January, 1991 was the eve of the First Gulf War. I took a train down from Boston to Washington, D.C. to observe the anti-war demonstrations taking place there. I felt a general solidarity with people of conscience who opposed violent action in the Gulf, albeit with misgivings as how best to confront Saddam in Kuwait. I attended impartially with my camera, and managed to catalogue about 500 photos.
I came away from the protests very confused. I went expecting to see speeches and rallies against the upcoming war, which were plenty. But there were also many other convocations by a disparate collection of people representing unrelated causes. There were gay rallies, pro-Sandanista rallies, pro-abortion rallies, and Earth First rallies; there were communists, socialists, anarchists and the precursors to the antiglobalists -- all of them performing acts while seemingly indifferent to opposing the war at hand.
I returned to Boston realizing that the liberal agenda was splintered into fragmented camps. Collectively, they lacked a powerful voice. Their discordant protests came off as noise -- performed on common ground but lacking a common cause. The D.C. rallies were like a morose party -- a parody of people's pet objections, acted as performance art and crafted for the network cameras that lined the streets bounding Lafayette Park.
During the remaining 1990s, while the country partied and worked overtime in search of digital gold I took a breather from the world, to recline as a political zero. I was utterly amazed and distressed at the excesses of those post-historical dotcom days. We were becoming too soft as a culture, I believed -- surrounded by too much wealth, convenience and distractive media to actually defend ourselves as free people. I felt that the West's hard-won liberal principles were melting into irony in the face of blinding overabundance and frivolous politics. But the confetti of those heady times draped over my concerns, and like many other people, I was too busy shuffling pixels to put much energy into discerning the gathering storm. But I sensed that history was near. For me, the 1990s were like a glorious sunset at the end of a long, resplendent day.
And then came nightfall.
I admit that it took 9/11 to slap me awake from complacency. It wasn't merely a shock to see the twin towers implode; I had the sick realization that the abstraction of history that so eluded me had suddenly made it's triumphant return. I felt irrelevant -- that I knew nothing when those buildings fell. Nothing. I knew that the free world had to be rewired, if only to survive the incipient era of terror that was hurtling towards us.
Yet many have dug their heels into familiar political ground. Political affiliation has become a security blanket -- a thing of comfort, worn in a tumultuous time. I can understand that. But in this era, reinvention is the key to survival, not pulling the proverbial covers over our heads.
My ironic western soul remains at odds with this changing, restless digital age of terror. We live in an era where an airline is pasting the gigantic blue mug of Elton John on the side of its planes, while Islamic fascists plot to fly them into the sides of our logo-covered skyscrapers. This is an age where our heritage is packaged in pixelated plastic, manufactured in China. Much of our history is a corporate museum staffed by underpaid posers wearing historical garb -- it doesn't take a genius to notice the charades that make up daily life. There's long been fake bricks on the quaint store fronts; 'Ye Olde Shoppe' signs on the corporate outlets; old-tyme values are spun into cheap, skin-deep amusement. Digital miracles have thrusted synthesized apparitions into our collective consciousness. When the trickery is applied to commercialism, most of us suspect that our culture is canned, and pitched. Crass commercial illusions amplified by powerful media tends to feed cynicism, not optimism. Irony hangs in our art galleries; it's the hot seller at Barnes & Noble and on the Big Screen.
This can be a strange time, where liberals -- once the bulwark of the struggling class -- drive to the supermall in SUVs just like conservatives do, with their kids zoning out on TV in the plush backseats. After parking their boats, the SUV Conservative and the SUV Liberal diverge at the mall over their choice of branded food -- one preferring Wendy's, the other Jamba Juice. Moral decisions too often boil down to merely buying brands that emit the right PC-vibes -- paper or plastic?
Perhaps the word embarrassment best describes the mood of a lot of secular, free-world westerners. I can relate. There's just so much damned stuff. I was in The Container Store with friends the other day and I realized it was a booming business because, with all our foreign-made stuff, Lord knows we need all sorts of foreign-made plastic containers to store it in. What a business! And at the checkout counter, people buying their crap containers snapped up copies of Real Simple magazine, perhaps fantasizing that the Mennonites had it right all along.
