[Peace-discuss] Come home, America

[C. G. Estabrook]

	August 01, 2010 Issue
	Up Against the Wall
	By Bill Kauffman

...The War Party called the Peace Party Nazis in 1941, Communists in 1951, 
Soviet dupes in 1961, dirty hippies in 1971 ... must I go on? In 2011, those who 
heed George Washington’s counsel to seek “peace and harmony with all” will be 
called mullah-headed appeasers of Irano-fascism.

...The range of permissible political opinions has narrowed to encompass the 
rat-hair’s breadth separating Mitt Romney from Joe Lieberman, and woe betide the 
straggler who wanders away from the cage.

...Radicals — even naïve Tea Partiers or idealistic left-wing kids — are 
dehumanized in ways unthinkable when America was a free country. No one was 
barred from the conversation back when there was a conversation. No dispatch 
ever read, “Wingnut Henry David Thoreau today issued a manifesto from his 
compound near Walden Pond...”

Which reminds me: I have a book due out in July — "Bye Bye, Miss American 
Empire" - my typical melange of Little American history, tendentious journalism, 
and bad puns, this time about breaking up our national and state leviathans into 
more manageable pieces. In the 1970s — ah, golden youth — a book wondering if we 
need both more states (Upper New York, Southern California, Jefferson) and fewer 
states (aloha, Hawaii and Alaska — maybe Vermont, too) would have been greeted 
with “Wow, man, that’s kinda interesting,” but my opuscule will, I expect, be 
treated as though I am advocating the colonization of Neptune. [BUT IT WILL BE 
DISCUSSED - PROBABLY SKEPTICALLY - ON NEWS FROM NEPTUNE... --CGE]

The squeezing out even of establishment dissent — especially since 9/11—has left 
us with an antiwar movement so feeble it makes the Esperanto lobby look like the 
AARP. Enter the new organization "Come Home, America," its name taken from the 
magnificent 1972 acceptance speech delivered by George McGovern in the last 
unscripted Democratic convention.

..."Come Home, America" is based on the now decidedly radical premise that young 
men and women belong home, with their families and in their communities, rather 
than fighting needless wars on the other side of the globe. I am a small part of 
what I hope will become a chorus of patriotic dissent ringing from Main Street 
and Copperhead Road and Martin Luther King Boulevard, from farm and church and 
coffeehouse...

Full article at <http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/aug/01/00050/>