Maggie's Farm

Weekends are good times on Maggies Farm to vent, given that participation falls to next to nothing and is perhaps a gauge of readership as well. Thus the "blog as bartender /psychiatrist " and the musings of Habu don't bore as many of our good MF folks.

Mine is not really a rant but a profound anger that in todays PC world must be twisted into sorrow, for anger is now hate, and hate is now illegal to voice. I have always had great admiration for those acedemics I like, meaning their writings resonant with my life's experiences and thus validate my thoughts. Bernard Lewis, acknowledged as the preeminent scholar on Islam said, at some point, I do not know when that,
America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend

It is a point I have heard from other scholars and writers I admire, such as William F. Buckley, George Will,Emmitt Tyrell,Thomas Sowell and more. It makes me profoundly angry because it wasn't always that way. Once, when the "Greatest Generation" handled a worldwide Depression, a horrifc World War, and a Cold War of nuclear tipped nerve and brinksmanship we had the right stuff. They are all but gone and we are down to the dregs of every barrel.

Our political and military leadership pusillanemous. Concern for collateral damage is now the tip of the spear in our fighting strategy, not victory at all costs. We spend huge amounts of money on non lethal weapons to use on barbarians who cut our throats and murder our civilians. We have gone mad. Our intelligence agencies remain ineffective and intraintelligence maneuver for each agencies own gain their animating cause.

It would be easy to say that is simply a reflection of the red state/blue state schism and "the people", but they are the ones being manipulated by unctious politicians who have gerrymandered 90% of the Congress into safe seats or military general's whose memory of the Billy Mitchells and the warnings of Smedley Butler are but dust on books they have never read.

We cannot or refuse not to unphold the most basic of survival principles of a nation, control of our borders.

Our "market, capitalist economy" now firmly hs the U.S. Treasury as the underwriter of all risk. Market schemes that make billions are hailed as the proof that markets and risk taking are best, but let them begin to fail and the it is the taxpayer, not the investor who is the biggest loser, in every sense of it's philosophy and reality.

We have become a house of cards, a porcine population, and an easy target...we are harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend

As you are fully aware I shovel my share. It's a farm after all and on the farms I've been on someone has to do the shovel thing. Glad to do it too.

Who owns the Vietnam narrative ?

The Tent

Once upon a time before there was an official monument, there was a ratty, old, green Army tent... it stood on a busy Washington, DC corner, with traffic speeding by, pedestrians wandering and vendors hawking and calling... but the battered tent stood, ephemeral, time and people passing...

It was the mid -1970's and on the very corner where a monument would one day stand, the Army tent stood... a makeshift monument manned by volunteers and family members and vets and anyone else who had the presence of mind to donate a day, even an hour, and help out.

The Wall

In the fall of 1980, a design competition was announced, the competition open to any US citizen 17 years of age and older. Spring of 1981 the juried review showed that submission #1026 was the unanimous selection based on its meeting the formal requirements of the competition.

Submission #1026 was made by Maya Lin, a 22-year old architecture student who designed what was to become known colloquially as 'The Wall' for a furnerary design class at Yale University


The Controversy

Immediately the hew and cry from Vietnam Veterans and others was overwhelming and, sadly, all aspects of the monument process were open for attack. The immediate response was that The Wall, with it's near-58,000 original inscribed names, indeed looked like a massive headstone. The fact the monument was designed in-ground also brought about much comment and controvesy. Many a vet was heard to say the monument was being 'buried' the same way that the Vets were. Many were incensed that East Indian granite would be used rather than North American. And others openly attacked Ms. Lin's ancestry with acrimonious and, at times, racist, cristicism. Many were horrified that more was being invested in the monument than in Veterans themselves and lastly, the fact that those who 'remained missing' would be included sent a red flag up. The clear phrase, nothing political, insured that POWs and MIAs were excluded in any manner except 'unaccounted-for' and their inclusion on The Wall, although welcome by many, was seen by just as many as a means by the powers-that-be to finally 'bury' the POWs, MIAs and issue itself

The Healing

There is no healing. You go to the Wall, if you care, and it is tear stained ground you walk. The rift remains, the "Wall" was referred to for many years as "The Gash" and not thought of as a respected memorial, but it is what we got.

Any healing that will ever take place will be generationally slow, as the Boomers who fought there die, their children will echo their thoughts, and then their grandchildren. It will divide this nation for a hundred years.

You cannnot heal in you own time the calumny visited upon you by your own countrymen and women who were working for your defeat, and even your death. They remain today to do the same work to our military and country in Iraq, and odds are increasing that they will prevail again.
I will damn them with my last breath.

The Left owns nothing of the Vietnam narrative but have imbued it with their treachery and cowardice. They are responsible for most of the deaths on that Wall. They bear no shame, but pride in their work to have had a part in our defeat. I will never ever forgive then nor ever give them any quarter. They are forever my enemy.

There were plenty of Congressmen and Senators who wanted to go to Hanoi. Wanted to bomb Haiphong. LBJ was a rube surrounded by leftover Kennedy "Whiz" kids and Robert (ass) McNamara who really fucked things up. Between those two it was adoomed enterprise once the great Cronkite told us so.

Now I'm not gonna do anymore try'in to convince people of the rightness or wrongness because those lines are etched as deeply as a wound that never heals can be.

But I could. I found on the very first fast read through of the article at least five "truths" of that war that are false.
Stanley Karnow's WGBH "Vietnam" productions was a piece of propaganda.

Finally, we had that war won. Our weak horse citizenry flopped at the 1/8 pole.

Dr X.....

You begin as if to support perseverence in our Vietnam War experience.

Then you "enlighten" us with faint logic that changing course is often the most prudent avenue, using Cuba , the Soviet Union , and Chinaas examples. First and foremost any comparison on a moral basis with those countries is an abomination and gross misreading of history.

My God man.

Perhaps you haven't noticed but the Soviet Union is simply old wine in new bottles and China is still fully dedicated to communism, fully. They have acquired the facade of great capitalist successs in a manner similar to what Uncle Joe did in the Ukraine in 1929-1933. There were over 30,000 riots in China last year because interior China is seeing NONE of the coastal wealth.
Poor analogies to compare the US venture in Vietnam during the height of the Cold War and hot proxy wars with Cuba, China, and the Soviets.
Geeeze Almighty.

Your message, that we should change course has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.