A Nam flashback...

Speaking of Vietnam and PC MC, I'm too young to have been drafted (though I do recall a scary day when I was sent a letter and told to report to the local post office for possible drafting when I was 18). In 1970 I was in the first year of junior high school, a mere 14 years old, in a suburb of Washington, D.C. My English teacher was a pretty black woman (sort of Diahann Carroll-ish) and I don't know how I got the gumption, but one day I handed her a manuscript of a story I had written. Without telling me, one day she announced she was going to have the whole class spend the hour reading it -- she had mimeographed some 30 copies of it. At the end, she was going to tell the class who wrote it. I sat there as the class read in silence all around me, burning with impatience to have the class know that it was me, me, me who wrote this. One girl sitting next to me turned to me at one point and said something like, "this story stinks!" I just smiled to myself.

Anyway, the point of my little trip down memory lane is that for some reason, I injected into my story -- which was about a special agent sent to Vietnam on a mission to help the combat troops -- an explicit message of how bad and wrong the war was. I remember some line in there about how the agent looked out his plane window as they were landing and noting how beautiful the countryside of Vietnam was, and lamenting how "we" (i.e., the US) was despoiling this lovely nature and its people. The usual PC MC claptrap about how the Big Bad West is ruining the precious Eternal Victims, the Third World. And of course my story and my 14-year-old mind had no comprehension of the pernicious Communist menace that made that war necessary and noble (only to be tragically botched by PC MCs and Leftists in government, academe and the news media). And of course my black teacher just lapped it up (which is why she specially featured it for a whole day).

How did this PC MC message get into my head at age 14? Percolation. It makes a good cup of coffee, too.

Since my 911 wake-up call, however, I prefer my Islamic coffee black, no milk of human kindness.