Slouching Towards Kabul

 

Slouching Towards Kabul: Echoes of Saigon.

I had a long talk with my lad yesterday-well, I always think of him as a lad although he's on the dark side of fifty. He's also a retired military combat medic, veteran of two tours in Assghanistan and he wonders as do (I think) all veterans and many Americans:

 

"What the fuck was it for? Why did our friends die? Will anyone remember the Afghan kids we patched up who picked up unexploded Russ ordnance disguised as toys and pens? Will anyone remember the Afghan cop who forgot himself and rumbled back like a man to the talib, and whose brother was kidnaped and had his head mounted on a pike for the Americans to see?"

 

For those of us drifting into old age I had an awful twinge as I recalled the photo of people on the roof of the embassy in Saigon trying to get aboard the last Huey. The veterans of that war asked the same question: "What was it for? Why did our friends die?" but they came back to an America so culturally adrift and doped up that they shamed those who wore the uniform. And as it turned out their righteous anger was turned to political advantage and directed, not against the generals and the politicians, those who sent the boys there, but against those who marched in the streets against the war in the first place.

 

And yet, as this was all taking place, pop culture wallowed in prurient tropes of GI Joe toys and Rambo flicks, making the vets out to be homicidal crazies running amok in a thousand nameless jungles, wasting gooks and going psycho with belt fed M60s fired from the hip.

 

In reality those veterans were just like you and me except they were people who were tasked with a lousy job for reasons nobody now believes were worthwhile, and they did it as well as they could, each according to their lights.

 

Shameful, awful times.

 

It was reminiscent of Kipling's "Tommy Atkins" where he illustrated that it was "thank you Mister Atkins when the troopship's on the tide" but the soldier couldn't even buy a beer in uniform.

 

So, as we chatted I thought about all this.

 

Uncle Sam is cutting and running. He's skipping town in the night with his carpet bag. He left a trillion dollars in blood and treasure poured out among the rocks and stones of that unforgiving place.

At one and the same time as we struggle to craft a bill to rebuild our rusting bridges and shattered highways, and we're faced with the consequences of a fifty year policy of deindustralization that has left large swathes of America penniless and crime ridden, I am quite sure that there are people in those places who are asking "Why did you do this when the need was in Detroit? Cleveland? Pittsburgh? Buffalo? Akron? Eastern Kentucky? Southwestern Virginia?"

 

Back in the early seventies I was working in an auto parts store and I met a man who said "In a future time we won't make anything we won't build anything, we won't fix anything. All we'll do is sell insurance to each other." I laughed at the time but he was quite right.

 

The problem with people who can see the future is that the rest of us cannot.

 

See, I think the two things are related and I believe firmly that the two worst policy mistakes of the 20th century-legitimating the brutal and racist kleptocracy that is China and selling out industrialized America for the crack of Milton Friedman style "free trade", Nafta style-are in some measure responsible for the hog manure pit we find ourselves wallowing in today

.

I think that the issue at its root is policy-bad policy made in Washington and in Moscow and Ottawa, in London and Paris and Kiev and Beijing and in Tokyo and in New Delhi and in Islamabad and in Istanbul, in Tel Aviv and Cairo and Algiers and Teheran and Pyongyang and Damascus and in every other damned capital in the known world, made by people who either can't see the ten-twenty-thirty year consequences of their bad decisions or don't give, as my brother in law used to say, a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut for the consequences.

 

The Vietnam veterans knew this. But as they have aged out and died off the lessons were forgotten in everyone's rush to be dot com billionaires Jeff Bezos style and devil take the hindmost.

 

As Gordon Gecko said "Greed is good." But that's short term. 

 

Crack is good too. But it has consequences 

 

And here we are. As Yogi Berra called it, 'deja vu all over again'.

 

I can only hope that the veterans take this to heart and realize that America is a work in progress, and that their experiences and loss translate into saner and better policy for the people who aren't even born yet.

Or else we'll get to do it all again thirty years from now.