Commentary

Love without grammar

An ode to my mom.


A plastic menagerie welcomes you to the Caswell home.

First you get a warning. Two plastic geese flank the doorway, one dressed like a pilgrim in a top-hat and buckled shoes, the other dressed like an Indian, with two black braids and a beaded suede dress. Thanksgiving is just three weeks away, after all. As they do every season, gnomes lead you up the driveway, and plastic beavers and squirrels welcome you throughout the lawn.

However, you still have no clue what is about to greet you on the other side of the door, for it is a surprise every time.

Your mother opens the door. Seeing you, she lets out a shriek of joy, breaks into a huge smile, and throws open her arms to hug you. You lower yourself to hug her and notice the orange lipstick on her teeth. You feel rotten for noticing orange lipstick on the teeth of a woman who has spent her whole life loving you.  

Behind her, domestic Disneyland awaits.  It is a full-on assault of the senses. A cursory inventory reveals: five monkey Beanie Babies, each wearing a hat; dozens of photos of you and your siblings dating from 1968 to the present; commemorative plates of Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, and the cast of Little House on the Prairie; cookie jars in the form of a cow, a goose, a pig, and a fat chef, which, when opened, moo, quack, oink, and belch, respectively; a framed photo of you at age four on a pony at Busch Gardens next to a framed photo of you at age 30 on an elephant in Thailand; fake flowers draping nearly everything, including candlesticks, the window valance, and dining room hutch; your late grandmother’s ash tray that is shaped like a toilet and says, “rest your tired ash;” a toy train that runs around an elaborate village that includes, among its buildings, a replica of Graceland; a clock that has, instead of numbers, birds that chirp every hour on the hour; a clock that has trains, again instead of numbers, that whistle in a similar fashion; and, last but not least, a life-size statue of the backside of a child in the corner, arms raised over eyes as if counting in a game of hide-and-seek.

A goose wears a pilgrim’s clothing.  

You are in a mecca of misplaced apostrophes. Your brother’s first woodshop project hangs above the door: “The Caswell’s, Welcome to Our Home.” A statue of an Italian pizza chef holds a chalkboard where tonight’s menu is written: “hamburger’s.” Holding up your third grade class picture on the fridge, a magnet confirms: “If mommy says no, ask the grandparent’s.” There is no grammar here, only love, only the efforts of your mother to make every inch of this house feel like home.

A bevy of signs implores you to join in the sentiment. “Bless this home,” one sign demands, addressing no one in particular. “Spread some smile, trade some cheer, let’s be happy while we’re here,” commands another.

You recall how, when you lived here, you were completely miserable — despite the pleas on the wall, despite your mother’s best efforts.

The writer on an elephant at age 30, on a pony at age four.

In the bathroom, the tone is different, less demanding. “Be a sweetie and wipe the seatie,” politely requests the sign above the toilet. Next to the sink, fancy bars of soap in various shapes and colors collect dust. One of them your mother saved from the Waldorf Astoria, where six years ago you treated your parents to a room when they came to visit you in New York. Your mother hated the city, but gleefully declared, “I can’t believe this is my life!” when she caught a first glimpse of the hotel lobby.

Back in the kitchen, your mother tries to feed you but, to her dismay, there is nothing she can give you that you would want to eat. Her cupboard food arsenal is stocked with giant containers of Oreos, Doritos, and marshmallows bought in bulk at a discount food club. You open her freezer to find “family-size” trays of taquitos, gallons of Neopolitan ice cream, and boxes of pepperoni pizza rolls. You remember how, as a child, your friends would come over to gorge on what they called “junk food,” but you just thought that this was how everyone ate.  

You wonder how you ever got any nutrition and conclude that you owe at least one full inch of your 5’5” frame to Fruit Loops.  

Declining your mother’s best attempt at getting you a diet “pop,” you ask for water instead. Your mother hands you the water in a glass marked “Hard Rock Café, Savannah Georgia, New Years 2000.” Your mother has never been to Savannah, Georgia, or a Hard Rock Café anywhere, but bought the glass for 99 cents at a discount closeout store.

There is no grammar at our home, only love.

