But governments always lie. Sure, that’s part of the picture. I spent a couple of decades of my life studying the lies of presidents and other politicians, especially concerning the mechanisms of our national security apparatus and the processes by which it leads us into armed conflicts.
Forty- plus years after I left Vietnam, and more than thirty years after that first NVA tank drove over the gate to the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, and our nation had lost the war that we were always bound to lose, that is still not okay with me. So much needless and wrongful death is never in the past. To put it in a larger context, Nanking is never in the past. Leningrad and Treblinka, even Sand Creek and Wounded Knee and My Lai, are never in the past. People remember - families remember - as Muslims remember the crusades.
So studying the great lies of my time – of the Kennedys, the Dulles brothers, Johnson, McNamara, the Rostows, the Bundys, the Lodges, Nixon and Kissinger - felt satisfying for a while, giving me someone to blame and avoiding the need to look in the mirror. But now I’m more interested in the rest of the picture, the part that’s “in front of our noses,” to paraphrase Orwell, but not really seen, because it’s so close. Having studied political thinkers from the I Ching to modern times, my favorite philosopher these days is Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo the Possum: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
