*with purchase of equal or greater value. Some restrictions apply. Offer not valid in all states. Void where prohibited. See participating stores for details. Offer expires March 31, 2002.
I'm tired of cutesy stories on local newscasts about old people doing things you expect from young people-
"After the break, we'll meet an 82-year-old grandmother who's pedaling away her retirement - with Xtreme Freestyle BMX!"
Just once I'd like a story about young people doing things you expect from old people-
"When we return - a 17-year-old who likes to sit in a rocking chair and bitch about Roosevelt."
- Homer Simpson.
It's easy to be good to family and friends. If you want to know how decent someone really is, watch how they treat the waiter.
Whenever some numbskull accidentally blows his own arms off in his basement with a pipe bomb, the news reports always say it was "a home-made pipe bomb."
As opposed to what? The store-bought variety?
When I was 25, I knew everything. Now I'm 35 and I know nothing. Maybe I'm getting smarter?
The history and politics of the twentieth century proved that where intellectuals lead, catastrophe follows.
When two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for dinner.
LIBERTY
When the sheep is armed.
Money trumps everything. Depressing, but true. I wish someone would prove me wrong.
Would it be asking too much for a moratorium to be placed on using "woefully" before "inadequate"? And how about "cautiously optimistic"? Why not "guardedly," just for a change of pace?
- Benjamin Disraeli
[This from the man who built the British Empire...]
I, a hypocrite, do solemnly swear:
Hi, guys... uh, they're telling me the generator won't take it. The ship is breaking apart, and all that. Just a FYI...
- Fred Kwan ("Tech Sargeant Chen"), Galaxy Quest
I know! You construct a weapon! Look around you - can you form some sort of rudimentary lathe?
- Guy Fleegman ("Crewman #6"), Galaxy Quest
In 1976, Clint Eastwood starred in The Outlaw Josey Wales, in which he played the stereotypical Hollywood gunfighter - a cool, avenging, but fundamentally reluctant warrior. He corrected that stereotype in 1992's Unforgiven, with his portrayal of William Munney showing the gunfighter as he truly was - a cold-blooded, psychopathic killer.
All of this being just an excuse to quote some really cool lines from both flicks...
Wales: Whenever I get to liking someone, they ain't around long.
The Chief: I noticed when you get to disliking someone, they ain't around for long neither.
Wales: You a bounty hunter?
Bounty Hunter: A man's gotta do something for a living.
Wales: Dying ain't much of a livin', boy.
You're the only friend I got.
LITTLE BILL: Well, sir, you are a cowardly son of a bitch. You just shot an unarmed man.
MUNNY: Well, he should've armed himself... if he was going to decorate his saloon with my friend.
LITTLE BILL: You'd be William Munny out of Missouri. Killer of women and children.
MUNNY: That's right. I've killed just about anything that walked or crawled at one time or another, and I'm here to kill you, Little Bill.
KID: Jesus Christ... It don't seem real... How he ain't gonna never breathe again, ever... All on account of pullin' a trigger.
MUNNY: It's a hell of a thing, killin' a man. You take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have.
KID: Yeah. Well, I reckon he had it coming.
MUNNY: We all got it coming, kid.
9/21
This was done by individuals with a warped view of Islam. Punish them. Better yet, eradicate them. But don't blame all Arabs, and don't blame all Muslims.
More Americans died in three hours on September 11th than died in the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg.
[UPDATE (4/25/02): As an anonymous correspondent pointed out to me, this is not true. At the time I wrote this (9/21/01), estimates of the number of dead exceeded 6,000. I have not changed this because I wished this page to remain a diary of my thoughts at the time. Since then, estimates have been revised downward to 3,000. So let's change this to:
More Americans were killed in the September 11 attacks than in the invasion of Normandy.
There. Is that sufficiently horrifying? Now, a few words for my correspondent. First, when someone invites critique, it's not necessary to write anonymously, unless you plan on being rude. Oh, that's right, you were. Second, "Better study your history books" leaves a lot to be desired as a critique. How about, "Your statement is in error. About 3,000 died on 9/11 versus about 6,000 at Gettysburg." See? That has facts. Third, I have an extensive library, thank you, which I consulted before I made my congruent-with-the-available-information-at-the-time original statement. And lastly, using an anonymous e-mailer so that you can be snide is profoundly chickenshit.
I do believe we have to give serious consideration to the grievances of the terrorists and their supporters. After we kill them.
I heard a reporter say something remarkable. After commercial flights that were still in the air were ordered to land at the nearest airport, he said, "The last of the flights was safely escorted to the ground by fighter aircraft."
