So unless you’ve been living under a rock, or you’ve set your RSS Feed to “Michael Jackson ONLY”, you’ve no doubt heard that Robert McNamara, evil businessman, Secretary of Defense under both Kennedy and Johnson, and nefarious mastermind behind the Vietnam War, has died.

Now that he’s dead, it’s time to speak ill of him, with gusto. By way of that, let’s get some facts about the Vietnam war out of the way:

* It was a shameful, evil thing we ought never have started;

* It wasn’t about defending democracy, but about preserving western colonial dominance of a sovereign nation who’s only real offense was wanting colonizers to get the hell out of their country;

* It served no strategic purpose and furthermore, with it’s ignoble completion proved that the domino theory was crackpot insanity at best and a vicious lie at worst;

*It could never have “won” for the same reason the British could never have defeated us in our war for Independence – namely because, in order to do so, indiscriminate slaughter on a scale rivaling Nazi Germany would have been required, something the citizens of our country thankfully would never have accepted;

*Despite this, we still managed to deal out a shocking, and disgusting level of carnage and mayhem, dealing that unfortunate country a near mortal blow from which they have only recently recovered.

To restate, there is literally nothing about that was that can be justified. It was indefensible, even at the time, and only hardened idealogues could possibly have felt otherwise. Making matters worse, it seems to have been escalated, in part, to provide commie-hating cover to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society plans. So in a sense, 50,0000 dead American soldiers, and more importantly, more than 2 million dead Vietnamese, were slaughtered so we could have a barely provisory welfare system and the meagerest possible health care system for the elderly (but for no one else). How’s that for cost/benefit analysis?

I jest, slightly, but only slightly, and none of this should detract from the fact that Johnson was egged on by his national security and foreign policy team, of which McNamara was at the head. All of that terrible destruction, needless waste and countless killing, it can be lain at McNamara’s feet. All the apologies in the world, and all of the favorable documentaries ever made, can’t make up for it.

Much has been said about the banality of evil that made that war possible, but to really measure just how terrible it was, one must look to its aftermath. Few things in life can be seen as an either/or situation, but the Vietnam War is just such a thing. Had we been willing, as a country, to admit the truth about this war, to acknowledge our cowardice, our greed, our stupidity, our casual brutality and our henious, wrongful attempt to genocide the communism out of the brown people, and I mean, admit all of this immediately upon the war’s completion, our subsequent history might have been vastly different.

Instead? Well, We seem to have these kind of indefensible national calamities every few generations, and the result is always the same: The bad guys increase their power by exploiting resentment over their own failed endeavors while those who were right sheepishly refuse to defend their position until they lose by default as the wrong side’s version of events becomes conventional wisdom. This is, of course, an American tradition, as those of us with roots in the south can attest. Even so, it’s one thing to know this, and another entirely to see it develop within one’s own lifetime. Especially as we should know better.

Post-Vietnam, in place of honest assessment and correction, we got 30+ years of Right Wing lies about how Vietnam was “lost” because liberals, protesters and squeamish politicians refused to do what “had to be done to win”. Year after year from 1975, continuing all the way into the 2004 election, a cadre of sociopaths and liars perpetuated the awful myths regarding our failures and defeat, extending the life of Mcarthyist slurs as an effective political tactic, and in the process convince millions of Americans to let them completely fuck the country up.

The recessions that have worsened with every occurence; the slow motion dismantling of our national safety net; the debt ridden, social darwinist culture that even now tears us apart; the millions who find their formerly well paying jobs flee the country as cost of living and health care costs increase expoentially; Katrina; right wing terrorist violence; even 911 and the terrifying 8-year long national nightmare that was the Bush Adminstration. All of these national calamaties, and more, can be traced back to how we as a nation coped with the end of Vietnam.

Luckily for us, we remain as a nation unwilling to honestly assess the Vietnam war, and we now have political and social culture in which Americans blithely debate the usage of torture not as a question of good or evil, but of “necessity”, with the issue of morality dismissed as “anything we do is, by definition, the right thing to do”. So we can look forward to many more such wars in our future. Apologies in advance to third world countries who happen to have resources we need or happen to be in our way. I mean, who happen to need “liberating” for “freedom” and “democracy”.

My point: McNamara spent his entire post-Vietnam life trying to apologize for his creation of America’s sociopathic political and foreign policy culture. And one must give him credit for realizing the awful monstrosities he inflicted on this country and on the world. But it wasn’t enough. His life’s work not only led to the slaughter of millions, it also helped give us a generation of insanities of which we are only now receiving full benefit. His death only serves to underscore the depravity that now defines national political culture and it is likely that it will end all discussion of the matter.

One hopes that on his death bed, he understood that. Based on his inexplicably lauded performance in The Fog Of War, I doubt it. Good riddance.