Violet Deliriums's video: Minutemen - Viet Nam guitar cover

This is my cover of the Minutemen's song "Vietnam" (1984). In this song and many other, they live up to their name with the minimized short song. During the 1980s, the Cold War was still in the front of many people's minds, and as a teenager I remember looking at the "Fallout Shelter" sign on the various buildings, as if we could go into the church basement and somehow be safe. I mean, the radiation for the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster has spread all over the world via the jet stream and has contaminated our air, soil, and water. For example, Cesium 137 with a Fukushima signature is found in milk produced on dairy farms in Vermont. But I am digressing...Back to the 1980s, when that part of the Cold War known as the Vietnam War was still weighing heavily on the minds of Americans so that films like "Rambo" (1982, and its sequels) and "Missing in Action" (1984, and its sequel) were required to try to ameliorate the guilt and shame we felt as a nation for this war. I am saying nothing about its veterans who simply did what they were asked to do, often with little choice due to the draft. Instead, through this song I am attacking US foreign policy and the government's justification for it. It was President Eisenhower who first articulated the "Domino Theory" which became the fear-mongering slogan of the Vietnam Era presidents that followed (Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon). It suggests that if we let one little country (such as French Indochina as it was known before it became Vietnam in 1954, when its people rallied against French colonialism) "fall to communism" then all the others around it would do the same and soon we'd be living in a communist-dominated world. The same sort of fear controls US citizens today and makes us feel justified in bombing other countries with drones. But the problem is, whether we intend it or not, we are harming civilians. Even if the smart bombs are one-hundred percent accurate (which they are not), we cannot look into the buildings that we strike to see who is in there. Every time we kill another person, that is one more reason for their friends and family to fear and hate us. We live in a world of fear, and many of us resemble the character that is dramatically brought to life in Black Flag's "My War" (you can see my cover at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keMey9fbE-8). I played it on my Fender Violet Deliriums ESM Signature Model Blacktop HH Jaguar, which has Seymour Duncan SH-1 pickups, a killswitch, and some neat-o stickers on the pickguard. (ESM = Explosive Space Modulator.) I select the bridge humbucker and that goes through my Fender Supersonic 22W amp's "Burn" (high gain) channel the the gain knobs set no 4 and 5 1/2. I shape the sound with a Keeley Compressor. To record it, I played along with the mp3 with my computer speakers and amp huddled around a Samson CO1U microphone into my Mac's Photo Booth program, which reverses the image and I don't know how to fix it. Let's say I got a number, that number's fifty thousand. That's ten percent of five hundred thousand. Oh, here we are in French Indochina! Executive order, Congressional decision. The working masses are manipulated. Was this our policy? Ten long years, not one domino shall fall.