Did We Read The Same Thing?
The LA Times Book Review regularly looks at graphic novels, which I applaud. However, these reviews often leave something to be desired.
A piece by Laurel Maury in this Sunday's edition discusses three works set in the Middle East. One, Shooting War, is narrated by a fictional journalist in the remains of Bagdhad some time after President John McCain has taken office.
Here's Maury: The exaggerations in "Shooting War" feel scarily unlike exaggerations. "The great capitalist experiment is dying here in the cradle of civilization," [the narrator] declares.
I agree this doesn't sound like an exaggeration. It sounds like pure idiocy.
The paragraph continues: "Marx is dead. Instead you gave us Hobbes. Which would you prefer?" Sounds like something I wish I'd said.
This whipsawed me. I assumed the quote was chosen to demonstrate how nutty the narrator is, not because it's clever or insightful.
I'm not explaining why these sentences I've quoted are so ridiculous. But then, I'm writing this quickly, and for free. Laurel Meany got paid. If she wants to quote what sounds like insanity, the least she could do is explain why she thinks it makes sense.
PS Merry Christmas
posted by LAGuy @ 1:51 AM
6 Comments:
When leftists get this shrill, they simply depart from any reality we have ever seen or known.
All schoolkids are taught the evils of Joe McCarthy, but they are rarely taught about the crazy things said by his shrill leftist opponents.
To quote William F. Buckley: "What about the complementary charges that McCarthy had brought about a reign of terror? The chief librarian at Berkeley said that the terror was such as to make him afraid to buy a foreign car. Bertrand Russell -- yes, the author of Principia Mathematica -- deduced that in America the terror was such as to make it dangerous for anyone to read Jefferson. One college president opined that it required an act of physical courage to give money to Harvard University. Nothing McCarthy did -- and what he did do correctly resulted in his downfall -- can compare with what his critics did...."
The biggest problem with this war is that it hasn't touched the lives of most Americans in any real way. I personally think the tax cuts were a bad choice: the rhetoric in war should be for sacrificing a bit of our time and wealth (but not our personal liberties), and Bush's tax cut prevented that. You may disagree on this issue, but my point is that the average American is not affected by this war (unlike Vietnam or the World Wars).
So people like Laurel Maury are forced to imagine for themselves what the war is like. And then their shrill rhetoric takes over: this imaginary war is capable of collapsing capitalist American civilization! I suspect that this is a prospect that Maury doesn't find unpleasant. (Maury would surely find the reality of this unpleasant, but that's a different question....)
I can't say how much the war has touched Americans in any real way, but I do know that the point of a war is to win it. Asking the people to sacrifice when they don't have to is probably a bad strategy. (FDR didn't ask people to sacrifice during World War II because he thought it was a neat idea--he had no choice.)
As to taxes, as far as the books are concerned, there's money in and money out. The Bush people and their constituents thought regardless of where the money out part was going, the money in part should be cut. I generally agree--I think lower taxes are a positive stimulus for the economy, and the right thing to do, even if I wouldn't go so far as to say that the tax cuts pay for themselves. Even though the Bush administration underestimated the cost of the war, it's still a fairly minor part of the annual economy, and is a pretty small expenditure compared to Vietnam or World War II.
Hey Lawrence, The "War" has clearly impacted the U.S. real estate market.
The "War" has clearly impacted the U.S. real estate market.
Really? Since I've been swamped with schoolwork, I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the mortgage crisis. I thought I had a sketchy but correct idea of what it was about, but I wasn't aware of a war connection.
Is this connection common knowledge?
Of course there's a connection. We were at war for four years then, boom, a mortgage crisis. There must be a connection.
Leftists talk about the war the same way rightist and religionists talk about moral values- an assumed piece in the belief system not necessarily tethered to stupid things (As Ronald Reagan referred to facts)
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