>By the way, I'm strongly put off by cowardice / cowardice
>discourse. Fear and the ability to overcome it are mostly
>determined by one's physical constitution, one's genes. People
>don't get to choose -- if we did, we would all choose to be
>noble heroes, I'm sure.
A hero is only a hero when lotsa people agree that's what you are. In 1967 a hero went to Vietnam and a coward stayed at home. I remember all the comic books of the time having those short tales at the end of the mag, where a callow boy joins up, comes back from basic, attracts the admiration of the girls, bashes up the boys who bullied him at school, goes to the shootin' war, and feels himself becoming a man. If they'd taken eleven-year-olds, I'd've gone there and then.
By 1970, it was cooler not to go, and I'd not have gone there and then. For the most part, we are talking *boys* here. And it's an exceptional boy indeed who flies in the face of definitions of male virtue du jour.
>Maybehe should just come out and call the people who went to the
>war with him bad names directly, as he does the "public".
You'd have to do that case-by-case, I reckon. I knew some nice human beings who went. Dunno how they came back, as I was living amidst the SWAPO war of independence by then. I was on the wrong side of the fence on that one, too, of course (being a square-headed white boy, I wasn't given an option in the matter). In these things, the world's a bit too big for a teenage boy, don't you think?
>Yes, there were all kinds of opinions among the folk, pro-
>war, anti-war, confused -- many people went along with the
>war because they had been taught at home and in school to
>obey the government and serve their communities as
>represented by that government. In those departed days that
>sort of idea was more common than might be believable today.
Exactement. The banality of evil and all that. Although I suspect there remains, even today, more evil in banality than you imply here. I mean, although all those flag-waving Vietnam films and PR-mediated newsreel vignettes display a ferociously racist one-sidedness in their human sympathies, they do a pretty good job of showing the chaotic slaughter-of-innocents that is modern war. You don't need a particularly well-developed critical sense to discern that this is what you're putting your moniker to when you go along with a Desert Storm or a Novi Sad. Yet ...
Something out there is stronger than reason - stronger even than the modest empathy with which Adam Smith credited our apparently timeless nature. "Capitalism" or "racism" are names we might give that something, but a name doth not an explanation make, eh?
Cheers, Rob.