| |
|
| |
logomachy--1. A dispute
about words. 2. A dispute carried on in words only; a battle of words.
logomachon--1. One who argues about words.
2. A word warrior.
|
|
| |
|
| |
2004-12-31
Vatican was right all along
A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on--Charles Haddon Spurgeon A lie can be all over the Internet before the Truth has booted up its ISP.--Logomachon The Vatican often takes an "even-handed" approach regarding Israel versus the Jordanian castoffs (aka, the Judean Arabs), but it seemed to have outdone itself when Catholic World News reported that the Vatican's newspaper was scolding Israel for refusing aid to Sri Lanka. Others picked up that story, slamming the Vatican for getting the story wrong and for anti-semitism (here and here): What had actually happened was that Sri Lanka had rejected an Israeli medical mission because it contained military personnel. Sri Lanka did accept a jumbo jet of material aid.
Meanwhile, it turned out that CWN had the story backwards. The correct headline and story was L'Osservatore raps Sri Lanka for declining disaster relief. CWN says a "crucial error in translation caused a serious misinterpretation of the news", and now reports Calling for "a radical and dramatic change of perspective" among people "too often preoccupied with making war," L'Osservatore Romano chastised the government of the stricken Asian nation for putting unnecessary restrictions on an Israeli offer to furnish medical help.
The Vatican paper observed that in what "should be a time for unconditional solidarity," some world leaders seem incapable of escaping a "small-minded approach that restricts their horizons." Yourish.com has the details, including copies of the original story, which has been pulled from CWN, but not its many Web spawn.
|
Tsunamis' spiritual silver lining
Amid all the reports this Christmas holiday season of the excesses of extreme secularists, the deaths of 100,000 people by tsunamis have brought a heartening indication that spirituality is still strong among, of all people, the intelligentsia. Author Simon Winchester writes in the New York Times that This year just ending - which the all-too-seismically-aware Chinese will remind us has been that of the Monkey, . . . [was] much prone to terrestrial mischief Inspired by the Gaia theory, Winchester explains that though the devastation around the Indian Ocean might “seem in human terms so tragically unjust”, it was all part of a higher plan, a “part of a vast system of checks and balances.” The events of this week were “ of unmitigated horror: but they may also serve some deeper planetary purpose, one quite hidden to our own beliefs.
For one thing is certain, and comfortless: on earth, eternally restless and alive, there will, and without a scintilla of doubt, be a next time. In other words, we must have had it coming to us.
Well, maybe Winchester finds some comfort in having Mother Earth kicking ass and taking names, but I don’t want to live in a world that allows such suffering.
|
2004-12-28
Bad news from Iraq
Steven Vincent at In the Red Zone continues to offer new and fresh insights on developments in Iraq. Recent posts have discussed some unsettling indications that interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s campaign strategy may be to form a Shia-Sunni alliance aiming to bring back a “Saddam lite” authoritarian regime. Part of the motivation is to make Iraq strong enough to resist Iranian moves after the US pulls back.
Allawi states his case here.
Yesterday’s post contains a report from Khalid, a formerly very upbeat Iraqi journalist, who has now left the country because of the predominance of gangsters allied with political factions (or vice versa). Last Spring Khalid and some other journalists told Vincent about the gangsters and graft operating “under the passive noses of the British”. Now, Khalid writes,Basra looks like a town in the American West, where gangsters and killers become the only authority and anyone who tries to discover their crimes will be shut-down and presented as a criminal and an outlaw!
It is like this: the gangsters control the government and steal money through many different ways, but most particularly through fictitious contracts. Their militias wear the uniform of the Iraqi National Guard. They are loyal only to their party chieftains. Private militias are an almost inevitable development, but they are not permanent. They can be superseded, suppressed, or co-opted. In South Vietnam, some units of the irregular troops (CIDG) run by the US Special Forces were effectively units of FULRO, the montagnard resistance organization. As CIDGs' capabilities developed and their areas of operation were stabilized, the Green Berets withdrew and the CIDG camps were converted to regular army units. In another case, the private armies of the warlords in Afghanistan are being absorbed into the national army.
What the situation is Basra does show is that regular army forces are not trained to deal with lawbreaking and gangsterism, any more than cops are trained to use tactical air support. Law enforcement by line troops pretty much begins and ends with martial law.
Gangsterism will persist until civil society has developed further. The rooting out of gangster rule and corruption requires strong action by higher levels of government, just as the U.S. Constitution makes the Federal government responsible for ensuring that each state has a republican form of government. This is a police responsibility, but coalition forces must be available to provide muscle for crushing or forcing the disbanding of gangster militias.
|
The Masters of Bugga-boo lose one
Whew! It looks like that asteroid won’t hit in 2029. Fortunately, new data were uncovered in old observations before some senator could start a Federal program centered in his state or hold hearings blaming Donald Rumsfeld. (h/t to Jerry Pournelle)
Of course, since the probability of a collision was no more than 2.7% with the initial data, it’s no big improvement, so there is NO REASON TO GET TOO COCKY. The Masters of Bugga-boo still have lots of horrible things in store for us, from the evils of outsourcing to global warming nonsense.
Some of this urge toward hysteria drove the headline writer of "Tsunami risk here is remote, scientists say", but the article is interesting, if a bit off-kilter in its explanation of the mechanics of tsunamis (this page is good on the generation of the tsunami, and this one has a clear explanation of the hydrodynamics, with just enough math to be satisfying). Philadelphia is too far inland to be affected by even an extraordinary tsunami, but the article goes on to consider ever-more remote possibilities of an Atlantic coast tsunami caused by geophysical disturbances. No mention of a meteorite striking the Atlantic.
I think they missed something, though.
Philadelphia lies on the flood plains of two tidal rivers. A tsunami would reach a few hundred feet inland from the Jersey Shore. But what happens at the 15-mile wide mouth of the Delaware Bay? Would the tsunami create a bore that would sweep up the 103 miles to the Philadelphia/Camden waterfronts?
Not that I’m worried. I live five miles away from the river, on the last outcropping of the Piedmont Plateau, 100 feet above the city.
|
2004-12-26
Today's lesson
Nine years ago, Colin was four and being fussy at Mass on the Sunday after Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Family. As the reading of the Epistle began, I sat him on my lap and tried to calm or distract him, only half listening to the passage from Colossians 3:18-21:18-Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
19-Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them. [“Col. 3:19” is engraved in my wife’s wedding ring.]
20-Children, be obedient to your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the Lord.
21-Fathers, do not nag your children . . . whereupon Colin immediately stopped fussing, pointed his finger at me, and said “See! Don’t nag.”
After Mass, I sat him down with the missal and explained to him the full import of the passage, especially verse 20, which had somehow escaped his notice.
|
"Everybody hates Ahmed!"
In the Red Zone (ITRZ) publishes a confidential State Department memo, a proposal to give Iraqis a sitcom to “counter the effects of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia.” The idea is to use alternative media to reduce tensions between Shia and Sunnis.
The set-up for "My Son the Shia," is that Abu Dulaimy, head imam of an ultra-orthodox Wahhabi mosque in Falluja, sends his son Ahmed off to engineering school in Basra. After two years, Ahmed comes back home married to the beautiful, but ditzy Layla. Problem is, Layla is Shia--and Ahmed has converted in order to marry her, driving Abu crazy! In the pilot, “just before Ramadan, Layla hopes to impress her new in-laws by cooking her sure-fire mazgouf recipe,” only she forgets that Sunnis start the holiday before the Shia. “Old Abu and his four wives try to maintain their fast, while trying to keep the city's religious police from dynamiting their house.”
In another side- and head-splitting episode, hilarity ensues again, when Imam Abu tells his Wahhabi congregation that Shiism is a Jewish plot against Islam. His son Ahmed gets so angry that he tells the local American commander about the rocket-propelled grenades hidden under the mosque.
Still another plot has Layla baking again. This time, it’s cookies to celebrate Mohammad's birthday. We are assured that “the scene where she gets chased down the street by an angry mob threatening to stone her to death is a classic!”
Can you imagine] Is this some kind of spoof or satire] What kind of Foggy Bottom numbskull would think twice about such an idea]
Why, that would be like Stars and Stripes during the Vietnam War publishing a cartoon about a goofy American platoon with their fat, hapless sergeant and their winsome opposite numbers in the “Nget Cong” with their own a fat, hapless sergeant. It might have been called “Nguyen Charlie” and looked something like this:E
That was a hell of a way to fight a war, compared with the buck-toothed, bespectacled Nips of WWII, and Donald Duck’s Nazi nightmare in “Der Fuehrer's Face”â. (The artist did some latter day strips involving Swift Boats. See if you can spot the flip-flops on the boat’s lantern-jawed officer in charge.)
So I think that if “Operation Infinite Ratings” can fly under Condi’s radar, it looks good for a mid-season replacement. Plans are to introduce some additional featured characters, and I have this idea for an English language spin-off. I can’t say too much now, but if you can grasp the potential of “The Fresh Thief of Baghdad”, have your girl call my girl and we’ll do lunch.
