The controversy over the 'Viet Cong' band name was the most 2015 shit ever
Jon McCurley et al can S my Sneaky D
L.P. Hartley was right: the past is a different country.
Looking at shit from the 2010s already feels like pouring over atlases of barely familiar landscapes we once visited. Oh, I… sort of remember that, I say as I see a photo of people in 2011 wearing bow-ties and suspenders in lieu of streetwear. I see a photo of someone who looks exactly like me in this same attire, standing with people who look exactly like some of my friends, somewhere that looks exactly like a bar I used to frequent. I squint, trying to jog my memory of who this fellow could be or why I’d know him. Suddenly, a phrase enters my mind. What the fuck is a “Fleet Fox”?
As we’ve discussed before, “identity politics” lies dead in the dirt (good fucking riddance), save for maybe its more reactionary White permutation (oh no), but there was a time when it constituted a petty Reign of Terror across the internet. Remember the band Viet Cong, that successor to the band Women? They’re called Preoccupations now, and you may remember that that was because they got dogpiled out of the former name. You can read all about it in this piece in Exclaim!, featuring an angry Jon McCurley, a biracial Vietnamese guy who used to run Double Double Land.1 It is, on the whole, what I would call “melodramatic.”2
The Vietnam War only ended 40 years ago. The Vietnamese diaspora is still dealing with the aftermath of this war and the Viet Cong. It doesn't matter if the band's music is good or if they are nice guys; people who organize our concerts and who attend our shows are deeply hurt and affected by these young men naming themselves Viet Cong.
No. Explain to me “how.” How the fuck are any of these people meaningfully “deeply hurt and affected” by a band being named after the Viet Cong? It’s like writing an article about how “deeply hurt and affected” Southerners might be by a band named after William T. Sherman.
Jon, Claudine and others I've spoken to have had similar experiences when calling attention to the racism of Viet Cong's name. My friends of colour are upset and empathetic, to varying degrees. A lot of white friends agree that something is wrong, but they are not necessarily sure why.
“A lot of white friends agree that something is wrong, but they are not necessarily sure why.” That’s it. That’s the most fucking 2015 sentence I’ve ever read. When I have to explain to my children (in our tiny bunker underground) why the second half of that decade sucked so fucking much, I’m just going to say: “a lot of white people thought that some things were wrong, but they were not necessarily sure why.” In 2015 we allowed some of the shittiest people in the world to police everyone’s language and actions so long as they were able to claim “an identity” and people would strain desperately to try to understand why exactly we should listen to them. “It seems like they have a point,” people said, forgoing that they themselves couldn’t actually tell what it was. Look: Jon is Asian, and he’s mad about something that has to do with Asians, so this must be legitimate! But was it really?
The truth is that people like Jon were mad because the band name probably reminded them that their families were on the wrong side of history in the Vietnam War, that they were The Bad Guys, and so they had to project their frustrations with this all over the place. You can get a faint hint of Jon’s background thanks to this interview with Jon’s mother:
It was very difficult for the people after the country turned communist. Everything was very scarce.
Considering that Vietnam had previously lost millions to famine, the idea that “everything was very scarce” after communism and somehow because of communism rather than a fact of Vietnamese life since colonization suggests a certain turn of fortune for the speaker that would align said speaker with a particular demographic in Vietnam. Convinced that I was reading between the lines correctly here, I looked further and found a (rather hard to find!) interview Jon McCurley conducted with a man identified to be his great uncle, the artist Pham Tang, while Tang was living in Paris. Taking a hop, skip, and a jump from there I learned that Tang studied at the French Colonial École des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine, where classes were conducted in French, something your average Vietnamese peasant certainly didn’t speak, to say nothing of the finances that would have been required to attend—something we further get a hint at when we consider that Tang spent some of the 1960s living in Rome.3 So, yes, I think it’s safe to say that Jon’s family were not toiling in the rice paddies.
Returning to Jon’s interview in Exclaim!, he seals the deal for us:
Jon didn't go into detail, but he has family members that were killed by the Viet Cong army. He dislikes the band's name choice.
Don’t worry, Jon. We can fill in the details. They’re not good!
"I feel like they're making a joke at my expense," Jon McCurley tells me.
And don’t worry, Jon, they’re not. But I’ll be sure to. Let’s go for the cheap shots, shall we?
That hat won’t trick people into thinking you’re not going bald, you pock-marked dweeb. You look like J.D. Vance if he tried to get into Mac DeMarco. Is this coming through as to what a “joke at your expense” looks like or can you only catch that if it’s nominative? I could change the name of the blog post to “Jon’s Dead Family Members” if that helps it get through to you. Millions of families starved to death before the Vietnamese people liberated themselves. I'm sorry yours was inconvenienced.
This is not the first time I’ve taken shots at people who claim to have been personally “victimized” by the revolution. Nor will it probably be the last! Self-involved comprador expats like this are the fucking worst. Sorry you lost some family members, Jon, but surely you can understand that whatever you think your family went through was probably worth it in the long run when we consider that it isn’t the case anymore that millions of Vietnamese people routinely starve to death because of colonial distribution. Okay: admittedly I’m not actually that sorry. See! I can admit my faults!
