Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Pointless, romantic nostalgia

I miss the period from 1983-1992 so much right now. I know that that probably means I'm not living in the present, but it is so fun to think about how rad it was to be a kid in the late eighties. Here is a list of the best things ever:

-Little League. Football wasn't half as fun. Nothing, and I mean nothing, beat riding my bike to practice with my glove hanging off a handlebar, in the warmth of a Visalia spring afternoon. We actually got to play games at night under lights once a week, with an announcer calling our names from the P.A! I have actually heard, "Now batting, for the Dodgers, number 17, Justin....Housman", while walking to the plate holding a bat.
-The plethora of incredible cartoons and toys of the period. Jesus Fucking Christ. The Transformers. GI Joe. Voltron. The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. M.A.S.K. Battle Beasts. He-Man. Air Raiders. Wheeled Warriors. Go-Bots. Duck Tales. Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers. And yeah, I'll say it, JEM.
-Fucking Nintendo. It really hurts that this is missing from my life. Until recently, when nearly all my stuff was stolen in the San Diego move, I would run across old notes I had taken for Final Fintasy, Zelda, Castlevania, you name it. Some were in my mom's handwriting. Nintendo Power. Remember how they would preview new games, like Super Mario Bros 2 and 3, and you would absolutely freak out with excitement! I don't think that I'll ever forget Konami's 30 extra lives code. The term "extra life", was in regular usage in those days.
-The music. I remember riding around in the car listening to Richard Marx, Peter Cetera, The B-52s, Journey, Hall and fucking Oates, The Eurythmics, and Jesus..new wave.
-Building forts. We must have built like a fort a week back then. We'd go to construction sites and take lumber, or go to grocery stores and take pallets, and build forts, so that we could....have them knocked down by rivals, whose forts we would in turn destroy. Now that I think about it, as we got older (5th, 6th grade), forts served chiefly as porn depositories, guarded jealously, sometimes with sticks sharpened into spears, and dirt clods, resulting in titanic dirt clod fights.
-Smoking in restaurants. Pizza tastes better when the pizza joint is a dark, smokey place. There is no getting around it.

Alot of this stuff sort of stopped when I had to move to Morro Bay in 1991, but there were new things, The Estero Street Gang, street hockey, Joe's backyard, the evil house, eagle rock, fishing, etc., but non of these things fill me with nostalgia quite like the Visalia days. Except for when I hosed down Eric Scott with a fire extinguisher after he erased my saved Legend of Zelda game. That, my friends was awesome.

5 comments:

Justin Cooley said...

This thread is now about whether or not Iraq is like Vietnam.

Here is Christopher Hitchens:

fighting words
Beating a Dead Parrot
Why Iraq and Vietnam have nothing whatsoever in common.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Jan. 31, 2005, at 1:16 PM PT
There it was again, across half a page of the New York Times last Saturday, just as Iraqis and Kurds were nerving themselves to vote. "Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam." The basis for the story, which featured a number of experts as lugubrious as they were imprecise, was the suggestion that South Vietnam had held an election in September 1967, and that this propaganda event had not staved off ultimate disaster.

I can't quite tell why this article was not printed on the day before the Afghan or Palestinian elections, or at any of the times when Iranian voters overwhelmingly chose reform candidates but were thwarted by the entrenched reserve strength of the theocracy. But perhaps now is the moment to state the critical reasons why there is no reasonable parallel of any sort between Iraq and Vietnam.

To begin with, Vietnam had been undergoing a protracted struggle for independence since before World War II and had sustained this struggle militarily and politically against the French empire, the Japanese empire, and then after 1945 the French empire again. By 1954, at the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu, the forces of Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap had effectively decided matters on the battlefield, and President Eisenhower himself had conceded that Ho would have won any possible all-Vietnamese election. The distortions of the Cold War led the United States to take over where French colonialism had left off, to assist in partitioning the country, and to undertake a war that had already been lost.

Whatever the monstrosities of Asian communism may have been, Ho Chi Minh based his declaration of Vietnamese independence on a direct emulation of the words of Thomas Jefferson and was able to attract many non-Marxist nationalists to his camp. He had, moreover, been an ally of the West in the war against Japan. Nothing under this heading can be said of the Iraqi Baathists or jihadists, who are descended from those who angrily took the other side in the war against the Axis, and who opposed elections on principle. If today's Iraqi "insurgents" have any analogue at all in Southeast Asia it would be the Khmer Rouge.

Vietnam as a state had not invaded any neighbor (even if it did infringe the neutrality of Cambodia) and did not do so until after the withdrawal of the United States when, with at least some claim to self-defense, it overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Contrast this, even briefly, to the record of Saddam Hussein in relation to Iran and Kuwait.

Vietnam had not languished under international sanctions for its brazen contempt for international law, nor for its building or acquisition, let alone its use of, weapons of mass destruction.

Vietnam had never attempted, in whole or in part, to commit genocide, as was the case with the documented "Anfal" campaign waged by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds.

