For a lot of folks in my generation, “boomers” or a little older, Vietnam means an “era,” not just a country or even a war. It’s what William Butler Yeats meant when in 1919 he wrote:
… Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned …
I admit I am no fan of either the president or the ignorance I believe is a primary driver for his supporters.
But wait. I have friends, people who are neither stupid nor malevolent, who still support Donald Trump because they simply don’t trust either the powers-that-be or that layer of society they see as the élite looking down their noses at average men and women.
There is a sizable sector of the population, especially in the old industrial Midwest, the shut-down mills of North Carolina or in the mines of Appalachia, for whom the late 20th century and where the economy is now have only meant a steady slide into poverty and despair.
The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., February 2016.
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
Bear in mind that these are our fellow citizens and they find themselves at the center of the “opioid crisis,” among other social dead-ends.
What did/does Vietnam have to do with any of this?
It’s because those of us who lost our innocence during that era, either fighting the war or fighting against the war — whether on the left or on the right — deeply share one thing: We no longer believe what we’re told by people in positions of authority.
The Most Dangerous President
Americans were lied to. They were lied to systematically. It wasn’t random, it wasn’t accidental. They were lied to on purpose.
They were lied to by John Kennedy and Robert McNamara on the way in. They were lied to by Lyndon Johnson as things started to fall apart. They were lied to by Richard Nixon, who connived to scuttle the Paris Peace Talks to help his chances in the 1968 elections.
Americans were lied to. They were lied to systematically.
In Vietnam, General William Westmoreland blatantly ignored what he was being told by his own intelligence services and, day in and day out, lied to the troops getting shot up in the field while he sat in the officers’ mess at Long Binh eating sirloin and shrimp cocktails.
And in the times that followed Americans were still being lied to.
Ronald Reagan was going to lower taxes how? By going a whole lot deeper in debt, that’s how. Bill Clinton was supposed to be the friend of Main Street and he turned out to be the friend of Wall Street and deregulated the financial sector – it took a while, but it ultimately led to the great recession of 2008.
George W. Bush, aided by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, cooked up phony reasons to invade Iraq and destabilize the Middle East for a generation or more. And on and on and on.
So, while people may decry the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — and he is without a doubt the most ignorant, unstable and downright dangerous chief executive in at least a century or even (given his power to “totally destroy North Korea” and kill 20 million people in the process) in all of our nation’s history — they cannot lose sight of the fact the “establishment” (and that includes the corporate establishment as well as the government and, one could add, all those charlatans preaching feel good prosperity gospels of one kind or another) has become so distrusted that a demagogue like Donald Trump can keep on shouting “fake news” and a whole lot of Americans nod their heads in agreement.
I encourage you all to view Ken Burns new documentary, The Vietnam War, on PBS.
The post Vietnam On Our Minds appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.