On Not Being A Dove

A long but fascinating essay from the late John Updike. I found this passage quite interesting:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of [the president] by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the USA and its many amenities—intact. A common report in this riotous era was of slum-dwellers throwing rocks and bottles at the firemen come to put out fires; the peace marchers, the upper-middle-class housewives pushing baby carriages along in candlelit processions, seemed to me to be behaving identically, without the excuse of being slum-dwellers.

Emphasis mine.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. They weren’t anti-war — they were just on the other side.

3 thoughts on “On Not Being A Dove”

  1. Most people would agree that the Vietnam war weakened the U.S.’s position in the Cold War. In 1965 we had unquestioned military and strategic superiority; in 1975 we were knocked back on our heels, and the Soviets could see themselves approaching parity (until they made their mistake in Afghanistan).

    So the irony is that those protesters were (rudely or not) arguing in the country’s best strategic interest, while the architects of the war were tragically mistaken.

  2. “So the irony is that those protesters were (rudely or not) arguing in the country’s best strategic interest, while the architects of the war were tragically mistaken.’

    ahhhahaaaahahah a
    omg sorry I can’t stop laughing
    if they had not protested, if we were allowed to fight the war the way we wanted, it would be done.
    Instead we gave them a 3 month cease fire which allowed the NVA and VC to re deploy and re equip. We did not bomb SAM construction sites, we did not pursue them like anyone would fight a war.

    The war was only half in Vietnam. Unlike you, even Ho Chi Minh realized and said the biggest fight in the war was back in the US, on the tv and on the campuses.

    We lost because we wouldn’t let our soldiers win.

  3. Jim, would you care to explain how a (my) country is supposed to benefit from a weakened strategic position, vis-a-vis a foreign superpower armed with ICBMs and what is technically defined as an “evangelistic” ideology?

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