I’ve harped on this a number of times before, but such sophistry has allowed the benefactors from imperial crimes to hide behind “their truth” by lecturing the “ignorant” cultural outsiders into accepting a warped or incomplete view of history which they’re browbeaten (often under the auspices of the all-important “race card”) into not questioning. They effectively claim a monopoly over history, defeating any counter-claim which might arise from actual research or critical thought by basis of ontological right, such as when the Exclaim! article’s Claudine T. claims her aunt was “used as a sex slave” by the Viet Cong, using language which almost suggests that the Viet Cong had some kind of “comfort-women”-esque process of sexual serfdom when no such thing ever existed. One of the most poignant examples of this kind of obfuscating farce was a couple years later when the show One Day at a Time (an arbitrarily Cuban-American remake of the sitcom of the 1970s, itself a very 2010s move) opted to lecture its audience via a cultural outsider surrogate figure about the “evils” of Che Guevara, a man they call a mass-murderer and even compare to Adolf Hitler.
I really hope that I don’t have to explain to my regular readers that none of these claims about Che Guevara are the least bit true, yet Vulture ran an entire piece about how this “perfect scene” (???) called his “supporters” out, ironically quoting one of the showrunners saying “we live in a world where people can have opinions and spread things about something they don’t know anything about.”4 I’ll say!
I’m a mongrel with a wealth of familial backstories—I have a great grandfather who fought in the Italian army during the Second World War, for instance. Allied soldiers probably shot some of his friends. I’m not fucking screaming at the TV when Saving Private Ryan comes on because the Allies “personally victimized” people in my family and demanding everybody stop what they’re doing to placate my childish reactions. As the Allies passed through the region my ancestors lived in, American soldiers stole livestock from the village, drove tanks through their crops, harassed their women, and bombed a nearby hub town for little to no reason. It certainly caused my family strife, sure, but man, it’s a good thing that Mussolini was deposed, wasn’t it? But then again, my Italian family supposedly didn’t feel too personally invested in Mussolini.5 Something tells me the same isn’t the case for a lot of Jon’s family in the analogous position.
I’m not saying the Band Formerly Known As Viet Cong necessarily chose their name to make a bold political statement, but that’s far from the point, the point is to expose yet another example of the imperialist identity grifter set in the culture sphere and their… what was the word Viet Cong chose as their new band name? Preoccupations? Jon McCurley has never gone online anywhere that I can see voicing his displeasure with the name of the band “Napalm Death.” For whatever reason, it seems like American military napalm offends him a lot less personally than the Viet Cong does. Funny that.6
A now-defunct Toronto DIY spot, obviously. What are you, not reading this blog from a booth at the Lakeview?
An aside: the piece’s author, Hooded Fang’s April Aliermo (wow I’m getting such flashbacks of like Toronto scenester bullshit and art events at the Great Hall in the 2010s throughout all of this) apparently calls herself “Filipinx,” which, like “latinx,” is a modification of a word which is already gender-neutral, and I’m sure is just as hated by its applicable community. That is, if they’ve even heard of it.
Tang, for his part, actually seems quite lovable. While he may have been from prosperous background, he was imprisoned for agitating on behalf of the communists and speaks very favourably of communists both back home in Vietnam and in Europe where he settled.
Another aside: one of the characters in the clip calls out Che for “not even being from Cuba.” So? Carlos Roloff is a hero of Cuban independence that even anti-Castro Cubans celebrate and he was fucking Polish. Since when did someone’s birthplace automatically disqualify them from becoming a hero to another nation? Plenty of national heroes weren’t “from” their respective countries. Thomas Paine was a Founding Father of the United States of America responsible for helping instigate the American Revolution with his writings, universally revered in American culture as an “American hero,” and was fucking British.
I have a similar recent gripe with how Chris Oliveros in his rather lopsided graphic novel Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? casts FLQ founder George Schoeters cause as being ridiculous because the man was actually from Belgium, but that’s possibly a post for another time.
Lest I be accused of evading historical scrutiny myself: my family were land-owning farmers in a small village in the mountains, so their class interests were certainly not at odds with the Mussolini regime, something which nevertheless felt rather far away from their tiny hillbilly mountain town. They were generally supportive of some of his early policies that impacted them personally, such as tax breaks for having all their kids, etc., but they became far more ambivalent once it became clear that Mussolini was going to pull Italy into another war.
A final note: to Jon’s credit, he did once do a piece called Find the US Soldier Who Killed Your Grandma, which suggests at least some critical attitude toward the Americans—however a peak at some photos of the project reveals that his grandmother was doing black market currency exchange, which further solidies that his family probably had some money (albeit was downwardly mobile due to instability, leading to turning to black market activity). Black market currency exchange was generally participated in by people with connections to corrupt bureaucrats and so could secure chunks of US aid money to Vietnam to sell to Vietnamese people at inflated prices admist their economic instability. Allegedly the US soldiers who killed McCurley’s gramdmother did so because of her role in the exchange—I’ll defend the Viet Cong for extrajudicial executions but not the US soldiers for obvious reasons concerning asymmetry and comparative informality. There is obviously some degree of resentment on the part of Jon in this capacity, but he has inherited a hatred of the Viet Cong which nevertheless marks him in alignment with the imperialist powers, no matter what he might think.
Yup. You're still a piece of shit.