634
JA~K LUOWI~
is the sanction of the
either/or,
the
yt s
/
no,
the
0/1,
and, being so, is
too
serious a matter to wait for a Bosch to be distinguished from a Castro,
or a Vietnam from a Korea. Nor must the Cold War be burdened with
distinctions such as would separate the idea of democracy from the idea
of America, or the idea of democracy from the idea of free enterprise,
or the idea of free enterprise from the idea of the United Fruit Company,
or Standard Oil. Both the CIA and the American banana-grower know
Communism when they see it, and if the undergraduates on American
campuses want to continue to investigate and differentiate, it's only
because they are "extremists" or "naive" or "taken in."
I, personally, have argued the United States' armed involve–
ment in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic many times, only to have
my point of view subjected to the Either/Or, which comes up saying I
want America to withdraw from Vietnam totally and unconditionally,
which, in fact, I don't. I believe that sad reality fixes itself on actions,
just or not just.
If
Bolingbroke became King illegally, he was no less
King in reality. So with American involvement in Vietnam. Though I
might not have approved of that involvement when
'it
began I look on it
as real, and certainly connected with our heroic, and sometimes quixotic,
attempt to meet Communism (or anything which looks a little like it)
move by move, head-on, or obliquely. The "domino" analogy is a sweet
knuckleheaded oversimplification, great for the unimaginative who wel–
come the chance to live with any metaphor, however tenuous. I would
take the Vietnam confrontation as serious enough in and of itself, and
would welcome a truce, an end to the fighting, even if that end came
at the price of a settlement as unsatisfactory as the one we all
live
with
in Korea at the present time.
What Johnson may not be aware of sufficiently, or Bundy care
about, or McNamara, is that the bombing of North Vietnam appears
to intellectuals not just on American campuses, but throughout Europe,
as well as
in
Asia and Africa and South America, as but one more
manifestation of American racist brutality, the same as was practiced
on Nagasaki more than on Hiroshima, the .same as is practiced in
Bogalusa and Selma. That power misused changes the world's impression
from
Strength
to
Bullying.
I do not say this impression is justified, or even
the majority view. I do say that
good
bright people, in this country and
elsewhere,
believe
no 200-plane raid could ever be loosed on a nation of
white men, our previous war actions to the contrary. They
believe
that
somewhere, under the carpenter's tears for the departed oysters,
is
a
notion about "dirty little yellow men."
And I suspect that the same kids who protest Bogalusa and Vietnam
