The Time of Forgetting

Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night was lying on the couch when I got to suburbia. I picked it up and started reading it again, and quickly became absorbed.

Mailer relates his experience in the October 1967 peace march on the Pentagon. At the very least, it is an interesting account of a celebrity writer arrested for crossing Military Police lines at the Pentagon. I was in training to go to Vietnam at the time, so the march did not make an impact on me. My mind was elsewhere.

When I compare Vietnam to the Iraq Occupation, some things feel the same: the frustration over the waste and lives lost for instance. You would think people would still remember after forty years, yet they make the same mistakes again.

What good is any philosophy when memory fails? All that is left is tragedy.