The main trouble with giving Reagan billing is that he seemed mostly to be dotting Carter's i's and crossing Carter's t's. I tend to think of 1977-88 as the Carter Administration.
Carrol ----------
Carrol, you are not addressing the primary issue, which is the indictment of US war criminals on charges of bad taste. Also you have failed to address the problem of the French and their inability to distinguish moral right from wrong.
Allow me some latitude here.
Tonight to celebrate Memorial Day, KQED has seen fit to broadcast a long documentary on the US Air Force pow's of Vietnam. Now while we the audience are supposed to be shocked and appalled at the treatment of US service personnel at the hands of the barbaric North Vietnamese (intermixed with gratitude and respect for the heroic endurance of the men), I am reading a slightly different text. For example, one guy who discovered a certain level of art in prison, memorized the Hanoi Hilton and did drawings later on each of the scenes he remembered. When he first saw his cell, and saw maniacals of wrought iron, he realized they were of French design, and he understood that the prison was built by the French during the colonial era.
This is a fascinating detail. It means that the French had inadvertently taught the Vietnamese under colonial oppression, how to perform what Kant called Practical Reason, which was of such immediate use with the Americans. What is most interesting here, is these devices, the shackles, leg irons, hooks all look exactly like those in Goya's Disasters of War--down to tying elbows together and pulling them over the head to dislocate the shoulder joints. In other words these systems date from the end of the Ancien Regime, the Enlightenment, and the Empire. Ironically, they don't particularly relate to the Terror, since it seems to me there was little use of torture under the rule of the Committee. Crimes against the State were resolved with summary orders of execution. I might be mistaken on this exception and would be interested in reading about the prison system under the Committee.
In any event, this is some what bad news for the anti-pomo crowd here and in the UK. It means that Foucault and others in the post-structuralist revolt understood more about the Enlightenment and the rational State than either the liberal rationalists or the old Left has given them credit for.
There is a more difficult problem involved here than whether Kissinger should be tried and convicted of war crimes, or worse (in my opinion) bad taste. Our whole theory of State is at issue. We imagine that the State is the embodiment of the people, accountable to them, and representative of them. But clearly this is an illusion, even worse, mere propaganda, and the highest level of liberal democratic theory nonsense. The practical truth of the matter is that the State is the universal enemy of the people, and the primary issue at stake is whose imperatives will out. One can hardly blame the state for being a State. Oh, shock of shocks, you mean they actually kill people?
This entire line of reasoning about the war crimes of Kissinger, et al, reminds me of the gut wretching, gnashing of teeth over dead solders that we are traditionally treated with during Memorial Day. You mean there are dead solders? I am shocked.
There are only dead solders. Those other guys were just pretending to be solders. So, there are only Secretaries of State who are war criminals, since there are no other kinds of Secretaries of State. Or, in a moment of weakness, I will admit that some Secretaries of State were just pretending, and didn't manage to get enough people killed to qualify as a war criminal.
This can't be news.
Chuck Grimes