You survey the situation, its stockpile of stuffed animals, photos of you and your siblings, and value-size bags of potato chips. You wonder where all this stuff came from and whether your mother is an unwitting poster child for the global economy. The house really does appear to have enough to keep an entire Chinese village occupied in sweatshop labor year-round. If you were to find the worker who sewed the tiny cowboy hat your mother lovingly placed on her fifth Beanie Baby monkey and told him the final destination of the fruit of his labor, he would not believe you. He might even get mad at the injustice of it all — that someone would spend an entire U.S. dollar on something as frivolous as a toy monkey’s hat that he made while sewing in some sweaty factory 12 hours a day, seven days a week, on a $17 monthly salary.  But then, if he met your mother — met her and hugged her and saw the orange lipstick on her teeth — he couldn’t stay mad for very long.

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Reviews

A $50 billion question

In his latest book, Bjørn Lomborg asks how we can best spend aid money.


While reading Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg’s latest book, How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, one phrase kept running through my head: better left pdf.

This short edition — just over 170 pages — is simply an abridged version of a previous book edited by Lomborg called Global Crises, Global Solutions, which chronicled the ideas that came out of the Copenhagen Consensus of 2004. And it comes off that way – as a rehash. Not that its content isn’t important, but most of the data is a few years old now.  

What is new in this version is that Lomborg asks the $50 billion question: How do we prioritize where we spend aid money in fighting global challenges? The problems he lists are extensive: climate change, disease, civil war and arms proliferation, access to education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and clean water access, subsidies and trade barriers. What should we do first? Lomborg and a pantheon of economists discuss 10 of the most pressing problems and then rank them according to “solvability.” They counsel: Fight HIV/AIDS, control malaria, liberalize global trade, and provide micronutrients to the undernourished — in that order.

While Lomborg’s instinct to create order of the chaos makes sense, the act of ranking comes off as a rather whack-a-mole approach to deep, systemic problems. And if you’re looking for substance beyond the surface, it just isn’t there. Can you seriously discuss climate change in 18 pages? Or communicable diseases in 19 pages? Given that short shrift, it’s a wonder the economists were even able to rank these issues. Overall, the result is simplistic, abrupt, and – paradoxically – unfocused for such a short book, which leaves the reader wondering if a white paper or article might have been a more appropriate vehicle for these ideas.

Another problem with the book is the almost total absence of experts and analysts from the developing world. Of the two dozen or so chapter authors and counter-argument presenters, all were attached to universities or institutions in the West, with the exception of only one or two. How much more valuable — and real — might this ranking system be if Lomborg had gone to the developing world and asked economists from those countries to identify the world’s most pressing problems and how they thought aid might be used more effectively? At the very least, this would have diversified and nuanced the rankings. At the very most, it would have been a substantially better book.

However, even these Western experts generally disagree on how aid money should be spent — highlighted in the opponent’s views sections, which follow each of the chapters. In a counter argument, Jacques van der Gaag thought the AIDS/HIV chapter fell short of addressing the needs of those who already suffer from the disease, and that basic health care services in places where AIDS is most rampant remain in such an abysmal state that simply throwing money at prevention is a stop-gap measure. David Evans, in another counter argument, doubted the figures presented and argued that there is an imperfect assessment of the burden the disease actually places on households.

Lomborg also neglects to distinguish which problems seem regional, or geographically specific, and those that are truly global in scope. For example, the control of HIV/AIDS, which is often managed regionally, tops the list as one with a “very good” chance to be adequately addressed, while global climate change initiatives are relegated to the “bad” category. And the solutions to combat each of these are overwhelmingly top-heavy and bureaucratic, rather than entrepreneurial. There is nothing in the book about bottom-of-the-pyramid approaches, private-public hybrids, or how global and local philanthropy can partner with governments and business sectors to tackle these issues.

Take the climate change initiatives, for example. The economists agree that potential solutions, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are unworkable and unrealistic, but eschew the fact that there must eventually be a new global standard for governments to enforce. They also ignore the possible impact of climate change on a whole range of issues: migration, for example, as some regions become less habitable, and the attenuating conflict, disease, or poverty that might result from this upheaval. There are, indeed, major holes in Kyoto, but by relegating it to last place in “solvability,” there is a risk that what is perhaps the largest and most damaging issue will remain ignored because of its complexity.

