Springsteen proves he still hasn’t learned the lesson of Vietnam

The Star Ledger of Newark ^ | 01.01.19 | Paul Mulshine

[Coleus]

The last two times I saw Bruce Springsteen, I paid $15 and $40 for scalped tickets. So I certainly wasn’t going to shell out $600 to a scalper just to see him on Broadway.

It wasn’t until Springsteen’s Broadway show finally appeared on Netflix that I got to see it.

The beginning is very funny, especially when Springsteen jokes about the fact that at the time he was singing about factories, he had never set foot in one – and that he didn’t even know how to drive a stick shift at the time he was about to write “Racing in the Streets.”

“I made it all up,” he jokes.

True enough, but that joke carries over to his positions on politics.

That becomes apparent when he brings up the Vietnam-era draft and the sad story of Walter Cichon.

Cichon was the lead singer of a Freehold-based band called The Motifs who “showed us by the way that he lived that you could live your life the way you chose,” Springsteen says.

Except that Cichon couldn’t – at least not with a big-government Democrat running the country. Lyndon Johnson got elected in 1964 by defeating Barry Goldwater, who said, “I want to end the draft altogether and as soon as possible.”

Lyndon Johnson wanted to keep the draft, but he declared “"We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

[elteemike]

For an in depth account of how the Democrats sold out the Vietnamese people and dishonored the sacrifice of so many American lives, take a look at An American Amnesia: How the US Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia by Bruce Herschensohn...

Available on Amazon...

And a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhyiJK5_waI