> The victory of the Vietnamese should have been an occasion for
> celebration for the majority of Americans who had come to oppose the
> Vietnam War
I danced a jig in honor of the Japanese bailout of Vietnam's extremely impressive developmental state at a local lizardfest, which should count for something. My own theory, which is probably as wrong as anyone else's, is that the Vietnamese Revolution sort of passed into the mass-cultural consciousness of multinational culture, as a kind of silicon dialectics, of the notion that what is weak and nevertheless just, can sometimes overcome what is powerful but unjust, via collective molework ("it takes a village to raise a revolutionary"). It's probably not an accident that while terms like "May 68" and "Prague Spring" have faded, you can still feel the energy radiating from words like "Vietcong" and "Ho Chi Minh" (a name which is really a cleverly punning anagram of international solidarity), whose superficial exoticism testifies to their startling nearness.
-- Dennis