But let’s not get stuck on Kyoto, since it is a minor focus of this book. If Lomborg’s treatise has a redeeming quality, it is the idea that some of these global crises are not as daunting as they first appear — when painted in numbers. (What’s $50 billion when the cost of the war in Iraq could reach $1 to $2 trillion by the time all is said and done?) A mere $27 billion dollars could prevent about 28 million cases of HIV/AIDS by 2010, say the economists. Another $12 billion could address the problem of micronutrient deficiency in a majority of the developing world. The economists don’t offer an overall number for trade liberalization, but estimate its benefits could be up to $2.4 billion per year. Lastly, just $10 billion would be needed to dramatically reduce the number of cases of malaria in developing countries. Clearly, Lomborg and his cohorts should get in touch with Bill and Melinda Gates.

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“We will not be silent”


I grew up and spent all my life living under authoritarian regimes and I know that these things happen. But I’m shocked that they happened to me here, in the U.S.


—Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi architect, speaking yesterday about being asked to remove his shirt, which had the slogan “We will not be silent,” written on it in Arabic and English, when he was flying on August 12th on a JetBlue flight from New York back home to California. Although he had successfully cleared the security checkpoint at the airport, Mr. Jarrar was later approached and asked to remove and change his shirt, on the basis that several passengers — who were jittery because they could not read the Arabic on his t-shirt, regardless of the fact that the slogan was written in English and in Arabic — had asked that he change his t-shirt. Mr. Jarrar eventually wore another t-shirt, which was purchased for him at a store within JFK airport. What was  JetBlue’s response? “We’re not clear exactly what happened.”

Compounding the sheer racism and ignorance of this incident is the origin and use of the slogan, which was written bilingually on Mr. Jarrar’s t-shirt: opponents of the war and occupation in Iraq and other conflicts in the region have rallied behind the slogan “We will not be silent.” The slogan may have originated with the student resistance White Rose group, which opposed the Nazi regime in Germany and allegedly used the phrase in 1942, claiming “We will not be silent, we are your bad conscience; the White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Imprisoning religion


While the release of Bishop An is a good sign, there are six more bishops in jail… We hope that this release is not an isolated case.


— Joseph Kung, head of the U.S.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation, referring to the recent release of Bishop An Shuxin, 57, who languished for more than a decade in the Chinese prison system.

Bishop An Shuxin is an underground bishop who led some of China’s eight million Catholics, according to the Vatican’s estimate (or, by the Chinese government’s significantly more conservative count, five million believers).  In 1951 China severed ties with the Holy See, which recognizes Taiwan, to China’s great annoyance. Chinese Catholics must be members of the state-sponsored Catholic church that functions independently of the Vatican and the Pope. Bishop An Shuxin now has a permit to serve as a bishop, but he nevertheless continues to be under observation.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Political Prose

Ghosts of America past, present, and yet to come

Two articles that appeared this week are essential reading for those who want to understand the difficulties that America faces in convincing the world of the justice of its military exploits abroad — in Iraq above all.…


Two articles that appeared this week are essential reading for those who want to understand the difficulties that America faces in convincing the world of the justice of its military exploits abroad — in Iraq above all.

One, a report in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, reveals that during the Vietnam War the U.S. Army sought to discredit soldiers who reported instances of torture and mistreatment of detainees — even though the army’s own investigators found evidence of much more widespread and severe abuse. Army records compiled in the early 1970s detailed 141 instances of detainee abuse, including the use of beatings, water torture, and electric shocks. Yet few soldiers were punished even after admitting their war crimes, and none served any prison time. In one case, military investigators recommended formal charges against 22 interrogators in an intelligence unit particularly notorious for torturing prisoners. Not one was disciplined. One of the interrogators, who admitted torturing a Vietnamese man who died soon afterward, told the Times he wasn’t “ashamed” of anything he did. “I would most likely conduct myself in the same manner if placed in a Vietnam-type situation again,” he said.

The other article, which appeared in GQ magazine, is the story of Joe Darby, the soldier who first alerted authorities to detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. For having the courage to do what he felt was right, Darby has been vilified throughout the military as a traitor, scorned by members of his own family, and run out of his hometown in Maryland. “People there don’t look at the fact that I knew right from wrong,” he says. “They look at the fact that I put an Iraqi before an American.”

That’s the crux of the problem. Whether decades ago in Vietnam, or today in Iraq, we see the same pattern: ends justifying unsavory means, expediency trumping ethics. America is rightly focused on promoting its own interests, but in Vietnam and now Iraq it has gone to the extreme of compromising its fundamental principles. Those who tortured prisoners in Vietnam and Iraq clearly believed they were doing what was best for their country. But the zeal to defend America from its enemies ultimately became a zeal for the most abhorrent cruelty.

