Our economy, our entire material culture really, is a tower with a roof of solid gold, built on a foundation of balloons and soap bubbles. Now we're supposed to be surprised that it's collapsing.
You probably don't remember this, but for years and years and years, nobody called what happened in VietNam a war. "No no," they'd say. "It wasn't a war, it couldn't be; America doesn't lose wars." No, it was just a conflict. The VietNam Conflict. Isn't that nice? Nice.
I wonder when we'll stop calling this mess in Iraq a "war"? We're not winning anything there, and we never will, because of course it's not a war, it's an occupation.
Why didn't we call our engagement in SE Asia a 'war'? Lots of reasons: we had just recently fought a real war with real enemies (WWII) and the pain of loss was still tangible; we were still mired down in Korea (that other 'conflict'); we had just suffered a series of horrible tragedies (all the assassinations of the '60's- JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, plus the attempts on George Wallace and others); ...but primarily because it just wasn't war, and we knew it. It was an occupation, plain and simple (and that's what all those Hippie protests were about- not anti-war: anti-occupation).
On this day in 1838, in response to what he termed "open and avowed defiance of the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this State,” Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs declared that “... the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description." This came three days after disaffected church leaders Thomas Marsh and Orson Hyde attested in an affidavit to Joseph Smith’s intention to conquer the world. Theodore Roosevelt was born on this day in 1858, and John Cleese was born in 1939.
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