Elvis has left the building. At last.
...and as the band was playing him out, the Beltway chattering class was in a mass conniption over all those poor, helpless collaborators we left behind, and our lack of political will, and how, if we could only piss away another trillion or two and tough it out until mid-century, we could lick those mean old Taliban once and for all.
In the days leading up to Elvis' departure from the building, the press was full of screeching and howling about how this wasn't going to be like the evacuation of Saigon, honest it wasn't, seriously, for real — and the louder they howled, the more convinced I was that it would be like the evacuation of Saigon, except even more awesome.
I was 18 when I watched terrified Embassy flunkies being plucked off the roof by the choppers on TV. The draft had officially ended around 1971 or so, but I still had to register. Got a ready-to-burn card and everything. The day Saigon fell, I was about two weeks from graduating high school, and classified 1-H.
Turn out the lights, the party's over...!
11x18 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 660kb