ãI looked for a download for this cartoon. I found a link on a neo-Nazi site (where people thought it was a riot, except the guy who objected that conditions were not so bad in Hitler’s Germany). The download site (steakandcheese.com) is full of ads for porn, but this link will open the cartoon directly in Windows Media Player.
|
2004-12-25
More records John Kerry won't release
Yes, the election is over, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a bit of snarky gossip you can dine out on for the New Year. I have to protect my source, so I will just say he is a friend and a trustworthy eye-witness.
The lacrosse squad at a major, academically top-hole East coast university has scouting reports going back to . . . oh, the Medes and the Persians. Before the election, the coaches got e-mails and phone calls from alumni, asking them to look at the scouting reports on Yale from the mid-1960s.
The coaches were laughing at what they had found when my friend walked in. They showed him the report from 1965 for John Kerry. Overall, it was a pretty positive evaluation, but down at the end of the page was this sentence:
Weak on defense.
|
2004-12-23
Two Wheelers’ Three Laws of Motion
I recently cast a cold eye on Becca Hutchinson’s complaint that drivers in Newark, DE, don’t show proper consideration for her when she rides her bike to work. My impatience with her didn’t arise just from her bad writing and the fact that she sounds like a humorless scold who wants everyone else to change because she feels unhappy. Based on my own experience, I believe her problem is the result of her own self-centered bad attitude.
For three years during and after grad school, I lived and cycled in Newark. I have been a bike commuter in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, and this past Summer I commuted by bike to a consulting gig in Center City Philadelphia, where I learned that the way to deal with traffic is the Way of the Urban Deer.
Urban DeerThree decades ago a writer in a cycling magazine described cyclists as “urban deer”, slipping silently through the noisy city, flitting along their own invisible trails, unhindered by One-Way signs or traffic signals, fleet, agile, alert, and aware. Some people might conclude from this description that cyclists scoff at the rules for cars and pedestrians, but that is wrong. We just interpret them differently, in the light of the Two Wheeler’s Three Laws of Motion: Don’t get hit. Don’t hit anything. Don’t stop.
But make no mistake. Bicyclists’ ability to flout the letter of the law—OK, flagrantly disdain every scintilla of order and restraint—depends on automobiles’ adherence to the law. We can run red lights and ride between the lanes because we know that drivers wait for the green and keep in their lanes. In turn, we mustn’t do anything that inconveniences or startles a driver. We don’t interrupt their traffic flow; they let us ride to our own rhythms. Viva USA!
Anyway, whenever a driver gives me an opening, I wave my thanks.
Granted, in Newark, Becca doesn’t have the advantage of learning the True Practice of the Way of the Urban Deer from its Supreme Adepts, the bicycle messengers. Listen and take heed, o pilgrim! The key is not to think of yourself as fighting the cars for the road, as Becca does. To the urban deer, the road and the traffic are one, as the pebbles and flowing water are one to the brook trout.
I learned this from watching the messengers, like this encounter on the Chestnut Street bridge over the Schuylkill River.
Learning the WayI had started following the messenger when he passed me on Chestnut. We were moving as fast as the cars on the bridge when he left the bike lane and moved left to ride the center stripe. I knew why he wanted to avoid the curb lane. Just across the bridge there’s a light: the bike lane disappears, cars make right turns, and the pavement looks as though it was last repaired by Ben Franklin.
A gap between cars gave me an opportunity to get on the center stripe, but I didn’t do it the way the messenger had. I cautiously took a position in the right lane, as though I were a car, then moved to ride the stripe. Conceptually, I was riding on a stationary road trying to avoid the cars whizzing by. The messenger rode the traffic flow the way a fish swims in a river. The lane he wanted was the “lane” on the centerline between two rows of cars. The entrance to that “lane” was next to the left bumper of the car ahead of him. He just swam diagonally through the traffic to the entrance and rolled down the “lane” between the cars.
When I had started bike commuting into Philly, the morning ride took 45 minutes. After watching and learning from the Supreme Adepts, I brought the time down to 30 minutes and sometimes less. For example, a few mornings after I followed the messenger, I was coming down the hill toward 42nd St. A college kid on a trail bike swung onto Spruce and pedaled hard up the long hill toward 40th St. This was a challenge.
I caught up to him as he slowed behind a truck blocking the bike lane at 41st. I swung to the centerline, passed the truck on the left, and zipped across the intersection. The kid must have taken it as a challenge, too. When I slowed to check the cross traffic at 40th, he passed me. On the flat beyond 40th, a solid line of cars kept me on his fender in the bike lane, but as we headed down the slope toward 38th, I again cut through traffic to the centerline to swing around the pedestrians and the cars turning right. I was across the broad 38th St. intersection before the kid even entered it, and sailed smugly down the hill toward the river.
As was now usual, I rode the painted line between lanes across the Schuylkill bridge. When a bus’s butt blocked me, the driver in the right lane made a space for me to get around. When she came even with me at the light, she smiled up through her window and says “You be careful”.
Cherry cockyFinally, a word of caution. After a couple of weeks of building skill and confidence, I got into the cherry cocky zone, that level of experience just past the first flush of competence, which afflicts pilots (I’m told) and motorcyclists (as I know from personal experience). I began taking chances without realizing they were chances.
And sometimes I took chances that I knew were chances.
One morning in University City, a bus blocked the curb lane, and a large Fed-Ex van was in the next lane. I rolled between them, feeling anxious as the sky closed above me. There was very little chance that the drivers knew I am there. I had to duck to get my shoulders under their mirrors. I beat them across the intersection, but they passed me and again blocked the road at a light. Without a thought, I went between them again, this time pedaling to keep my speed up. (It is counter-intuitive, but faster is better in tight spaces. You spend less time in the danger zone.) I ducked the mirrors, popped out in front of the bus as the light changed, and was around the corner before they started moving.
Imagination is the enemy of action.
For details, see my bicycle-commuter log.
|
2004-12-22
Narcissism on wheels
A case study in thinking locally and acting globallyWhat do you think of when you get on a bike? That it is a ”noble form of transport” that makes you less selfish than motorists?
Whatever you are thinking, you can’t be more lofty-minded than Becca Hutchinson, for whom cycling to work is a way “to save the world or improve myself” or ““to make a statement about saving the Alaskan wilds or ending the war in Iraq, and whatever benefits the Earth might reap”.
If this sounds too good to be true, just look at her picture. Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, and one look at Becca and you know she is not a woman to be trifled with. She is of a decidedly stern, no-nonsense demeanor. It is clear that she suffers no fool gladly, and she is never beguiled by frivolities or distracted by the unrighteous. Seeing her picture, one is comforted by the knowledge that the English language holds in reserve the expression “crack a smile”, should it ever be needed.
What the picture tells us, the thousand words of her essay confirm, for nothing can hide from her those opportunities to bike for good, even though she began biking to work in the cozy hamlet of Newark, DE, because she “just wanted to save some Franklins on parking.”
Nor does she falter as the miles roll by. Her eye is fixed on the most unselfish and virtuous behavior, even though it eludes her in practice.I'd like to be able to say that since those early days I've done a 180 and broadened my focus, boxed up the money I've saved on parking and gas, and mailed it off to a worthy organization such as the Sierra Club or Doctors Without Borders, but that's not the case. For Becca, bicycling has been an invaluable occasion for moral preening of her sensibilities. But enough about her. After only one of her allotted three columns, she turns her attention to others and discerns areas where her fellow commuters could stand some shaping up, especially in their attitudes toward her.Pedaling to work each day, fighting cars for my share of the shoulder, has started me thinking about greed and excess and what it means to tune out the other guy in the name of progress. She is impelled to both struggle and these melancholy meditations on her fellow man because she is being attacked by the weighty auras of hostility projected by passing drivers.
On a bike on any given workday, the aggression you feel from passing cars is immediate and powerful enough to shave you off the shoulder in an instant. . . . It's amazing what a few layers of metal and glass can do to dull a person's humanity, and more amazing still what having a full tank of gas and the spare change to buy it can do to boost his false sense of entitlement. [Ed.A-hem! His] His]]] Does dulling a person’s humanity ipso facto make him or her male?] Isn’t it enough that ”you suck a fair amount of exhaust as a cyclist”?
Amazingly, her—apparently unremarkable—ability to read the minds of her fellow commuters has not enabled her to ameliorate this insufficient concern for her, the noble cyclist. Her sedulous efforts to arouse drivers from their dulled humanity have been unavailing:You can flip as many birds to as many selfish drivers as you like, but your feeble attempts to humble them are like the voice of the wind down the road. The frustration of her attempts at gentle one-on-one suasion has not discouraged her. The nature of the road block to Becca’s utopia is clear, and Becca doesn’t boggle at the solution:If more motorists put down their car keys and hopped on their bikes . . . the shift couldn't help but improve bike lanes, traffic and attitudes. She offers her modest proposal with some initial diffidence . . .I don't know where an answer for the question of road-sharing lies. But if the wheels in my head are spinning in the right direction, I'm certain that some sort of balance can be reached. . . . but only at first. The gas-free “revolution” is just too good not to share . . . with the whole wide world.. . . imagine [Imagine!] what the world, or at least my town, would be like if everyone went gas-free. It's been years since all the places we need to get to have existed within walking or biking distance. If we downshifted from motors to manpower, even on a small scale, the possibilities for change would outstretch I-95. You may be wondering why I am bothering to lift the rock from a blogress so self-centered, ungenerous, judgmental, severe, irritable, frustrated, and passive-aggressive. How can we expect any wisdom from someone who displays in such pure form every twitch and trope of the narcissistic liberal psyche?
