the draft 5

 They called it Vietnamization fifty years ago.  Afghanization is what we did lately but we did not call it that because everybody remembered what became of Vietnamization.  Maybe Vietnamization lasted longer because they had more of a sense of being a country than the Afghanis do who never had much of a central government.  There was a lot of talk about the bloodbath that would happen if Saigon fell. but that never happened.

Hopefully that will not happen in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is saying they won't do that, but who knows.  Actually it is surprising how little we know about the Taliban.  What about our CIA, what about all those investigative reporters?  Well I guess it's hard to get a double agent imbedded in an organization like that.

And my guess is that it is a pretty loose organization. The Afghanis pretty much look alike to us Americans, but there are about six nationalities in the country and each of them are divided into different tribes who don't like each other much better than the different nationalities do.  When people are all working together for a common goal they can work together pretty well, but once they have accomplished it they look around and ask themselves what can I get out of this for myself, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Taliban begins to fall apart.

And now it's Friday and time for the draft again.  I suddenly remember that I never did respond to Beagles's comments about how unlikely it was that somebody convicted of murder in Texas would ever get to breath fresh air again.  I have to admit that I had never thought of that before.  My guess now is maybe he was lying to us.  That's the kind of place Berkeley was, that was the kind of lie somebody might think would impress people.

When I say Berkeley I mean the campus area, actually I mean the area directly south of campus where I suppose some students must have lived, but it was mostly dropouts and people like us who just came there to hang out because it was cool.  The main drag for us was the six or seven blocks of Telegraph Avenue which extended south from the campus.  Just off the end of Telegraph there was a vacant lot.  Whatever had been there had been torn down and whatever was going to up next hadn't gone up, and The People discovered it, and it became People's Park.

 They put in some vegetable gardens, and some places to argue politics, and some places to crash, and like that.  This didn't make the people who were going to put up the next thing too happy, or the city because to the upright citizen the place looked like an eyesore, not that a lot of upright citizens frequented that area. 

 But anyway The Man was going to take People's Park away from us, and the unpopular war was going on apace, and in France they were having big student uprisings, and were we going to let them show us up, and...

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
cause summers here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy   

 The demonstrations were to go on that weekend.  We went out to see them that Friday.  The police were on one side of Telegraph and the police on the other.  I don't remember which line approached the other one first, but suddenly bottles were being hurled at the police.  This was a recent escalation I didn't like.  It seemed to me that the role of the demonstrator was to get his head beat in, and then the people would see how brutal the police were and that would bring on change, you know like in the civil rights marches.  How the brutality of the police proved that the war was wrong (there were other issues from time to time, but the war was really what it was always about) was a weakness in my logic that didn't bother me overmuch.  So this throwing bottles thing, who was going to feel sorry for us when we got our heads beat in.  Note that my head was safely on the sidelines.

 Diane's father was visiting us, well her, but that meant visiting us.  He was a retired FBI guy.  We were all a little wary about that, but he arrived with boxes of beer and food and that won us over.  At some point, many beers into that night, Bob Bergschnieder and I ran out of cigarettes and had to go down to Telegraph Avenue to get more.

 There was probably someplace else we could have gone to get cigarettes, but we knew Friday night's demonstrations were to be just a prelude to Saturday night, and we wanted to see what was going on.