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.

Slacker

Posts have been a little infrequent lately because Troutsky has been re-proletarianized. Thats right, the wife finally got tired of me sitting around all day researching the phenomenological implications of sixteenth century culinary arts and said if I was so damn interested in cooking I could go work in a kitchen! Thats a joke but I really did find a wierd job working in a school cafeteria. Low pay, hard work, screaming second graders, the whole catastrophe. Im the only male on the crew, schlepping fake- cheese nachos and tuna casserole until the fishing season comes along.

So, did anyone else catch those Coca-Cola commercials during the Sooper Bowl celebrating how far the civil rights movement had progressed? To the point where two black coaches had reached the mountain top and one of them had a bucket of Coke product dumped on his head. And the almost all black players reminding one of Fredrick Douglas or Stokely Carmichael. They were very serious commercials in a very un-serious crowd. Coke Kills, in Columbia, in India, probably other places of which I am unaware.

Then I heard some pundit say "the point we are at in Iraq is like the Superbowl in the 4th quarter." Well, yeah, except at the end of a football game everyone shakes hands and goes to take a shower, whereas in a civil war they kill and torture each other and destroy everything. John McCain called the Democrats position on a non-binding resolution "intellectually dishonest", an interesting turn of phrase considering what we know about pre-war "intelligence" and Scooter Libby, secret rendition and torture and on and on and on. A billion dollars every seventy two hours. Whatever.

I would never try to equate the bombing campaign in the final stages of the Vietnam "conflict" with anything associated with the "surge" strategy but it seems there is increasing reliance on Hellfire missles and rockets, somewhat indiscriminate killers when trying to win hearts and minds. Do you remember the picture of the little Vietnamese girl, clothes burned off, arms outstretched, stumbling toward the Life Magazine photographer after being napalmed? My wife is going to Vietnam next month, by the way, on a three week delegation with Thich Nhat Hanh (a Buddhist monk) to try to help heal some of those spiritual wounds.