Hammer Mill Days

This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. Leave the mill immediately. Proceed to the exits marked "exit". We apologize for the absence of standard, lighted exit signs - crayon on cereal box will have to do. Oh, hello. Sorry for the confusion - just affecting a temporary evacuation of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Actually, it's more complicated than it sounds. The place isn't actually abandoned in the sense of being vacant - just abandoned by its owners. We, the members and various hangers-on of Big Green , actually live there, and therefore must be told to leave the building when a) a natural or fire-related disaster strikes, b) the land agent arrives to chuck us out, or c) Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, builds a more-dangerous-than-usual monster with which to amuse himself. (You know... just the usual things homeowners fret about day in and day out.) And we are faced with one of those exigencies today. See if you can guess which one. Go ahead...

This seems like a good time to talk about all of the reasons why we should stay and fight in Vietnam. No, that's not a typo nor a brain fart - Vietnam is exactly what I mean. Totally different war, of course, but the reasoning in both the public and the internal planning spheres is very much the same. It's kind of instructive to look back at how that war was sold to us - swap a few nouns around and you've got the Iraq narrative, post 2003. Interestingly enough, opportunity presented itself this past week in the shape of various remembrances of Robert Kennedy on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Amy Goodman played a tape of a talk RFK gave at St. Lawrence University in 1966 (I believe my cousin was at that event, as it happens) in which the senator responded to a question about Vietnam with a somewhat lengthy defense of LBJ's escalation policy, in progress at the time. His justification, in essence, was the contention that the Vietcong (NLF), Hanoi, and China we...