There are many ways to get close again to the Vietnam War.  Watching the movie The US vs. John Lennon is one.  I did it with three other people late on Tuesday night, the theater virtually abandoned, a tiny group watching massive groups mobilize for peace and against war on the screen in front of it.  But it is impossible to actually relive the Vietnam War unless you were actually in that war and lived it a first time.  And one thing we know is that George W. Bush, whether he was with his National Guard unit in Texas, or whether he abandoned it for an Alabama chickenhawk’s political campaign, was not in Vietnam.  And so he will not ever be able to relive the Vietnam War.
 
But he sure has tried nonetheless, by invading Iraq, another war where American buffoons think they can bring their notions of government, right out of thin air, to a place where those notions have never organically existed.  That Bush has even attempted such a thing derives directly from the fact that he missed participating in the earlier attempt in Vietnam.  There is no better teacher than experience, and Bush never witnessed the hubris of trying to impose upon tens of millions of culturally different people a different culture by using 18 and 20 year old American males as tutors.  If he had actually personally witnessed such foolishness, then he would probably, and I emphasize probably, not have repeated it.
 
The young Bush instead over the years sucked down the conservative party line that our hands were tied behind our backs in Vietnam, an easy line to adopt from the comfort of the so-called homeland.  Even though millions of Vietnamese lay shot, incinerated, and dead at the very untied hands of the US military, Bush was spoon fed such garbage in his Houston and Texas circles in which he grew up.  His father, who actually flew a fighter plane as a young man in WWII, declared that America had kicked the Vietnam syndrome with his Gulf War.  And now we all sit and watch his son try and kick his own Vietnam syndrome with his Iraq War.  This week, twenty more American soldiers – one from here in Houston, a young twenty year old man – died, as did many, many more Iraqis now engaged in an ugly civil war unleashed by the US invasion.  All those who died this week, like the many before them, died most directly for one cause and one cause only – George W. Bush’s Vietnam Syndrome – a syndrome in which a cowardly young man simultaneously and hypocritically talks a tough militaristic game, and later when put in power attempts to defeat the unconscious memories of his own earlier cowardice by unleashing a foolish war machine, ironically, yet again, from the safety of his home.  Had George W. Bush come from a progressive family, in the intervening years he might instead have found himself in a therapist’s office, discussing the conflicting feelings that he had, and perhaps coming to very different conclusions.  He might have understood how profound and honest his own fear of the Vietnam War really was, and that the devil’s side of his own internal conflict wasn’t his fear, but the hypocritical words he simultaneously spoke in favor of war in order to please his family, and especially his father.  But George Bush did not grow up in a progressive family.  He grew up in a regressive family, and those families and the many like them reacted to the passions unleashed by the Vietnam War by doubling their efforts to regress the country.  They have worked extraordinarily hard at this, and they have damaged many things.  Their propaganda efforts, spouted through all manner of major media, have in the recent years convinced many other poor, hard-working, and trusting Americans to share their regressive views.
 
But success in the pursuit of foolish aims is not success.  For success to be deemed success, it must truly last, and each day now, we see the undoing of their foolishness accelerate at a rapid rate.  Much of the current Congress too shares Mr. Bush’s Vietnam Syndrome, a collectively mendacious group which is only too happy to approve the current round of invasions as long as its children don’t have to go and participate.  Is there any other clearer sign of a corroded and corrupt empire than one that allows its legislators to send other parents’ children to meet death while theirs’ remain safe?
 
