When I was a boy, WWII came and gone as if it was a natural phenomenon. Like the rainstorms and thunderclaps of a monsoon, here today, gone tomorrow. No question of “why” WWII came to my native land ever arises in my mind.
1962 military coup in Burma was altogether different. It had cracked the shell in which I was living.
Vietnam War taught me a few things beyond the lessons of citizenship and politics. But I don’t feel that my understanding was adequate, mainly because my knowledge of the steps that led to it was second hand. I felt like the eyewitness who came after the fight had started: all you see are the bruised lips and broken noses.
In Iraq War my senses were better tuned. Before the sky of Baghdad had lit up with the bombs and the flares, I have the sensation that the fuse of war will be lit at any minute. There were thunderous speeches and drum beats for war, including what turned out to be some falsehoods dressed up in a dulcet tones of diplomacy. The demonstration at the UN lacked only the Bunsen burner.
No one vigorously opposed – or dared to oppose – the prevailing sentiments. Senator Hillary Clinton’s (now the Secretary of State in Obama administration ) YES vote in Congress for war authorization bill can be understood in such light.
Now we are in a pickle – in Iraq and on Wall Street.
We are in Iraq for the seventh year, and no one (except a few) fess up to been wrong.
As to what happened on Wall Street, the corpse is still warm, and there is no time yet for detailed autopsies to find either the causes or the culprits. But then why do I feel like the gas station attendant in the move “No Country For Old Men” who put nothing up in the coin toss, and yet his fate is being decided by the outcome of that toss?
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