You Can Get Anything You Want...

I think this was the first Thanksgiving since my college days that I didn't listen to Arlo Guthrie sing Alice's Restaurant. I own it, and thought I'd listen to it on my mp3, but found I hadn't loaded it. It's usually played on the local classic rock station at either 11AM or noon, but I wasn't listening at the time. So, I wound up having an Arloless Thanksgiving.
I can't help but think about the differences in the eras of the today versus the time the song was written is worth commenting on. Guthrie wrote and performed the song in the latter stages of the Viet Nam War, an unpopular war being fought overseas to "keep free" a people whose culture most Americans didn't understand. Today, we're at war in two overseas nations, one of which is little supported by the American polulace. Still, one lesson we've learned, that is that even if we don't support the war, now we don't condemn the warriors. American policy is the work of the policy makers in government, not of the soldiers.
It's also worth noting that our other war, in Afghanistan, is a follow-up to a war of occupation fought in the late 1970's and much of the 1980's by the USSR. The Mujahadeen fought a war of attrition against the Russians and eventually outlasted them, not unlike what we did to the British over two centuries ago. It was this war that prompted the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics of 1980.