My favorite places to be have always been bookstores. When my son Liberty was about ten we were in one as we frequently were. I saw a copy of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. I picked it up. Handed it to him. And told him this is the biggest book ever written. It was paperback at around 1400 pages. Of course he had to leaf through it and check the last numbered page. Tolstoy wrote it in the mid 1800's. He didn't have Surrealism, Futurism, Cubism, or Dadaism to refer to and did not have the Internet as a tool. In Tolstoy's Second Epilogue Chapter VIII he said, "Man in connection with the general life of humanity is conceived as governed by the laws that determine that life. But the same man, apart from that connection, is conceived of as free. How is the past life of nations and of humanity to be regarded? as the product of the free or not free action of men? That is the question of history." Shortly thereafter, on an island far away, Paul Gauguin created what he considered his masterpiece and wrote in the corner "Where Do We Come From? What are We? Where are we going?"
Both of these artists/writers were seriously questioning Man's position in the universe. It was an attribute of the end of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's. Tolstoy's works indicate that he was more interested in Civilized man and Governed Men. Whereas, Gauguin indicates with his works that he was interested in the primal or evolved man. Retro Punk X is more concerned with Gauguin's questions. We have seen, with WWI, WWII, Vietnam and Middle East wars, what Civilized man has given us. Retro Punk X answers Gauguin's questions and now ask one additional very important one. Is Civilization, as it has played out the past 12,000 years or so, worth it? Is Civilization detrimental to the Man Species?
Around 1959 I was l6 and living in Seattle. My Uncle James Jordan took me to see the movie "War and Peace". He was a WWII veteran and had landed on Omaha Beach. He had married when he got out of the Army and moved to the small town of Eldorado in Preble County, Ohio. I remember visiting him when I was a child. His wife was pretty. They had no children and he soon divorced her. He moved to Seattle because there was work there. His brother, Uncle Ike, had also moved there. Ike was a WWII veteran. They would sit around in Aunt Lizzie's back yard with other vets and drink. They would tell their war stories and the gatherings always ended in a fight. Uncle James drank a lot. He was a handsome man, he looked like Roy Rogers, but had trouble keeping steady girlfriends because of his drinking. He frequently took me to the movies in Seattle. They were always war movies. The war haunted him. I could tell even at that young age. Uncle James was reliving the war at the movies. He could not escape it. He was searching for the answers to Gauguin's last two questions. He never lived to find the answers. His life ended in 1959 in an early morning auto accident. He was searching, but it wasn't for Poe's Eldorado. Poe's Eldorado, that was written about the same time as Tolstoy's and Gauguin's works, was one of wealth. Uncle James's was one of peace. The Kentucky Hillbilly at that time was no different than Tolstoy's soldiers of a few hundred years before. Uncle James's first encounter with a flushing toilet was in jail in Mt Vernon when he was 16. He thought it was an automatic rear end washer. That War, as well as all wars, not only destroys man's concept of reality but it pulls them from it and leaves a void that can never be filled..
I, later in life, got to know my Uncle Ike who by then was in his 60's. He also drank all the time and when he did he would tell his war stories. I remember one in particular where he burned people alive. I tried to reassure him that they were the enemy and were trying to kill him. He said, "No, they were civilians." It awakened me to the fact that the ones that won the war got away with all their war crimes whereas the ones that lost were tried and executed.
Uncle Ike was a big man, over six feet. Stories of the WWII veterans youth are fading into the Ǽther. Uncle Ike was a good man. One story that survives was that he was on his mule and saw a bunch of men harassing another as he was riding through Brush Creek, in Rockcastle County. He got off his mule and threatened to take them all on if they didn't leave the defenseless one alone. They quit harassing him. Uncle Ike went on a hunting trip with us. This was late in his life. He drank and stayed by the fire all night even though he was shirtless in the rain. I stayed up as long as I could and listened to his stories. One I remember well. It defined the phrase that "brave men feel the fear but do it anyway". While in Germany he was a lineman. If the communication went out it was his job to follow the wire in the dark by feeling it until he found the break. He said Germans would cut the wire and wait for someone to come fix it and cut their throat as they came by. He said it was the most fearful he had ever been. He crawled along the wire feeling it with his hands and expecting a German to kill him any minute.
These were the wars of our past. Why do they go on and on and on? Why do we never learn? The answer is that they are an attribute of the Super Organism. With the creation called Civilization we can never have peace.