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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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Thursday, October 21, 2004
10:20 - Not that there's anything wrong with that
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1098346007.shtml

(top) link
Dean has it right:

If Kerry wins, the American people will have spoken definitively, and for all time so far as I am concerned. They will have, in effect, said, "We will not support pre-emptive wars or large-scale efforts to democratize other nations any longer. We simply haven't got the stomach for what's required."

Because let's face it: by any rational measure, the Iraq war has gone better than any operation of its type and scale has ever gone in history. And yet the piddling cost and the incredible work of our people is now routinely viewed as a disaster. The press is content merely to report the negative, without any rational or historical context, and the American people are (apparently) content to let them get away with it.

And that's okay. If that's what the American people want, it's what they want. If anyone proposes such a task in the future, I'll simply say "Look to the Iraq war. It will end in disaster because the press will only report failure and death and excuse that with phony mealy-mouthed claims of "objectivity," and within a year or two the American people will go wobbly. It's just who we are as a people."

That's what this election will mean. I don't think Kerry's going to win, but I'm bracing myself nonetheless. I'm bracing for condescending, patronizing head-patting from European acquaintances, which is a good deal worse than such acquaintances simply ignoring me out of disgust. I'm bracing for Michael Moore riding the wave of celebratory euphoria and becoming a political celebrity of unprecedented stature for someone from the filmmaking industry, rather like Oliver Stone winning a Senate seat, only with the added bonus of making our philosophical leaders look like the stereotypical fat, loud, obnoxious Americans we're already seen as. I'm bracing for Barbra Streisand, Janeane Garofalo, Arec Bardwin, Martin Sheen, MATT DAMON, Bruce Springsteen, and a thousand other actors and artists being filled with giddy joy and the sense that through the power of movies and songs and petulant theme concerts and appearances on The Daily Show they can change history, even if they haven't given a moment's thought to what they're fighting for except "change". I'm bracing for our troops (who support Bush by a margin of something like five to one) waking up in their barracks two weeks from now to find that the man who flew to visit them on Thanksgiving, who called them by name and saluted them and shook their hands until the tears streamed down their faces, has been kicked out of office by the American people in favor of someone whose promise to bring the troops home by any fixed date speaks more loudly and reassuringly to the enemy than to our soldiers or their families. I'm bracing for history books ten years from now to refer to the brief Bush II years as an unmitigated disaster during which the economy crashed, 9/11 occurred, and America embarked upon an inexplicable series of hideously unpopular foreign wars that were mercifully cut short before anyone could see any long-term results to prove what they were intended to achieve.

It won't be the end of the world, no. But it will suck. Especially if, as I'm also bracing for, the radical Islamists and rogue dictators all over the world (who have to a man endorsed John Kerry in a flurry of anti-Semitic vitriol, Eurocratic condescension, and screenings of Fahrenheit 9/11) take the election's results as a sign that the American people's righteous outrage over 9/11 has flagged and dissipated—and therefore that even an unprecedently audacious and bloody attack on the heart of America's premier city, forever rending its skyline and the Americans' sense of security in their homeland, will provoke only a couple of years of aimless thrashing before the beast lies still and goes back to sleep. If that's the worst America will do in response to an attack like 9/11, then what do the terrorists have to fear if they mount another? They're patient. They've waited six hundred years. They can take their time.

But terrorist attacks don't worry me all that much, really. What worries me is what we show of our character in response to such an attack. Any country can be happy in time of peace, after all—it's only in those periods of trial, like World War II, or Vietnam, that we really see what each country is made of. Now that Jimmy Carter has repudiated the Revolutionary War, blithely throwing away the two-hundred-year legacy of this country's fighting spirit that would never have existed if America had somehow gained its independence peacefully (which would not have happened, Jimmy), we see that shamefacedness over what this country has come to stand for has reached even into the uppermost echelons of our leadership, into the mind of someone who was once our President, and someone who now shares a box seat at the Democratic National Convention with Michael Moore, endorsing a philosophy that says the world would be better off without an America gumming up the works. If a sizable proportion of the populace comes to agree with Carter, or with the people who think like him, then we truly have left behind any traces of the generation that hurled itself into the forests of Belgium or the jungles of the South Pacific, let alone the one that tore itself to pieces on Little Round Top, each man believing deep in his heart that the cause for which he was taking a bayonet in the gut was right, right, right, and to hell with anyone who would tell him otherwise.

This country won't be the last one on the planet to slip over the edge into the postmodern, postnational, gray-and-shabby Nerf-padded peacefulness of apathy already embraced by Europe. The Middle East is younger, for all its history: it has the fire that we once did, and it will eat us alive if we have no heart to fight back—and meanwhile China and the Pacific Rim will come into our inheritance while we stare blankly at the wall of the convalescent hospital of nations. We can kid ourselves that it's better that way, that jacking into a virtual-reality paradise while our corporeal bodies wither is no different from paradise itself; but if we do, it'll be the end of any argument in favor of the experiment that is this country: the idea that freedom, human liberty itself, is a force greater than any other one on Earth, and once truly secured for its posterity by a people, they'll die before they let go of it.

We aren't ready to let go yet, are we?


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