RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Credential Dropping

Excuse this digression into pompous jackassery, but I’d like to make a point. I’m a history person. I studied it in school. I did extremely well in school. The school I went to is regarded as one of the best in the country.

*obligatory caveat: I went to the University of Pennsylvania – although I went non-traditionally, working my way through part-time with a mixture of day and evening classes. I worked at Penn full-time and took classes year round. In the end I earned the same degree, from the same professors as any Penn student, only as a Penn employee, my classes cost me a total of $0.00. As Philadelphian’s well know, the stereotypical Penn student is a pampered, shiny faced, know-it-all, self centered asshole with an inflated ego and a delusional sense of entitlement. I was not one of those Penn students.

But where was I? O yeah. While at Penn I studied history… particularly American History. More particularly American History with an emphasis on the 20th century and a further concentration on United States culture and the country’s place geopolitically, especially the Western Hemisphere… (Although at this level it’s all just variations on a theme.) Got that? All that I’m really saying is that I know what I’m talking about when I say:

Whoever says it’s unfair to compare Iraq to Vietnam is out of their fucking minds. Sure they’re different (one was in a jungle and this one is in a desert) and sure, U.S. culture has changed in the last 30-40 years. No shit. But when people start talking about history repeating itself, this is what they mean.

Go to the library and read a New York Times from the year 1969. Replace the word ‘communist’ with the word ‘terrorist,’ ‘Viet Kong’ with ‘insurgent,’ ‘war on terror’ with ‘Cold War,’ ‘gunning down unarmed civilians’ with ‘gunning down unarmed civilians.’ Sure it’s not an exact parallel. It’s just a striking parallel in many of its most fundamental ways.