Too much going on to do live blogging, so here is a link to the New Yorker’s blog on YearlyKos.
One of Hertzberg’s posts ends with a lament that there’s no revolution in the air at YearlyKos. I had a different experience by getting away from the grand McCormick Place convention center where the Kossaks are meeting. Being a Vietnam veteran in addition to blogging, I spent Friday evening with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now 40 years old.
MORE below the fold, a version cross-posted on www.miami-dade-dems.blogspot.com, with photo.
This was the 40th anniversary of the VVAW's founding, and a happy crowd gathered informally Friday evening at Thai Binh, a Vietnamese restaurant that Chicago-area vets have frequented for decades, in an Asian neighborhood north of the Loop.
Here the atmosphere was more to the revolutionary mood unfound at YearlyKos. The "open mike" format for speakers was perhaps more liberating than the formal VVAW sessions scheduled for Saturday at Roosevelt University; present were not only the around-60 age group of Vietnam Vets, but also the young generation of Iraq veterans, including resisters.
Eugene Cherry, 24, took the microphone to express gratitude for the help he’d received from VVAW and like-minded anti-war groups as he fought to get discharged from the Army – the Chicago native is finally free as of July 13. Click here for background on his case. The Army is infamous for forcing him to go AWOL to get treatment for PTSD.
Others from the younger set wore T-shirts with "Support War Resistance" on the chest, and some of the youth fashions would have pleased Hertzberg’s desire for something more defiant than the bloggers’ look.
"Remember to reach out to other veterans," one speaker said. (Kossaks, do you hear that?)
A Vietnam vet led a cheer-leader’s chant: "Give me and F! Give me a U! Give me a C! Give me a K!" A big "FUCK" roared out, and what’s it for? "Fuck You!"
And who’s that for? The answer came from Carl Rogers of Los Angeles, the first vice president of VVAW when it formed in 1973. He recalled the event back then when so many Vietnam vets threw away their medals earned in that war. It was the perfect "fuck you" gesture of the day, he said, lamenting that we’ve yet to find the perfect "fuck you" gesture for the Iraq war.
There's a mission, Kossaks: find the perfect "fuck you" gesture for our situation. But don't stop at that.
So there was some defiant, revolutionary atmosphere to be had in Chicago. Just not at McCormick Place. Where we’re blogging like crazy – and maybe that will turn out to be the factor that helps turn this country against another wrong war. Without all the misery of revolution. Nor homeless veterans in the streets.