Synchronicity Strikes Again

So I was watching a recorded episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" tonight, trying to take my mind off quite a few things. Maher was grilling Bill Moyers about journalistic responsibility. Apparently, buried underneath an avalanche of coverage of the Virginia Tech mass murder was the news that our military has basically given up on training Iraqi troops and advisors are now seriously attempting to explain to President Bush that in fact, he is not wearing any clothes at all. Turns out Bill Moyer was a White House Press Secretary during the Kennedy/Johnson era so there was plenty of cud to chew about the eerie similarities between the Vietnam & Iraq conflicts. In fact, it's now becoming so depressingly similar that I decided that I'd be better off just getting some work done. I went onto the web just to check in, and saw that David Halberstam had been killed in a car crash in California. It's one of those things where one might not personally know the famous name, but a loss is felt anyway. I was working on some film or other that was shooting at Milton Academy a few years ago and ended up spending a long summer afternoon set dressing in the school library. I saw a book that said "The Making of a Quagmire" and something told me to take it down from the shelf. It turned out to be a highly readable account of the Kennedy administration's clumsy overtures to the Diem regime in Vietnam. For a few minutes I considered slipping the book into my set bag and taking it home, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Some teenaged kid needed to read that book more than I did. I can still remember that war and growing up around its aftershocks and victims. I hope some freshman picked it up that September of 2000 and found it as good a read as I did. A 14 year old in 2000 would be a 21 year old today, probably just getting out of college and hopefully a little more skeptical of presidential foreign policy for having read Halberstam's "Quagmire".

Synchronicity Strikes Again