Why does it matter if American soldiers bend the rules? In today’s world, the conflicts that America and its allies face are increasingly global in scope, and ideological in nature. They’re also harder to win. America no longer has the luxury of stamping out another nation’s conventional forces with its superior military might, as it did in the World Wars of the last century. The fighting today is asymmetrical, the endurance of guerrilla armies endless, and the conditions of victory almost impossible to attain. (Consider, for instance, that Hezbollah can plausibly claim victory in Lebanon after weeks of devastating strikes by Israel.) The key to victory under these conditions lies not just in a nation’s strength of arms, but also in its ability to stake out the moral high ground. America has failed to do that in Iraq. It has failed to present a compelling ideal that can persuade the American people to persevere in the struggle, and dissuade people elsewhere from adopting the cause of its enemies. It has failed for various reasons, but one reason is especially striking: The torture of past and present has eroded America’s moral authority.

“If they’d really taken action about the bad apples and been honest about it,” Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert, one of the Vietnam whistleblowers, told the Times, “then they wouldn’t be arguing about Abu Ghraib and different places today.” Even if Iraq is already lost, perhaps a return to principled leadership can avert similar failures in the conflicts yet to come. Otherwise, an overzealous military and reckless leadership may bring the entire edifice of American ideals — once such a source of inspiration to the world — crashing to the ground.

—Victor Tan Chen

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Vanished first out of the box for Fox


The TV season has begun as Fox gets out of the box first with the new serial drama Vanished.  It’s a little bit CSI, with a pinch of Without a Trace and a dash of 24.  The gist of the Monday night show revolves around the disappearance of the second wife of a prominent Georgia Senator who turns out not to be who she’s pretending to be.  The pilot purposely gives out clues that seem to implicate everyone who is close to the beautiful woman named Sara, including the Senator, his kids, and even the ex-wife, who has yet to be revealed on screen.  

The stock characters include an angst-ridden FBI agent named Kelton, played by Gale Harold (Deadwood), who is trying to cope with a past botched kidnapping retrieval situation that caused the death of a young boy.  His reliable partner Lin Mei, the always-sharp Ming-Na (ER), is leaded with the task of keeping Kelton grounded.  Near the end of the pilot episode it’s revealed that Kelton had written a memo to his bosses that he was against the tactic used in the attempted retrieval of the kidnapped boy that ended in tragedy.  In a cheesy bit of dialogue, the Senator, who unleashes this information, tells the agent that he doesn’t want him to write any memos, just do what he thinks will find his wife.

Vanished was created by a veteran of CSI, Josh Berman, and partially executive-produced by feature director Mimi Leder (The Peacemaker, Deep Impact), who also directed the pilot and seems to try too hard to grab the audience with clichéd plot introductions instead of building with interesting characters we haven’t seen before.  Shows become hits when the audience becomes enamored by the characters and invites them into their homes week after week, such as with other Fox dramas like the already mentioned 24, House, and the surprise hit Prison Break, which proceeds Vanished on Fox’s primetime schedule.  

Not to poo poo on the casting director, but none of the actors stand out, at least not yet.  The most intriguing character is the kidnapped victim herself, played by Joanne Kelly, in a quietly subdued but compelling performance.  The only problem is Sara vanishes during the first half-hour of the pilot and only reappears in flashbacks or snippets of imagery.  It is my hope that in subsequent episodes, she isn’t relegated to a ghost character, much like Laura Palmer, the victim at the central core of the bizarre, early 90s, David Lynch series Twin Peaks.  She needs to be front and center and a key figure in the dramatic action.

Plot wise, they have concocted enough twists to rival the real-life JonBenet Ramsey murder case.  Whether they can sustain this form of storytelling without becoming maudlin, trite, or repetitive, like ABC’s Lost has successfully done over the last two seasons, is yet to be determined.  They were successful in keeping my attention for the full hour and making me want to return next week to see how the case is moving, though Twin Peaks was able to string out Who Killed Laura Palmer for a whole season (but the weirdness factor wore off by season two and the show died a slow, ugly death).  I also hope the producers and Fox execs aren’t just trying to duplicate 24’s success by trying to force us to fall in love with the FBI agent character, à la Jack Bauer, so that we will continue year after year to tune into his out-of-the-box ways of finding missing persons.  I call it the MacGyver Factor, where you love a character no matter how convoluted the situations are that they get themselves mixed up in.  It has been critical to hit shows of the past such as The Fugitive, The X Files, and of course, the namesake MacGyver, always getting himself out of trouble with a stick of gum and a paperclip.  

