Reading the op-ed piece, it is quite apparent that Glavin is an anti-war activist, bemoaning the fact that some anti-war protests got little press coverage. Never does the author trouble himself with the possibility that Iraq is not Indochina redux, for that would surely spoil all the fun. Look at me mommy, I'm on TV, protesting the war just like the 1960's. If wishes were horses, Mr. Glavin, then anti-war protestors would ride. Claiming that today's war is a repeat of the recent past does not make it so.
History does not begin when we come into being. Vietnam is not the only war that Americans have fought, yet it has become the standard by which Iraq is judged. You want bogged down? Read George Washington's thoughts on the morass that he was mired in, long before any of us were born. The United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and again in New York City, but the anti-war movement does not make an analogy between the two because that does not fit in with the Vietnam Revisited hypothesis.
If we were not in Iraq, they like to claim, then all those people in New Orleans would have been spared. But if Ray Nagin had evacuated all those people on the school buses when the storm was coming; well, no one wants to criticize him when it is so much more delightful to blame Bush and Iraq.
Really stretching the point, Glavin tries to tie in Watergate with the prosecutorial fiasco of the Scooter Libby indictment. No brass ring on this go-round, however, because the two cases are radically different. As for the second grand jury that was convened, it was not set up to get Cheney, as much as the anti-war crew longs for Mr. Cheney's departure. The bombshell case turned out to be a bit of a dud, and Bob Woodward's recent disclosure further waters down the case. Rather than Watergate, we are seeing an increasingly lame issue that begins to look like Washington gossip run amok.
Listen carefully. That Bob Dylan song you hear is coming from a car commercial or an advertisement for Victoria's Secret. The Sixties are gone these past forty years, and while the times are a'changing, we have to change our tactics to get to where we want to be. Buried in the past, the anti-war folks are not taken seriously, any more than the retro fashions that reflect the style of the Sixties. Think outside the box? Boxed in by a desire to relive the hey-day of a more radical era, those who exist in the past are going to be left behind, to listen to their old vinyl albums and reminisce about the good old days, when Bob Dylan was singing about things that mattered.
They may not be Bob Dylan, but Nizlopi has put out a song that is worth hearing - and the video is a delight
">JCB Song
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