There is plenty of irony to life in our secular, anything-goes, well-supplied world. It comes with a bizarre set of postmodern values in the form of embarrassed guilt over our swelling girth. We're all super-sized. Our whole culture and self-image is super-sized. Our problems and solutions are super-sized. Our shopping centers, churches and whims are all super-sized. The weighing scale is popping its springs, and the only thing we've got in the larder is custard. No wonder wheatgrass is such a hot seller.
We suffer the complaints of kings, not oppressed masses. Look at us. We're spending billions of dollars despairing over burning excess calories and alleviating the clutter of useful junk. Our litany of complaints seem more to do with organizing our pillows than with nourishing our souls. Our royal embarrassment has lead to ironic, self-indulgent guilt.
There's no escape from the culture of guilt. None at all. You can go completely vegan, if you like -- the cows and chickens can finally retire to Happy Barn Ranch -- but you'll still be guilty when eating that nut-and-gluten soy-cheese NotDog. You'll be guilty of supporting corporate farming and wetback labor. You might grow that stuff yourself, or join an organic farm cooperative, but you'll be guilty of using the land for agriculture when instead it should be a virgin redwood forest.
We lead conscience-stricken lives. And in our culture of psychobabble, guilt is the worst thing possible. That word has practically been banned from our secular lexicon, since it figures so prominently in the Bible. But there it is, shining its headlights onto our rotund, soft, well-fed bellies: Guilty... guilty... guilty...
So I understand the guilt. And the embarrassment. And the irony. I get it. But here's the rub: A simple solution is at hand. The guilt can be relieved. The irony silenced. Restless people in this world have a plan. The Call to Prayer beckons from a minaret near you. You could sequester your wife, perhaps add a few others to your name. You could send your kids to a madras. You could pin all the world's problems on the Jews, and onto anyone else who has a grain of progress left in their skull. You could have a whole world of convenient enemies along with those Zionist Jews -- Shi'ites, Sunnis, Sufis, Secularists, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, Americans -- there's an endless supply of people who you can project your guilt onto. It can be quite refreshing. The next edition of Real Simple magazine should splash Muhammad Atta on their cover. Because it doesn't get any simpler than piloting Allah's jet into the twin towers of western guilt and embarrassment.
Muhammad Atta must have been the most guilt-free man on Earth in the seconds leading up to his plunging Flight 11 into the North Tower. His gesture was the ultimate F**k You that lurks in many an embarrassed westerner's privileged heart. Some might say that they understand Atta's feelings, but I don't -- and I don't want to try. Deep down, 9/11 forced me to cut the cord on my royal discontent before it became self-hatred, metastasizing in my soul. Any westerner's quasi-alliance with medieval Islamofascists is playing with ancient fire. Sure, it singes our excessive, bulging culture. It might even feel like it's cauterizing wounds. But fascist fire is hotter than most people imagine. My pessimism has its limits, and Shari'a law is it.
The Belmont Club quoted Nelson Archer's column, The Berlin Wall's Revenge regarding the vengeful Left:They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence. They may, outwardly, fight for some positive cause: save the whales, rescue the world from global heating and so on. But let's not be deceived by this: they choose as their so-called positive causes only the ones that have both the potential of conferring some kind of innocent legitimacy on themselves and, much more important, that of doing most harm to their enemy, whether physically or to its image.The Belmont Club chimes in:
...any honest Leftist must realize that his movement and its aspirations are rooted in the very West it seeks to destroy. Communist totalitarianism is the doppelganger of secular freedom; and the serpent in the garden must know that the desert, so hospitable to Islam, can only be a place of death for it. The Left may have embarked upon a journey of revenge. They will find suicide.I often appreciate Wretchard's deeply considered political analyses, but I think it he might be oversimplifying things by identifying internal opposition as 'the Left,' ascribing it destructive traits like revenge. Belmont and Archer's essays make little distinction between Left and Liberal, sharing the same suspicion that I have -- that often, they're one in the same, and what distinguishes them in our satirical media is very subtle.
