> I said that if it weren't for the GOP vs. Clinton antagonism,
> people would see that Clinton is a Republican. Brad De Long
> asked "an Eisenhower Republican?" which might be a reference
> to Clinton's self-description (according to Woodward) when
> he discovered the Discipline imposed by the Bond(age) Market.
>
> I guess we could do a comparison: Eisenhower threatened to
> use nukes on N. Korea and at Dien Bien Phu. Clinton bombed
> a medicine factory. Eisenhower only threatened, while Clinton
> acted. Etc. But that kind of accounting would be fruitless, IMHO.
In early 1992 I was talking with Harold Meyerson, LA Weekly editor, DSA mucky-muck, and "pragmatic" enthusiast of the "possibilities" Clinton might create. I asked him what he thought about having TWO Rockefeller Republicans leading the Democratic primary race. (Remember Paul Tsongas, and how GOOD he made Clinton seem if you had no peripheral vision at all?)
Harold responded that he didn't think Clinton was a Rockefeller Republican, he was a Rockefeller Democrat. (This was before Clinton did his mini-Attica routine, flying back to Arkansas to be on the job while Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black man, was executed. Rector was so severely impaired that he didn't eat the peacan pie slice from his last meal, instead setting it aside "for later.")
I shook my head.
"Well see." I said, as darkly as I could manage in the midday LA sun. I had this premonition that we really would.
> Some of the left's lesser evilism on this question seems
> more and more reminiscent of a discussion in Phillip K.
> Dick's MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. It's about an imaginary
> world where Hitler won WW2. People in a restaurant
> in that part of the US that wasn't occupied by either
> Japan or Germany are discussing the succession issue:
> now that it's pretty clear that Hitler is going to die,
> who will succeed him? who would be better, Himmler or
> Goebels? maybe this guy Heydrick?
I've been thinking about *The Man In The High Castle*, too, but for a different--though not completely unrealted reason. I've just finished reading *The Spitting Image: Myth Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam.* by Jerry Lembcke. It's a brilliant debunking of the myth that anti-war protesters spat on returning Vietnam vets, along with an analysis of the sources and context for the cultural production of the myth, as well as it's fuction during the Gulf War period--when Lembcke first confronted the myth, drawing on his own background as a Vietnam vet and memeber of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
*The Man In The High Castle* kept haunting me as I read. It's alternative history perfectly captured the amazing contrast between the reality of the Vietnam War, symbolized in no small way by the VVAW and its radical political response to the war, and the false memory symbolized symbolized by the myth of veterans spat upon by protesters.
This relates to Jim's point when one recalls the way Clinton disowned his own anti-war activism -- adding his weight to the unreal over the real -- and then appointed his ideological (but id-repressed) doppleganger, Al Gore, to be his own successor.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"