[Peace-discuss] Come home, America

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Come Home America" is a good theme to organize objections to USG actions 
around.  It avoids the LURP (left-right paradigm) and the LOAD (limits of 
allowable debate) and allows us to talk to unwashed types, even teapartiers and 
socialists. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as Clement of Alexandria said.


On 7/5/10 9:53 PM, E.Wayne Johnson wrote:
> 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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