I remember when saying ‘Peace now’ would get you clobbered

Turned out he’d spent a lot of time on TDY in Bangkok, in communications. TDY, or temporary duty in the U.S. military, means a temporary assignment, though there was nothing temporary about it for this guy. He spent more time in Thailand than in Vietnam, and glad of it.

I told him the truth. “I got draft number 323, so I never had to decide.”

He nodded. No hostility at all between a veteran and a draft number escapee.

No “Baby-Killer!” No “Hippie scum!” No “Get a job!” Just a quiet understanding of how it was.

It’s taken our country and the world 50 years and more than 1 million deaths to recover from our dishonest deluded catastrophe in Vietnam.

And here we are being split apart again, suffering the same symptoms of the same aborted thinking, if you can call it thinking at all, and I wager it will take us another 50 years to recover from this.

I do not for one second believe that the needlessly violent abductions of women and children by masked men on city streets, outside schools, churches and immigration courts are meant to control immigration.

They are transparent attempts to incite violence, so that the Trump administration can “justify” inflicting even more violence upon civilians in Democratic cities and states, and directing headline news away from the Fűhrer’s extortion of colleges, universities, newspapers, news stations, tech billionaires, law firms, corporations, campaign contributors and foreign governments, for the benefit of no one but himself and his schlubby family and all the sheep on the payroll who goose-step behind him toward the ovens.

Mind: I am not complaining.

I have nothing to complain about.

I live in a warm house in a safe neighborhood near Denver with a view of the Rocky Mountains. I have two big dogs and every day we walk 3 miles through an off-leash park as the sun rises over the creek.

My dogs get better medical care than billions of people in the world ever will, and are better-fed, too. So what have I got to complain about? Nothing.

OK, but … Notice that everything on the “nothing to complain about” list was just me and my dogs, and a couple of friends? Isn’t there a larger game, a better question here, involving other people: Fellow Americans.

Now, if you follow the news — to which I, as a columnist, am condemned — you’ll see that every report from the White House and Congress is based upon the theory that if we as a country want to get along, we must all lie flat on our backs, mumbling, “Yes, Sir, of course you’re right, I guess I was wrong,” no matter how blatant the lie to which we are ordered to accede.

To our fat Fűhrer, saying so much as, “Sir, I don’t think so,” is an act of treason, punishable by death.

Don’t believe me? We’ll, this month alone, our Republican Fűhrer has claimed:

• that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar snuck into America by committing incest with her brother. See the ninth paragraph in this link: “She married her brother in order to get in. Therefore, she’s here illegally. She should get the hell out. Throw her the hell out.” (In fact, Congresswoman Omar moved here legally in 1995, when she was 12 years old, after she fled civil war in Somalia and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya;
• that “we haven’t had a murder [in Washington, D.C.] in six months,” thanks to his deployment of the National Guard, though there have been 28 murders there since that deployment;
• that he has “brought our nation — and the world — back from the brink of catastrophe and disaster” and settled eight wars, including, by his scorekeeping, “ending the war in Gaza,” and other wars and violent border conflicts that continue. (These blatant lies appear on page 1 of his National Security Strategy, a document so corruptly dishonest it triggers my vomit reflex);
• that he has made America “respected again … all over the world,” though the opposite is the case, particularly in his abhorrent treatment of the European Union, undermining, indeed, attempting to destroy an alliance of nations that has helped preserve a jittery sort-of-peace for 75 years;
• that despite the jerky sort of love slathered upon him by the White Christian Right, this corrupt carrothead smirking motherfucker appeals around the clock, day after day to hatred, not love;
• to the extent that even his former altar girl of hatred, Marjorie Taylor Green, felt compelled to resign her seat in Congress in the middle of her term.

We all know this, or should have known it.

Well, my fellow Americans: We all got us here. What are we all going to do about it?