Absurd R Us

I'm hurriedly reading Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal by Howard Zinn for Mondays Ravalli Radicals Book Club. It begins with this gem "Vietnam, it seems to me, has become a theatre of the absurd." Bertoldt Brecht himself could not have written the screenplay for Iraq 2003-7. We are now told our escalation is to "give the embattled government some breathing room", an interesting metaphore, the kind of action you would take if someone suddenly fainted in a crowd. Does it have a tactical meaning or have things become so surreal you could tell reporters that "the surge is meant to provide tuna fish sandwiches to every one" and they would just nod and jot it down.

200,000 veterans- mainly from the Vietnam War- sleep on the streets every night according to the Dept. of Veterans Affairs. Cheney says liberals are destroying "this nations resolve in achieving success, supporting the cause of democracy and stopping terrorist forces in their ultimate aim of bringing the violence to our shores." The second most powerful officer in our government is living in a Green Lantern comic. A billion dollars every 72 hours and they have mold in the rooms at Walter Reed. Who's in charge? people who hate government. Who's on first? This is all the legacy of Ayn Rand, Jean Kirkpatrick, Ronald Rayguns, Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, Oakeshott, Schmitt, Straus, von Hayeck, Barry Goldwater.

You think ideas don't matter? These apoligists for greed and avarice exploited Americas struggles with race and class to insert their insipid conceptual framework into the dominant narritive and sugar-coated it with consumer goods and old time religion. 1968 tried to challenge the "normative limits" but backed down in the face of state power. Kent State was not a shot across the bow.