The Homecoming

[dweller]

B Y H A L C R O W T H E R

With the world watching anxiously, and often with horror, Americans
have flailed and fumbled our way to the end of one of the most critical
presidential campaigns in the nation's history. Apparently the strategy
was to bury the electorate under such a landslide of irrelevancy,
pseudodrama, mischief and misdirection that bewildered voters would
slip into mental gridlock and obey some Pavlovian command as simple
as a road sign. Macbeth's idiot never told a tale that seemed to signify
so little. To keep your head in such a rout of reason, you have to ignore
nine-tenths of the media menu and somehow view the whole carnival
from a great distance, a great height, an angel's eye view of democracy
(75 percent of Americans believe in angels).

Up here circling, you miss a lot, of
course. But every so often your
eagle/angel eye will settle on the one
thing that illuminates, the thing that at street level, amidst the sound and
fury, you might easily have missed. Months ago I came upon a story
datelined Hanoi, Vietnam. It described the homecoming of Nguyen Cao
Ky, once known as "the playboy prime minister" of South Vietnam.
Remember Ky the flashy dresser, the handsome one with the
mustache? Twenty-nine years after the fall of Saigon, which he fled by
commandeering a helicopter and landing it on an American aircraft
carrier, Ky--now a California businessman--returned to his native city
at the invitation of the Communist authorities.

An avid golfer, Ky had flown to Hanoi from Ho Chi Minh City
(formerly Saigon), where he played a couple of rounds with the city's
recent mayor, Thanh Vo Viet. In Hanoi, his warm welcome included
tee times at a new people's course near the capital and a reunion with
two high school friends, college professors who had stayed in the North
and remained loyal to Ho Chi Minh. The old friends and onetime
enemies reminisced about their reckless student days; they ate ice
cream and laughed about a fat lady who used to sell them ices from a
cart on the street. They were ... well ... cute.

Ky's sentimental journey was vigorously opposed by some members of
the Vietnamese exile community in the United States. The Bush
administration, deaf not only to the lessons but to the ironies of history,
encouraged Ky to go. So there in the once-occupied country the
once-bitter enemies played golf and ate ice cream over the bones of
58,000 Americans and countless more Vietnamese. And which sane
person would now argue that those deaths accomplished anything
whatsoever, that their sacrifice left America one micro-unit safer or
stronger or more admired in the world? Who would venture to cry, "Not
in vain!"? And which sane person, contemplating Iraq, doubts that
someday Allawi and al-Sadr or their surrogates will play a round of golf
or share a tender goat (in the dining room, I mean) over the bones of
another multitude of Americans, another generation of soldiers doomed
to perish pointlessly because their leaders were stubborn and dishonest?


more here

long but worth it.
dp

[bemildred]

1. Bravo. Could not be said better.

And which sane person would now argue that those deaths accomplished
anything whatsoever, that their sacrifice left America one micro-unit
safer or stronger or more admired in the world? Who would venture to
cry, "Not in vain!"? And which sane person, contemplating Iraq, doubts
that someday Allawi and al-Sadr or their surrogates will play a round
of golf or share a tender goat (in the dining room, I mean) over the
bones of another multitude of Americans, another generation of soldiers
doomed to perish pointlessly because their leaders were stubborn and
dishonest?