The Trouble
With Electing Caesar
By John Chuckman
21 August, 2004
Countercurrents.org
What
shameful accusations are being tossed around: an ambitious, privileged
young John Kerry, who spent a brief stint in Vietnam beefing up the
hero section of his resume, never actually did some of the things he
claims or at least didn't do them under the circumstances he claims.
Since his heroic deeds included chasing after a wounded man and shooting
him in the back and skippering a machine gun-mounted speed boat that
ran up and down rivers shooting peasants desperate enough to appear
in their own fields, there is reason for concern.
Polls apparently
show the large group of undecided voters already having second thoughts
about Kerry. You can't elect a man Emperor who distorts the truth about
things like that. Much better if he actually did them.
I only wish undecided
voters had the same doubts about the other pathetic candidate, but that
is expecting too much. Bush has demonstrated he could overcome a background
of avoiding Vietnam for no reason other than to carry on his happy games
as frat boy, stock fraud, and drug addict, eventually to rise to the
Imperial Purple and lie his way into killing tens of thousands of people.
If I'm not mistaken, those are precisely the qualities expected of a
contemporary American Emperor.
If all the men sent
to Vietnam behaved the way Kerry is said to have behaved, how would
the mission have succeeded? How would you have managed the awesome task
of killing about three million people? How would you have managed to
leave their country looking, in the words of a contemporary witness,
like craters on the moon? How would you have managed to saturate their
soil and aquifers with toxic chemicals?
How would you ever
have played that magnificent exit scene, as the last helicopters left
the roof of the fortress embassy, with Vietnamese servants and supporters
literally having their hands ripped from the landing skids, abandoned
to those they had been told for ten years were their deadly enemies?
Or the scene with a load of kidnapped Vietnamese babies killed in the
crash of an American cargo plane, an event one editorial cartoonist
depicted as a huge plane dropping babies instead of bombs?
Perhaps Americans
should dismiss as frivolous charges that Kerry's three Purple Hearts
were earned by such mundane events as bumping his head on the boat's
dashboard and focus on the big issues like whether he deserved a Silver
Star for shooting someone in the back. He does seem the kind of man
who bumps his head a lot on dashboards, whether going out to shoot people
in the Mekong Delta or to wake-board off Cape Cod. Still, I know from
old veterans of World War II, including one awarded a Purple Heart,
that the medals sometimes were dished out with the K-rations. I guess
that's why some states actually have special license plates with "Purple
Heart Winner" emblazoned on them. There's that many of them around
laying claim to their fifteen minutes of fame.
When Kerry isn't
photographed earnestly saluting or jabbing his finger in a bad parody
of John Kennedy during the Cold War, he's photographed being thoughtful
next to some symbol of war. Clearly, Americans just can't get enough
of this kind of thing. A picture appeared in some newspapers recently
of Kerry contemplating some state or local Vietnam memorial, one with
a Vietnam-era helicopter atop a pillar. This particular memorial had
no bronze casts of Vietnamese hands being yanked off the helicopter's
skids, nor did it have a statue of desperate Vietnamese prisoners being
hurled from its door. There's just a desolate-looking helicopter over
some plaques commemorating some of the people who might have died helping
do those things.
There should be
at least one memorial somewhere in the country with a statue of that
cargo plane dropping babies. It might provide Americans a bit more to
think about. Considering the Iraqi babies mangled by cluster bombs,
Americans clearly haven't thought enough about Vietnam, at least not
about the lessons that matter. That certainly includes Kerry, who voted
to support the low-key suburban psychopath who now prances around in
Imperial Purple.