Going on vacation later today... ahhh. Anyway...

Saying some things that need to be said - James Lileks from his daily Bleat for today:

http://www.lileks.com/bleats/index.html

I was heartened to read of several anti-Usama games on the web - I knew about Bin Laden Liquors, but not the Usama skins for Unreal, Quake, and the Sims. The more humiliation involved, the better. This is healthy. A few days ago I saw one of those WB cartoons they rarely air - a WW2 propaganda short. Hitler was heading to Moscow to bomb the city, but was brought low by Gremlins from the Kremlin. The indignities visited on der Fuhrer were minimal - a tack in the arse, some flamboyant electrocution, premature burial from which he emerged with horse’s teeth and brayed NAZIS ARE DE CWAZIEST PEOPLE, a la forgotten comic Lew Lehr. But the portrayal of Hitler was dead on - frothing, meaty, beady-eyed meglomaniac, more human than any human I’ve ever seen in a WB cartoon. When it was done I thought of the WW2 urinal decals that allowed one to micturate, forcefully, into the visage of an Axis leader. There is a modern variant: the shield for urinal cookies with OBL’s face. I read some online message board posts deploring this sort of thing for all the usual reasons. It came down to this: while one can certainly understand why one would want to . . . issue a statement against OBL’s face, the sort of people likely to do that are the same people who are too patriotic, who fly flags without a second thought, and are otherwise characteristic of the vast number of lobotomized sheep who make up our racist, greedy, brainwashed population.

I’m finding these people all over the Internet, and one thing bothers me - well, many, but one above all: they stand for nothing except the virtue of cynicism. (One amusing post speculated that Cheney is behind all this to enrich his oil cronies, who’ll have access to a pipeline in the region. Yes, that’s certainly more credible than OBL et al being the bad actors.) They seem to be reacting to events that are not happening - they cannot believe that the President isn’t demonizing Islam and Arabs, so they pretend that’s what’s happening. They cannot believe that America isn’t rounding up Arabs and putting them in camps, so they pretend that the country is awash in racism. The fact is, the victims of 9/11 were quintessentially American - i.e., black, white, gay, straight, Jew, Arab, Christian, Atheist, Moslem, male, female, hispanic, Polish, Italian, Chinese, all working in the same tall tower without laboring under divisions of caste or tribe, and this sort of diversity is unique to Western Civilization. That’s one of the attributes that makes us a target, and that’s one of the characterstics that makes this civilization worth defending. It seems as if some critics believe America stands alone as a gross violation of the norms of the planet, instead of a member of a civilization that defies the norms of the planet.

Finally: they seem to believe that patriotism equals a pollyanna worldview, that it is impossible for a thinking person to be a patriot. I heard a talk show host this weekend lament that Americans “think this is a CNN miniseries, Gulf War 2” - which of course they don’t; this is waaaay different, and pretty much everyone understands that. She went on to say that this situation is “soo complex. There are so many shades of gray.” Well, duh. The shallow mind always congratulates itself for identifying complexity, as though that alone constitutes an insight. But in nearly every instance, her notion of “complexity” made her unable to formulate any response to a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, nihilistic death cult which itself is bereft of the very idea of complexity, let alone displays any manifestation of it. Nothing complex about two planes into two towers.

The comic strip “Boondocks” is a perfect example of this sort of blinkered derision. It’s being held up as a brave example of dissent. Yes, it’s brave to make political points on a page usually reserved for Cathy’s musings on the size of her thighs. But every point made for the last three weeks has been banal and predictable, right down the fallacious $43 million aid -to-the-Taliban canard. Today the strip addresses those who’ve complained about or pulled the strip, and suggests that the artist’s freedom of speech is being suppressed. In a word: bullshit. When the government comes to your house and takes away your brushes and pens, and forbids you to publish, then you’ve lost your freedom of speech. If no one wants to buy your work - or, having bought it, chooses not to use it - that’s different, and if you don’t understand the difference then there’s little point in reading the thin little screeds anymore.

I want to ask the artist: Well, what do you want to do here? Take a look at this film of Taliban whipping women in the street: this your idea of the good guys? I’d get an argument about US support of the Afghan rebels, how we caused this. But if we hadn’t supported the rebels, we would have been criticized for leaving Afghans to the fate of the Soviets, because they weren’t white like the Slavs. Make no mistake: the Soviets were brutal SOBs who targeted children as a means of spreading terror; why wouldn’t we aid the resistance? If we had stayed in Afghanistan afterwards,the cynics would have called us colonizers. If we had invaded the Taliban for no particular reason before 9/11, the cynics would have called us imperialists. Nothing satisfies these people, because now they cannot abide clarity in anyone but themselves. They think they see things clearer than anyone else, but they’re blind men in a dark room full of mud, congradulating themselves for identifying the substance in their hands as dirt.

I’m not talking about people who have long-standing, detailed complaints about US foreign policy, who believe a compromise with the PA is possible, who want more equitable trade policies, or any of the other things reasonable people can disagree about in a civil fashion. I’m talking about comfy members of the intellegentsia who can say, like Columbia historian Eric Foner in the London Review of Books, that he’s “not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” I don’t know what planet such people live on. I do know what planet my father lived on: one in which his twin brother was denied medical treatment for a nosebleed at two hospitals, once because he was the wrong religion, and once because he was poor. The third hospital gave him a perfunctory exam and sent him home, where he died. And still my father fought for that country, and did what he could afterwards to make it better. What happened to my uncle - who’ll I never meet, of course, and whose name I bear - could never happen today as a matter of policy; no one turns away people from the ER because they're the wrong creed, or can't pay. We’re better today than we were then; we will be better tomorrow, because that is what this civilization struggles and staggers to achieve: progress. It’s messy and imperfect because we are both of those things. But some people seem to believe that this planet would be Eden without America. Fine: imagine a world with no America to counter Hitler. To counter Stalin. To counter the Chinese. To counter militant, intolerant, monocultural theocratic gynophobic etc. Islam. These people like to dream of what the world would have been like without a strong United States. It never seems to occur to them the hell this planet would be without one.

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), October 19, 2001

Answers

You might like this one...

Bin Laden's Special Song

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), October 19, 2001.

Randall Xpher, %Unk's WW West

Dear sir:

Please be apprised that a class action suit in the amount of $10,000,000.00 will be filed against you by the cohabitants of "Unk's Wild Wild West" for the heinous crime of cut n pasting.

We have our standards.

Yours truly,

Mako, Mako and Bako, Attorneys at Law

PS-LadyLogic, you're next

-- (Harold Sharkskin@MMB.com), October 19, 2001.

You have a good vacation, Randy.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 19, 2001.

Rich you are so obvious. Does your ass hurt? I hear prep H helps but only if you stop the homo behavior.

-- (Ouch@my.ass), October 19, 2001.

I am still trying to figure out what a fist cut and paste is...

Is that like a new style band-aid for fists???

LOL...

rollin' on the floor...

The Dog

-- The Dog (dogdesert@hotmail.com), October 19, 2001.