Look at her last paragraph. Is she saying the world should change for her convenience, or that making her life easier will induce earth-shaking changes? Either way, it’s pretentious megalomania. If cars are necessary, then in a carless world change wouldn’t be a “possibility”, it would be necessary and unavoidable. What change does she anticipate? What change would be desirable? She hasn’t thought about it at all, let alone imagined it. All she knows is the liberal credo: A better world is possible; I am justified because I wish for that better world.
So, why? Well, first, she is not a blogress. She laid bare her spiritual failings and macadam persecutions in My Turn, Newsweek, 4 October 2004. More important, her essay is a distillation of liberal rhetoric: Moral posturing with politically correct clichés to excuse a lack of moral action. Projecting her own anger onto others, and casting them as the sinners. Arguing from hypotheticals. Thinking it is sufficient to put words together in a sentence, no matter how discordant their meanings. Seizing the victim’s mantle. Confusing levels of abstraction. Confidently deploying convenient scientific factoids (contrary to Becca, cyclists inhale less pollution than car passengers (see here , here , and here).
And then there is the bad writing. In service to all the bien-pensant boiler plate, she deploys platitudes, false antithesis, consequences without antecedents, absurd redundancy (”a full tank of gas and the spare change to buy it”), and phrases of judicious reflection to introduce shibboleths that were cut, dried, and canned long ago. I urge you to read it, for the sheer wonder of it.
Second, my mother clipped the article for me.
And third, I have some experience with other solutions to Becca’s “problem”, and I will write more about them soon.
|
2004-12-21
Did Rachel Corrie's Parents Kill Arafat?
Just when you thought that AIDS would be best story about Arafat's death--after the mere fact of it--the ever reliable Little Green Footballs places Rachel's parents at the head of the line of suspects: motive and opportunity; the means may always be a mystery. (hat tip to the Corner)
Geo-politically, AIDS would be better. The Jordan would run white from the frothing mouths of the Judean Arabs.
|
Cleansing Sword of Allah redux
Earlier, I noted the excerpts from Steven Vincent's In the Red Zone at NRO and repeated my belief that the US had missed an opportunity by not making the Iraqis take responsibility for Saddam, acknowledge that he had oppressed and humiliated them, and accept that America had rescued them when they could not help themselves. In a word, we should have “rubbed their faces in it”.
The NRO series constitutes Chapter 4, "The Resistance", of In the Red Zone. It explains how Western opinion and policy makers have misunderstood the nature of the Sunni insurgency because they are casting it inappropriately into the conceptual framework of 20th-century "wars of national liberation". I had some reservations after the first excerpt about where Vincent was going to go, but the whole series turns out to be very, very good.
Vincent's first article (The Power of Shame) describes how even apparently rational Iraqis hate the US for having liberated them.
America the Omnipotent reports on the fantasies into which the Arab mind escapes:It is tempting to discount Ahmed's analysis [that Saddam was kept in power by the Jews] as typical of the anti-Semitism one finds with tedious regularity in Iraq. But it reveals many of the demons that lie beneath the surface of the Iraqi national character: historical grievances, conspiratorial thinking, and a kind of bi-polar superiority-inferiority dynamic. Moreover, his comments point to another, equally troubling impulse that confuses Western observers and informs the nature of the Iraqi "insurgency": an unwillingness to take the blame for Saddam.[Ed. Emphasis added.] The Oppressive Occupier? records the bitterness of the people in the Sunni Triangle, who believe that things were better under Saddam. For Sunnis, in many ways, they were. For nearly 500 years the Ottomans and then the British had cultivated the Sunnis as a bulwark against the Shi’a Persians to the east. Then, "Under Saddam, a Sunni himself,the religious sect reached the apogee of its power, thriving under a system of patronage and government benefits that awarded them top positions in all aspects of Iraqi life. In 2003, the American war machine ended their reign; suddenly, the jobs, pensions, and prestige the Sunnis used to lord over the Kurds and Shi’a were gone. Rage Against the Foreigner continues his tour of the Sunni Triangle. He finds the root of the Sunni insurgency and its “air of pointless, self-destructive violence” in the Sunnis’ tribal structure and its multifaceted concept of honor.For my part, I discovered this cultural and psychological phenomenon [the compulsion to expunge the “living death” of public dishonor by violent vengeance] throughout the Sunni Triangle. While conversing with dozens of residents, I felt much less the anger of a population that was "occupied," "oppressed," or "enslaved" than the self-loathing of a people in disgrace. After decades of imperious rule, the Sunni Ba’athists were crushed by America—shamed, humiliated, they felt they had lost something perhaps even more precious than jobs or political power: honor. The Wrong Words reviews the rhetoric of the, um, well that’s the problem: Is it a Resistance, or an insurgency, or a guerilla war against an American Liberation, or Occupation, or US-backed Provisional Government. The romantic, conventional models of the 20th century don’t fit; the terms may be technically accurate, but the moral connotations are all wrong. The murdering savages are ill-lit in the heroic glow of Resistance, and the Coalition is not an oppressive, Nazi Occupation. Clarity requires “we see in all their glory the anti-Coalition forces so admired by many on the left and in the media: ex-Ba’athists who kill American troops out of a sense of humiliation and dishonor, and foreign jihadists who wish to see the U.S. "occupiers" remain in the country in order to justify additional attacks against their fellow Muslims.
What kind of "Resistance" is this? Terms like "paramilitaries" and "neo-fascists" would better describe these Ba'athist and mujihadin killers, whose primary victims are the Iraqi people. The left-tinged press, says Vincent, hasn’t adopted them because it is still fighting the last war.
Steven Vincent blogs about Iraq at In the Red Zone.
|
2004-12-17
Morale 2
I just reread my previous post. It occurred to me that there are probably people who--if they were on those e-mail lists--would read about the generals serving chow and would scoff "Oh, that's nothing. One night! That's no big deal."
They are right. It is no big deal. But can you think of any general in history (maybe U.S. Grant) who realized it is "nothing". Those senior officers and NCOs are just in their forties. They have children the ages of their young troops. [When I was in 8th grade, the father of one of the kids in my Scout patrol was an admiral.) They probably really enjoyed relaxing and joshing around like the guys on the barbecue line at the Knights of Columbus picnic, seeing young people tuck in with a hearty appetite. It really is nothing.
Here is the big deal: Can you think of any army in history where the generals could do that?
|
2004-12-16
Morale
The media made a big fuss about SP4 Jery Wilson's asking Donald Rumsfeld why his Guard unit had to scrounge armor for their Humvees. "Speaking truth to power" was the immediate reporter's cliché. They seemed to think he had gotten away with something, and were also surprised that he had gotten away with it.
I wasn't surprised on either count. MSM journalists and the class-conscious liberal crowd they run with know nothing about the military. Their ideas are formed from Saturday Night Live sketches and reruns of Dr. Strangelove and Patton.
We had SOB, career-polishing officers in the Army back in the '60s, but most were good, and the better ones would have appreciated the question. Today's officers are children of the '60s and '70s, and in the volunteer military, the dynamic is even closer to the official definition of discipline: "the condition of good order and respect that exists between soldiers and superiors".
Now an ex-Marine of more recent vintage than mine writes that Marines are not only allowed to ask the tough questions that challenge superiors' assumptions, they are required to do so. I soon discovered that this command to think and to ask questions wasn't mere rhetoric. I was serving with the First Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment at an abandoned pistol factory in Al Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad. Every three weeks or so, we were visited by Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, who was then commanding the First Marine Division in Iraq.
Gen. Mattis is a Marine's Marine, a true warrior who speaks bluntly and candidly, without being bound by the constraints of political correctness. For well over an hour, on a routine and regular basis, the general would gather together his Marines and field questions. Nothing was out of bounds. The event was entirely democratic and thoroughly American--though marked by standard military etiquette and respect for rank. Thus, newsmen and commentators who fear "retribution" against Spc. Wilson haven't a clue as to what the U.S. military is all about. Spc. Wilson asked a tough but fair question; however, for any U.S. serviceman who's ever been to war, this was hardly surprising. Finally, the Adventures of Chester shows how the Marines build morale. He posts something I got in an e-mail a while back: a Marine's account from near Baghdad of how the officers and senior NCOs of her unit took over all the ordinary duties--including the mess hall serving line--so the low ranking enlisted swine could have the night off to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner. If you can read this without getting a bit choked up, then you probably voted for Kerry and have already moved to Canada.As we came to the first gate to the camp, I was in shock because a Marine Corps Major was standing at the post. Along with the Major was a 1stSgt. . . He told me to proceed and have a Happy Thanksgiving. As we came to the second gate, a Marine Capt and a SgtMaj were standing the post. There was not a PFC or LCpl to be found. None of the posts had young Marines at them; Officers and Staff NCOs manned them all.