All this takes me back to Washington D.C. in 1991. What I saw was a large gathering of people who were marching out of conscience. They felt there was a non-violent way to achieve a resolution in the Gulf other than war. Whether or not their conscience was misguided and naļve, or enlightened and viable in the game of global power politics is certainly open for debate. But within that crowd -- the ones who were genuinely opposing violence -- there were many good, earnest people, marching with their families. They weren't there to exact their revenge. They were The Embarrassed, not The Vengeful.
But the wild, hellish malcontent party at the fringes drowned-out those good people of conscience and stole the show, and has gained a lot of momentum since 1991. There is still a difference between Liberal and Leftist, though what distinguishes the two is often incredible in the media age of Moore and Fox.
Not all conservatives are followers of Pat Robertson and send their kids to Baptist Bible colleges, demanding Creationism in their schools; not all liberals are members of the leftwing Tranzi freak show, hurling stones at banks. There still is a vast middle ground of good people in this country -- people who are reasonable and principled. But the radical fringes at the edge of their politics have the microphone.
The same is true of Muslims. People decry the silence of moderate Muslims, who quietly acquiesce to the radicals amongst them who are steering mosques into becoming anti-western strongholds. Moderate Muslims must speak out to save their religion. But it rarely happens. Their media-savvy radical fringe is setting the course for Islam like it is in conservative and liberal camps.
The media age rewards people for building cartoon effigies of their opposition and hurling stones at them for the television cameras. This indecent tableau is primarily what forms our opinions of society, turning opposition into enemy. No one loves a mic more than a totalitarian; and humanity is minting totalitarian idealism like there really is no tomorrow. In the process, liberals are blind to fascism; conservatives are blind to global cooperation; and Muslims are blind to the opportunities before them to transform their culture into a positive force that might address 21st century challenges.
Can level-headed, straight-shooting people find their voice, and take over the microphone? To paraphrase Joseph N. Welch:
"The radical fringes have done enough. Have they no sense of decency, at long last? Have they left no sense of decency?"
We lead conscience-stricken lives. And in our culture of psychobabble, guilt is the worst thing possible. That word has practically been banned from our secular lexicon, since it figures so prominently in the Bible ... Guilty... guilty... guilty...
I think your insight is correct about the activist culture having a problem with unresolved guilt.
For people who grew up in (and grew into) Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish faith, the problem of guilt is raised and dealt with at an early age. It is acknowledged and put into its proper perspective.
But if you have no God and everything is (or seems to be) permitted to you, how do you deal with the problem of guilt? How the Hell should I know? It's not my problem.
I think we are witnessing some attempts to wrestle with guilt, though. Those who know a religious faith probably don't appreciate the depth of paranoia and loathing that many secularists feel towards religious notions of guilt and judgment. They seem to live in constant terror of judgment - which is odd, because if there is no God then they ought to be in the clear. This is what underlies the widely exaggerated fear of the "religious right" and any public displays of religion. They fear some kind of immanent earthly punishment from religion, like a medieval peasant might.
It's no accident that we've long since outdone the medievals with our superstitions. We laugh at them for thinking that sex is a sin, but in our world it's a sin to eat a bowl of chicken soup, or read the wrong newspaper, or to speak well of another human being who disagrees with us politically.
