[Peace-discuss] Come home, America

[E.Wayne Johnson]

Kauffman Rox!

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "peace discuss" <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Monday, July 05, 2010 11:17 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Come home, America


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/>

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