Vanished is well-written, well-produced, and warrants at least a sampling for a few episodes.  You’ll either get bored quickly or the show will draw you in each week with anticipation.  Given that it takes 24’s timeslot for the fall, what do you have to lose as you’re already used to watching something at this time anyway?  So take a chance on Vanished until Jack is back in January.

Vanished, Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Fox (check local listings).

—Rich Burlingham

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(Non)Thinking people


It is official. Today at 8:57 a.m. it was empirically proven that there is no correlation between intelligence and the capital letters postdating one’s name. In the university setting and the world over, there is a gross assumption that an individual’s smarts can be equated with the prestige of his/her major, profession, or number of degrees held. The majority of the people who believe this have the Ms, Ds, PHs, Js, and BAs after their names and send their children to college, perpetuating a self-fulfilling societal farce that masks pedanticity as intelligence.  

My appointment is at 8:15 a.m. Blood pressure, no pain, a solid temperature, (and) I am ushered into the exam room. Crappy cologne first, then the doctor himself; sporting a navy blue polo shirt with vertical rows of sailing flags, a detective’s moustache, and high school county championship ring, he asks me if I am ready.

I am as ready as I am going to be.

He escorts me to another room where he confuses my right foot for my left foot several times, finally drooling iodine all over my ingrown toenail. Running before walking, he now puts on his exam gloves. Clumsily, he fills the syringe and proceeds to jab my foot six times, obviously unsure about what he is doing, like a toddler who struggles to play with a toy that is meant for a child three years older, a Looney Tunes character trying to blow out its tail.

His plastic hospital I.D. card shimmers on the counter: First Name, Last Name, M.D.

Twenty minutes and my toe is numb. Hunting for the scissors and gauze, he puts gloves on and does the procedure. At one point he yelps, “Wow! Look at all the pus,” the medical professional response to an infected wound. Gloves bloody, he pours through every cabinet in the room, wiping blood on all the handles and some of the cabinet doors. My toe hurts, but I pinch myself to make sure this is actually happening. A doctor wiping blood all over a room, surely unsanitary and surely an 11-year-old knows not to do that.

He can’t find the bottle of alcohol he is looking for, so he picks up a can that is lying around. Holding it upside down he flips it in the air, displaying that he’s still got his high school finesse, reads it, chuckles, proud of himself, and squirts some white soap on my foot.

No, not actually empirical, but telling. This man has being practicing medicine for decades. He told me so. He has those prestigious, awe-inspiring initials after his name, yet he is one of the least competent individuals I have ever met.

Coming off a week of orientation for incoming freshman where I met countless pre-med students, students who want to be lawyers and joint J.D./Ph.D.s, today was a harrowing experience that typifies a crippling lack of creativity within the adolescent/young professional mindset. Intellect, pursuit out of curiosity and not a teleological, career-obsessed, money-making impetus for learning, is lost. Students care about their grades but not their minds. The majority of undergraduates obsess over internships, jobs, grades, and graduate school before they ask questions that might make them better writers, thinkers, or more holistic young adults. Such is the climate of college campuses today, and it is blinding, rendering most students unable to function in non-traditional capacities and non-traditionally in professional careers. Able to pay for Kaplan and get into med school sure, but to think for themselves, take a risk, read a book that is not assigned or on Oprah’s book club list, no. Worst of all, this literally mind-numbing set of expectations has become the norm — the laudable norm, the revered doctor, the brilliant lawyer; you must be smart if you have a Ph.D.

My toe knows better.

—Aaron Charlop-Powers

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The cost of war


$419 billion: Requested budget allocation in 2006 for the Department of Defense.  This figure excludes funds requested for Homeland Security and other operations.

$230 million: Sum pledged by President Bush for aid to Lebanon, which was devastated during the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah. The newly promised aid, which will be used to reconstruct Lebanese infrastructure and homes, bolsters America’s previous meager offer of $50 million.

$50 billion: Money spent on rebuilding Lebanon — particularly its roads, power lines, medical facilities, airports, and sports locations — during the past ten years.  Lebanese infrastructure lay in ruins after the brutal 15-year-long civil war, which began in 1975, destroyed the former banking and mercantile hub of the Middle East. Lebanon is now again in ruins.

