Yesterday as usual, as one of the first things when I wake up, I turned on the radio to listen to our "left/liberal" NPR station. And they were running some piece, some reporter supposed to be over there in Iran, and she was going on and on about how the Iranis want to be bombed, how every Irani she talked to (probably in some Palahvist/expat bar) wants to be bombed, bring on the bombs!
I was astonished, naturally, but they went onto some other piece and my day went on. Then later, in the evening, I saw some thing on Reddit about how "Mark Levin", a local far-right Zionist small-hat, had been ranting on his AM radio show about how .... the Iranis want to be bombed, every Irani he knows says so, bring on the bombs!
The Iran war grinds on, with Iran winning of course. This is another Vietnam. I know why the US fought so hard in Vietnam before getting its ass kicked too - it was about rubber. Your standard car tire probably has little to no natural rubber in it. But truck tires, industrial tires, military tires... those are a different story.
I learned about this is an unusual way. Somehow I was reading about these sneakers made by these cool Socialist skater punk kids, I wish I could remember the brand name. It wasn't Black Ball, it was some other name. And they used natural rubber for the soles. Where'd they get it from? Easy! They explained it on their web site. They bought used dragster tires. The guys at the drag strip would go through tires like crazy, and they had to be natural rubber to perform as well as they do. Just ... like .... military ... tires.
And what was Vietnam a French colony primarily for? Those Michelin rubber plantations. During WWII there was a saying something like, "Our military moves on a sheet of rubber". This is serious business. So serious that it's only by reading about cool skater dudes making their own hi-tops out of natural rubber, that I was able to learn about it. Serious enough that it's not talked about. The Vietnam debacle is always explained away as being for Freedom or Preventing Communist Domino Theory, or something. It was about rubber.
Obviously Iran is about oil. And do we Americans love our oil! We have something like 2X the carbon production per capita as the next runner-up. An American is not a person, but a person + a car (or two). And I can't be too smug, because I ride a bike on rubber/petroleum tires imported from Germany, on a frame imported from China, other parts from Japan, etc.
I was a little kid when the Vietnam war was going strong. I remember the name Pnom Penh because ... I liked pens. I remember the STOP signs having "WAR" painted on them so they said STOP WAR and thought this was normal. The adults, a lot of them, must have been freaking out. Of course there was the hippie thing, and "Canadian Geese" which meant that draft dodgers who got up to Canada were given asylum. Imagine Canada doing that now! There was Nixon's "wage and price freeze" and again, imagine any president doing that now.
Right about that time there was a shipping strike in Hawaii, too, and since our sugar was sent to the mainland to process it into white sugar, we used something called "SugarTwin" which was awful. There was also something called "cyclamates" in food that had to be avoided. And some pretty crazy inflation, hence Nixon's wage and price freeze.
What I'm saying I guess is the 70s were pretty crazy, and the boringness of the 80s to the mid "oughts" is probably the unusual thing.
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