Watching Ken Burns Vietnam

What can you say. Go backwards from the wall and those 58,000 names. All those people who were just like you and me. All those people who never came back. And then you go back into the jungle and watch them die and see their wounds and hear their mothers and sisters and wives talk. And then you see the men now talking about what happened and they are back there. And it goes on for two hours every night and sometimes you drift off but you want to stay in there.

Kent state. The students who are shot down. The guardsmen who shot them. The people who spat on the vets when they came home. The vets who came home and thought about killing themselves. The POWs who somehow survived to return to their homes and meet their children on the tarmac who are six or seven years older. The solider who bends down to kiss the ground.

And everyone cries. They cry when they get the telegrams telling them their son died and they cry forty years later talking about it. The Viet Cong cry. The US soldiers cry. The families cry. And finally by the end you realize it is a living thing. The Vietnam War will remain real until everyone is gone and there will just be that wall of 58,000 names.

Then it will be up to us to remember. 

The Cautionary Tale of Ken Burns Prohibition

You cant' help but finish watching all three nights of Ken Burn's Prohibition because it is so damn interesting in terms of what is going on today. You have this radical element called the Drys in congress who are supported by a radical element in rural Protestant America that basically wants to  take away the right to drink from the immigrants in the cities. Then it spreads out into a moral crusade for God and country and an amendment is passed that doesn't represent the country but goes through nonetheless and the country goes dry for thirteen years.

And because of the Drys America descends into lawlessness. Capone and the boys fire it up and cities like Chicago become like the Wild West. Speakeasys and stills pop up all over the country and people go blind from bad alcohol and are shot by government enforcers of the Volstead Act that is radical all in itself with prison terms for even knowing somebody is selling booze and not turning them in. Personal freedom takes a severe hit and the country is consumed with this war on drinking while steaming toward the Great Depression.

You certainly see the parallels with zealots in government today who say they know what is best for our country now. Like the Drys these fiscal warriors do not bend. Not an inch. The Drys would never accept even a modification to Prohibition that would allow people to drink beer and wine. It was all or none. Sound familiar. We cannot extend our debt ceilings or get just about anything through congress because of an all or none faction. The same moral crusaders invoke God and Country and speak of our children as the victims. The Drys cried out with the same "its for the children."

And of course it ended. The very intransigence of the Drys undid them. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 and the Drys vanished from the political landscape. Everyone was in agreement, Prohibition was a disaster for the country. It left us with organized crime, maimed people, dead people, and a collective hangover to the folly of enforced moralizing by  government decree.

It is our cautionary tale.

Rocket Man ...a Catcher in the Rye for the Forty Somethings