Some brought their luggage, heartbreaking, hope to make flights they were promised. Crowds massed around the gates of the American embassy. Once the communists arrived, anyone with connection to the Americans could expect to be killed. "We have plenty more," a South Vietnamese lieutenant quipped bitterly. One plane from Operation Babylift, the evacuation of 2,000 war orphans, crashed, killing 151 aboard. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, friends and family had been leaving for weeks. The North Vietnamese Army encircled the city. Some claim they never heard the song, ergo it never played.īut others insist they heard it, though not the Bing Crosby version, but Tennessee Ernie Ford's. Like so much about the Vietnam War, which ended 40 years ago Thursday, there is controversy. Haven't we made any progress?Īrmed Services Radio played "White Christmas," the signal for the last Americans to leave Saigon. The thinking man, rather than plunge into the political maelstrom emerging from Massachusetts, might instead wonder why we as a nation would want to beat ourselves up, in exactly the same way, over exactly the same people, as Juvenal did in 85 A.D. Juvenal offers up the monstrous image of women giving birth to calves and lambs and then shudders, "horreres maioraque monstra putares" - "you may be aghast and consider such men even greater freaks." He was horrified by gays because of what he saw as womanishness, and a violation of nature. We point to nature-they can't have kids! So did Juvenal. He waved morality and he worshipped Zeus. We oppose gays based on our morality, based on our Bible. I guess so that conservatives will feel better. We seem to be gearing up for the vast, expensive and time-gobbling exercise of ripping up our nation's bedrock-our operating code, to use computer language- all so we can protect.
I guess we're there now, what with the marriage announcements in the New York Times, and after the Massachusetts court all but ordered the flowers for gay marriages in the Bay State this spring by pointing out that-sorry-there's nothing in our sacred Constitution that specifically permits denying people their civil rights based on sexual orientation. "And if we only live long enough, we shall see these things done openly: People will wish to see them reported among the news of the day.'' Grumpy old Juvenal-the patron saint of crusty pundits-ridicules the short crew cuts of these queers, "their hair shorter than their eyebrows," and presciently predicts our exact situation regarding gay marriage. Homosexuality was open and tolerated in Rome, and, perhaps for that reason, Juvenal can barely wait to launch into them in his Satires-a quick introduction damning the clatter and corruption of the empire and then, boom, the entire second satire, a rant against gays for their effeminacy, their brazenness, and the very existence of guys such as Gracchus, the former priest of Mars, who has the audacity to actually marry somebody, who "decks himself out in a bridal veil" and weds in a little ceremony.Īnything familiar here? The similarities are quite stunning. They remind us that the issues we tie ourselves into a knot about, and consider evidence of our own fallen state, are really the evergreen issues of history, only we don't know it because we're too busy trying to shove our religious dogma down strangers' throats.
Like a good many Americans, apparently, Juvenal hated gays-he hated lots of things but had a special hate for homosexuals. "A friend is taking to himself a husband quite a small affair." And off they trot to the ceremony. "What is the occasion?" chirps his dainty pal. "At dawn tomorrow in the Quirinal valley." 'I have a ceremony to attend," lisps one of Juvenal's loathed fellow Romans, more than 1,900 years ago.
The truth is that gay people got married to the degree that whatever repressive society they found themselves in would permit.
Plus a link to Juvenal's second satire, which is no big flippin' state secret.
I would like to enter into evidence a column that ran in the paper 10 years ago and is, sadly, as if ripped from the headlines. Umm, if it please the court, au contraire, you ahistorical asshats.