Jean Campbell (1)

This seemed to me to be the reminiscing of an older male who spent time in the American army during the late sixties during the Vietnam War. There are memories of the past and time spent as a soldier interspersed with rather paranoid moments in the present including while he tends his underground marijuana garden, a reference to 9/11, G-men out to get him, bizarre dreams, philosophical rambling, historical references, words from songs and more. It seems to be an overview of the past and show more perhaps catharsis for the author. Not my favorite book but my guess is that it would be of interest to anyone interested in reading a book about a person who did not fall in with the party line while serving in the military. show less

Minds work in different ways. Very well written

I grew up during the Vietnam days. I felt the emotions that flooded our country. For so many years our parents trusted and supported our government. This period was not only a transition of realization for the young people, but for the older generation also. A time when everyone faced the reality that we were not as free and honest of a country as we had been told and believed we were. Then we had to accept the fact that we had all been show more brainwashed to a point that could not be reversed. We live in a constant mistrust which sometimes alleviates itself with denial. High officials professing their love of a God to keep the believers in a non-thinking mode–they give a good percentage of their money to the church and the rest to the wealthy that control the government. They push faith today, still Marxism.

This story is the reality of what young people faced during that time, but it was all new and too sudden. Very real story. Very well written. Very true. And, very sad that they were not prepared to face the truth that had been hidden for so long. The psychological damage was not only caused by fighting in Vietnam, but for those that watched here at home–the psychological war was everywhere. The mind was at war with old conditioning, while watching loved ones die for something that had no purpose. Some saw it more vividly than others. Many didn’t know how to deal with it. New religious groups started, hoping a God could figure it out for them. Drugs made it too clear for others.

We are the aftermath watching the government try to come up with new ways to fool the people, because we have gotten a little smarter. Obama doesn’t have a chance, he is too honest to fight the wolves within and around our government, although he is a fighter and will fight to the end of his term. There are too many wealthy, dishonest, religious con artists to battle. All we can do is sit and watch them destroy our empire. Maybe an underground garden isn’t a bad idea.

A positive note, the dirty, corrupt, money-mongers in control are old, like me, and are, fortunately, biting the dust, picking out their $100,000 caskets and prime cemetery plots. As the Republicans are finding out–it’s getting harder and harder to groom the next leader into following their unscrupulous ways. show less

My Psychic War with Uncle Sam
E. Alexander Scianna & Jean Campbell, PhD
Harmonious Circle Press 2012

I've said it before but it bears saying again,

... a new artifact appears powered not by cultural norms but by personal passion. Often unregarded these noyeaux of information float like sleepy cows in cyberspace, freely available for the scholar or the curious - Looking for sweatless livelihood, a review of Chinese Education in Singapore by Zhang Zhxiong

If you want to know what it was like to be show more an alert but confused Los Angeles teenager in 1968 this is the book for you. Almost minute by minute you can watch the pot parties, the car rides and the brutal army life as the dude waits to go to Nam. A distinguished effort of retrieval. Everybody our age has those flowery, mazy, hazy times in their head o to be sweet and sixteen again, lying on the floor with Jane with undone hair and Sergeant Pepper! And then whoosh, you're greying and bugged about garden problems, radio on with too much information - what happened to your life - all the in between bits? This ebook is a look at that structure.

Only, our hero doesn't go to Nam; he works night duty in the cookhouse. And there is a teaser time puzzle. E. Alexander Scianna was born in 1957 it says on the the Meet the Authors page and yet in the introduction he states: my experiences as a draftee in 1968. I knew the Viet Cong used child soldiers but the idea of an eleven year old American private, I'm sorry, I don't accept. The introduction also states that this is a composite work, not only thru having two named authors, the other author is Jean Campbell PhD, but in ransacking the viewpoints of thinkers as diverse as Noam Chomsky and G.I. Gurdjieff and including paraphrased veteran testimony from the Vietnam war. As far as how the collaboration worked Scianna says, originally, I found this novel an exorcism of past ghosts, but with Jean’s genius and spontaneity of prose it began to take on its own life.

I'd honestly forgot what book I'd asked for. When My Psychic War with Uncle Sam popped into the inbox I remembered that I'd had problems with my own book, Robots, Reptiles & Rezistants wondering whether it was writers block or senility and ZAP! I'd spotted the Scianna/Campbell title on Library Thing, the book lovers site. Library Thing invites you to ask for books to review; part of their community building function. I was interested in the Scianna/Campbell title because it talked about bundling diverse sources, which was what I had been trying to do when I got stuck.

The set up is a middle aged marijuana grower looking back on his life thru paranoia tinged shades. The underground garden he refers to is both a real place with velcro fastened panels, fluorescent lights of different color temperatures and sterile cloning blocks and an imaginary space where he writes down his thoughts. After a flash into his childhood and drafting into the Army in 1968 we get a finely tracked, moment by moment sequence where our friend prints a subversive leaflet and is interrogated. We leave him waiting for his court martial confined to barracks and flash to the classic George Kennan quote from 1948. For those of you who don't know George Kennan was a really bright State department official who was at one point stationed in Moscow. From there he sent a devastating analysis of Soviet Union point of view and intentions. The quote begins - we have 50 per cent of the worlds wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population...

