Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

The words do not have to be perfect.

No one could have predicted…

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

This fight is for everything.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

People are complicated. Love is not.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

This really is a full service blog.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

The willow is too close to the house.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

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Late Night Open Thread: Not Forgotten

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  2. 2.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    “If this memorial has helped to welcome you home and to help heal some of the turmoil and pain of that war, and to embrace you and honor you in our nation’s capital, then I am deeply honored to have played my part in your story.”—Maya Lin, designer of The Wall

    I still can’t believe wingnuts at the time hated her design. I’ve been there in person to see the memorial and it’s very humbling seeing all of the names of those that died on the wall

  3. 3.

    dmsilev

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): ‘Black gash of shame’ was the term they used. Needless to say, it’s a good thing the selection committee had a bit more insight and were able to see just how powerful Lin’s design was.

  4. 4.

    Jackie

    Thank you for this post. I’ve been thinking of all our BJ Vietnam Vets today.♥️
    I’m not the least bit surprised President Biden and First Lady Jill took time to honor our fallen.

  7. 7.

    phdesmond

    that article from the WaPo about the women journalists in Viet Nam sent me right down here.

  8. 8.

    randy khan

    I first saw the Wall on Memorial Day weekend in 1985.  My dad had driven me down to D.C., where I was working for the summer, and we spontaneously decided to go there on Saturday night.  We looked for the name of the son of a family friend, and the very act of looking for a particular name helps drive home  just how many people were lost in that war.  It was really moving, particularly at night.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment.

  14. 14.

    Soprano2

    I saw the Vietnam Memorial with my husband in 2008. It’s an amazing experience to see it, walking down the hill to it. You don’t realize how tall the middle is until you get close. It has the effect of inspiring awe unlike any other memorial in D.C., with the possible exception of the Lincoln Memorial. I was a child during that war – to me, we’d always been at war, it was on our TV at 5:30 every night. I didn’t know anyone who was killed there, but my husband is a combat vet of that war. He took a rubbing from the wall; he only said it was someone who shouldn’t have died. Actually, that describes everyone who fought in that war and died.

    I remember what a shit fit conservatives threw about the design. I wonder if they ever admitted how wrong they were.

  16. 16.

    Jager

    On Veterans Day 1994, we had a wedding in Virginia that weekend. My girlfriend and I flew from Boston to DC, rented a car. We visited the Memorial on a foggy cool, November night. I found the names I came to find, 2 classmates, two Army buddies, and my old platoon Sgt’s name. In retrospect, it was the perfect time to be there. It was very moving. At the wedding, my girlfriend’s brother, the father of the groom, was a Vietnam vet. When I told him about our visit, he said “I wish I would have known you were going.”

  17. 17.

    Yutsano

    In 1994 the Washington State Cougar basketball team got into the Tournament. 40 band people were allowed to go. Somehow as a freshman I was selected to go. Our first (and only) stop was Washington D.C. We were all excited as all get out. That was the first time I saw the Vietnam Memorial. And I found it both humbling and awe inspiring.

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):  Maya Lin is* both a woman and Asian. Both of those points sent the wingnuts into fits.

    *correction to my language. Lin is very much alive. 僕はアホです

  21. 21.

    Kineslaw

    Part of what helped me understand the Vietnam War was spending three weeks in Vietnam in the mid-2000s on a cheap tour.  Part of the tour involved walking bent over through the extensive tourist versions of the Cu Chi tunnels, which, while bigger, are still in scale.

    What really brought home some of the aftermath for veterans of that war was a conversation I had at St. Arnold’s Brewery in Houston.  I started talking to an incredibly nice Hispanic family sitting next to me, everyone from the family patriarch to the grandkids.  The grandfather and I were talking and Vietnam came up and he said he fought in that war and I asked what he had done.  Frank mentioned that he had been forced into the role of tunnel rat a few times and I told him I had seen the tunnels and couldn’t imagine having to do that.

    It was the first time he had talked to a civilian and a younger adult that had some inkling of what that must have required of him.  I was also the first person Frank had talked to that had been to Vietnam as a tourist.  He got a pretty serious look on his face and asked about what people in Vietnam thought.  He was obviously yearning to hear that things turned out okay.  I gave him an answer that seemed to give him some closure, although I had to put a rosy spin on the the truth to get there.  A couple minutes later we rejoined his family in both conversation and Jenga.

    I’ll never forget Frank going from a man surrounding by a loving family, to a Veteran reliving trauma and seeking answers, and back to a family man in twenty minutes.

  22. 22.

    Kent

    Time just keeps marching on relentlessly.  I’m 57 and so was just a child during the Vietnam war and only really remember snippets of it in the last years of the war.  Nightly news coverage in the early 70s.  The fall of Saigon, and so forth.

