Linguistic risk

Today we have had a visitor from Vietnam. Welcome! Bienvenu!

I took a risk by taking the phrase "welcome to Vietnam" and substituting "BB" for "Vietnam." It might work but I may quite easily have committed a solecism in the graphic above, in which case I apologize.
Here is haunting little song, "Bonjour, Vietnam" (Good morning, Vietnam), sung in French. A yearning for one's country that one knows in terms of a Coppola film with helicopters flying in anger, a vow to go there, saying "hello to my soul, hello Vietnam." Lovely images of contemporary Vietnam (3:30m):


More contemporary views with folk music....
The North and Hanoi (4:43m)



The South and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) (7:51m):


It seems that President AWOL has been lecturing the American People on the lessons of Vietnam again. [Strains muscles rolling eyes]

I doubt he has ever learned a lesson in his life.
--the BB

War as an enemy of the poor

Photo source

An excerpt from Dr. King's comments on Vietnam:

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

Read it all here.

UPDATE 1:
A further comment of King's from his speech of November 11, 1967 to the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace [via The Rude Pundit]:

"Now what are some of the domestic consequences of the war in Vietnam? It has made the Great Society a myth and replaced it with a troubled and confused society. The war has strengthened domestic reaction. It has given the extreme right, the anti-labor, anti-Negro, and anti-humanistic forces a weapon of spurious patriotism to galvanize its supporters into reaching for power, right up to the White House. It hopes to use national frustration to take control and restore the America of social insecurity and power for the privileged. When a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor can become a leading war hawk candidate for the Presidency, only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events..."

Plus ça change....

UPDATE 2:
So many wonderful and challenging postings on this commemoration of Dr. King!

Juan Cole has an extended reflection at Informed Comment. He includes this portion of King's Christmas Sermon, December 24, 1967:

' And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.

What is the problem?

They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.'

[All emphasis in these quotes is mine.]
--the BB