I have an idea to assuage those fears, that guilt. Help some one. We are quite happy in our own little worlds, but there is a vast forsaken land out there that does not enjoy the same things we do, the same country we have. As a warrior, doctor, worker, etc. you CAN make a difference in other's lives- particularily around the world. What I find funny is that the liberals here had a grasping notion of this before 9/11 in our outside interventions but lacked the conviction to see it through. Conservatives however after 9/11 took this as their cause and have genuinely seized on it. Say what you may about the way it is proceeding, but President Bush genuinely wants to make the world a better place for us all- and has the conviction to lend muscle and tons of political capital to it. He is therefore despised by those who hear their own conscience calling, but ignore it as a naive little voice nagging in their mind that their sophistication does not have time for. The American people know this as well, and this huge political gamble for him which he undertook because he heard his consience calling, has paid off hugely while the faux-elite pooh pooh his attempts to bring some light to the world. This is what irritates us about France and is why during the elections you heard the word "values" bandied about. It's not that others don't have them, its that Bush listens to his and then acts decisively.
Hm. Lots to chew on there, Cicero. It seems to me ideals are necessary for life (read "Logotherapy", a short book by Viktor Frankl), but "idealists" are the most dangerous people around, since actual humans are incidental to their vision and agendas. It's a dilemma: how to hold a shining vision of the possible without being blinded to the masses who may get trompled in the charge, march, or stampede towards it.
Democracy and pluralism are, as much as anything, a way to accommodate this strain, using a shifting menu of inputs and compromises to keep a forward momentum without charging over a cliff, and to keep internal disagreement from morphing into a shooting civil war. This is very stressful and distressful to idealists, who see it clearly as a guarantee that their pure quill programs and impassioned policy papers/screeds will never be fully and "properly" implemented. And it also leads to that "irony" you feel somewhat guilty about, I think. If no pure ideals will ever be pursued or achieved, what's all the posturing about? Yet the ideals are what makes us feel nobly human. What to do?
I think the "help someone" prescription by the doctor above is a part of it; calling a spade a spade when it comes to the domineering demands of demagogues is another; and keeping a general eye on and hand in helping guide the overall direction of change is most of the rest. Blogs like this are an Info Age response, perhaps.
Excellent! Well said. Thank you to the blogosphere for allowing this "liberal" voice to be heard.
Don't beat yourself up about being complacent.
The Bush administration had plenty of warnings coming from the Clinton Administration, its own security people, the FBI, and the FDA and it didn't wake up until a few days AFTER the towers fell. And then they tried to use it as a pretense to invade Iraq.
You weren't one-tenth as forewarned as they were so you didn't really have any basis for fear.
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What others described as post-historical, I always thought was merely a mark of the insulation from reality afforded to the developed world by a boneless media.
History has always kept right on happening, to Salvadorans, Palestinians, Sri Lankans, etc.
US policies abroad have had tremendous historical effects, typically downplayed in US media.
A lot of academics thought a 9-11 event was inevitable. Certainly Richard Clarke thought the attempt was inevitable.
I have long opposed many US foreign policies, but not for a second have I confused that with the drive to destroy. Immediately after 9-11, one got on loads of trouble for merely suggesting there might be a connection between US policies supporting oppressive political systems and 9-11.
Now, that idea is apparently central to Bush's philosophy, at least according to the recent SOTU address, and the US supports freedeom and democracy around the world, he says. Except of course where it doesn't.
Brian H. says, " but "idealists" are the most dangerous people around" and I couldn't agree more.
You touch a pet peeve of mine that rarely seems to be noted. And that is that both the people of the left and the right are very guilty of hindering small measured reforms that could do much to make this world a better place, not tomorrow, but today. Thanks to those who, as you say, "see it clearly as a guarantee that their pure quill programs and impassioned policy papers/screeds will never be fully and 'properly' implemented" these two groups, in their individual search for purity, WORK TOGETHER to slow progress and prolong suffering, by killing simple fixes that could quickly adjust and correct imbalance.
Brian! You are so right!!
The left's belief that, IF it was just pure, communism or socialism will lead to utopia on earth is ridiculous and defies the logical conclusion that - in order to have pure communism (or even socialism) it would require a totalitarian regime to force all individuals to play along - or be removed from the game. With socialism, (communism lite) you can move non-cooperating individuals to "somewhere else" but for communism to be pure, you must ultimately remove those who refuse to cooperate from the planet, in order for to achieve the purity that will apparently "create utopia".