For Scianna/Campbell this quote sets up the thesis of the ruthless military industrial power clique - the reptile brained Cheney's and so on - who have broken America off its true, revolutionary, humankind liberating mission and are out to punish misbelievers. While the writer's marijuana plants are forced by his technological manipulation to disclose their sex he gives us the clue to what he is fighting - Christian Theocracy. And it may be the case that there are quite a few run and burn fundamentalist people of the cross behind the over successful US capitalism. Be surprising if not given the founding DNA. Mayflower? Goddamn will flower!

And now lets turn to the writing. By now the permanent present tense is beginning to tire me a little, it is too much like staring unblinking with no relief. I start to ask myself, where is the real world in all this? Which concrete objects does the writer choose to deal with and why? The army context - all those solid objects, trucks, gears, water spouts - what does it all add up to? I read on, patient, friendly, to see what happens but the problem becomes the writers handling of that strange incalculable: fictional time, fictional space.

One of the weirdest things about writing fiction is that the reader only knows what you tell her. The corollary of this is that if you put something in the reader is going to think it is there for a reason, and if there is too many words there without reason it gets tiring for the reader to do the sorting you should have done.

Example:
I’m here to see the captain.” I present myself to the young private behind a big desk.
“Just a minute.” The private goes into the back room.
“Okay, you can go in and see the captain,” he says returning to the desk.

Do I really need to know that it is a big desk, do I really have to watch the private toddle backwards and forwards? You have to cut all slackness right to the bone. "Kill your children" said Rider Haggard - any phrase you think specially fine, out it goes. Like Stephen King says in his classic memoir On Writing "cutting is the literary equivalent of Viagra" He recommends your second draft is ten per cent less than your first.

I’m here to see the captain.” I tell the private on desk duty.
“Just a minute.” He disappears for a moment. I stare at the desk.
“Okay, you can go in,”

Hard to get a grip on the concept of fictional time, fictional space; that is why writing this review helps me. To say we dig a hole deep enough to stand in doesn't register unless it has a relation (is in a properly imagined proportion with) other physical descriptions. The language skin here is only ever one word deep, it lacks inner resonance. You may think I'm being hard, well why not? - I'm trying to figure out this stuff for the sake of my own writing.

Example: We zap from his brother over dosing fatally on the floor to breakfast with Dad and Mom the next day - all in the same tone, no change of pace. Good writers of the old fashioned sort pop in a descriptive phrase with just the right length tone, rhythm, perspective to give the piece some architecture within which the reader can be present in a comfortable way. Perhaps I've got it all wrong, I'd love to know what present day eighteen year olds make of My Psychic war with Uncle Sam.

Back to the book. We are on the move again, that lovely, careless, big space American traveling in the desert with the older head, Tom, who speaks in theosophic riddles. In the middle of their acid trip a curious thing happens, Marcel the buddy of the hero discloses that his mother was a German Jewess escaped from France and his father, captured by the Spanish trying to escape over the Pyrenees committed suicide. Any half literate person will recognize that we have here smuggled in the story of Walter Benjamin, no?

(Walter Benjamin who wrote amongst many other great things that history is always history of the victorious tk has become a cult figure for many marginal intellectuals, they like to think he holds out hope for obscurity, beside the fact that his interests and analyses were so fascinating. To fantasize about being his secret child is pretty powerful stuff to smuggle in, no?)

We come up to the surface into the present and the narrator, now in middle age, steals a knife and is locked into a mental health facility. Nibbles, pool table, music - and freewheeling conversations about America. A chilling picture of the super modern sinister guardian/nurse figures we are all going to struggle with, with I work for X stamped across their eyeballs and their pre-cut dialogue filled with registered affective vocabulary to make you come gently: valence (the pleasantness of the stimulus), arousal (the intensity of emotion provoked by the stimulus), and dominance (the degree of control exerted by the stimulus).

Freewheeling? It is the uninterrupted conversation about America's problem with the use of its power, a bastard baby born with a gun in one hand and a bible with the other. What does D.H. Lawrence say somewhere? The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. Why say somewhere? Its in his 1923 discussion of Hawthorn in Studies in Classic American Literature ISBN 014003009.

Thanks Scianna/Campbell - you made me think and got me writing again. show less

My Psychic War with Uncle Sam is a tour through the life of a young soldier at Fort Lewis, Washington in the years of the Vietnam War. At time it gets confusing, but being a college student during the end of the 1960s, I recall a lot of things being confusing. This is the story of a young man who begins to question the reason for being in uniform and on the verge of being shipped out to a war that he does not understand.

He is befriended by a returning Vietnam Veteran, who tells him of his show more experiences and tries to convince him that the war is none of our business. They smoke pot and use other drugs in trying to understand the reason for it all. The even stage their own protest to the war on the base and end up being court martialed. They go on leave to Seattle where they fall in with some hippies that leads to more questions of why they are in the military. But they continue to be good soldiers following orders and going on maneuvers though maybe not wholeheartedly like others.

The main character invites the reader into his “private garden” where he can hide from all that is going on around him and think, to read, and write his thoughts down. After being discharged from the Army, he is still confused and trying to find answers. In many ways we are all confused and searching for answers.

I found the book to be very good and an interesting read. In some instances it has left me with some questions, but only a discussion with the author will answer them. It gives a good view of the time period through the eyes of a young soldier. show less