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“Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the call Don’t stand in the doorway Don’t block up the hall For he who gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There’s a battle outside And it’s ragin’ It’ll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a changin’.” – Bob Dylan, 1963 That’s right, folks, nineteen hundred and sixty-three. I was thirteen years old and I was told that the big bad communists in North Vietnam just shot at one of our destroyers. I was told that, if we didn’t fight back, the North Vietnamese were going to take over Democratic South Vietnam and then Laos, Cambodia, Burma, The Philippines and even New Zealand and Australia would fall! After misleading the American people about the phantom attack on the American destroyer Maddox in The Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson went so far as to proclaim, “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco.” My god, people, what in the hell does this sound like to you! Does this not reek of “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them over here.”? What I wasn’t told when I was thirteen was that the very same commander who reported being attacked by the North Vietnamese in The Gulf Of Tonkin on August 4, 1964, Captain John Herrick, retracted his original report after further investigation. However, Lyndon Johnson, getting all he needed with the first, erroneous report, ignored Herrick’s correction and the rest, as they say, is one goddamned sad history.
Song sample for September, 2008 Let The Sun Shine Down from the cd Flameland. Michael Bonanno is a published poet, essayist and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of his poetry can be found at The Poetry Corner at OpEdNews.He is an associate editor for OpEdNews. Bonanno is a political progressive, not a Democratic Party apologist. He believes it's government's job to help the needy and that leaving the people's well being to the so called "private sector" is social suicide.His CDs may be purchased at CD Baby.
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