Safely escorted? He made it sound like they were being shepherded to safety. They weren't, of course - any sign of distress on any of those airplanes would have been greeted with a Sidewinder missile. I thought the reporter was being politely mendacious, until just about everyone I talked to was surprised to hear Dick Cheney say that authorization would have been given to shoot. I asked these people what they thought the fighters were doing escorting the planes. The general answer was, "I hadn't really thought about it."
We're a very sheltered people.
I don't know how many times now I've heard people say that America "lost its innocence" on September 11th. Let's see - the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam - off the top of my head, that's five previous historical events which have been considered America's "loss of innocence." How many times does a girl have to have intercourse before she's finally deflowered?
Bin Laden wants a religious war. Don't accomodate him. Pray for the victims, pray for our soldiers, pray for our leaders, and pray for our country. Otherwise, keep God out of it. God will not be pleased to be dragged further into this. I think he's had enough of people killing and dying in his name. This is not a war of Christianity versus Islam. It's a war of civilization and freedom versus barbarism and theocracy.
<
9/01/01
A mention by Matt Damon's character in the film Good Will Hunting had the unfortunate consequence of elevating the sales and profile of Howard Zinn's deeply flawed A People's History of the United States. Zinn is a family friend of the Damons', but this was not a case of nepotism - Damon seems to genuinely admire the work. Tip: when a Hollywood celebrity professes admiration for an intellectual and his work, avoid both.
One example is sufficient to illustrate Zinn's intellectual and philosophical failure. He takes historian Samuel Eliot Morison to task for praising the seamanship of Christopher Columbus. Zinn admits that Morison "does not omit the story of mass murder. Indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide" [page 7]. But in Zinn's stridently sanctimonious worldview, it is inexcusable to praise any aspect of an evil man, even a characteristic as morally neutral as navigational skill (no doubt Zinn would be in high dudgeon to hear Adolf Hitler described as a vile sadist with brilliant oratorical skill.) This is, at best, immature.
What is worse is that Zinn follows immaturity with hypocrisy. A mere three pages after he finishes castigating Morison, Zinn has this to say about the Aztecs:
The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this) the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods.
How is this any different from what Zinn criticizes Morison for? I suppose there is one obvious difference - where Morison uses "the harshest word one can use", Zinn himself euphemizes slavery as "human labor." And to say that Aztec civilization "came out of" Toltec culture is another interesting choice of words - the Aztec Empire conquered the Toltecs, in 1350 AD.
It gets worse. Says Zinn, "The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a certain innocence." Zinn cannot stomach Morison praising a genocidal European's seamanship, but he can overcome his queasiness to speak of the "innocence" of Aztec mass-murderers. The hypocrisy is now almost comical in its scale, but the quote also illustrates the book's other fatal flaw - a patronizing Rousseauism. "A certain innocence" - the adjective "childlike" is implicit in the sentence.
Rousseauism is at once naive and cynical, an indulgence of educated bourgeois Westerners who can exculpate themselves from the guilt of privilege while simultaneously maintaining a sense of superiority to those they patronize as "noble savages." Indeed, that very phrase nicely encapsulates the duality, and that duality informs all of Zinn's work. The modern Rousseauist excuses the faults of non-European thieves and murderers because the benighted (but wise!) savages didn't know any better - unlike Europeans, who should be held to a higher standard. That's self-congratulatory self-recrimination, back-patting disguised as breast-beating, and it insults all.
On a more pedestrian note, I would be remiss if I did not point out the following, from J.M. Roberts's History of the World:
[The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan's] magnificence seems to have been derivative, for the Aztecs exploited the skills of their subjects. Not a single important invention or innovation of Mexican culture can confidently be assigned to the post-Toltec period. The Aztecs controlled, developed and exploited the civilization that they found. [p. 385]
Thus, not only does Zinn excuse and patronize the Aztecs, he also miscredits them. At least Columbus really was a skilled seaman.
The Aztecs were murderous, exploitive imperialists, the same as the Conquistadores who defeated them. Zinn's sympathies are obvious in his telling of the Spanish conquest, which is all the more odd in light of his quotation of Albert Camus. If, indeed, "it is the job of thinking people ... not to be on the side of the executioners," then a thinking person who reflects on the bloody altars of the Aztecs must take a stance of disgusted neutrality to the conflict. Zinn may care who won, but the scales of cosmic justice are undisturbed.
Zinn's book is not a history, it is a polemic. As Zinn himself writes in criticizing Morison:
The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.
A People's History of the United States is a book that needed to be written. After Zinn's treatment, it still does.
Copyright 2001, David Schipani
My other pages:
Y2K B6 • Bio Matter