For any free-thinking person the idea of communism as a viable government, has indeed been disproved by the abject failure of all communist states.
But what about capitalism? I have yet to be on a conservative web site where the same "purity" argument for capitalism is not made. They say, if we could just eliminate government intervention on absolutely everything (including hours, minimum wage, environmental controls ...etc., etc.) then AND ONLY THEN, would the forces of the free market cause the bad apples to become better. I guess the logic being that once ALL barriers are removed, the products of the good guys will be chosen by the market. Or whatever it is that they believe.
The idea of PURE communism/socialism/Islamism {insert your ism here] creating utopia - or as near to it as possible on this earth - is no less absurd than the idea of pure capitalism creating a free market that will promote good business practices over the more ruthless ones.
Just as pure communism results in genocide, pure capitalism would result in slavery.
In the end, it's about finding that BALANCE of control between government and individual freedoms. A BALANCE between providing services for the weak, who would end up in our gutters , v/s creating a entire culture dependant on a welfare system. It's about finding BALANCE that allows free market forces to determine appropriate wages, hours, etc. which make it worthwhile for the employer to continue, v/s simply allowing ruthless businessment to set the standards at a level so low that honorable businessmen can't compete.
Some conservatives will insert here; "yes, but.. blah, blah..if the connditions get bad enough, the unions will step in" or liberals will spew the economically challenged ideas that seem to make up the left's belief as to why the government makes a good nanny for us all.
Sadly, purists (idealists) always seem to be willing to justify today's suffering as an ends to a better means.
And please note, it is balance - not just individual freedom - that makes our country great. Balance of freedoms, balance of power, balance of ideas.
I know this is long, but I'd like to leave you with one last thought (if you got this far already) as it relates to what is missing in our society. The baby boom generation lost sight balance. In the end, it's never about right or wrong. It's about balance. Balance of when to fight wars v/s allowing rape and slaughter. Balance of how much we need v/s how much we want. Balance of government to help us, v/s government controlling us.
There IS no right way - no perfect manifesto. Tinkering and adjusting obvious flaws in the system today will move society much more quickly(and painlessly)towards a better tomorrow than will idealistic promises of radical changes that will provide purity and perfection.
Thanks for reading. whew!
Becky,
Your post reminds me of this wise saying by one of my friends:
"People's ideas for a great workable society only seem workable as long as everyone else signs on."
I understand your value of balance in our society, and for the world. You spoke mostly about the excesses of Capitalists and Communists, but breezed over the elephant in the room: Radical Islamicists. If Conservatives are too obsessed over radical Islam, I think it is due in part to Liberals' inattention to them. While we battle out the nuances of finding balance between the extremes of two secular, western socioeconomic systems, there's a whole new fascist religion grafting itself onto Islam. That's why I am no longer a Democrat. And I'm not a Republican. I will remain a political nothing for as long as the turbaned elephant remains in the room, while our political representatives obsess over healthcare and social security.
Lastly, one more quote, from Christopher Hitchens:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/
"Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. "
As a former Democrat, I wish I could flush 80% of the current Democratic senators and representatives down the proverbial toilet. They've gone AWOL and have not only outlived their usefulness, they're downright dangerous. They offer no balance of ideas to the Republicans.
I see idealism in the neoconservative camp. It doesn't matter if I agree with them or not; they have ideals and are acting upon them. Liberals are, well, back in that 1991 rally in D.C. -- Making a lot of noise.
No wonder they carry no majorities in the halls of power.
Wow. Great post.
I think part of the radicalization of ideas has to do with internalization of those ideas. Many will follow any dumb thing Bush does (for example) because they supported Bush. If Bush did something wrong that would mean THEY did something wrong. There is a resistance to change and an inability to criticize even that which throughly deserves it. This happens in all facets of the political spectrum. Hopefully we will mellow and allow ourselves the luxury of admitting a mistake.