The command decided that the young Marines were going to have the night off to get some good chow. It was unbelievable, and a wonderful sight. The leadership took charge and took care of the younger Marines. This filled me with a pride indescribable with words. I am so honored to be a part of an organization like this. Marines taking care of Marines with such unselfishness.
As I went to Thanksgiving chow with my brothers and sisters, the IMEF Commanding General LtGen Saddler and the IMEF SgtMaj, SgtMaj Kent were serving chow. The amazing part was that they were so enthusiastic about it. Everyone was in a great mood, and ready to take on anything. It makes you think that if a 3 star general in the United States Marine Corps can serve turkey to a bunch of 18-20 year old Lance Corporals, then you can suck up whatever you have to do and stop complaining.
|
I dibs that usage
Elizabeth came home from college for Thanksgiving using "shotgun" as a transitive verb: "I shotgun the last piece of cake". I'd like to shotgun that usage. “Dibs” was good enough for us in our day; kids got no respect.
She and her friends do use "shotgun" in the standard slang way as a noun for the front passenger seat and as an--I don't know what, exclaimation?--to claim the seat: "SHOTGUN!". She and some others try to flout the unwritten rules that that one cannot call shotgun out of sight of the car or the day before the proposed trip, but the majority won’t let them. At least all is not chaos, revolution, and wild-fire individualism among the young.
I mentioned the generalized shotgun=claim usage to other adults (30+), They immediately got the usage but said they hadn't heard it before.
Elizabeth was also saying "I nose" to dibs something. This is her own variant, which she admits is non-standard. The standard is to use "nose" as a shunning spell, the inverse of "dibs".
She works in the dining hall at a retirement home (DRO for those with military experience). When someone points out a chore that needs to be done, he says "I nose that" to get out of doing it. After that, the last person to put his finger beside his nose must do the chore. I guess it came from playful use of "no" as a verb to mean "refuse/decline/exempt myself".
Is this usage wider than the staff of the retirement home?
|
Common-Weality-based community
The left’s LOL practice of referring to itself as a “reality-based community” went to ROFL after the election as it complained that a close (2.98%) loss was one more heartless abusive blow to their self-esteem and oh-by-the-way the end of the world.
The Democrats think Kerry lost because they just somehow didn’t quite understand red states. But they are wrong. It isn't just one thing. If the Democrats were any more disconnected from reality, they would be trying to fly out of windows and shaking hands with lampposts en masse.
A lovely example of how pathetically unable they are to imagine a world in which 51% of the people might vote Republican is a review of “Team America: World Police” in the 3 December issue of the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal. As you probably know, “Team America” is by Matt Stone and Trey Parker of “South Park” fame. Team America, a co-ed A-Team with cooler toys, fights terrorists, who turn out to be underwritten by Kim Jong Il and backed by a gang of Hollywood stars like Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, and Sean Penn.
[This isn’t a review, but if reviews have made you think you want to see it or rent it, my advice is forget about it. It is awful, and doubly so for being disappointing. It’s great that it “puts the ‘F’ back in Freedom”, and a treat to see Hans Blix fed to sharks and Susan Sarandon hurled 6 stories to splat like a ripe tomato, but when my wife said I owed her big time for dragging her to it, I didn’t argue. Save $20 and two hours: find somebody who really liked it and have him describe the good bits to you.]
Here is how Richard Alleva sees the movie. Team America: World Police is the all-marionette satire of our current administration’s penchant for unprovoked invasion. Its creators . . . had the brilliant idea of debunking the mindset that brought about the invasion of Iraq without ever mentioning Bush, Cheney, et al., . . . and without overtly referring to the invasion. [Ed. emphasis added.] That’s clever. Bush and Iraq aren’t mentioned, so the movie must be a satire of Bush’s Iraq adventure. Just the way Moby Dick, which never mentions Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller, is about the titanic struggle to build Standard Oil into an industrial behemoth. Oil is black, and Standard Oil is big, and, being a corporation, is ipso facto evil, while Moby Dick is white, and big, and being a whale, is good. Kerosene comes from oil and replaced whale oil as lamp fuel. It all makes sense! because I hate Big Oil and John D. Rockefeller.
Alleva’s enjoyment of the movie is not unsullied, though. Parker and Stone don’t sustain the political satire of the initial scenes. Instead, they unintentionally turn their movie into a different, smaller kind of satire, a lampooning of Hollywood lefty celebrities. Because Parker and Stone wanted to satirize the mindset of George W. and Co. by getting inside it, they picture Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, all the usual suspects, not only as war protestors but as gun-toting, karate-chopping champions of the North Korean dictator. On paper, that’s a valid way of satirizing right-wing paranoia. [Ed. emphasis added.] And that’s a problem because the more we laugh at the Hollywood stars, the more “Team America” looks like direct satire of Hollywood and less and less like an attack on politicians. And that’s a very odd thing for a political satire to do. Despite the evidence and lack of evidence in front of him, Alleva remains convinced that the movie is mocking the politics that he wants mocked. He knows this because he wields that sovereign tool of liberal analysis: He knows what Stone and Parker’s thoughts and intentions are. Just as he knows without evidence what the intentions and motives of Bush and Cheney are.
In point of fact, “Team America” does fall flat, because it faithfully follows the plot arc of the team-with-a-mission films it is satirizing while failing to subvert the conventions of the individual scenes. The first scenes have some loopily over-the-top wish-fulfillment for the Baghdad Lutetiaque delendi sunt crowd, such as yours truly, but most of the rest is uninspired. While I’m sure Stone and Parker didn’t mean to be boring, Alleva believes the lampooning of Hollywood stars is “unintentional”. His case, to use his phrase, does all work on paper, especially inside the Democrat mutual affirmation society.
Unfortunately for his case, it doesn’t work if Stone and Parker’s intended targets actually are Islamic terrorists and pompous, hate-America liberals. If he had looked, well, almost anywhere, he’d know that out in the real world, Parker and Stone went from “right-leaning” non-voters in 2000 to being self-declared, Bush/Cheney tee-shirt wearing Republicans in 2004.
ROFLMAO.
|
2004-12-13
Cleansing Sword of Allah returns
On 15 November I wrote The Iraqi attitudes that Americans find most incomprehensible--not to say idiotic--are the anger and blame that Iraqis direct against the US for invading their country. They're glad Saddam is gone. They acknowledge that his henchmen, or worse, will prevail if we leave. As though to confirm every suspicion we have had about Muslims' tenuous connection to reality, they say the invasion and occupation have shamed them, because they overthrew Saddam, or were about to, or would have. And what had Iraq ever done to us, anyway? Now National Review On Line is beginning a series by Stephen Vincent on "The Power of Shame--Why so many Americans don't get the Sunni opposition". [Ed. You tawkin' abou' me? You tawkin' abou' ME?] The writer describes an encounter shortly after the liberation with a "Sunni Muslim, an attractive, thirty-something writer, one of the few women I met who eschewed a scarf in public. And she was overjoyed at the demise of Saddam.... "I am so happy! Freedom at last! The world is open to me now!" she exclaimed during a small social function at an art gallery in Karada. . .
-- "You must not mind seeing American soldiers on the streets."
The woman's smile vanished. Her brow darkened and she shook her head. "Oh, no. I hate the soldiers. I hate them so much I fantasize about taking a gun and shooting one dead."
Stunned by her vehemence, "But American soldiers are responsible for your freedom!" I replied.
"I know," the woman snarled. "And you can't imagine how humiliated that makes me feel." I don't think he is talking about me. I got the nature of Iraqi anger at the US; I just won't accept it:Instead of treating Saddam as a fugitive from blind Western justice, US propaganda should have emphasized that he had humiliated the entire Iraqi population. Instead of reprimanding the soldier who threw Old Glory over the face of Saddam's statue as US soldiers pulled it down, we should have built on that image. We should have publicized the myriad ways that Saddam humiliated the people, how he robbed, raped, tortured, and mutilated them. They should have been shown that Saddam had shamed them before all the world. Iraqis should have had months of a steady diet of posters and videos showing how Saddam had ground them into the mud, and we had saved them. We should have rubbed their faces in it . . . and called the operation Cleansing Sword of Allah.
I don't buy the idea that the Iraqi resistance owes much to some mad fanatic spasm of patriotic bloodlust--though I suppose that if Arabs were ever motivated by patriotism, a spasm of bloodlust is as likely an expression as any other. For the Ba'athists, the resistance is part of a quagmire strategy. For the NGO jihadists, it is a tactical opportunity and a strategic challenge.
