Friday, March 14, 2003 |
12:20 - Not All Rock Stars are Clueless
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Greg Kihn is the morning DJ at KFOX, the classic-rock station that wakes me up each morning. He's not exactly what you'd call a household name; but as aging rockers go, he's one of the most respectable I know of. The Greg Kihn Band only ever had maybe two hits back in the 80s (one of which, "Jeopardy", was spoofed by Weird Al), but nowadays he's parlayed his one-hit-wonder-ness into a fine running gag. The man who's had almost as many hit records as he has ex-wives!
And his band still plays, from time to time. Plus you oughtta hear his son Ry play.
Anyway, Greg is particularly interesting to listen to in the mornings because he's unabashedly pro-WoT and patriotic, and he fields irate e-mails on the air every morning, tearing them down as best he can. He's not the best public orator in the world, quite frankly; some of his on-air ranting is more comic bluster than eloquent rhetoric. He'll put on a big Pomp & Circumstance-esqe fanfare to play behind him when he gets going; it rises to a triumphant fever pitch as he builds up more and more steam. It's camp, and he knows it. It's why we like him.
(He's also a big Mac fan. Apple has often sent the station various products to play with, in exchange for Greg's unsolicited shilling for them on-air. His co-anchors put up with it from him-- you can almost hear them snickering in the background whenever he starts talking about his Macs. But they defer to him and give him the stage.)
Anyway, Greg was giving an on-air response to an e-mail he'd received that shrilly condemned Bush for setting out to kill "innocent Iraqi civilians", as is such a common refrain. In his response, Greg explained in a very measured manner that we'll be specifically going out of our way to avoid harming civilians. He said, "It's just not our style".
I fired off the following e-mail to him:
"We go out of our way to avoid targeting civilians".
It's not just "not our style", it's the reason why we've been spending billions and *billions* of dollars over the past decades to develop weapons which take out not just the target *building*, but the target *person*. We have missiles that can fly into an individual person's house's *window* and leave the adjoining buildings on either side completely intact. We have Predator drones that target terrorists in their cars where they're as isolated as possible from innocent civilians. We even have EMP weapons designed to disable electronics so enemy weapons systems become useless, without even a single *military* life having to be lost.
Why the heck would a country that has nuclear weapons capable of leveling cities devote all its attention to creating weapons that cause *less and less* damage, with more and more specific and targeted results? It's because minimizing civilian casualties is the paramount goal of American military development, and we've achieved more toward that goal than any other country in history.
People who whine about "killing innocent civilians is wrong" will get no argument whatsoever from US military leaders; however, they *might* get a frustrated punch in the mouth.
Within minutes, he responded (though not on the air), "Those people that whine about killing civilians will whine anyway no matter what we do. . . Of course Saddam wants as many as possible to die on both sides. I expect him to pull every cowardly, cheap trick in the book."
I know he's not a Chrissie Hynde or a Peter Gabriel-- but these days, that's no bad thing at all.
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