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11.11.00, 8:41 p.m.

Floyd can't eat the nuts because they might crack his new set of teeth, though when Jacqueline mentions that she stole the cans from a wedding he says, "Okay, then, give me one 'cause it's the punk rock thing to do." She refuses of course, because who wants to be a party to denture-demolition?

7:13 p.m.

reading: Lies Across America: What Our Historical Sites Get Wrong, James Loewen; Nomadic Citizenship, May Joseph
listening: Marvelettes (girl group)

On 24 June 1995, I participated in an anniversary, marking (my) time in America. As a commemorative event, "Operation Homecoming: A 20 Year Commemoration of the Vietnamese Refugee Camps, Camp Pendleton," enabled a particular mode of recovery and a strategic redemptive act. Institutional memory is selective, and the reunion --complete with marching marines and award ceremonies-- while appearing to present the resolution of a once controversial question of war and responsibility, performs an ideological role in a contest of meaning. What seems to be simple observance -- marking a history, a chronology of war and loss-- mobilizes powerful affects for political purpose, producing and produced by a specific geopolitics of memory.

There are crucial questions that have to be asked, because I need to understand. How does one derive a sense of "home" from a highly regimented space of state violence and terror? What are the ideological implications of choosing a military base, and a deserted camp ground, to express a memory at this specific moment of history? What does it mean to lay claim to the rehearsal space for war? To desire possession of or belonging to more than America, but a military base, and more, to perform that patriotism as thanksgiving?

I've been working on this project for years. Five years, on and off -- since I attended the commemoration. I'm resolved to finish this version of the essay by the end of the month, for real, incorporating the recent protests over the Ho Chi Minh lithographs and the video store owner in Little Saigon. And there are the efforts of late to re-make Little Saigon into the third point in a tourist triangle that includes Disneyland and Knotts' Berry Farm -- I'm horrified and fascinated at the idea of a French Colonial cafe being built next to a pagoda-style shopping mall, connected by a walkway lined by a series of large, white marble statues of Chinese gods and goddesses. Somehow this seems important too, after all the years of conflict between Little Saigon and the surrounding neighborhoods -- to become appropriately "American," are we forced to commodify ourselves within a certain narrative of corporate-sponsored "diversity"?

I joked at the time of the commemoration --wandering the military base with my brother-- that we were in Adventureland: isolated and surrounded by the instruments of war and imperial "adventuring." I also hear that a statue has since been placed near the former site of the refugee camps --something called The Hands of Hope, small stone children cupped in giant hands pointed toward the skies-- and I'm reminded of the large placards hung on chain-link fences around the military base in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove , reading: "Peace is Our Profession."

Ahhh. Who says the movies are just make-believe?

In the spirit of interrogating what monuments, commemorative plaques, towering obelisks, malls, and actually, just about any built environment, might mean and how they function in local and national narratives, here is a good beginning -- James Loewen's "Ten Questions to Ask at a Historical Site" from Lies Across America. Not the nitty-gritty and certainly not all that "meta," his ten questions provide an important spring board I think:

1. When did this location become a historical site? (When was the marker or monument put up? Or the house "interpreted"?) How did that time differ from ours? From the time of the event or person commemorated?

2. Who sponsored it? Representing which participant group's point of view? What was their position in social structure when the event occurred? When the site went up?

3. What were the sponsor's motives? What were their ideological needs and social purposes? What were their values?

4. Who is the intended audience for the site? What values were they trying to elave for us today? What does the site ask us to go and do or think about?

5. Did the sponsors have government support? At what level? Who was ruling the government at the time? What ideological arguments were used to get the government to acquiesce?

6. Who is left out? What points of view go largely unheard? How would the story differ if a different group told it? Another political aprty? Race? Sex? Class? Religious group?

7. Are there problematic (insulting, degrading) words or symbols that would not be used today, or by other groups?

8. How is the site used today? Do traditional rituals continue to connect today's public to it? Or is it ignored? Why?

9. Is the presentation accurate? What actually happened? What historical sources tell of the event, people, or period commemorated at the site?

10. How does this site fit in with others that treat the same era? Or subject? What other people lived and events happened then but are not commemorated? Why?