I don't know where Vincent is going to go with this. He says "The Kurds and the Shia have shown a willingness to negotiate over the future of Iraq--why not the Sunnis?", but then he talks as though this circumscribed resistance speaks for all Iraqis. A completely armchair suggestion is that Sunnis--Saddam's favored tribes--are the only people who feel that their Iraq has been humiliated.
|
2004-12-10
Rumsfeld sandbagged...let's be proud
It is front page news that some reservists at a Q&A with defense secretary Rumsfeld told him that they were about to move into Iraq without proper armor both for their vehicles and themselves. It has also made headlines that the questions were set up by an imbedded reporter, who did not reveal his part in his own story of the Q&A. [Ed. But, but ... I thought it was going to be a GREAT day when the Army had to hold bake sales to buy equipment.]
NRO's Kerry spot allowed thatI think it was a little shady for Pitts [the reporter] to go to the officer running the question and answer session "and made sure he knew to get my guys out of the crowd," as the reporter put it. That strikes me as too close to stage managing. Uh, unh! Pitts' activities weren't close to stage-managing; they were stage managing. Not that there is anything much wrong with that, as long as you are up front about it.
But there are two things questionable, not to say wrong, about what Pitts did that being candid doesn’t absolve him of.
First, a soldier about to deploy can make a statement or ask a question about readiness with an authority that a reporter cannot. By the same token, a reporter should be held to a higher standard than the GI. He should have confirmed the accuracy of the statements he makes or implies.
Instead, Pitts got to make accusations and ask loaded questions and put them in the mouths of other people, or even feed them the questions, without having to take responsibility for them. As a situational justification, he says the questions came out of conversations with the troops he was embedded with, and the crowd reaction might have indicated that many in the unit were glad to them see raised with Rumsfeld. But that doesn’t change Pitt's responsibility. One of the assumptions in the questions was that Guard and Reserve units were being deployed with hand-me down equipment. This was a widespread and even predictable rumor among the troops, but it is denied by the command. A reporter is or should be expected to have investigated.
Second, the dramatic impact of a question--which is to say the "newsworthiness"--doesn’t just depend on the facts implied or assumed ("have you stopped beating your wife?"). It also depends on the relationship of questioner and answerer, because that relationship affects both the tone and content of the answer. Rumsfeld can answer a reporter's accusation much more objectively than he can answer the same accusation from a soldier. When a reporter says "I've been told that the Reserves get substandard equipment and the Regular army gets first-rate stuff", the answer can address the substance; Rumsfeld can just say "you were misinformed" or “we are dealing with that”. When a soldier says it, there is a personal, emotional aspect. Rumsfeld's answer to be effective must address the emotional aspect as well as the factual aspect. If nothing else, it makes it harder to communicate the facts.
In effect, Rumsfeld was sandbagged. He's a grown-up and has little to complain about, but that doesn't change the sleaziness of the manipulative sandbagger's behavior.
I'm glad to see the question raised, though I think Rumsfeld nailed it when he said you go to war with the Army you have. I also think it reveals a bit of a hangdog, miss-ish, whiney character to be complaining that they had to scrounge reinforcements to their vehicles. In my day (Vietnam), we scrounged and improvised, and we laughed and were proud of it!
The initiative shown by the troops and the fact that US soldiers can ask these kinds of questions to the top man in the chain of command are both things to be proud of. I notice that so far the politicians haven't jumped on this story. Probably because they know that a good part of the problem is that they have larded military procurement in pork fat and tied it up tight in red tape.
UPDATE: M0nday--I wish I had put it in writing last Friday, but I'm not surprised this has been pretty much a single news cycle story. Anyway, by friday evening the Kerry Spot had come around to what I wrote here in the morning.
|
2004-12-06
Have you had a stroke now?. . . how about now? . . . Have you had . . .
…doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:- Ask the individual to smile.
- Ask him or her to raise both arms.
- Ask the person to speak a simple sentence.
If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call 9-1-1 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher. There are some e-mails going about the Internet offering this advice. My first thought when I received the e-mail was to ask when one should administer the test. One can’t, after all, go around like the “Can you hear me now” guy, walking up to people and asking them to raise their arms. Sure you can’t.
So, to whom should you administer the test? That guy standing on the corner, slapping a lottery ticket on his palm and staring into space?
Someone who falls down and holds his head while moaning and losing sphincter control?
Someone who voted for Kerry?
Another thing the e-mail could be clearer about: Once you have him standing there with a grimace on his face and his arms in the air, what sort of simple sentence do you ask him to repeat?
How about "My dog has fleas"?
Maybe "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers"?
Is "I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy" asking too much? [Ed. If he doesn’t smile at that, has he had a stroke or is he just thick as a two-inch pine plank?]
It turns out that the e-mails are based on a press release from the American Stroke Association (part of the American Heart Association). The tests are intended to be used by 9-1-1 operators to have someone on the scene evaluate a possible stroke. Obviously, something serious enough to get 9-1-1 involved has already happened before you start playing Simon says with the victim.
So don’t try this at home, kids, except under the supervision of a certified emergency telephone-call operator.
P.S.The ASA lists warning sign of a possible stroke. Early detection is important, because clot-dissolving drugs can greatly reduce long-term disability from a stroke if they are administered within three hours.
|
2004-12-05
Offending Homosexuals
With Hegelian irony, the PC exclusion of religious references from a Christmas Holiday Parade of Lights may help the Boy Scouts defend themselves against the homosexual aggression.
Michelle Malkin reports that her Operation Lump of Coal has had some success.
However, sponsors of Denver's "Parade of Lights", i.e., Christmas parade, are still refusing to allow participation by church groups and others that primarily promote religion.
The reason, said the sponsors, is that Christmas carols might be offensive to others. In the 30 years that the parade has been staged by downtown commercial interests, the policy has been to "not include religious or political messages in the parade--in the interest of not excluding any group".
As irrational as that statement is, it does open up an interesting line of reasoning for the Boy Scouts, namely, arguing that homosexual scout masters might be offensive to somebody. Even more people might be offended if Scout were sending pre-pubescent boys into the woods in the care of perverts.
They could add a thirteenth item to the Scout Law that a Scout is "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent" . . . and Sensitive!.
|
2004-12-04
Wordplay
How is it, I asked myself, that in all the terabytes burned about GWB in the last year, no one has thought of "Dubya-MD"? It was almost a relief to find that it did occur to a few people. Curiously, almost all the Google hits are in song parodies. Apparently, only liberals with extra high verbal aptitudes were able to tumble onto such an obvious pun. Given the problems liberals have with humor and metaphor, perhaps this should not surprise.
The versifying doesn’t surprise, either, though it does show the advanced levels of intellection Blue Staters expect of themselves. [Ed. Yeah. If it’s too much to read the newspaper, can’t they at least run spell-check?]
This prolific gasbag presumed to speak for the real soldiers, "many of whom really hate this war", which is--wait for it--"a quagmire . . . just like Vietnam". (The "Dubya MD" verse isn't worth repeating.)
. . . We had to face Saddam
We knew it all along
He had bombed and gassed the Kurdish folk, that's wrong!
Bush's strategy's the same
Positions haven't changed
And he can't admit he's blown this Iraq war!
Don’t vote for Bush Again/Won’t be fooled again/The Who
This guy was moved, if not to melody divine, then to rap irrational by "Chomsky, Pilger, Fisk and more", who told him "Oils [sic] the fundamental why/You've been sent out there to die". It goes on for 210 lines and dissolves into an anti-Red State-bourgeoisie rant that makes Michael Moore sound like Cicero. He, too, can't see any difference between GWB and Saddam Hussein.
. . .Osama he Bin Relagated [sic]
Iraq connection intimated
Iraquis [sic ad lib.] blew Dubya T C
Iraquis got Dubya M D
And Dubya wants Iraquis free
Any one is good but take all three
Evidence? can't let you see.
We're bringing them dem-o-cracy
But no elections, no siree
Can't have Iraq run by Shi'ites
Who don't respect our oil rights . . .
You've been lied to
But you don't get it
Buying trash on plastic credit
Patrotism [sic], is all you got
Mindless spineless emotive rot
General Rap
 But enough of them. Let's talk our own trash. How about some e-mail signature lines and bumper stickers playing on the “ Jesusland” sneer. [Ed. Don’t forget Canada 2.0.] If Jesusland is what our Democrat neighbors hate, we'll rub their noses in it.
First, let’s get the obvious ones out of the way. Jesusland: Love it or leave it
Jesusland, My Jesusland
Jesusland: Heart- and Soul-land of America OK. Now what will get in a liberal’s face and make him feel that the public thoroughfare is a hostile environment? How about Join the Jesusland Crusade Against NGO Jihad [Ed. Islamofascists would burn the multiculti types.]
Jesusland—Faith, Hope, and Dubya-MDs [Ed. Uh, whose side are you on? OK, How about]
Liberties, SUVs, and Dubya-MDs in JESUSLAND
In Jesusland We Can Count Beyond the First Amendment
Jesusland. You Got a Problem with That?
Jesusland--We're here. We're near! Deal with it! [Ed. Just how Christian is attitude?]
WELCOME TO JESUSLAND [Ed. Simple yet infuriating.]
Jesusland: Men are Men. Women are Women. Babies are Born.
|
2004-11-24
Thanksgiving
Heavenly Father, we thank You for all Your blessings this year, for our successes and for the strength to bear up under adversities.
