Where is Metro when you need him? Probably sulking because Blogger won’t let me leave any golden droppings in his comment section.
Stolen from the comments on Gawker:
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Oh, look what’s lying right here on the coffee table, one of my favorite passages by Gore Vidal:
“Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons. It was Acheson– again– who elegantly explained all the lies that he was obliged to tell Congress and the ten-minute-attention-spanned average American: “If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise…Qualification must give way to the simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” Thus were two generations of Americans treated by their overlords until, in the end, at the word “Communism”, there is an orgasmic Pavlovian reflex just as the brain goes dead.”
Gore Vidal, Dreaming War, New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, p.117-118.
Bonus points for the following as well:
- “When she was running for the Senate, Hillary’s psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately — I heard she said, “I remind them of their first wife.”
raincoaster 
And there is also this, from Charles Beard in 1939:
The destiny of Europe and Asia has not been committed, under God, to the keeping of the United States; and only conceit, dreams of grandeur, vain imaginings, lust for power, or a desire to escape from our domestic perils and obligations could possibly make us suppose that Providence has appointed us his chosen people for the pacification of the earth.
Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.
At the time you were posting this I was probably wearing out my feet on the Relay for Life. Or sleeping. I do that too, sometimes.
Charles Beard seems to be advocating disengagement from “the maelstrom”. Yet disengagement generally doesn’t work either (North Korea or Iran–who did the US eventually talk to, and who’s still looking for enriched uranium?).
Besides, aren’t there rather a lot of folks who tends to crap on the US for being consistently late to the World Wars I and II?
I’m getting sick of the media acting as though they were somehow hoodwinked by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Second Gulf War and acting like McLellan’s telling them something they’d never heard before. They were collaborators. In fact, as the gatekeepers of truth for most of the nation they were Quislings.
Yet the audience also bears some responsibility. The thing that made Korea, Vietnam, and the wars since possible was the utter disengagement of the civillian populace. Most people sacrificed nothing. Some sacrificed their sons and daughters. Not enough of the population at large was invested in the war effort.
If Canada was sincere in her comittment to maintaining a presence in Afghanistan until the country can stand on its own, we’d return the nation to “meatless, wheatless, and sweetless” days and show our support by mending and making do until the troops got home, instead of carrying on with life as usual.
You can’t claim that the US was never engaged with North Korea. North Korea exists in significant part because of the US engagement in the Korean War. Come on!
I think he’s drawing a line between diplomacy and military enforcement Team America World Police style. It’s only the latter to which he’s addressed his remarks, and I believe that they stand in that context.
Your WWII references are pretty, but they are not relevant. Wars are now financed through deficits, which is a political solution invented by politicians to keep the goodwill of the people directed towards politicians, and away from soldiers. You of all people should know this. Claiming the Canadian people are insincere because they don’t storm Parliament Hill demanding rationing is jejune and irrelevant.
Actually, that was my point. The engagement of the international community, herded along by the US and reinforced by a nervous China, was what persuaded Kim Jong Il to at least back off on the nukes. Iran, with whom the US persistently refuses to sit down for a chat, is still busily building centrifuges.
On the Global Cop statement, I’ll go with that.
It is not irrelevant. If every person with a “support the troops” magnetic ribbon on their SUV were told that gasoline was about to be subjected to a 10-cent tax per litre to finance the current war, I think they’d pay more attention. I also suspect we’d have a much better plan for what has to happen.
Better yet: Let’s have a “support the war” tax–payable only by those who wish to do so, and partly deductible at year’s end. Any takers?
In a constitutional monarchy of the modern age, wars are fought by the agreement, accesion, or acquiescence of the people. This war is taking place a long way away and arrives as news briefs between football games and reality shows.
The detachment on the home front is kind of alarming. Ask someone how many Canadians have died in Afghanistan. Seven gets you three you’ll mostly hear “Uh … I think it’s about …” before the answer.
I merely mused on the possibility of bringing the war home symbolically. Because people are dying literally.
Also–I didn’t actually make the claim that Canadians were insincere in their support.