Month: March 2003

On another message board I frequent (for discussion of non-political matters), there are some very vocal and very conservative participants — the type of people who are happiest if they can find any reason at all to both exalt George W. Bush and vilify Bill Clinton in the same post, and double-credit if they can do it in the same sentence. I mainly ignore all of that, because these same people can be quite sensible when discussing that message board’s actual focus (film music). But yesterday, one of them commented to the effect that President Bush should get credit for choosing to set aside “Shock and Awe” in favor of the “surgical strikes” we saw, in which our forces attempted to either “decapitate” the Iraqi command, or better still, kill Saddam Hussein in the very first hours of the war. This was contrasted, of course, with the air campaign in Kosovo, when President Clinton directed massive air strikes in an attempt to kill or incapacitate Slobodan Milosevic.

Well, yes, I suppose the current commanders deserve some credit for this. I’m not prepared to give credit to President Bush — at least not all the way — for the same reason that I’m not willing to blame Clinton for any civilian deaths in Kosovo. I’m far from a military expert, but I very much doubt that Bush or Clinton — or any President — has a direct role in planning military campaigns. This is why they have things like Joint Chiefs and Secretaries of Defense and National Security Advisors. If the President decides to attack, he asks for options from his commanders, they present their recommendations, and then the order is given. While Bush’s decision may have been clear — intelligence provided someone with some information about the whereabouts of some very important people in the Iraqi command, and time will tell if one of them was Saddam himself — I have a very hard time castigating Clinton for Kosovo, especially considering the campaign there was ultimately a success, if definitely messy.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Ministry of Planning building in Baghdad, after being struck by a missile.

While I’ve come in recent months to view this war as probably necessary, I also can’t help but consider with sadness the nature of a species that so often makes a necessity of killing off large numbers of its brethren in as violent a manner as possible.

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It’s really easy to focus on the wrong stuff, out of habit or anger or other reasons. I remember, eight years ago when I was entering restaurant management, a boss of mine (who was soon to be fired) decided to focus on food-cost issues in our restaurant, which were quite out of control. Food-cost is basically that: the amount of money a restaurant spends on the ingredients for the food that it prepares and serves. In our case, a Pizza Hut, this involved the dough mix, oil, cheese, sauce, toppings and all the rest. The unit I was in at the time was in the habit of discarding at least three full batches of unused dough each night — which anyone can see is a pretty big expense — but the manager (who was soon to be fired) focused on tiny things like the amount of ice in the beverages, the number of shakes of seasoning we put on the breadsticks, and so forth. He was concentrating to exclusion on things that had little, if any, effect on our food-cost problems and ignoring larger practices that had a big effect on those same problems. This is what the saying “Penny wise, pound foolish” means: concentrating on ways to save pennies, because pennies are often easier to track and we’re simply in the habit of doing so, and not seeing the more important big things going on behind it all.

That seems to me to be what the anti-war movement is now experiencing.

I’m sympathetic, I really am. I’m one who is supporting the war, but not without a queasy fear deep in my stomach that things are going to be messed up afterwards. But the thing is, the war has begun. It’s happening, and the only thing that anti-war protests — especially civil disobedience designed to shut down, or at least hamper, major metropolitan areas — is going to accomplish is to make the anti-war people look more and more flaky and disconnected from reality. It reminds me of the liberal commentators and bloggers who never refer to President Bush without a parenthetical comment like “You know, you weren’t really elected”, and it quite frankly reminds me of the conservatives who still find ways to blame the evils of the world on Bill Clinton.

So if you opposed the war, and went to the trouble of screaming your opposition at the top of your lungs, great. That’s what America, and democracy, are all about. But America and democracy are also about moving on to what’s next — and in this case, the “what’s next” is far, far more crucial than the war which I think everyone knows we’re going to win. If the Left wants to be productive, then it seems to me that protesting the war itself needs to end; what the Left needs to do now is to start holding the Administration’s feet to the coals to make sure that the post-war stuff isn’t screwed up the way Afghanistan was. To keep up Bush’s poker-metaphors, we on the left really need to stop crying about the hands that have gone by, because the cards are being dealt again. It’s a new hand, so let’s play it.

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Sometimes the gravity of events must be forced to the back seat, and having a three-year-old in the house is just the way to do it. Instead of watching war updates on the news this morning, we watched Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. There’s plenty of time for war stuff, and for all our pious rhetoric about the Reasons We Fight — to preserve our liberties, our culture, et cetera — I think that sometimes we still forget to actually partake in the things for which we fight.

(Yes, I’m still suffering the cold and hopped-up on over-the-counter stuff. Deal with it.)

