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i oppose bush because i oppose everything--and i mean everything--he stands for.
i dislike kerry, but much less so than i do bush.
this is not the best place to be in, in many ways.
i say this to note up front that i am not among those whose votes are going to be swayed by the campaigning at this point, so i look at it as if from a distance.
i do not understand why rove et al chose the tack of introducing the relation or non relation to vietnam into the election--well, maybe i do---obviously the bushites felt threatened by the chickenhawk accusation as a potential political liability, but frankly i do not understand why the questions at stake in this election have come to condense around this.
the sad thing is that it has forced both candidates into a quibble about tactics (when and how to withdraw, mostly) on the question of iraq, when the problems that surround this foul little colonial adventure are far more fundamental and should be extremely damaging to the administration. so maybe this is why the distraction of personal involvement with vietnam got thrown into the mix. it also serves the general cause of right revisionist "history" of the war in vietnam in that it makes the war itself neutral at best--actually, it legitimates the war--and forces positioning to occur against that set of assumptions.
there were many many legitimate, powerful reasons to have opposed vietnam outright--it means nothing to me that this kind of dissent horrifies the right--but their horror at dissent does make me wonder what exactly they want of america, what kind of place they want--whether they would be happy at some level if the occaision arose and bush followed the path putin is presently charting in russia using the same set of excuses to do it.
i also imagine--but would be pleased to see this falsified in practice, maybe even here, that the right has nothing to say about this matter, given that the idea that vietnam was legitimate because it occurred and that unthinking support of all state actions when it involves the military (but not when it comes to making the states a coherent capitalist social system) is a matter decided in advance for them.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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