April 30, 1975, SAIGON FALLS

April 30, 2019: When the U.S. Embassy in SAIGON, SOUTH VIETNAM was evacuated and the capital city of America's client state in Southeast Asia finally fell to the North Vietnamese Communists and the Vietcong, four Georgetown University freshmen learned about it from the proprietor of a hippy shop on Wisconsin Avenue.

I was one of those four students.

The store owner learned of it from radio, there being no cable-tv or cellular telephones.

He told Susan, Tessa, Ed and me, the only patrons in his small store at the time.

I said to him, and to my three friends, "That's the end of our empire."

I was wrong.

Footnote to history: Upon saying those words, I was reproached by the store as not having "learned anything from Vietnam, ma-an."

I actually did.

I read Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald and The Best and the Brightest in high school, and they shaped my Weltanscnauung.

We did have an empire.

We still do, I reckon.

Transmogrified, but still imperial.

Vietnam remains in our sphere of influence, long after the fall and renaming of Saigon as Ho Chi Minh City.

But now our Nation is under stress. Russia is subverting our political process.

I'm reading the Mueller Report. (Don't buy the dinky Dershowitz edition).

After having defeated the former Soviet Union in the Cold War, we're now besotted by Russian influence of a sickening degree, egged on by DONALD JOHN  TRUMP and his co-felons.

This is not normal.

This is corrupt.   Let's end it soon.

The Constitution, in its majesty, deserves our respect.  Impeachment is the constitutional remedy, since 1787, for potentate-pretentious federal officials who abuse their powers.