We thank You for our family, for our friends, for our community, and for our countrymen. Their service and sacrifice through the centuries have made Your loving promise a reality for us: to them we owe the bounteous comfort and opportunity that we enjoy as Americans.
We particularly thank You and ask Your blessings for those who dedicate their lives to our protection. Send Your Spirit to guide them, strengthen them, and protect them, especially our soldiers far from home today; may this Thanksgiving Day be for them a day of satisfaction and rededication.
We gratefully acknowledge that difficulties and misfortunes are signs of the freedom that You have given Your creation and are invitations to draw closer to You. In the coming year, give us the grace to be agents of Your Providence, as Christ taught us. May we and all men strive to live by the Truth of Your Love.
Merciful and generous Father, we thank you for this life and hope to be with You in the next. Amen.
|
2004-11-22
Get a better kid
A paradigmatic moment occurred election night on NPR that shows that Republicans and Democrats don’t just check off different lines on the ballot. They live in different countries, if not in different universes. Scott Simon interviewed two women in Milwaukee, long-time friends, at their regular ladies’ bowling night. One had voted for George Bush. The other had not.
The Bush voter said that she thought Bush made the right decision to go to war in Iraq.
The second woman had voted for Kerry. Why? Bush had said all during the 2000 campaign that he would try to “end the divisiveness” and “bring us together”. But it had gotten so much worse that at her three-year-old’s play group, the “moms for the Democrats sit on one side and the moms for the Republican children play on the other side”, and “we can’t move forward on any issue, on Iraq, on anything social unless he brings us together”.
She reminded me of a young matron I met 35 year ago during an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Washington, D.C. She was protesting the war because her very young son was watching the news on TV and having nightmares.
I didn’t know what to say, then. Now, I would just tell her to get a better kid.
Like this one.
Elizabeth and the Gulf WarElizabeth was five-and-a-half when the shooting started in the Gulf War. At bedtime, we added a prayer for our soldiers and pilots, and as I tucked her in, she asked, "Is there going to be any shooting around here?" I told her that the Persian Gulf was on the other side of the world and assured her that a war in Iraq was not going to come to our neighborhood.
That didn't seem enough for her. It wasn't just that she had no sense of the distance from the Persian Gulf to upstate New York. She had no sense of proportion about combat, no sense of the ineffectiveness of combat, of the opportunities to discover, as Winston Churchill said, that "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."
So I started to tell her funny stories about Vietnam.
Blowing up the ammo dumpActually, the first story was more about exhilaration than comedy. It was about the time I was on the company reaction force to help the perimeter guards during the Tet Offensive in 1968.
"One night when I was in Vietnam", I started, "there was an attack, a big attack." I told her how we got out of trucks and stood in the dark, watching red lines of tracers from guard towers and helicopters stream down beyond the perimeter fence. As it started to get light, the sergeants told us to line up and walk toward the shooting.
My section of the line came to a steep pile of dirt. "It was almost as high as our house and much wider", I described it to Elizabeth. My friends and I climbed to the top of the pile and saw we were on a wall, or berm, protecting a huge pile of ammunition crates.
We had been sent to clear Viet Cong from an ammunition dump!
We walked down the berm, around the crates, and over the berm on the opposite side, where we found a barbed-wire fence.
As we sat down, the pile of ammunition blew up, just a few minutes after we had walked past it—the Viet Cong must have left a time charge. The ground rolled like an ocean wave. I bounced twice as though I were on a trampoline and flopped onto my stomach. I looked over my shoulder and saw a big column of smoke rising from behind the berm. I thought, "Uh-oh. What goes up must come down". I scrunched myself up as small as I could and wished that I could crawl into my helmet.
"Why?" Elizabeth said. "What happened?"
"It rained rocks for a minute," I explained, "I saw a jagged chunk of steel the size of a softball land right next to my elbow. But only one person was hit, and he just had a bad cut."
"Nobody was killed," she said.
"No," I replied. "Most of the bullets and explosions don’t hurt anyone. That’s why there is so much shooting."
"I’m glad you weren’t hurt." She reached up for a hug.
"So am I, sweetie", I told her.
Too many magazines"Are the soldiers in the fighting afraid?" she wanted to know.
"Of course," I assured her. "You are always a little afraid, but you are mostly excited, and you can still do what you are trained to do, even when you are afraid.
"Did I ever tell you about Brian Ryan?", I continued.
The attacks and alerts of the Tet Offensive continued for a several weeks. One day, some of the men in my barracks were talking about what they would do if our company area were attacked, which wasn’t likely, because we were in the middle of one of the biggest American bases in Vietnam. Brian Ryan, who had just gotten to Vietnam, said that he wasn’t going to defend the barracks. If the Viet Cong attacked, he said, he was going to run to the bottom of the hill and hide in the pits where they burned out the tubs from the latrines.
We told Brian that hiding wouldn’t help. The Viet Cong would come looking for him. "Ol’ Charlie’s gonna come over the hill", we told him, "whoopin’ an’ hollerin’ and yellin’ 'Blyan Lyan, you die'". Brian just laughed and said he didn’t care. He was going to hide in the fire pits.
A few nights later, Brian was called out on reaction force and went to the company armory to get his rifle and ammunition. Brian filled his ammo pouches with loaded magazines, and because there was a big box and no one said to stop, he just kept taking more and more magazines and stuffing them into all the big pockets in the jacket and pants of his jungle fatigues.
This night, an ammo pile blew up even before Brian's platoon had left the road. Everyone hit the ground. When nothing more happened, everybody else stood up. Brian didn’t see any reason to move, so he stayed lying in the sand. A sergeant came down the line to check on people, and when he saw Brian, he asked "Is this man injured?"
"The fact was," Brian told us later, "I had almost killed myself landing on all those magazines, instead of nice, soft sand".
"We were all laughing," I told Elizabeth. She giggled a bit on cue. Brian went on, "But the best part was when we got back here. I had stuffed my pockets so tight that I couldn’t get the magazines out. I had to take off my clothes to work them loose. They wouldn’t have done me any good at all."
Elizabeth giggled happily at Brian’s silliness. I told her a few more stories of funny things that had happened to me, and of more close calls without result.
When I saw she was asleep, I thought of my friend, Harry, who had been a 19-year-old bomber pilot and POW in World War II. Harry was a Scoutmaster. When the younger Scouts couldn’t sleep at camp, he would tell them about his "18 death-defying missions through the flak-strewn skies of Nazi Germany". The kids never lasted past the second mission, he said.
The next morning, I looked in to see if Elizabeth needed any help getting ready for school. She was fine. "Pater," she announced, "I’ve decided what to wear. I am going to wear my red, white, and blue sailor dress today, in honor of all our soldiers and sailors."
|
2004-11-18
Kerry Spot Does Applebee's
The usually excellent Kerry Spot at NRO recommends this balderdash to us:I also think there is something to this assessment of Democratic leaders' cultural divide from red state voters:One veteran Democratic strategist, Clinton White House political director Doug Sosnik, sums up the answer in one word: Applebee’s.
For Sosnik, the chain of modestly priced restaurants (more than 1,600 in 49 states), symbolizes precisely what is wrong with the party’s Washington-based elite.
Democratic leaders are out of touch with the American people, Sosnik said in a panel discussion Tuesday sponsored by the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
“The leadership of our party has a cultural disconnect,” Sosnik said. “Our leaders — particularly Washington, D.C.-based — don’t really have the same life, day to day, as all those people out there in those red states. We don’t eat at the same restaurants. I don’t know how many politicians in town that are leaders of our party who voluntarily go to Applebee’s, unless it’s for work. You look at the swing voters out there, what their sporting events are, the music they listen to, the celebrities, the television programs, it’s just not what the East Coast leadership (watches) — it’s not quite where we are.” That's one of the instant simplistic clichés that substitute for thought in political journalism. [Ed. What is it about journalists and politicians that they think anything that fits in a sound bite and headline slug is profound? Ans. I don’t know…and aren’t you supposed to be ranking on me, not other people?]
Where are the Applebee’s Republicans?First, just ask yourself What’s so special—or especially dim—about Democrats. How many Republican big suits think taking the kids or the old folks to Applebee's is a neat evening out? Heart surgeon Bill Frist? Karl Rove? Mary Matalin? Even Sen. Rick "Cheaper by the Dozen" Santorum? Great folks, all. I am in awe of Santorum and his wife, who really walk the pro-life walk [Ed. don't be too hard on yourself. You've never claimed to be pro-life, just anti-abortion. And you haven't liked kids since you own kids were born and all the other sprats came to look like vermin over-population greedily trying to snatch nuts and berries from your offspings’ mouths.]
Great folks, but you won't find them at Applebee's. [Ed. Better admit that you are aggressively ignorant of spectator sports, pop music, TV, and celebrities, and you loathe Applebee's, much preferring Pizzeria Uno for that sort of night out.]
That’s one.
