of humanity of sin. So Christianity could certainly have picked up a lot of its beliefs from extant Jewish mythology.
In summary, certainly a bunch of the harmless stuff, like bunnies that lay eggs, Christmas trees, lights, etc. probably came from Roman cults. But the rest, it’s hard to say, and harder still because some of the people who are interested in propagating this train of thought are doing so to discredit Christianity as a religion. [Whatever that means. I don’t see the fact that a religion has particular sociocultural/historical roots as incompatible with believing in it, but even in my religious days I was never a literalist.–Ed.]

Em ơi! #323: Conspicuous Consumption, pt. 2

For those who didn’t get enough last week…

So Freud was Austrian. I mean, we all knew this, because he’s ALWAYS depicted with zis re-dik-u-lous achent, ja? What I didn’t realize is that he died in 1939. When the Nazis took over Germany, Freud’s books were among those they burned, and he famously quipped, “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” He had four sisters who died in the camps, and he eventually escaped to London with the assistance of a Nazi who had studied his work and was a fan.

The more you know.

I do think that the change in conception of personality is very interesting, in part because of what it makes possible in terms of mental illnesses – think about it, unless you believe that personality is malleable and influenced by environment and that people can have different personalities for different situations, you cannot believe in Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as Multiple Personality Disorder. That is not to give a judgment on whether it exists or not (I have read too much on both sides of the issue to feel comfortable making a definitive statement here), but just to point out that if you lived in a culture that had a more static view of personality, you would probably see DID in a rather different light.

It seems as though today we’ve come to some sort of truce between all these conflicting ideas – we see personality as static but also see ourselves as presenting different facets of it in different situations; we see people as driven by instincts and ruled by chemicals, but still insist on the ability of the mind/ethics to govern it all. And we are more nervous and depressed than ever (which might have more than a little to do with our old friend advertising). Whee!

I love reading history because whenever I am convinced that the world is falling apart and we’re all going to fucking die (this happens frequently; I’m a pessimist), I just remember that society has been wrestling with these issues for more than a hundred years, and we ain’t dead yet.

Yet.

This comic’s call number is HC79.C63 L86 2010a.