In Vietnam the deep-rooted Communist Party was against the partition of the country and against the American intervention. It called for a boycott of any election that was not an all-Vietnam affair. In Iraq, the deep-rooted Communist Party is in favor of the regime change and has been an enthusiastic participant in the elections as well as an opponent of any attempt to divide the country on ethnic or confessional lines. (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is not even an Iraqi, hates the Kurds and considers the religion of most Iraqis to be a detestable heresy: not a mistake that even the most inexperienced Viet Cong commander would have been likely to make.)

No car bomb or hijacking or suicide-bombing or comparable atrocity was ever committed by the Vietnamese, on American or any other foreign soil. Nor has any wanted international gangster or murderer ever been sheltered in Vietnam.

American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi "insurgents" are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of "people's war" and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi "insurgents" are dismal riff-raff by comparison.

Where it is not augmented by depraved Bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi "insurgency" is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned. This could not be said of Ho Chin Minh or of the leaders and cadres of the National Liberation Front.

The option of accepting a unified and Communist Vietnam, which would have evolved toward some form of market liberalism even faster than China has since done, always existed. It was not until President Kennedy decided to make a stand there, in revenge for the reverses he had suffered in Cuba and Berlin, that quagmire became inevitable. The option of leaving Iraq to whatever successor regime might arise or be imposed does not look half so appetizing. One cannot quite see a round-table negotiation in Paris with Bin Laden or Zarqawi or Moqtada Sadr, nor a gradually negotiated hand-over to such people after a decent interval.

In Vietnam, the most appalling excesses were committed by U.S. forces. Not all of these can be blamed on the conduct of bored, resentful, frightened conscripts. The worst atrocities—free-fire zones, carpet-bombing, forced relocation, and chemical defoliation—were committed as a direct consequence of orders from above. In Iraq, the crimes of mass killing, aerial bombardment, ethnic deportation, and scorched earth had already been committed by the ruling Baath Party, everywhere from northern Kurdistan to the drained and burned-out wetlands of the southern marshes. Coalition forces in Iraq have done what they can to repair some of this state-sponsored vandalism.

In Vietnam, the United States relied too much on a pre-existing military caste that often changed the local administration by means of a few tanks around the presidential palace. In the instance of Iraq, the provisional government was criticized, perhaps more than for any other decision, for disbanding the armed forces of the ancien regime, and for declining to use a proxy army as the United States had previously done in Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, and Greece. Unlike the South Vietnamese, the Iraqi forces are being recruited from scratch.

In Vietnam, the policy of the United States was—especially during the Kennedy years—a sectarian one that favored the Roman Catholic minority. In Iraq, it is obvious even to the coldest eye that the administration is if anything too anxious to compose religious differences without any reference to confessional bias.

I suppose it's obvious that I was not a supporter of the Vietnam War. Indeed, the principles of the antiwar movement of that epoch still mean a good deal to me. That's why I retch every time I hear these principles recycled, by narrow minds or in a shallow manner, in order to pass off third-rate excuses for Baathism or jihadism. But one must also be capable of being offended objectively. The Vietnam/Iraq babble is, from any point of view, a busted flush. It's no good. It's a stiff. It's passed on. It has ceased to be. It's joined the choir invisible. It's turned up its toes. It's gone. It's an ex-analogy.


Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty, and War, has just been published.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112895/

Anonymous said...

if chris hitchens wants to use his "vietnam isn't like iraq" arguments as an excuse for our immoral invasion of iraq, he can kiss my ass. iraq is EXACTLY like vietnam in that we had no business in either country, and our presence only made it worse.

HOUSMAN, your post made me smile with nostalgia. for me it was all about growing up in north morro bay. me and my brother cody used to ride down to the asian grocers and tell him his pac man machine ate our quarters. this guy would just hand us a bunch of change without even checking to see if we were lying. ah, the joy of free video games. justin regiers house used to smell like a pine tree. buying comics at giant food. playing at the park down at no-name creek until dark. the forbidden joys of sifting through shredded porn behind the trees at lila keiser. my brother leaving me in a shopping cart in front of the circle k. moving three blocks every six months. watching fraggle rock every morning before school. hiding behind a van when the bus went by, so i could tell my mom i'd missed it and stay home for the day. and of course, eagle rock. good times, man. i didn't meet you until 1991? surprising. thanks for the memories...

polly conway said...

My parents never let me have my own Nintendo, but it was okay, because I could play it anywhere else. I used to play the original Super Mario at a 7-11 in LA. Remember when 7-11 was the place to go for your video game fix? I really loved it in the first level, when you get the little smiling star that makes you go fast for the first time...so satisfying. Being a kid was great.

Bill Eseltine said...

Did you ever thread rope through the walls of your forts as a self destruct mechanism? That way if your enemies were closing in, all that porn would be lost to the ages. Why did we do that? Man I miss being a kid.

Bill Eseltine said...

I neglected to mention that the threading of the rope through the walls meant that with one tug all the walls would come a crumblin' down. It was even better if your little brother was still inside.