Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>
> What made Vietnam a syndrome were exactly the moral qualities -- the
> national feeling that it had been shameful and futile, a sacrifice for
> nothing, for less than nothing, for evil to all concerned. These didn't
> spring from the deaths themselves. They sprung from a change in the
> climate of ideas. And from new media that started out excellent churner-
> outers of the big lie and ended up a terrain of conflict.
"They sprung from a change in the climate of ideas": But this doesn't explain anything -- it merely names what it is that _needs_ to be explained.
Carrol