11-30-06, 9:01 am

Last year Harry Frankfurt, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, wrote a great non-Marxist book about our time and place in the 'information age.' 'On Bullshit' is its catchy title. In it, Frankfurt analyzes our media-saturated world, where reason, scientific method, and the rules of evidence are either absent or merely dim afterthoughts for the processors of our 'information.' I thought of Frankfurt's book last week when I read Bush's statement comparing the Vietnam War to the present Iraq horror. Being in Vietnam, Bush was expected to say something and so he did. That it lacked coherence was not important, at least to Bush and the mass media. It filled media time and the space, like a ten-second commercial or department store Muzak.

Before Ho's statue, Bush said that the lesson of Vietnam for Iraq was that 'we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is…just going to take a long period of time to – for the ideology that is hopeful – and that an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate….We'll succeed, unless we quit.'

That he said it posed in front of a statue of Ho Chi Minh, one of the great Communist revolutionaries of the 20th century seemed to matter as much to Bush as if he had made his remarks in front of a statue of Lyndon Johnson or John Wayne in a Green Beret. Did he even recognize Ho? Could Bush even understand a man so unlike himself? Ho Chi Minh was a man who was born in a colonial society, who never had anything handed to him. He succeeded in school, traveled throughout colonialist world as a merchant seaman. He joined the Communist movement at the close of World War I, exhilarated by the writings of Lenin, the achievements of the socialist revolution in Russia, and the possibilities for liberation it held for peoples living under colonial domination. 

Bush by his own admission has never read much and has always traveled in narrow, privileged circles where he had everything handed to him. Therefore he has never had to learn much of anything about the world. Ho, on the other hand, learned to combine internationalism and patriotism in a delicate, balanced way for nearly 50 years, only to pass away six years before his people were finally liberated. Bush, if the accounts of his life are to be believed, simply substituted God for alcohol in the 1980s and went on his merry way, using words like 'freedom' and 'democracy' the way some people say 'whatever' or 'have a nice day.'

Bush made this statement at the headquarters of the Communist Party of Vietnam, which, even with the changes and adjustments that Vietnam has been compelled to make, is the party of a unified Vietnam and is committed in the long term to building socialism.

That this statement may have been insulting to his hosts didn't seem to dawn on Bush, since he apparently had no knowledge of their history or the war of liberation they fought against Japanese invaders and occupiers, French colonialists trying to make a postwar comeback, and for another 21 years against the US imperialists, who eventually dropped more bombs in Vietnam then in WW II and the Korean War combined, creating millions of casualties and an environment  poisoned by defoliants and pockmarked by bomb craters.

Was anti-Communism the 'hopeful ideology' to which he was referring  that triumphed over what he calls an 'ideology of hate,' meaning the ideology of socialism and national liberation that sustained the Vietnamese people against the most powerful military machine in history?

Was Bush's menaing that the US succeeded in Vietnam because it never quit, did not withdraw completely in 1975, stayed the course, and won the Vietnam war, as it must do in Iraq? If anyone else made such statements to psychiatrists, it would at best lead to a negative evaluation that would keep them from many types of employment, including quite possibly military service.

For Bush though, it was merely one more disconnected moment, one more inappropriate statement, made while Iraq burns and Vietnam continues to recover and grow, extracting itself from the clutches of the 'hopeful ideology' that cost its people millions of lives in the 1960s and 1970s.

Such statements and the policies they provide the verbal Muzak  for have been soaking us in B.S. for six years now. It is difficult to be angry at them or even to laugh at them anymore. It makes no sense to analyze them any more than this because they are simply fluttering out there to mark time.

Politically, the tide has definitely turned against the Bush administration. What now must be done is to expose the Bush administration's failed and deeply reactionary policies in Iraq, which it can no more successfully implement than Diem, the American puppet in Vietnam half a century ago, could enact meaningful land and social reforms on behalf of the Vietnamese people.

What must be done now is to move forward on a steady and determined march toward 2008, toward the end of this nightmare administration and the establishment of the first progressive national government in terms of domestic policy since the 1960s and, in terms of foreign affairs, since the end of World War II. 

--Reach Norman Markowitz at