    My middle daughter just turned 18 this past week on March 20th.  She was born on the very day that Bush invaded Iraq.  I remember watching the start of the war on CNN in the hospital room in Juneau, Alaska on the morning of March 20, 2003 while we waited for my wife’s C-section.

    For my kids today, the Vietnam war is now farther in the distant past than World War 1 was to the Vietnam generation.  That is a sobering thought.  For my 18 year old daughter, 9-11 was something that happened 2 years before she was even born.

  24. 24.

    Roger Moore

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): ​
     

    I still can’t believe wingnuts at the time hated her design. I’ve been there in person to see the memorial and it’s very humbling seeing all of the names of those that died on the wall

    That’s exactly why they hated it. They wanted something that treated the war as a noble endeavor. Showing its the terrible cost was one step away from admitting the DFHs were right, which was the last thing the wingnuts wanted.

  26. 26.

    Amir Khalid

    This film taught me a lot about the Vietnam war: Dear America: Letters from Vietnam. It consists of letters home from soldiers, read by actors; period news footage; and some contemporary music that would have been on the typical soldier’s playlist if they had Spotify in the 1960s. It ends with Springsteen’s Born In The USA, played over footage of the Vietnam War Memorial and its visitors.

  27. 27.

    opiejeanne

    I lost a cousin and a friend from HS in the Vietnam War, both 19 years old. I found both of their names on that wall.Very moving experience even if I hadn’t known anyone.

    Nearly lost The Boyfriend, although by then he wasn’t mine any more.  He came back with the 1000 yard stare, according to another friend. I saw him at the reunion in 2018 and he’d recovered; seemed like the same guy I was so nuts about.

  30. 30.

    Amir Khalid

    @opiejeanne:
    I’ve seen some of Matthew Brady’s photos of Union soldiers in the Civil War. Those photos are one century and half a world apart from Vietnam in the 1960s. But one thing that seems a constant for soldiers in both wars is All That Mud.

  31. 31.

    Dan B

    @Kent: I was in the Freshman Design Studio at the University of Cincinnati when they announced the lottery draft numbers over live radio.  There were groans when someone’s number was read.  Architecture was a high failure program.  Failing meant going to Vietnam if your number was low.  Mine was 359 so no chance.

    I sent a letter to my draft board in Medina, Ohio that I was homosexual.  They replied that was not true “because there are no homosexuals here.”  It was a different era when America won every war and there were no deviants outside New York and Hollywood.  We all bled the same as did the heroic myth of the country.

  32. 32.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    I have an Uncle who fought in Vietnam or more correctly, drove trucks. That had been before and was again , his job at home.

  33. 33.

    Dan B

    @opiejeanne: A classmate lost both legs in the war.  He’d been the blonde guy with the perfect muscled physique.  I made contact with him via email a decade ago.  He had become embittered.  He’d won the Boston Marathon in his wheelchair – fastest finish of anyone in a chair or not.  That wasn’t enough to lift him out of his hatred of his fate.

    There were more than 58,000 casualties.  People died and the life force died, often long after.

  34. 34.

    raven

    @dlwchico: I’ve been following your flickr for quite some time but I forgot your dad was a cannon cocker in Korea before his Vietnam tours. Thanks

  37. 37.

    raven

    I picked up a copy of “You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War,” which celebrates the work of FitzGerald, Kate Webb and Catherine Leroy. It’ very interesting but I almost threw it across the room reading, in the preface, how LBJ had “won” the Silver Star in ww2. That fucking  asshole was on a plane that went NEAR some action and turned away. He was in no danger and did nothing. No other person on the plane got any decoration. Fuck LBJ

  38. 38.

    Ruckus

    One of my absolutely must do items is to visit The Wall.

    I can’t imagine the feelings that will bring back for me.

    I wasn’t sent there, many went and did their jobs and a hell of a lot of men and women died there. The other side are the people who served and were injured and have lived with those injuries for the following decades. I’ve seen them, in a navy hospital during that war, men with shattered lives, I see people every time I go to the VA who are still paying a price for serving their country. The Wall is for all of them, a reminder that war always has a price, and it’s always measured in lives.

    If you get Netflix, watch Resurface. It’s less than an hour out of your life. I’ve watched it countless times. Vietnam is a part of your life if you were of that age, war seems to have to be a part of all of our lives, no matter how you feel or felt about it.

  39. 39.

    raven

    @Ruckus: I’ve been several times. I like it best in the dead of night or during Veterans Day. The couple of times I went during a regular day sucked because it’s just “Another Roadside Attraction”. I don’t begrudge anyone that but I don’t like being  there then. On the 10th Anniversary I was part of the group that read all the names. I made sure I got to read my good friend’s so it ended up at 3 am.

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