I'm against extremism of any kind. I long ago discovered that though I consider myself liberal - I am happy to be a complete capitalist. For me it took a trip to what was then the soviet union in 1990 to really appreciate our gluttonly of things. When you see people waiting in lines to get dubious looking sausages - the idea of being a vegetarian seems like a real indulgence. Only when a society gets to a certain opulence and stability can extremes be afforded. It is also no coincidence that much of the brains of the muslim extremists that have caused such world terror come from wealth.
I think we are an animal with appetites that need to be kept in balance. Guilt and sin are merely one method of doing so.
That being said - I am contemplating getting one of those large family mobiles with video in te back seat. For one I don't travel far so I am not burning up too much gas and for a another - I like the idea that my kids can be entertained on the longer drives I do take. But then again - I let my kids watch tv now and will allow them computer access as soon as I can figure out an appropriate set up. I go farther than many as I don't see any harm coming from it. Right now one of my three year old's favorite dvd's is one from leapfrog that teaches phonics.
Oh and I have shopped at the container store many times. I often think of the George Carlin routine about "stuff". And I shudder when I contemplate the amount of trash generated by us all. For my moderate modest part - I do aim to be better and better at recycling. But I still choose to use disposable diapers.
Becky - you may be right about the balance between the right and the left, or between capitalism and socialism to use a different terminology. I have been reading
David Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: Western European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996)
and it makes the argument that capitalism and socialsim need each other to progress. I am not sure that I buy his whole argument, but I am not finished with the book either.
Becky, not bad, but rightists have no demand for perfection or any kind of utopia.
Ahh contrare, we say that perfection is imposible, and that attempts to smooth the rough edges of freedom can create new problems while amplifing the old ones.
Well if we are so fat and wealthy, perhaps we can spend just a little bit, to help the poor, sick, lazy, whatever right ?
However, that notion becomes perverse once the burden removes the first job from the economy, because you have crossed the line from making things better to making things worse, at that very instant.
What would Madison think about our current situation ?
And when you do so, the rest of the consitution becomes meaningless, even the bill of rights can be reasoned away with a nice rationale, be it taking your guns or taking the lives of "enemies of the people" at the side of a mass grave.
To me, its not enough that the left have come to accept the flaws in the leftist religion that created mass Murder Mountain of 174 Million Skulls
They also need to be re-aquainted with the very things that make this country special.
Nothing is more pathetic, ( and dangerous) than to see a man attack the source of his own confort.
well said, Cicero. And I agree, too with John that people often act as if they are members of teams, quick to scream foul when a referee make bad calls against their own "side" and but sit strangely quiet "bad calls" work in their favor.
Let me just give an example of what I believe to be an important point about the positive movement of society as a whole:
In a macro sense, those who marched against the war in Iraq, rightly or wrongly, may have prolonged it and caused more death, by providing hope to the enemy that, if they could just create enough blood and gore, that the US would lose their will and go home.
Yet, in a macro sense, these same protesters also prevented many deaths as well. By forcing our leaders and war fighters to limit the death toll as much as possible to prevent that same loss of will - they ultimately caused our military leaders to fight a war that trained and worked very hard to limit the unnecessary deaths as much as possible. As a result, excesses could not excused simply as "collateral".
The result was a modification of the war machine to change the way wars have been fought, to be more responsible for who gets killed and what gets destroyed - ultimately a good thing overall. Humanity has moved forward in this way.
We are a generation raised on the Hollywood fantasy that provides characters with either a white hat or a black hat. And if our hero is a drug dealer, we share no concern for the cops or their families, who are shot as mere props in the background It just fantasy, but reality is that real life characters are much more complex...with a little good and bad in each and every one of us.
We have to stop the white-hat, black-hat mentality and recognize that each one of us believes what we believe to be true based on our own experience. We may be right, or wrong, but the very word "believe" means that we think we are right. No one of us has it ALL figured out, and no one of us has the "right answer". But rather we must try to move society forward in an ordered fashion, balancing the concerns of the right and wrong as best we believe to be true.
