A Letter from 2009
Thursday 26 February 2009 Dear Blair, Sorry it has taken so long to respond to your simple question—but as you are a teacher, I can probably count on your understanding. You wrote: “From everything you’ve…
Tag: Robert McNamara
Wartime during Life/3
We Expect the Germans To know their own historyTo tell the truth about their warTo refuse rationalizations and excusesTo act responsibly here and nowHowever many decadesAgo that was The world expects the AmericansTo know their…
Gloria Emerson’s Rage, according to Cal
Dear Carla Cal keeps sending me stuff I keep sending it to you With my slight adaptations… Perry I endorse her rage I approve of it Even though the Buddhist masters say Anger is a…
McNamara and Co./2
I’d chain all of the politicians to that haunting Vietnam memorial and have them read—slowly—every name aloud. Then the war would end for me. Take all of them, all of them who gave us the…
McNamara and Co./1
In his 1995 book, In Retrospect Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara [translation: former Secretary of Aggression) Made an apology to the American public For the harms brought to the country Because of his unwillingness…
Reasons of State Or Reasons of Memory
First published in The Ecumenist, 1997. Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York: Penguin USA, 1995. $27.95, U.S.A; $36.99, Canada. Throughout this spring, there have been several…
Norman Morrison
Now, maybe some U.S. citizens over 65 Remember the name “Norman Morrison” But many people in Vietnam of all ages Know that name The young Quaker immolated himself in 1965 Deliberately close to Robert McNamara’s…
Our Wars
On David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) Today there exist tremendous and unprecedented possibilities for knowing the reality of our world just as it is, with all that it has in it of anti-kingdom…