HO CHI MINH IS A SON-OF-A-BITCH

I still feel guilty about admiring Ho Chi Minh when I was a kid. Please read: "Ho Chi Minh" by William J. Duiker; now all is revealed, and the tale of how Ho was trailed and hunted by the authorities for many years is layed bare. And his astounding vision to free Vietnam from the yoke of oppression by the French is inked in; these events, including the American involvement, did not have to go down this way. This kind of information was not available back in the days of the Vietnam War. Now we can see that Ho Chi Minh was more of a Nationalist than strickly a Marxist/Communist. This was not known at that time. The Johnson Administration saw him as a proxy to Red China and The Soviet Union. This, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a malignant outgrowth of The Cold War. I`m still hiding my portrait out of fear and guilt; the fear of retaliation or accusations of treason. Maybe we are not yet enough years away from those events to be in calmer waters. He implored FDR to embrace his cause of a United Vietnam, at the close of WWII. When FDR died, Truman let the French re-colonialize Vietnam. This was the beginning of the debacle. My collage just capsulizes some of the puzzling events of the war. When I was growing up, the collage medium was the newest thing! The Marshall McLuhan idea that the medium is the message resounded with me. Maybe I learned that from John Lennon too and the first solo album: The Plastic Ono Band. Mama don`t go...daddy come home...mantra repeated a thousand fold...