If you found yourself singing along with this title, you are of a certain age. This is the chorus of Country Joe & the Fish’s "Feel Like I’m Fixing To Die Rag," made famous at Woodstock in 1969. The song actually opens:

Come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
he’s got himself in a terrible jam
way down yonder in Viet Nam so
put down your books and pick up a gun we’re
gonna have a whole lotta fun

Country Joe McDonald, by the way, was named after Josef Stalin. That must have been some household.

Our purpose here is not to re-fight the Vietnam War, even though this war has been fought and re-fought in our never-ending cultural wars for the past 40 years. Massive shocks have a way of reverberating for a very long time. Consider the oft-told and possibly apocryphal tale of Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-Lai in 1972 describing the impact of the French Revolution on Western civilization as, "too early to tell." All global history since 1914 has been a footnote to World War I, we are still living with the economic aftershocks of the New Deal, and chances are very high everyone reading this will be living with the consequences of the 2007-2008 collapse of Wall Street’s institutional model for the rest of their lives.