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Just a quick book-note: this morning I finished The Duke of Uranium, by John Barnes. This is a colorful SF adventure story that’s a pure romp — action, romance, and some actual “sensawunda” to boot, about a young man in the 36th century who falls into adventure when his girlfriend is kidnapped. He’s plunged into the standard world of intrigue and interplanetary adventure when he embarks on a mission to get his girlfriend back. It turns out, of course, that she’s not who he thinks she is; but then, this is one of those books where nobody is who he thinks they are. The book isn’t loaded with surprises, but surprises aren’t the point in this kind of story. The point is the sharply drawn characters, the interesting background (Barnes gives a lot of hints-in-passing of the history that intervenes between now and AD 3600), and the excellent pacing. SF is such a versatile genre. You can have tragedy, or thought-provoking literature, or mind-expanding stories about the universe and our place in it, or extrapolations of our possible future as a species — and you can have just plain fun, which is what The Duke of Uranium is all about. Highly recommended.

(This is the first in a series.)

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Just in case anybody’s wondering, I’ve seen this little thing around the Web the last couple of days that tells you to do a Google search on “French military victories”, and then click “I’m feeling lucky”. This causes Google to respond that no results are found, and it asks you, “Did you mean French military defeats?” Heh heh heh.

Except that it’s a prank, folks. Don’t take this as meaning, well, anything.

When you click “I’m feeling lucky” on Google, that takes you directly to the Number One page in the Google search results. In this case, someone’s finagled a page to look exactly like a real Google page, as described above. (And, in fact, that page has now been replaced by another that’s soared to “Number One”.)

(BTW, France’s past is certainly checkered — as is the past of just about every European nation — but they’ve had their military successes. Yeah, it’s been almost a thousand years since the Battle of Hastings, but I wonder how different British history might have turned out had William the Conqueror lost there. And of course, Napoleon Bonaparte was something of a military success before he overreached. And then there’s the greatest Frenchman in history. He hasn’t been born yet, of course, but his destiny is to shape humanity’s outreach to the stars. I’m talking, of course, about Captain Jean-Luc Picard.)

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I’ve been considering buying the new album by the Dixie Chicks, and not because one of them said something mean about President Bush. Truth is, I don’t care about that. I’m not a fan of what passes for country music these days — the “rockabilly” stuff that seems to me to be closer to Madonna in tone than Patsy Cline — but I’ve heard enough of the D.C.’s music to want to hear more, and I thought their simple, three-part harmony version of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl was the best rendition of the National Anthem that I’ve heard yet. Their political views, as far as I can see, have nothing to do with their music or the quality thereof. But of course, some folks don’t agree.

I’ve never understood the whole business of boycotting a particular artist because of that artist’s political views. Maybe it’s because I grew up listening to classical music, an area where if one selects the composers whose works one will listen to on the basis of their views in life, one would have a pretty short playlist indeed. I doubt, frankly, if any artist has ever been more of a lout in his beliefs and behavior than Richard Wagner, and yet Wagner’s operas form one of the grandest peaks in any art. Wagner’s name ranks with Shakepeare and Michelangelo, in terms of his art, which seems all the more incongruous because in terms of his personal politics, Wagner’s name ranks with Hitler’s. (Literally. Wagner’s views were Naziism, seventy years too early.)

Even though I don’t air my political views much in this space, I make no secret that I’m pretty much of a liberal. But I see no reason at all to base my choices in terms of art and entertainment on my political beliefs. I didn’t suddenly stop watching Magnum, PI when Tom Selleck introduced Nancy Reagan at a Republican National Convention; I’ve watched movies featuring Charlton Heston since I found out about his conservative beliefs; and so on. So why is it that so many people on the right in this country are so willing to either (a) boycott an artist or entertainer who publicly supports liberal causes or (b) play the “Just shut up and entertain me” card, as if by virtue of being a liberal entertainer or artist, they should abandon any public voicing of their beliefs? I find this phenomenon incredibly odd, every time it comes up. And no doubt it will again this coming Sunday, when I’m sure some Oscar winner will say something not terribly pleasing to the conservative crowd.

I have to say that I find this attitude at once goofy — think of the great films and books and musical works we’d never hear if we limit ourselves to that subset of artists with whom we agree politically — and, frankly, hypocritical. “Shut up and entertain me” was never much of a concern if Ronald Reagan was the actor doing the talking, and it certainly seems odd that on the one hand the ravings of talk-radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh are apparently not to be taken seriously (“He’s just an entertainer!”) while the ravings of other people who actually are entertainers are to be treated with enormous gravity.