Ultimately, it will be that balance of belief that will provide a better result than simply hanging our hat on one solution or another.
War is not good. But sometimes you must fight to prevent rape, genocide and slaughter.
I don't have answers to the world's difficult problems. Nor does anyone else. If there were easy answers to homelessness or war or crime, they would have been solved by now. But this is a complex and imperfect world that requires that each one of us stands up for what we "believe" is right.
Just like diet, alcohol, pornography, punishment, war, etc. etc. life requires balance - some sacrifice, some letting go and some individual effort from each of us. There isn't a right side or wrong side. All of the billions of Muslims in the world aren't all wrong or bad. Nor are Christians or liberals or conservatives. It's not possible for us to be all the same and besides, what a boring world that would be.
But the point that I want to make is that if each of us gives in areas that we know - no, change that word "know" to "believe" - that we believe to be in need of additional effort on our part - this world will be a far better place than if we simply step over the homeless, or ignore the enslaved while we wait for a better, more perfect plan to be implemented TOMORROW.
And I believe that is why the American system works so well. Our forefathers understood the ambitions of men and the corruptness of power and they created a system that provided - as best as humanly possible to date - a balance of power that attempts to prevent any one segment or belief system from being able to control others. There will never be a solution to worlds problems - only a balance that attempts to prevent real problems from going too far one way or the other.
When we can accept the idea that we are working towards balance, rather than perfect solutions, it is easier to work together to take small steps to make the better. A soup kitchen won't solve the problem of the homless, but it will make it better.
I'm sorry to be so wordy.. it's hard for me to make my thoughts concise. But I feel very strongly that idealism is good - but must be grounded in the reality that pefection can never be attained - only attempted.
wow! I stepped away when posting above and only now read some of the other responses. I think that my thoughts above still apply. Good comments all.
Nice post Cicero
Just to be clear though I don't feel one bit of guilt about owning my Acura MDX, Pontiac Firebird, 3 bedroom - 3 1/2 bath - full basement - 2 car garage home, 4 TV's, 2 home entertainment systems, complete satellite service, 2 play stations, 3 cell phones, 4 PC's, beds to sleep in, chairs to sit in, tables to work at and eat off of, plates, silver ware, glasses, cups, pots and pans, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, stove, refrigerator, clothes, shoes, coats, hats, gloves, snow shovels, lawn mower, ladders, grill, soap, toilet paper, tooth brush, tooth paste, electric razor and yes Ball Park all American Franks in my fridge. Nor will I ever feel guilty about owning such things because there are those less fortunate.
USMC
That's good you don't feel guilty. Just as long as your long list of things don't define you, you'll be sitting pretty.
Cicero
True - I certainly wont be needing them when I'm six feet under. Not that I need them now mind you but they certainly make my life more enjoyable and interesting.
I'm embarrassed that Elton John is considered an icon worthy of putting on the side of a plane belonging to a major airline. Sheesh!! We need some better heroes--or at least more exposure for the real ones.
Here's the Belmont Club's first archived post that AJL refers to (#19).
Interested WoC readers can decide whether, per AJL, "stupid" or "dishonest" is a more apt description of Wretchard's in memoriam post to fallen Marine Joseph Menusa. Or perhaps, for some, another word will come to mind.
19, 20:
Both of you are missing the spirit of the essay.
uh, sorry, Cicero (slaps self). I could say "me too" to many of Becky's thoughts. And add that I like reading AJL's critical perspective in the comments at this site.
wait, why is that post stupid or dishonest or anything like that? it isn't even really a declaration of victory.
this reminds me of my first reaction to the post, which was that the mind-blowing uncertainty and complexity that we face when confronted with the mind-bending contemporary state of affairs are less 'decency' and 'indecency', more 'relativism' and 'paranoia'. it's a bit more of a postmodern flavor, you know? 'team america' vs. media matters.