No basis in factThe liberal elite, which can voice their shock and frustration in the public prints, are projecting their feelings onto the unsuspecting electorate. There’s no glory in losing because a few million swing voters leaned a bit more for Bush this time than they did for Clinton eight years ago. Far better for one’s self esteem to be an embattled remnant of enlightenment overwhelmed by semi-human brutes who shop in big-box stores and salute the flag. That’s a soothing fantasy.
Face it: Bush won by less then 2 per cent of the vote. That’s right. If 2% of the voters had switched their votes, Kerry would the one claiming a 4 point mandate. This is not a polarized electorate. This is not a country where the red state hordes crushed the brave Democrats. As this Purple America map suggests, we are an evenly divided electorate.
In fact, this whole elitist NOKD (Not Our Kind, Dear) snit against the red states is so baseless that I have to conclude that it is all about liberal narcissism, not political analysis. [Ed. But you think that everything liberals do is about narcissism.]
True but irrelevantThird, saying Democrats don’t understand Applebee’s customers is true but irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether the Democrats understand Republicans. The Democrats represent whom they represent. There just happens at this time to be about 2% too few of them to win elections. [Ed. Aren’t you contradicting the “no basis in fact” point above? That was the losing part. This is the “don’t understand” part. The premise is true but the consequence didn’t happen.]
Can the Democrats turn the numbers around?. I don’t think there is a pool of non-voting potential Democrat voters out there who could be recruited to overtake the Republicans. 120 million actual voters probably exceeds the number of citizens with an adequate number of brain cells to vote intelligently. That nearly 10% were undecided at the beginning of October shows the supply of intelligent voters is pretty near tapped out.
For a while, the numbers will be moving against the Democrats. Pace the Purple Map above, this red county-blue county map shows there are only a half dozen true blue states. Most so-called blue states are really red states with blue urbanations. The red states and the red counties are growing in population. The 2000 red states picked up seven Electoral College votes between 2000 and 2004 just from the 2000 census. There will be more red-county voters in 2008 and the change will reach the Electoral College in 2012.
That leaves conversion. And here the Democrats come up against their real problem. It is not that they don’t understand red staters; their difficulty is that red staters understand them. The Democrats are the party of acid, amnesty, arrogant self-absorption, and abortion, and no others need apply. The self-anointed saints of the Democrat party, the high-toned old post-Christian women and the humorless scolds, the self-mutilators and baby cutters, the limousine liberals and radicchio snobs, have driven out all the sinners, the breeders who think sex is about self-giving love and life, the producers who want to enjoy what they earn, and patriots who rejoice in the debt they owe for what they have been given.
What do the Democrats have to offer someone who rejects the Democrats’ bitter, narcissistic nihilism and elitist social engineering? Not much. And suppose they managed to entice some swing voters with a few items from the Applebee’s menu. Where would the Dems put them? Where would they be willing to sit? Who in the present party would be willing to sit next to them, let alone join them at Applebee’s?
|
2004-11-15
“Shame is the Reality”
Jay Tea at Wizbang writes “In praise of civilian casualties”. He doesn’t really lust for civilian deaths. His point is that over-sensitivity is counter-productive.
His argument is that once the NGO jihadists find that we will grant them a zone of sanctuary if they hide among civilians, they will do it all the time, ultimately causing more American and civilian deaths. He points to what happened with mosques. Our first reaction was restraint, and the mujihadin immediately began using mosques as ammo dumps, assembly points, observation posts, and firing positions. The result was that we had to treat mosques as military targets, and more mosques have been damaged than would have been if we had flattened the first one.
Jay Tea's post stirs an idea that I've been kicking around for a while, namely, that the guards at Abu Ghraib had the right idea, just at the wrong time and the wrong place.
As soon as I saw the pictures of a American woman smirking at kneeling, naked Iraqi men, I recognized the special humiliation the pictures would convey to Arab/Islamic viewers. She is a woman looking on a man’s nakedness. She is in pants and tee-shirt—virtually naked by tribal/Islamic standards. She is a soldier in men’s garb—a double offense against all that is right and decent to Muslims.
I was prepared for outrage from Arab sources. I wasn’t prepared to read in the Washington Times of the former prisoner who felt so humiliated that he had been unable to return to his home neighborhood. Now that the pictures had been published, he had no hope of ever returning. He would have to emigrate.
Where did he think he would go, he was asked. Oh, America would be his first choice. In America, nobody cares what has happened to you.
He got that right.
Arab tribal culture is primarily an honor-shame-revenge society , quite different from a primarily justification-guilt-justice society like the US. In Arab culture, if I piss on your boots, you have been shamed. The only way you can recover your amour propre is to diminish me, say by killing me or raping my sister (or sometimes by raping your brother; as I said, it’s different). In America, you want me to admit or be convicted of doing wrong. Chances are I agree with you that pissing on your boots is wrong, but the critical difference with Arab culture is that the focus is not on making you whole or at least dishonoring me; the focus is on making whole an abstract principle, Justice, in the name of the community.
How does this apply to US policy? The Iraqi attitudes that Americans find most incomprehensible—not to say idiotic—are the anger and blame that Iraqis direct against the US for invading their country. They’re glad Saddam is gone. They acknowledge that his henchmen, or worse, will prevail if we leave. As though to confirm every suspicion we have had about Muslims’ tenuous connection to reality, they say the invasion and occupation have shamed them, because they overthrew Saddam, or were about to, or would have. And what had Iraq ever done to us, anyway?
The U.S. approach from the beginning has been to try to minimize the subordination of the Iraqi people and the incompetence of their society. In other words, what we would think of as putting shame on them. This is precisely the wrong initial goal. The problem is that Iraqis have not been shamed enough, and they have not been shamed by the right person,. Our goal should have been to make their shame unavoidable and undeniable, and to make us the agents of the ending of their era of shame.
Instead of treating Saddam as a fugitive from blind Western justice, US propaganda should have emphasized that he had humiliated the entire Iraqi population. Instead of reprimanding the soldier who threw Old Glory over the face of Saddam’s statue as US soldiers pulled it down, we should have built on that image. We should have publicized the myriad ways that Saddam humiliated the people, how he robbed, raped, tortured, and mutilated them. They should have been shown that Saddam had shamed them before all the world. Iraqis should have had months of a steady diet of posters and videos showing how Saddam had ground them into the mud, and we had saved them. We should have rubbed their faces in it.
Perhaps then they would have recognized that they had not been defeated by US aggression but by Saddam and the politics that grew out of their own hearts. It might have put them in a more realistic frame of mind for the nation building that was necessary. We didn’t need to have conversations like this with the Germans and Japanese:“We, the Iraqi people, overthrew Saddam”—Crap.
“We were innocent victims”—More crap.
"The insurgents are Iraqi freedom fighters"--Sorry, that's Michael Moore, but still crap.
“You Americans should have . . .”— Shut the f* up. Whatever you were going to say, it’s just more crap. You Iraqis were harboring a dirt-bag monster. Your whole country was an offense against all that is clean, decent, holy, and life-giving. Get used to it! We are the cleansing sword of Allah. Get on your knees and give thanks. I always regretted that the U.S. acceded to Muslim and secular western sensibilities and stopped referring to the “war on terror” as a crusade. It seems that Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi is naming the operations to clean out Islamofascist strong points in the Sunni triangle. They should name the whole campaign Cleansing Sword.
One of the peculiar bits of nonsense practiced by the German Nazis was to put “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes you Free) over the gates to concentration camps. In the case of Abu Ghraib, it would be a declaration of sanity to put a sign “Shame is the Reality”.
|
2004-11-11
I'd like to say he is only momentarily deranged . . .
by Kerry's loss, but I think W drove this guy batty long ago.
Anyway, he sent a letter to John Derbyshire at NRO's The Corner:
GLOAT, and watch your pretend Teddy ride up the mound of civilian corpses he thinks of as San Fallujah Hill.
Gloat, and see suicidal economic policies precipitate the worst economic dislocation in 75 years.
Gloat and enjoy the spectacle of a faith that imagines Torquemada to be the Redeemer; prefers burning Joan to the miracle of the loaves.
Gloat and chuckle as you watch a polity riven and divided by demagogue fueled ever more implacable hatreds.
Gloat. Time and reason will bring you low. Is it just my impression, or do nut cases on the right make extravagant claims of fact (Eisenhower and Earl Warren were knowing agents of the Communist conspiracy) while nuts on the left are exercised by fantastic metaphors? Is it that liberals live in a fantasy land (as opposed to a land haunted by fantasies) or are they just more pretentious?
Anyway,my brother points to the assumption that true Christian Gospel implies liberal social polices and that people who disagree are idolatrous heretics.
