Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A military air show is supposed to read as civic spectacle: clean lines, patriotic roar, a crowd trained to clap on cue. Ferlinghetti flips it into a scene of collateral damage that happens to be domestic. The Blue Angels "coming back to scare the local population" lands like a deadpan news brief, the kind that makes you laugh and then feel implicated for laughing. He refuses the usual framing of jets as harmless entertainment and treats them as what they are: weapons performing a publicity tour.

The image does the real work. "Old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square" turns a postcard of bohemian San Francisco into a flashback corridor. It’s not metaphor; it’s physiology. Trauma lives in the body, and the state’s sonic theater reaches it without asking permission. The bench - public furniture, shared space, everyday safety - becomes cover. A park becomes a battlefield because sound is enough to revive it.

Ferlinghetti’s intent is less to indict those women’s fear than to indict the culture that can’t hear what it’s broadcasting. The subtext is immigrant America as a nation of refugees forced to relive someone else’s nostalgia. Context matters: Ferlinghetti, long aligned with antiwar politics and the Beat-era suspicion of American power, is pointing at the way militarism launders itself through pageantry. The jets are "coming back" not just to the city, but to history: a reminder that wars don’t end when the news cycle does; they echo, literally, overhead.