Hammer Mill Days

Okay, ready? On three ... one, two, THREE! Arrrgh. I meant, on the count of three LIFT the freaking thing, not wave your hands in the air. What the hell's the matter with you? It's like you just don't care. Yeah, I guess you could say we're having a little moving party here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green's adopted home for the last two decades. (I think we technically have squatter's rights, but what law is there in a place such as this?) No, we're not vacating the premises - far from it. I just wanted to move my piano from one room to another. No particular reason. Maybe that's why I can't get any cooperation out of this crew. I KNEW I should have done one of those leadership retreats! Curses. Sure, there are useful things we could all be doing, but who's got the time for that? I mean, I've been putting off restringing our borrowed electric guitar for about two weeks now. That sucker isn't going to string itself, righ...

I mentioned last week that I have some problems with the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War. That was on the basis of just the first episode, so to be fair, my comments were a bit preliminary. I have not seen much of it since - just the odd half-hour here and there. (Frankly, it's hard for me to come up with 18 hours of viewing time over the course of a week or two.) That said, the episodes I've seen since the first installment have done nothing to change my estimation of the overall project. It's important to get many and varied perspectives from American veterans; I'm all for that. But the Vietnamese perspective that I've seen thus far has been very limited and two-dimensional. Further, the narrative seldom departs from the neo-imperial framing that has always defined mainstream retrospectives on this brutal war. We're told, for instance, that in 1969 Hanoi would not consider an agreement that would leave the Saigon government in place. Actually, it wasn...