28. Nothing ever ends

June 2nd, 2020 Tuesday

Dear Blog,

What a weird time to finish watching the HBO limited series Watchmen, a reimagination of an alternative American history in which the United States won the Vietnam war with the help of Dr.Manhattan, thus making Vietnam the 51st state, another symbol for the terrifying colonial power. It also deals with racial trauma and the legacy it carries to the present day. It’s a meditation of time and a process of finding one’s meaning in life through the connections to the experiences of one’s ancestors. I could already see the backlash for such audacious work simply by the virtue of putting the racial tension of America at the front center of the show, both in the plot as well as in character development, since some might consider this too “political.” Just like the opening scene depicting a historically accurate event of white supremacist committing a massacre against a group of wealthy African Americans in Tulsa, which happened precisely 99 years ago as I was watching the show. Goosebumps down my spine when I found it was a real event, and like many events that are hidden by the winner, remains a distant memory in people’s minds that might very well never existed. The case of George Floyd has a resonance back all these years, and America is still trying to deal with the fundamental paradox of its identity: freedom built on slavery, at the cost of the lives of millions of African Americans, its trauma still lived through this day in every fabric of the social life.