They Marched into Sunlight is worth reading, especially for people like me who are interested in the Vietnam War but too young to remember it. Maraniss tells two main stories, based on interviews: an ambush of US soldiers in Vietnam and an antiwar demonstration gone wrong on the U. of Wisconsin campus, both of which occurred in October 1967. Maraniss expresses an affectionate acceptance of his (non-fictional) characters that reminded me of War and Peace, and made it unusually easy to identify with most of them. The two mains stories are, as Walter Isaacson’s jacket blurb notes, “set against the backdrop of the helpless agony that is engulfing the White House of Lyndon Johnson.” Unlike some other readers, though, I can’t say that my empathy extended to Lyndon Johnson. I kept thinking, pull the troops out if you’re so upset.
While I was reading They Marched I went to see The Fog of War, the documentary film about Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara. The movie was interesting but kind of creepy and unpleasant, with McNamara spinning his life story and, it seemed, trying to make himself appear wise, erudite and philosophical. At one point he recounts traveling to Vietnam in the early ’90s and meeting with one of the former leaders of the Communist forces. A heated debate ensues about cause of the war: the Vietnamese leader claims that his side fought for independence against imperialist foreigners, and McNamara claims that US war leaders fought to keep Vietnam free from the rule of a Soviet and Chinese puppet government. The Vietnamese replies something like “you must never have opened a history book, since Vietnam fought China for centuries.” The audience laughs.
My Former Sec of Defense Went to Cuba and All I Got Was This Lousy Near-Apocalypse
McNamara describes going to Cuba for a Cuban Missile Crisis villain reunion. Sure enough, the incompetents almost ended civilization in a nuclear war in the early ’60s. I’m gonna go out on a limb here & opine that the wooly-headed liberals are right on this one: the citizens of all 9 axis-of-apocalypse countries should get organized and insist that “their” governments destroy those useless inherently terrorist weapons. And let’s do it quickly before we’re too far along in the post-post-Cold War era, and the loonies think up a new excuse to keep them.
As I mentioned previously (“Sold Short), while the US government was busy ignoring prominent Saudi terrorists in California (& what’s the deal with this Saudi government-funded San Diego-based bigamist /alleged terror financier with a penchant for international travel?) and promoting jihad in the Balkans, Antiwar.com was providing (absolutely free) warnings of the domestic terrorist threat. While the SEC was busy chasing a Jersey teen short-seller Manuel Asensio was uncovering deception in the markets and posting the info (absolutely free) on his website. Here’s another one: while the US military was invading Iraq to stop an invisible wmd program, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (May 2003 issue) warned the world of a real program by re-publishing Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan’s centrifuge sales brochure. This is the same Khan that President Bush shielded from US intelligence, according to a BBC report: “CIA and other agents told BBC they could not investigate the spread of ‘Islamic Bombs’ through Pakistan because funding appeared to originate in Saudi Arabia.”
(The Pakistan proliferation double-standard is another example of the Axis of Allies phenomenon I’ve commented on before, though perhaps Axis of Bait-and-Switch would be more accurate. According to a UPI survey, the vast majority of the terror suspects being illegally held by the US military in Cuba are citizens of nations allied with the United States. 160 of them are Saudis and 82 of them are Pakistanis, while only a single prisoner is an Iraqi, and there are no Iranians or North Koreans.)
Of course there’s no such thing as a free scoop, which is why Antiwar.com has periodic pledge weeks and can always use a contribution. Here’s another good reason to give: it might make you happier. According to a recently-published book, You Don’t Have to be Rich, giving to charity is one of the five habits statistically linked to feelings of financial satisfaction. And while we’re on the subject, a good book about personal finance for hard-working high-earners is Your Money or Your Life.
For self-directed stock market investors, The Battle for Investment Survival is a fun read by a veteran trader, Gerald M. Loeb. It was originally published in 1935, and has that era’s fear of risk. Loeb advises that we try to view our stocks as if we don’t own them; any that we wouldn’t buy, we should sell. This is meant to overcome the “endowment effect,” a term (from the “new science” of behavioral economics) that describes the quirk of human nature in which we value something that we already own more than we would value the same thing if we didn’t own it.