Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recently-established International Criminal Court and failing to acknowledge decisions from the World Court, denouncing it both as political and as a threat to national sovereignty. What if the Cambodians, for example, suddenly wanted to extradite Henry Kissinger, charging that his direction of bombings of civilian villages during the Vietnam War constituted a crime against humanity? Or if the engineers of the Iran-contra scandal were to face an international tribunal? Being committed to justice on paper is easy. Being prepared to subject yourself to it is another story...
...time hunting seemed heroic: a test of manliness, a mythic pageant, a recreational surrogate for war. Ernest Hemingway was savagely, sometimes childishly competitive for trophy animals. The '60s brought a shift, and Vietnam a sort of anti-Hemingway revulsion. Michael Cimino's 1978 movie The Deer Hunter ended with the hero lowering his rifle, declining to kill a good-looking buck that, before Vietnam, he would happily have slaughtered...
...maybe a class-based aesthetic revulsion against hunting preceded Vietnam. Just after the election in 1960, Lyndon Johnson brought John Kennedy down to the L.B.J. ranch in Texas and, much to Kennedy's distaste, forced him to go out shooting deer. Urbanity recoiled at bloody, redneck crudeness. That's how the moment was interpreted at the time. Hunters belonged to the oaf class, Elmer Fudds who were dumb enough to be flimflammed by Bugs and Daffy: "Duck season! Wabbit season...
...fact, Reporting Vietnam makes one wonder at America's ability to sustain the war effort as long as it did, given the grim news and harsh truths that were being sent home from the front. Was no one listening? Was the power of the government information machine so vast as to overcome the real news from Vietnam...
...magazine, Jonathan Schell of the New Yorker, Ward Just of the Washington Post, Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times and scores of others--that is most moving, both for the horror seen and the risks taken. Tom Wolfe's reconstruction of a carrier-based bombing run over North Vietnam still makes one's palms sweat...