I think Mr. O'Brien misreads much of the POW/MIA cult. While Mr. O'Brien has a sort of upper-class point of view, finding it dashedly unfair that Americans make such a fuss about their own losses in the detritus of a country they trashed, the kind of people who fly those ugly black flags (1) didn't, as a class, concoct the War in Vietnam -- the best and the brightest did that -- and (2) have a pervasive and well- founded belief that they were lied to about the war. After all, Nixon and Kissinger were in charge of the winding-up of the war, and would not have been overscrupulous about leaving the bodies, living or dead, of lower-class Americans in Vietnam if it suited their convenience. As a POW/MIA activist asked me in a newsgroup several years ago when I ventured to doubt some of his contentions, "Who are you going to believe -- Nixon and Kissinger or ordinary American citizens?" I had to concede where the probability of fraudelence lay, and repented my previous obtuseness.
What we have is not the narcissism of the upper classes but the justified fear and grief of those they rule and exploit, the beginning of a consciousness which the Left could expand were not so many of its constituents so strongly oriented towards the bourgeoisie and their values. But everything is as it is, and so the mute bones continue to be sifted for everything that was lost. I respect that refusal to _play_ _the_game_, and I think it's too bad that no can speak to it.