$2.5 billion: Lebanese government’s estimate of the cost of damage to the nation’s infrastructure after Israel’s most recent war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

—Mimi Hanaoka

  

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Political Prose

Allen’s bully pulpit

You have to feel a little sorry for George “Monkey Boy” Allen, the Virginia senator running for reelection who is touted as a strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. His White House ambition…


You have to feel a little sorry for George “Monkey Boy” Allen, the Virginia senator running for reelection who is touted as a strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. His White House ambitions just got YouTubed. A wildly popular video clip shows Allen at a recent campaign rally, where he twice called a volunteer of Indian descent from his opponent’s campaign a “macaca” — a word that is either an ethnic slur for Africans, or the name of a genus of Old World monkeys — and then proceeded to tell the college student, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!” (The student, S.R. Sidarth, was born and raised in Virginia.)

Calling someone a monkey isn’t exactly presidential-sounding, so Allen and his campaign staff have been quick to deny any racist, derogatory, or anti-primate intent in his comments toward Sidarth. Allen speculated whether “macaca” was a play on Sidarth’s hairstyle, a Mohawk (Sidarth says it’s actually a mullet). At another point he insisted that he didn’t know what the word meant when he said it, which actually makes Allen sound rather presidential, given the current commander-in-chief’s struggles with the English language.

Allen also gave an apology, of sorts. He told a reporter, “I do apologize if he’s offended by that” — which in monkey-speak apparently means, “He shouldn’t be offended that I called him a monkey, but I’ll apologize anyway because I want to be president.”

Regardless of what Allen meant by “macaca,” there’s something unashamedly cruel about his behavior at the rally. Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. Allen is the grownup version of a schoolyard bully, singling out the kid with the funny pants (monkey pants?) for ridicule while he and his cronies chortle smugly. You half-expect him to start cracking jokes about flatulence next. Do we want this man as our president?

—Victor Tan Chen

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Good morning, this ain’t Vietnam


The current situation in Iraq has been drawing comparisons to the Vietnam War for some time now, and one can’t really argue with the fact that there are similarities.  From the original goals of instilling new governments in unstable areas to the enemies’ reactions in the form of dangerous insurgencies that we don’t seem to have the will power to stop, the two wars have been taking similar courses since their inceptions.  

What’s slightly disappointing about the way Vietnam is often brought up is the context under which it’s being done.  People aren’t making this comparison to give our children a history lesson or to enlighten us as American citizens.  The word “Vietnam“ conjures up certain images and thoughts about the way the U.S. government handled a foreign war, the way our people responded to it domestically, and what happened when these two philosophies clashed.  

Comparing what’s going on now to a war without a resolution is ultimately meaningless and, more directly, useless.  Vietnam wasn’t a success and, if 30 years later we’re still making the same mistakes with no plausible recommendations or answers, then the left, the right, the center, and every other opinionated faction still hasn’t learned anything from the war in question.

Anybody can look back at past mistakes and point out that they’re mistakes.  It’s a weak argument.  OK, so it’s another Vietnam… What are you going to do about it?

By referring to “Our Vietnam” or “Bush’s Vietnam,” people are taking a good idea and turning it into an ineffective partisan issue.  The U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War ended over thirty years ago.  Maybe there are people out there searching for some vestige of this past era, but there’s no longer a purpose in making comparisons which at this point serve as little more than political rhetoric.  

In terms of the polarizing message people are trying to get across with a Vietnam comparison, this isn’t another Vietnam.  There’s no draft, and most young people out there don’t know what’s going on in Iraq and probably don’t care.  So as far as it being a culturally divisive issue on the home front, it’s not.  

The comparison is still an interesting one because another debacle is happening so soon after the original, but the fact that it was allowed to happen again is something nobody should be proud of.  Since we do live in the year 2006 and not 1968, some of our leaders might want to consider figuring out how to fix “Our Iraq” rather than making sure that we all understand it’s becoming another Vietnam.  

Finding a parallel in a war most people have since recognized to be a failure militarily, politically, and strategically is a good reminder of what can happen when foreign policy goes wrong, but without a solution to how that war or this war should be handled, its effects seem to be intended to produce wins at the polls, not on the battlefield.

—Mike Robustelli

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