This post probably isn’t very coherent, which I’ll chalk up to the DayQuil. I’ll leave off with this: owning a copy of Thriller doesn’t make a person a nut-case, plastic-surgery-fetishizing weirdo with an unhealthy love of children. If you’re a conservative, watching The West Wing is not the equivalent of sticking a “Martin Sheen for President” bumper sticker on your car. And if you’re a liberal, enjoying T2: Judgment Day doesn’t require you to religiously trace every negative event in world history since January 20, 1993 to Bill Clinton.

There’s an old adage that I try to apply in my fiction writing: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”. I think the reverse applies as well. Let’s stop limiting ourselves.

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Stupid cold. Ugh. I’m torn between being annoyed that I’m sick on the first instance of nice weather in Syracuse since, well, September and my desire to take a big-ass drill bit, jam it into my sinuses, and spin it away.

I think I’ll just make some tea and watch a few more movies. I already watched Say Anything, which just happens to be the best teen romance ever filmed. “I gave her my heart; she gave me a pen” has to be the single most succinct expression of total heartbreak ever uttered in a movie.

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Just some very brief stuff today, because I’m nursing a cold.

:: Ah, Spring in Upstate New York — when the ground enters that most beautiful intermediary state, between “snow-covered” and “grassy green”. Otherwise known as “muddy quagmire”.

:: We drove to Buffalo yesterday to do some apartment hunting. It sounds incredibly geeky, I suppose, especially given that we were gone for all of six months, but it was really good to see our once-and-future-haunts again.

:: Today’s entrees on the liquid diet include green tea with honey, and copious amounts of DayQuil. I hope to be back on solids by dinnertime. My colds, fortunately, tend to be really rough for a single day and then I get better. I expect to be somewhat recovered by tomorrow.

:: CalPundit is on hiatus until Friday. I suppose he deserves a break. But I don’t want to give him one. Oh well.

:: Sean is a NCAA b-ball fan, and he’s got an online pool going. I’m refraining because my knowledge of such matters is so bad that I’d be tempted to write-in St. Bonaventure. But, people who are more aware on such matters might want to have a look.

:: I’m shocked! shocked! that Saddam Hussein rejected President Bush’s ultimatum. So, it looks like it’s time for bombs to start dropping. As others have noted, it’s time to hope for the best. My general position is that while I agree with the necessity of the war, I look on the people running things and imagine what the country would look like if the South had waited to secede until Calvin Coolidge was President. This Administration’s bungling attempts at diplomacy and nation-building do not particularly infuse me with confidence in what a post-war Iraq would look like — rather the reverse, actually — but the die is cast. President Bush has shown a certain fondness for poker metaphors lately, so here’s one of my own: in the war itself, we’re about to play our full house. Problem is, I can’t help but suspect that when it comes to the post-war stuff, we’ll be sitting on a pair of two’s.

:: That’s all for today. I’ll try to be back tomorrow, and hopefully with the long-awaited continuation (heh) of “Attack of the Presidents”.

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The following humorous anecdote appeared in my Inbox this morning, and I would be remiss in my duties as a blogger if I did not inflict it upon all nine of my unwitting readers. So, without ado of any kind:

:: Two Pirates, Black Jack and Capt Blood, meet up unexpectedly in a Jamaican bar…

“Blood!” says Jack, “I haven’t seen you since we graduated from pirate school. You’re looking fantastic, what with the wooden leg, parrot, hook and eye patch. You must be one hell of a great pirate, man.”

“I’ll be honest,” replies Blood. “Most of this stuff’s just due to stupid accidents, I’m not really a great pirate at all. I lost the leg trying to tie my ship up to a mooring in Plymouth. I’m such a dumb ass that I got the rope wrapped round my leg and pulled the sucker clean off. The parrot was just left to me by my great Aunt who left it to me as one of the conditions of her will.”

“What about the hook?” said Jack, “surely that’s the result of some epic battle?”

“No,” Blood sighed, “I lost the hand in the galley, helping to prepare vegetables for the crew. Nothing piratical, I’m afraid.”

“Hells Bells, man” said Jack. “But you look every inch the perfect pirate. At least tell me that you lost the eye to a musket shot!”

The Capt gave his old friend a one-eyed look of weary resignation. “Ah, Jack. I lost that eye when I was walking the fore deck at sea, looking up at the top mast rigging, where my men were setting the mainsail. A seagull did a shit right in my eye.”

“You were blinded by seagull shit?!” exclaimed Jack.

“Of course not, I just hadn’t got used to having a hook yet…..”

The persons responsible for the preceding have been sacked.

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