Spine 156: Hearts and Minds

I don’t often talk about our recording schedule, but this week’s episode is already terribly dated for terrible reasons. Pat and I watched Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary on the Vietnam War, way back in September. I actually watched it on the 11th, because I don’t want to be happy. The world has changed a lot, even in the last eight weeks. On the one hand, we recorded this so long ago because Pat took paternity leave for the birth of his second child. On the other, the concerns of continued militarization of Japan Pat expresses in the episode have come to fruition, and it’s a bitter fruit. I rhetorically ask what it will take to forget the lessons we learned from the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like we forgot the lessons of Vietnam -- naively suggesting that those wars are over and that we actually learned a lesson -- and it seems we may now have an answer.