The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In what may have been explained in this space earlier, late in 1962 this scribbler was sitting in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, having a drink with David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne while watching the flashes of gunfire across the river in what is now known as the Vietnam disaster. This is pertinent to the fiasco now awaiting George Bush as Iraq approaches its alleged election on the rocky road to "democracy". Halberstam, now a famous author, was the New York Times young reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Vietnam, intimating that the American military brass were lying in their reports to Washington that they were winning the war against the guerrillas in the jungle. It is almost parallel to the fiasco in Iraq, where even the most guarded of the military admit they cannot guarantee safe passage between the Baghdad airport and the "safe" Green Zone inside the capital where the safe ones are supposed to be safe. Browne was the correspondent for United Press International, and also won a Pulitzer for the copy he sent out across the world, saying essentially what Halberstam had also found, that the American people were not being told the truth. The George Bush problem is that he doesn't want to be told the truth. Forty years ago, in Vietnam, there wasn't instant TV, 24-hour cablevision stations, American casualties only vaguely released Ñ not in numbers but counted only in the body bags being unloaded off aircraft in Los Angeles and sent off to Arlington Cemetery in Washington. Now, thanks to modern technology, the confused American public see each day the name, the number Ñ and the age Ñ of their youth slaughtered in Iraq by suicide bombers who are taught that Heaven will reward them with 92 virgins in the afterworld. Halberstam's Times list the dead every day. Something never done (because being unavailable) in Vietnam days. The ABC's hour-long Sunday morning show, hosted by George Stephanopolous, winds up each week after showing the best laughs by late-night comedians David Letterman and Jay Leno, with a "Memoriam" Ñ who has died last week: Artie Shaw, Rosemary Kennedy, whoever. And then all the kids blasted to smithereens in Iraq, and their ages Ñ 21, 19, 22, on and on. Mostly from the Deep South, uneducated black boys who joined the military in hopes of learning a trade. The American public must be torn by those dreadful statistics. President Bush has a major problem. He has a volunteer army, no draft. How many American wives, knowing their husbands report weekly for National Guard duties Ñ and seeing those stats from a country they couldn't find on the map Ñ want him being shipped to Iraq. The scribbler was raised in a small town in British Columbia outside Camp Chilliwack, an instant army camp an hour east of Vancouver in the Fraser Valley. Our high school entertainment on Saturday nights was to stand outside the only beer parlour in Chilliwack and watch the riots when the soldiers, completely swacked at closing time, would beat up on the "Zombies" Ñ so-named they being the Quebec conscripts whoÊ refused to be shipped overseas to fight an "English war." Mackenzie King, of course, became famous because of his famous pronouncement: "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription." Thus saving the Liberal party tradition so currently revived by Paul Martin. Dubya Bush has an equal problem. Is he going to have to bring back the draft, while all those 19-year-olds appear on his TV screen each night? Tough choice. XÊÊÊÊ XÊÊÊÊÊ X AND ANOTHER THINGÊ Seriously, what do you think of a grown man, a Rhodes Scholar, a millionaire who made his fortune inventing Newfoundland's first cablevision empire, who still calls himselfÊ "Danny"? Is that not somewhat self-indulgent? Okay, if not Daniel. Maybe Dan. We all know that the reason "Jimmy" Carter lasted only one term was because he was a "Jimmy." Bill Clinton, for all his sins Ñ he had only one Ñ was never known as "Billy." Get serious.
