You want to talk about health care, minorities? My
brother-in-law is French. He’s a good man. He came here
less than two years ago, got a good job in about three
months - during a recession - and secured health coverage
for his family. Then he bought a house. And a new car. Could
I go to France and repeat his accomplishments?
"The
entire house smells of ceremonial pig." by James Lileks,
The Bleat, April 21, 2003
My point stands:
there are two good things about the UN not being involved in
Iraq. One is that the UN isn't involved; the other is that
the US knows it can't blame anyone else if everything goes
pear-shaped. That's a motive to damn well make it work.
Natalie
Solent blog, May 11, 2003
We have been so safe, and so
free, for so long, that it has warped our sense of history
and human nature. It is, of course, a trade I am happy to
make, but this isolation from the true horror and depravity
that are everyday experiences in many parts of the world has
imbedded in it, like a particularly lethal virus, the seeds
of our own destruction. And it is this threat, much
more than that from fundamentalist Islam and its organs of
terror, that we must look at – closely, and deeply, and often.
I believe that many of those
who opposed the war did so because they simply could not --
or in many cases would not – imagine what life
under real oppression is like. Remember, these are
the people who say, and seem to believe, that we in the US
live in a police state, under a murdering dictator, where
propaganda is spoon-fed to us like willing idiots and
political opposition is crushed mercilessly.
If you say such things long
enough, and you spend all your time in the company of
similarly tinfoil-hatted comrades, then you actually begin
to believe that life in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein
wasn’t that much worse than life in Berkeley under the
racist, election-stealing, Wellstone-murdering,
Earth-destroying Republikkkan administration.
This nation has been for many
decades under direct and coordinated attack by fanatics
whose failure to gain respect and attention through the
force of their arguments have turned their level of rhetoric
to such a shrill and hysterical pitch that years of it have
seemingly driven some of them quite insane -- insane to the
degree that they cannot see that acid baths, state rapists,
children’s prisons and daily torture and execution are not
mere rhetorical flourishes -- roughly equivalent to hanging
chads and bulldozed Dixie Chicks CD’s -- but a
desperate and ever-present reality. They did
everything in their power to deny this reality, these
Champions of Compassion, and Not In Their Name did these
daily horrors come to an end. That is what six decades of
freedom, security, tolerance and prosperity will do to some
people: isolate them from the brutal reality of horror and
torture to the degree that “evil” must be accompanied by
sneer quotes and the motives of 300 million free and decent
people are suspect while those of a small cabal of
psychopathic mass murderers are not.
. . .
Despite the reams and rolls
of evidence, there remains a committed, fanatical cadre of
people who find the idea of a Benevolent State so
compelling, so seductive, that they refuse to give it up in
the face of any mountain of evidence to the contrary. They
point to halfway states like Sweden, which, on the face of
things, seem halfway awful by many standards. A lower GDP
than Alabama or Mississippi – the poorest states in the
opposing camp. But this isn’t just about filthy lucre. The
culture produces what? Abba, and Volvo. Loved the
first, not a fan of the second. There is little invention,
almost no outstanding contributions to science, technology,
music or the arts -- although Bergman was terrific. It is a
safe, decent place where everything is taken care of. It
reminds me, in fact, of a very large retirement home.
. . .
America’s strength must be
must be seen as that of a greedy, blinded giant, a drunken
bully stealing from the world. It must be endlessly,
constantly described as Imperial, consigning it in a
single word to a long line of repression and historical
failure. Forget that we rule no other countries, forget we pay
billions for our presence, rather than stealing billions at
the point of a bayonet. Forget that we have paid for every
single drop of oil we have ever burned, when we could in
fact have easily done what we are accused of: stolen it at
gunpoint. We do not, and did not, and will not –
and they know it. We are, in fact, the anti-Empire. We have
bucked history in every fundamental way. Wherever we sail is
uncharted territory. No nation in history has done what we
have done, and continue to do.
. . .
And I have one final wish,
which I know seems very unlikely, but which I will share
anyway.
I fervently hope that
someday, perhaps decades from now, Iraq will have a really
top-notch soccer team. I hope that one day, they will get to
the final round of the World Cup, and when they do, I hope
it is Team USA they play for the championship.
I hope that the Americans
play a tough, aggressive, masterful game, that they use all
of the speed and skill and power at their command. And then
I want to sit there watching TV as an old man, and watch the
faces on the Iraqi people when the game is over, because I
want to see that the most relieved and joyous they can
conceive of being, is the day that tiny Iraq got out on that
soccer field and kicked our ass.
"Victory,"
by Bill Whittle, Eject! Eject! Eject!, April 27, 2003
If there was a
single event in our recent cultural history that established
literal-minded crudity as the ideal of artistic endeavor,
however, it was the celebrated 1960 trial of Penguin Books
for the publication of an obscene book, the unexpurgated
version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The trial posed the question of whether cultural tact and
restraint would crumble in the absence of legal sanctions.
For, as the much derided prosecutor in the case, Mervyn
Griffith-Jones, understood only too well, and specifically
advised the government of the day, if the publication of Lady
Chatterley’s Lover went legally unchallenged, or if
the case were lost, it would in effect be the end of the law
of obscenity. To adapt slightly Dostoyevsky’s famous
dictum about the moral consequences of the nonexistence of
God, if Lady Chatterley’s Lover were published,
everything could be published.
"What's
Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks?" by Theodore Dalrymple,
City Journal, Summer, 2003
In Ramadi
[Iraq], in another cafe, the maitre d', in honour of my
presence, flipped the television over to BBC World. Some
Beeb type was doing a piece about some Baghdadi who hadn't
been paid since March. Now what sort of fellow hasn't been
paid since March? A chap who worked for the toppled thug
government perhaps? Might be a committed thug ideologue,
might be just a go-along-to-get-along type. But, given
that the new Iraqi government is never going to be as huge
as the old one, maybe that chap should just stop whining
to the BBC and look for a gig in the private sector. Ditto
for the BBC reporter, come to that.
As usual, the
piece wound up with the correspondent standing in the
children's ward of the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre
predicting more doom and gloom. By contrast, every medical
facility I went to in Iraq was well short of capacity. The
NGO types concede that Iraqis aren't exactly rushing the
hospitals, but say that's because they know that there are
no drugs and/or they're worried that they can't afford
them. Might be that. Or it might be that they don't want
to be stuck on a ward trying to get a moment's sleep under
the blazing lights of round-the-clock CNN and BBC camera
crews filming their reporter yakking away in front of a
telegenic moppet whose acute tonsillitis is somehow all
Rumsfeld's fault. These days, I always laugh my head off
at BBC World reports. And, in that Ramadi cafe, I was
touched to find that, even though most of them hadn't a
clue what he was going on about, within half a minute, the
rest of the crowd was roaring along with me.
"Come
on over, the water's lovely," by Mark Steyn, The
Daily Telegraph (England), June 1, 2003
previous
months:
- February , 2004
- January , 2004
- December, 2003
- November, 2003
- October, 2003
- September, 2003
- August, 2003
- July, 2003
- June, 2003
- May ,
2003
- April , 2003
- March , 2003
