g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, May 18, 2004
11:10 - Black is white, up is down, and short is long
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/22/1082616260498.html?from=top5

(top) link
Tim Blair may have already given this a righteous poking, as it's a month or so old, but still. It's another one of those instructive things, instructive in that it really shows how the deft use of language can have you singing that the sky is made of mud and the sun revolves around the moon.

I'm sure the author, one David Campbell of Australia's The Age, got an A from his Sarcastic Journalism 201 professor for numerous pieces just like this.

It's genius in its way. I mean, if anybody can read this piece—in which we conclude that through the pure and innocent eyes of The Children™, the real terrorists are us—and not see the fallacies on which it's predicated for what they are, and the piece for the insidious bit of fluffery that it is, then he or she is truly beyond reasoning with. But look at the sheer brilliance of it: by casting the Socratic conversation into the voice of a child with no sense of historical perspective or handy facts at his disposal, you can be sure you'll never have to hear the tricky questions:
  • "Daddy, wasn't Saddam in violation of 17 UN resolutions, and repeatedly violating the cease-fire agreement?"
  • "Aren't chemical and biological weapons really easy to conceal, and just as easy to store as harmless components?"
  • "What about that sarin bomb that blew up on a roadside? Doesn't that count?"
  • "Remember Somalia? Isn't there something to be said for being extremely firm, and a little bit overeager, in response to 9/11—because the fact that we retreated whenever we got bloody noses like in Somalia is exactly why 9/11 occurred?"
  • "What about Ansar Al-Islam? Haven't there been all kinds of links drawn between al Qaeda and Iraq?"
  • "Even if Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, wasn't it worth getting rid of him for all the crimes he'd already committed, and just in case he decided that if 17 UN resolutions against him weren't going to be enforced, then there was no point in trying to avoid incurring an 18th?"
  • "Isn't it a good idea, when the Middle East is exporting Islamic terrorism daily, to make sure that there aren't any avowedly anti-US dictatorships operating in the Middle East, whether they're sponsoring terrorism or not?"
  • "How is one of our soldiers making fun of an Iraqi prisoner's wee-wee to get information about terrorists remotely the same thing as Saddam feeding people feet-first into shredders for failing to agree with him?"
  • "Daddy, this is Iraq we're talking about! Saddam Hussein! The guy who gassed his own people and killed 300,000 of his citizens! The guy who's been the personification of evil in every sitcom and stand-up routine produced in the 90s! The guy that all America's been aching to get rid of ever since 1991! And now all of a sudden it's a bad thing, because we actually seem to be willing to do it?"

Kids don't say these sorts of things, see. Because they involve a certain amount of historical awareness and moral surety. We're doing a great job, though, of making sure our kids grow up with the ability to see the good in 9/11 and the evil in saving a million lives.

Yeah, this piece is old. But it just showed up as a forwarded item in my inbox. Courtesy of whom? The Ar-Rahman list, naturally.


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