If this is too disjointed and annoying, I apologize. It didn't come out as good as I had it in my head, but I decided to post it anyway.

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I am a historian, not by profession, but by temperament. That's what I went to college to do. That's what I constructed my life to be. That's what I am. It's just not what pays me my salary. As a historian I spend no small amount of time attempting to educate people about history and leave them understanding why it is important. This is no small task, and it is often a frustrating exercise. A presentation I gave to a group of freshmen college students several years ago revolved around the long history of ethnic and religious conflict in the Balkans. I specifically focused on the ancient battle of Kosovo Polje and how the legacy of this battle, the victor of which is not and will never be positively known, played a large part in the beginnings of WWI and the more recent horrors instigated by Slobodan Milosevic. The latter in fact had risen to power in part on a platform that invoked the cultural memory of this historical conflict, and he had justified his campaign of genocide on it. A good portion of the reason he was eventually able to come to his position was due to the influence of Britain, France, Germany, and Russia in shaping the destiny of this region in the years following the world's first global bloodbath. The media won't tell you this, mostly because the media knows you don't care, just like the freshman to whom I spoke did not care.

This disturbs me.

A close friend of mine, a very intelligent man with strong credentials in the liberal halls of power, has over the years become the sliver of bamboo in my fingernails over this very issue. Is history important? People don't care about history, he says. He is correct, but that has not stopped me from my crusade to help him to understand why the importance of history doesn't depend on people holding any interest. I could present a lengthy discussion of the rhetorical battles we have fought over this, and I could discuss how I have slowly drawn him to my way of thinking and how he's shifted his political tactics to fall in line with things I have suggested are important. But, I will not do that because I have, just tonight, decided none of what I have argued with my friend is correct.

History does matter, of that I am still adamant. The problem with my argument is that history is important in the same way the legacy of John O'Neil matters. Don't know who that is? Look it up. It's history now, recent history, but all the same history, the kind of information that most people don't care to know.

So I don't ramble on too long, I'll end with a few comments to attempt to tie this to a meaningful point followed by a song. My friend says history doesn't matter because no matter how many lessons history teaches us, we refuse to learn, or if we learn, we are too stupid to incorporate the lesson into our behavior. He is, partly, correct. Most thinking people know Vietnam was a disaster for the United States. Slightly fewer people know that the problem was not our military might but our cause, i.e. we won the battles but lost the war because we were not fighting a war that could be won entirely by the military. Relatively speaking, almost no one knows that Ho Chi Minh was a great admirer of the United States, that he initially based his vision of Vietnam on the same vision as that held by the Founding Fathers of this country, that he took Woodrow Wilson at his word regarding self-determination and went to Versailles and begged for the assistance of the Western world in liberating his fellow people from the yoke of imperialist power. Of the few who know that, fewer still are willing to admit that we, the people of the United States of America, are responsible for every war-related death in Vietnam from the time of the French through the horrors of our own involvement and beyond. History is important to this understanding, but most people don't want that understanding, and so to them, it is not important at all.

And we turn to Iraq, in the days before the now when the British were carving out the Middle East in the wake of WWI for their own ends. They too refused to give audience to many people from these lands who longed to have what the Western world had, self-determination and freedom. And the United States supported them. And now the British and the United States continue to reap the rewards of their legacy because, to us, this history just isn't important.

We have learned nothing. Years from now, assuming we survive, groups of soldiers and groups of citizens of all nations involved will stand together and cry together about what they endured because we were all too stupid to learn.

Goodnight Saigon

We met as soul mates
On parris island
We left as inmates
From an asylum
And we were sharp
As sharp as knives
And we were so gung ho
To lay down our lives
We came in spastic
Like tameless horses
We left in plastic
As numbered corpses
And we learned fast
To travel light
Our arms were heavy
But our bellies were tight
We had no home front
We had no soft soap
They sent us playboy
They gave us bob hope
We dug in deep
And shot on sight
And prayed to jesus christ
With all our might
We had no cameras
To shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe
And played our doors tapes
And it was dark
So dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers we’d write
And we would all go down together
We said we’d all go down together
Yes we would all go down together
Remember charlie
Remember baker
They left their childhood
On every acre
And who was wrong?
And who was right?
It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight
We held the day
In the palm
Of our hand
They ruled the night
And the night
Seemed to last as long as six weeks
On parris island
We held the coastline
They held the highlands
And they were sharp
As sharp as knives
They heard the hum of our motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive
And we would all go down together
We said we’d all go down together
Yes we would all go down together