by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

If you click on this link, inadmissible evidence: One Small Step, you will be taken to a quote from Andrew Chaiken in his book A Man On The Moon. In fact, I'll assume that you've gone to the link and read the quote.

He is so right. Think about the speeches John Kennedy gave during his brief moment. He challenged us, he uplifted our vision and spirit, he reinforced our pride in being Americans. Now think about what we hear from the conservative Republicans in this country. They do not tell us how we are great and they do not hold up uplifting and bold visions of the future. No, we are told rather to be afraid and to hoard our wealth. They encourage us to distrust our neighbors, and they focus our eyes on the ground rather than the stars.

It is true that the Vietnam War took something out of us. We lost our sense of being right, of being a people of destiny. Lyndon Johnson tried to fight the first televised, in Living Color, war and to promote his extension of FDR's vision, and found he could not do either. Nixon dragged us even further into the muck and mire with his dirty tricks (most of which still seem to be in the Republican play book...), and we lost even more of our sense of identity that August day in 1974 when Nixon became the first president in history to resign his office. Think about it: Since the mid 70s we have been almost exclusively focused inwards. Our national goal has become personal aggrandizement rather than a sense of national purpose. Our current president used the heinous assault of 9/11/01 to carry out a personal vendetta rather than to build a strong international coalition to both root out the terrorists who planned and executed this attack and to ameliorate the conditions that gave rise to these people in the first place.

We are now rapidly becoming mired in another Vietnam. Just this week we saw our troop strength in that country increase again. We are not moving towards the exit in Iraq...we are moving deeper and deeper into the quicksand. We are laying the foundation for a generations long conflict with the Moslem world. These are a people who remember the Crusades as if they happened last week.

'Nough! I have to call it a night...besides, I could write more than most would want to read on this subject. Chaikin is so right on this.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005