Maddening!

“There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of principle, bent only on amassing a fortune.”

That party was the Republicans, a bit more than century ago, led by Teddy Roosevelt.

The next governing majority will be guided by independents, and include liberals, conservatives and people whose great-grandparents left the Republican Party a century ago. It will also include a whole lot of Budweiser drinkers, wondering how the world changed so quickly, without them.

In fact I was proud of my service, and try though I did I could not reconcile my blue-collar patriotism, visceral to the point of fists clenched, with the virulent hostility to all things “imperialist” that passed for the common wisdom in those interminable days of rage. BRING THE WAR HOME. Although I came to loathe the war with a passion, my estrangement from the 60s was very nearly complete, and it wasn’t until I discovered who the real veterans on campus were — nearly a thousand strong as it turns out — that I could forgo the bristling stance and turn my hypos to fraternal account.

Thanks to the campus chapter of Veterans For Peace I learned to be a veteran. A veteran on the Berkeley Campus, no easy feat with two intramural wars raging. Moreover a veteran committed to peace, tutoring the martial campus in the irenic arts. Ceasefire Now. Thanks to the power vacuum created by the incessant war of attrition, On Strike Shut It Down, we became — for an all too brief, almost apocryphal time — Big Men on Campus. The administration couldn’t go more out of its way to accommodate us, and the Plateglass Revolution couldn’t think to avoid us. (No one dared spit on a veteran, and indeed we were met with the grudging respect of the ultras in the Movement.)
The Berkeley Wars might have had a far different storyline had we exerted our authority, but that was asking too much. Reentry to civilian life was difficult enough without having to take responsibility for the ivory tower under siege. Instead we became exemplars, role models even, and because we were antiwar and spoke from (often harrowing) experience those middle class students who scorned the military came to think twice about the lockstep uniforms they wore. For those of us who savored that fraternity and got a fleeting glimpse of that lost treasure, every Veterans Day since has been a memento mori, of the fugitive peace we brought home during that well-nigh apocalyptic time of defiance and despair.

Robert Andersen, Kittery, Maine