by Fred Reed
LVT P5 AMTRAC. What we drove in my AMTRAC Battalion in Danang. Designed as a Landing vehicle, it had the gasoline tank in the bottoms so that, when the Marines decided to used them on land around mine fields, they were death traps. We were rushed into the war half-trained. Happy Memorial Day This might …
It’s funny. For the better part of a century we have had the Drug War, useful to politicians, heavily funded, but producing no results. Prices of drugs have remained about the same or gone down. Drugs are one of those things like poverty and climate change that everybody is against but that never change. The …
There is a lot of snot and malice about rednecks on the internet. Most of it comes from such cornflowers and honeysuckles as college professors, other witless suburban nonentities, and assorted twits in cities. By “redneck,” these bundles of intellectual lingerie seem to mean anyone without a college degree who can hang a door or …
The Fitty-Sedden Chevy was an American icon, like the flag, Babe Ruth, and McDonald’s. Boys figured that when their time on earth ran out, and they went to the great Southland in the sky, they’d find Elvis and Carl Perkins parked in front of the soda shop in a bad-ass Fitty-Sedden convisible — top down, …
May 6–The Reed-Gonzalez traveling circus will go to San Carlos on the Pacific coast to visit a friend and indulge in warm water and red wine for roughly two weeks but will renew sedition and libel on return if not caught and hanged first. Meanwhile some thoughts on artificial intelligence. Whether there is any other …
Inasmuch as America has a large population of Latin Americans, it seems to me that some might want to know about them, and what they are, and where they came from. Most Latinos of the south are either a mixture of Spanish and Indian, or sometimes pure Indian. We have some idea of the Spaniards. …
Living in Latin America, and having spent much of my working life in Asia, as well as many uears in the Potomac Rome, I now watch with considerable care the portentous and rapid currents of change in the world. I suppose the news business is an addiction. Perhaps there should be a twelve-step program. Yet …
Parents of bright children learn the futility of argument over ill-advised desires of their offspring. A daughter of fourteen who wants to go to what predictably will be a drunken fraternity party will argue that they are really nice boys and daddy, you are prejudging, It isn’t fair, you don’t even know them and she will …
Living as I do near Guadalajara I do not, thank God, see much television from the Great Squirrel Cage north of Mexico. When I do, I get the impression that America is four-fifths black and that all white women have black husbands. Whites apparently do not marry each other. My information is unreliable, but it appears that …
I was pleasantly surprised a couple of months ago to get a call from Wang Fang Pi of the Chinese Political Affairs branch in New York, an old friend. Fang Pi headed the speech-writing office. I had met him in a press bar in Bangkok while on a junket for the Washington Times and we had stayed in …