John Lennon sang “Power to the People”, “Give Peace a Chance”, “Revolution.”  In recent years, some of these titles might have sounded a little anachronistic.  Not this year.  This year there is a current of anger, discontent, and disgust reminiscent of our last most tumultuous decade, the decade in which I emerged onto this planet.  It is palpable in the polls showing the rapid decline in support for the President and his party, appropriately nicknamed by one wag as the GOP - the Guilty Old Party.  It is palpable in the whining and crying and refereeing that the AM talk show hosts are now heard doing as their beloved Republican Party now comes under the same types of scurrilous attacks that it pioneered and spread across this land like a plague.  Take your own medicine, I say.  It is palpable at the dinners and parties where someone you know who a few years ago was beating their patriotic chest and the drums of war, now quietly, almost with embarrassment, mumbles something about disliking “how political things have gotten.”  Meaning, they’re scared that they were on the wrong side with so many others and are clambering to get off the sinking ship and be allowed onto the life raft of progressive ideals, a rich cornucopia of dynamic and timely ideas including alternative energy and energy independence, global cooperation and harmony, global nuclear disarmament, advanced social programs, elimination of externalities from the economy, Constitutional and government reform, secular, math, science and liberal arts based education, environmental conservation, intelligent municipal planning, organic food supplies, and so much more.  Next to the progressive agenda, the conservative plank is good for one thing and one thing only: walking off the ship into a vast empty ocean.  Every day it is becoming abundantly clear to increasing numbers who has the ideas.  And every day more and more – from activists, to business people, to clergy, to laborers, to caregivers, to homemakers, to the enlightened rich – come to this cornucopia, and make it theirs.  Take it, I say, there is plenty to go around.  Welcome to the party, what took you so long?  It doesn’t matter.  We’re glad you’re here.  Welcome.
 
The current of anger is palpable if you listen to the rest of the world, now rolling its eyes at the Bush Administration, without a shred remaining of international credibility, attempts to contain the nuclear weapons of other nations, while it holds the mantle of the most nuclear tests by a single nation in the history of the world, over 1000 including many launched into our atmosphere and oceans, the mantle of the only nation ever to drop nuclear weapons, twice, on other people, mostly non-combatants including women, elderly, and little children, and, I promise you, the nation working most assiduously under the current ganglords to improve the efficiency and violence of its existing nuclear arsenal.  It’s palpable as the scales tip, and tip, and tip in favor of the view that the Bush family act and the Republican Party act has gotten very old, very stale, very fast, though for many of us, their act has never been more than that – an act intended to cover up their deepest, darkest desires, about which they themselves remain totally unconscious.  In order for Mr. Bush’s remaining two years in office to have any potential value, I recommend a Presidential psychiatrist, and fast.  But we all know that won’t happen, and we know where Mr. Bush will continue to seek his salvation.  Not with the help of credentialed, scientifically sound professionals, but with his own personal deity, really just an additional creation of his own broken psychology.
 
It feels, if you’re still for a moment, that something is happening, just as it must have felt that way back around, say, 1962.  Few could have predicted what lay in store.  But that few knew, truly new.  It feels, if you’re still for a moment, that the spirit of the 60’s, the good spirit, not the narcotic, violent part of it, but the angry advocacy for peace, and the outrage at the scoundrels, is on the cusp of returning in a full bloom.  I feel my wounded heart beginning to heal, my angry heart beginning to soften, and my betrayed heart beginning to trust again, just a little bit.  Go ahead.  Change the station.  Turn on AM radio.  Listen to the whining, to the absurd rhetoric, to the twisted facts, to the sorry justifications, to the violence and hatred, and then listen to the true current as those horrid sounds come to sound so hollow to so many, like the sound of glass promises being broken. 
 
Are you with the People?  Are you with the current?  Are you up and fighting?  What are you doing?  What will you do today?  How will you make your impact?  What will you do for progressive ideals in the fight against the Regressives?  If you’re on the wrong side, what are you doing to change your mind?  Or will you be the last one off the ship and will there be a life raft waiting for you?  Don’t wait.  There’s plenty of room for you here, plenty of room for you in a peaceful, cooperating world built on economic efficiency and honest accounting, social harmony and beneficence, and environmental beauty.  Choose your world.  Think carefully about how you define progress.  Does the past look like progress to you, or can you not see a future, a vision where progress is real?  To whom do you want to entrust your power, your personal power?  To liars?  To crooks?  To greedheads?  To lonely individualists?  To hatemongers?  Or to progress?
 
Power to the People.  Power to the People.  Power to the People.  Power to the People, right on.
 
I’m Leo Gold.  This is the New Capital Show.