And one cannot but chuckle to read of his concern about a "polity riven and divided by demagogue fueled ever more implacable hatreds".
|
Veterans' Day, since a.d. 400
Today, Veterans' Day, is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours (316-397), who was a veteran of the Roman army. Wouldn't this further evidence of the great Christian Anti-Constitutional Jihad Conspiracy just curl Maureen Dowd's toes!In his early years, when his father, a military tribune, was transferred to Pavia in Italy, Martin accompanied him thither, and when he reached adolescence was, in accordance with the recruiting laws, enrolled in the Roman army. Touched by grace at an early age, he was from the first attracted towards Christianity, which had been in favour in the camps since the conversion of Emperor Constantine. His regiment was soon sent to Amiens in Gaul, and this town became the scene of the celebrated legend of the cloak. At the gates of the city, one very cold day, Martin met a shivering and half-naked beggar. Moved with compassion, he divided his cloak into two parts and gave one to the poor man. I am not entirely enthusiastic about St. Martin as patron of soldiers. He had to be forcibly restrained to take the oath of enlistment and spent his early years in a rear-echelon ceremonial unit. When ordered into battle, he refused to bear arms on the grounds of Christian conscience, saying "Put me in the front of the army, without weapons or armor; but I will not draw sword again. I am become the soldier of Christ." Fortunately, the invading Germans offered to negotiate, and Matin was discharged a few days later.
This pacifism of early Christianity is a sturdy and authoritative tradition, but I find it unpersuasive, at least as a general rule. It was professed by men who were or who wished to be monks; that was why Martin tried to avoid enlistment. Certainly, as Chesterton pointed out, to the very limited extent that the Gospels give any sign of Christ's attitude toward soldiers, it is that He was rather fond of them. Maybe it was the lay down your life for another bit.
|
2004-11-10
Good Riddance
Fox News reportsIsraeli on Wednesday approved a Palestinian plan to bury Arafat at his sandbagged West Bank headquarters, known as the Muqata, in Ramallah. Palestinians want to turn it into a shrine, defusing a potential conflict with Israel by dropping a demand for a Jerusalem burial. Yeah. Israel said the only way Arafat's corpse would be allowed into Jerusalem was dragged behind a tank and nipped at by wild dogs--they offered to import the wild dogs, if necessary.
|
2004-11-03
I have a dream . . .
Over at NRO and Free Republic ("Vietnam Vets--WE HAVE WON!!!"---(Welcome Home!!!)) they're getting a little high on the new même: Kerry's defeat is the homecoming parade the Vietnam vets never had.
Well, second, Ronald Reagan shamed the country into having a bunch of shamed-faced welcome-home parades.
First, Kerry's defeat is a good thing for the Republic. Thanks to the Swifties and everyone who supported them for exposing Kerry's lies and lying and the vicious lengths his supporters were willing to go to. But this "parade we never had" stuff is veering perilously close to sentimental slop. As Dr. Johnson told Boswell, "Clear your mind of cant!" We haven't won. We have just prevailed in one battle. Half the country is proud to embrace the lies that stuff Kerry’s empty suit.
Personally, I don’t want to walk in a parade. I dream of walking down the street and seeing one of those proverbial homeless Vietnam vets—Oh! It’s John “Band of Mongols” Kerry, kicked out by Teresa, sitting on the curb in a ragged wet suit and his old fatigue jacket, holding up a sign: Will Marry for Money
There's more to my dream, but it begins to get uncharitable.
|
2004-10-29
Here's Osama
I think I have a clue in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
The sports equipment bag I've had on back order arrived yesterday from Pakistan.
Inside was a bag of white powder and a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker.
|
2004-10-28
The unbearable credulity of the enlightened mind
Did you know John Kerry said this, as he attended Ronald Reagan’s interment in California?This moment in Simi Valley is a moment of truth. Not just for my campaign, but for the future of my party as well. For some of us, this may be our only chance to confirm the demise of the man who is solely responsible for turning the American people away from liberal philosophy.
As Democrats, we need to put small differences aside and be certain that this man is truly gone. Next, we must reclaim our country from the churchgoers, the middle America folks, and the uneducated conservative masses. Actually, Kerry didn’t say that. It’s an e-mail rumor.
A friend forwarded this comment from someone who had received the spurious quotation [verbatim]:
This is the whole issue that I have with Bush supporters. They, just like Bush, have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Do you really think that a potential U.S. presidential candidate would say something this stupid?.
Does anybody bother to check out the facts before they propigate this bullshit. Nope, Just like Bush they don't care to find out what is truth and what is crap I replied to my friend.
I wouldn't believe for a second that Kerry said this. However, if your friend is honest, not ruled by ire at people with the nerve to disagree with him, and not just looking for any stick with which to beat a dirty dog (is this "problem" really the only thing, the major thing, he has against Bush), he must acknowledge that if Kerry were to say that, a great cheer would erupt from his supporters.
To suppose that Kerry in a moment of unwonted candor did admit to the hostility that powers his campaign is no worse than the boasting that Kerry's supporters--and often even Kerry and his campaign—do of what they believe about the rest of America:- Ashcroft the new Göbbels
- the Patriot Act’s ending of traditional liberties
- that evangelical Christians support Bush because they want a cataclysm in the Middle East as a necessary step toward the rapture
- Bush stole the election
- a million blacks were disenfranchised in 2000
- plans to restart the draft
- that Bush invaded Iraq either because he had to show up his daddy, or to fix his daddy's mistake, or to revenge his daddy, or to enrich Halliburton.
What is preached by the mullahs is echoed by the faithful. In an everyday conversation, a woman tells of a Homeland Security reminder to report suspicious activity. “What am I supposed to do?” she sneers, “Call the police that there’s a little old lady leaving the Superfresh with a suspicious bulge under her coat?” Her friend nods sympathetically and likens the current security régime in America—if it can be dignified as a régime—to the USSR under Stalin. Sometimes sarcasm and invincible ignorance are one and the same. [ed. In Stalin’s Russia, her friend would have reported her for not reporting the possible shoplifter.]
This has nothing to do with reality. It is a fantasy. Democrats are not so much the party of the people as the party of peasant superstitions. Their preferred mode of politics is to demonize their opponents and look for reasons afterward. At least the folks who believe the e-mail about Kerry are in line with reality; they may be credulous, but they aren’t delusional.
The Democratic Party is the welcoming home of people who completely agree with the sentiments put in Kerry's mouth. Prominent figures in the Party or among its supporters have said exactly those things. You can hear them almost every week on Bill Moyer's NOW show on PBS. The NY Times a couple of years ago described the religious right as poorly educated, unsophisticated, and easily led Of course, the closer you get to the activist rank and file, the greater are the volume, virulence, and open rancor. Moveon.org is full of it. Liberals think their fellow citizens need to have it explained that “Hate Is Not a Family Value”. The chants at Democratic and progressive demonstrations and rallies are things like "Keep your rosaries out of my ovaries".
Democrats and liberals preen themselves on being the smart party and, like your friend, routinely declare that Republicans/conservatives are stupid and ignorant. Case: the Duke dean who said the professoriate is dominated by leftists because conservatives are "the stupid party". Another case: last Sunday I drove past a gaggle of Kerryites campaigning at an intersection. One of the signs was "Smart people vote for Kerry". [ed. I posted a few days ago on this conceit the leftist brilliance.]
My point is two-fold. Democrats really do believe and say those things that were put in Kerry’s mouth, and the left is consumed with its own, much nastier and less excusable, delusions. Take the article of Democratic faith: Bush lied about WMD in Iraq. Leave aside the evidence and take just your correspondent’s point about plausibility. Can the left really believe that Bush would sacrifice a 90% approval rating in order to support a lie by pursuing a controversial course of action that would inevitably expose the lie? If he were lying to get at Saddam, wouldn’t he have called for everything except an invasion? (It worked for Clinton, and Kerry slammed him for it.)
For implausibility, dissing Reagan at his grave ain’t in it.
|
Kerry steps in the al Qaqaa
Captain Ed has the links and the latest word about the 380 tons of of HMX and RDX supposedly looted from the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant at al Qaqaa: not only did US forces investigate and secure the area, most of the material removed long before US troops arrived and the figure for the amount of HMX and RDX was probably off a bit, by a factor of 100. By January 2003 there were only 3 tons there. And have you noticed that in the hysterical charges, censorious reporting, and excited revelations , the TV talkers and politicians have not been naming the site?
It's the only miscalculation in a Rovian plot.
Can’t you just see Rove and Cheney snorting and guffawing, Rummy saying My Goodness, and Dubya smirking when they hatched this plan. In the last week of the campaign, let’s feed our most rabid media antagonists a misleading report suggesting a scandalous looting of WMDs by terrorists, then watch the story blow up and unravel.
If they rush into print, CBS and the NYT are revealed as the partisan trollops they are, and Kerry flip-flops to bellowing that WMD were there so he can bellow our line about terrorists getting the WMD. And the beauty of it is, even if they don’t fall into the trap, the whole country will be in a good mood from watching Kerry and Edwards and Rather saying “Qaqaa” over and over again. That last part was the only thing that didn't work.
One of the much discussed--but never executed--Hallowe'en pranks of my youth was to fill a paper bag with dog doo-doo, set it alight on the victim's porch, ring the bell, and watch from a safe distance as he fouled his shoes stomping out the fire. If Terry McAuliff thought the fake TANG documents were a Rove scam, why didn’t he smell a set-up at al Qaqaa?
|
|
|
|
