CSotD: Oh. You’re back.
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Jeff Danziger needs to go on my list of cartoonists who would be here all the time if I didn't pay attention.
But this panel has some eternal truth to it, as well as some new truths and some things we really need to think about for the future but probably won't.
To start with, the Folks Back Home never do understand and never have. I had an old copy of Time magazine from about 1966 — which I seem to have lost — with a story in it headlined "Oh, you're back" about guys coming home from Vietnam and finding that nobody really knew where they'd been or cared about what they'd done.
Yeah. A year before the March on the Pentagon. Two years before the Democratic National Convention. Don't blame the weathermen for the way the winds were already blowing.
I used to say that, if LBJ and crowd wanted support for the war, they should have told us that they needed scrap metal and they should have rationed gas and meat and sugar, and made the war something we were all involved in on a daily basis, like back in World War II.
But every war constructs its own retrospective mythology. If you want a different view of what homecoming was like for the Greatest Generation, get hold of a copy of "The Best Years of Our Lives" and see what the story was in 1945, before grand narrative had been fixed in place.
"Oh. You're back."
Rationing was over and we didn't have to save fats and we could till the Victory Garden under and so now everything was normal again and it's nice that you're back. Put on your gray flannel suit and get into the swing of things.
There was no rationing, no Victory Gardens during Vietnam, but the draft meant that at least people with draft-age sons were aware of the war, and most people, at whatever level of society they lived, knew kids who were serving over there.
And I think that, if we'd wrapped it up as quickly as the Korean War, it might have gone down in history as the second forgotten adventure of that century.
But now we have the Iraq War, which went on forever, but it didn't include rationing and it also didn't include a draft.
More than that, it didn't even have a price tag. A price tag would have suggested a cost that might have included raising taxes.
The politicians who strut and bray about how we can't afford schools, we can't afford to support our old people, we can't afford universal health care, because it would require raising taxes, were strangely silent about the cost of war.
You know what they say: "If you have to ask, you can't afford it."
Or was that, "Don't ask, don't tell"?
Well, we probably should have asked, because we sure as hell couldn't afford it.
Instead, our motto became "Take two — they're small!"
And we paid for them by cutting taxes to stimulate the economy.
That being the policy of the wise and knowledgable people who now lecture us about how the national budget is just like your family budget, and, if you want a new car, you have to plan for that, don't you?
Yes. When I need a new car, I order two, and then I request a pay cut from my boss, because my family budget is just like the national budget.
And when my personal economy crashes, I blame the kids and we stop taking vacations and I cut their allowances, and we go down to two meals a day, and we stop going to the dentist and we don't bother with annual visits to the doctor, and we never, ever, ever bring up the topic of those goddam cars.
Oh. You're back.
Some people like editorial cartoons to be jokes. Okay. The joke is, those little uptown tyros don't really know anybody who served in Iraq. Or, y'know, that other place.
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