Anyone catch this?
(Anyone visited the Vietnam Memorial?)

SF State: Hayakawa rippin the speaker wires off a sound truck; Ed Meese talkin about advising Gov Reagan to send the CHP to State to protect its new 'conservative' (Read: anti- the antiwar 'mob') Chancellor, etc. 'Ol Spiro talkin 'bout them nattering nabobs of negativism (not long before resigning over some graft.) Meese later had a similar problem, but I don't recall how that turned out. He's not in jail now though, IIRC.

MLK said in '65, My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Pity that most-all here Missed all that exciting stuff - maybe scanned a few soundbites of our 24/7 daily fare, in some archive for a class? Hey.. there were, in fact: some actual street barricades! Some got heads cracked, some maimed - a few deaths. Kent State + callow-youth National Guard. Nothing like 'Nam, of course.

Reminded me of how many, and how massive - had to become the public demonstrations before the likes of Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara et al would move an iota from Staying The Course - towards ceasing the slaughter. That toll (just-US is all We count, natch) reached 58,nnn; don't recall % as occurred during the throes of getting-ready-to Start to actually Get Out of that charnel house.

Nixon kept the pot boiling, (thanks to the assassination of RFK == only way he got in, in '68) -- for ~5 years. All that napalm, Agent Orange, megatons of CO2 producing detonations: signifying, producing, improving.. absolutely Nothing.



In the newest, daily Hotting-Up charnel house it's a mere 19xx dead + the thousands of permanently-maimed (just Our boys And girls, of course).

But.. it seems that the $$-cost of the recent water unpleasantness is the larger driver of Negative Ratings on the cabal: than any appreciation of the direction that the Insurrection is heading - some say has already arrived --> the Iraq Civil War.

(And there're few of those alleged $100Bs for schools, infrastructure (blown-up then restarted) etc. as are not being spent mostly, now - to 'train Iraqis' to [Hah] Impose Democracy.) Amidst the 3- 4-Way? w/Kurds irreconcilable God supporters with centuries of traditional, lethal polarization.



Will many be able to afford the gas / fare for 1M or so walking bodies in DC, this time around? Will it take 5 years, again - or 5 months?

1968 + 40 = 2008
Gimme 50:1 odds, and I'll bet $20 on Impeachment(s) or resignations by mid-2008. (However the 'withdrawal' is choreographed, in Save-Face-space.)



(Of course I ain't prescient - can't estimate when? how? the wanna-be martyrs we've manufactured (of those multiple surviving relatives and clan-members) - will hit a ground-zero or three, here in the Fatherland. Doubt Lloyds will take any bets on that one, either. Yet.)



Perhaps I'm being impatient.
Unlike Klaatu, I don't live on a planet where, We've abolished stupidity. (But I'm sure that Patricia Neal's character really wanted to join him in that saucer..)
Robert Wise (director of Day the Earth Stood Still) died recently.
Are all our smarter Old Ones dropping like flies - or does it just seem so?