bump the origional article for later my Liege...
Posted on 05/20/2005 12:41:18 PM PDT by HairOfTheDog
What’s worse than crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage?
NOT crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage.
I’ve been away for a while, doing a little thinking. Usually, my thoughts for these past few years have started at home and then taken me to Iraq, and the war. Lately, though, I have been thinking about Iraq, and my thoughts turn more and more to home.
I started thinking along these lines six months ago, after a young Marine shot and killed a wounded Iraqi in a mosque in Fallujah
The ideas behind this little adventure we are about to embark upon have changed enormously since then. I have, quite frankly, been at a loss to know how to put so many wide-ranging snapshots together into this montage, this image, this idea of Sanctuary that I think holds the key to many of the problems we face today.
Stay with me -- our first stop is not our destination, but it is a necessary one. So let me first take you on that original journey, and show you how events in Iraq can show us how to fight and win a much wider and deeper conflict, right here at home.
(Excerpt) Read more at ejectejecteject.com ...
As he says at the top of his page... You should grab a cup of coffee and maybe a snack. This essay is marvelous.
I intend to buy his book.
Please consider this for your ping lists.
Pinging all of my friends here. This is an article that I recommend you give an hour to read... Now, or later, whenever you can. I found it to be too engaging to stop once I began.
Thanks - I did search on sanctuary, and didn't see it.
That thread didn't get as much play as it should have.
I've done the same thing. Interesting article thanks for bringing to our attention.
bttt - Bill Whittle is BACK!
Thank you. :~D
I must be terribly un-hip. I've never read his stuff before and obviously others are quite familiar with him.
Bill Whittle is an incredible writer. Read every essay on his site, or as you said, buy his book.
bump
Pingage for later
Indeed... thanks!
Now that I've read this, I have this intense desire for everyone I know to read it.
Especially those who really need to read it... our fellow Americans at DU.
Rather, it is how they fight, and who they target and how they go about it, that breeds the understandable and, IMHO, justafiable contempt. Today's terrorist homociders are usually young, fairly ignorant, ideologues who have been indoctrinated in a tyranical ideology/religion by modern tyrants (Bin Laden, Zarquwi, Arafat, etc.).
Buy his book - worth more than every penny.
bttt
It's beheading frightened prisoners on camera.
It's blowing up new schools and power plants.
It's blowing yourself up when the soldier who would tend to your wounds approaches you out of mercy.
And it's about those spoiled spoiled cowards in this country who would think these things are our fault and not our enemy.
And our news... I despise them because this is what they think is news. Iraq: Pictures show Saddam Hussein in his underwear
This is a must read, hands down. Thanks for posting it.
Bump for later
I think the lack of uniform is just the first visible clue. It's not the first time, certainly the concept of guerrila warriors hiding in villages is not new...
These guys have just taken it a step further. They learned about us from our outrage over burned innocents in Vietnamese villages and they will use our own ethics against us. Those villages also had non-uniformed combatants in them. And those stories played on our news and in our movies and horrified us. Those images shake our confidence because we are moral. It's our morality that makes us rip and tear (and roll the live camera) at each other for mere mistakes in judgment in war.
They riot over the suggestion that a book was ruined... not because they give a damn about it, I don't think, but because they know that their riot will make us fall all over ourselves with guilt that we might have offended their sensibilities.
These guys know us. They know our news, and we don't know them well enough to know they are using us against ourselves.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, but not this time. We have to look Islam in the eye and name it for what it is. As long as we pander to Muslims' cult/religion, we're weak and ineffective, and it's Vietnam all over again. They don't follow the rules because the Koran says they don't have to. Simple as that. Meanwhile, Arab tyrants, Democrat Libs, and Euroweenies are only too happy to beat us over the head with whatever scurrilous lie bin Laden and his pals are yelling. If Kerry were President, things would be different. Worse. We'd be on our knees to the UN, and blaming republicans left and right for everything. Now and then dems might spare a thought about DC being blown up by Muslim crackpots sprung from jail by the ACLU and the likes of Ramsey Clark, but we'd be busy with multiculturalism/Muslim sharia, etc., rammed down our throats morning, noon, and night, a la Germany, France, Canada, and Spain.
Libs don't realize America's existence is what annoys Islamofascists. We'd have to vanish from the face of the earth before they'd be satisfied. If we get hit hard again, another 9/11, perhaps Boston or another attack on NY, and this after months or years of appeasing the fiends, even the dumbest lib might acknowledge that something was wrong with our foreign policy. Don't count on it, though.
I shudder to think.
I would sell my left arm to have this caliber of wit
must read
I read about the first third and will finish when I get a hour or so. Good reading. The liberals will hate him because guy makes entirely too much sense and threatens their worldview.
All you say about how Washington fought is true, and he was brilliant in the manner in which he did so, and the soldiers were valient in their holding out against all odds and many times in the most horrible of circumstances.
The point was, that it is not the uniform or lack thereof that really typifies terrorist behavior, it is how they fight, whom they target and how, and what they fight for. That was my whole point.
As to butchering or cowing entire enemy populations...unfortunately, horrifically, when those populations are a willing part of the war effort, it is sometimes necessary. Never desirable, never glorifying, but sometimes tragically necessary just the same to bring the war to a quicker and sure end. We did did so to many, many enemy cities in World War II to break the will of the populations fighting us. Sherman did it in large measure for the same reasons as he cut acrioss the south from Atlanta. There are many other examples, including in our own history...notice I did not say they were unjustified. Depending on how it is done, and why it is done, albeit horrific and a teerrible part of the "war is hell" equation, it is sometimes justified and very necessary.
Just my opinion on the matter.
good-stuff/moral-clarity ping
War is hell, and soldiers have to live there. It is an unbearable burden; unbearable in the sense that not a single man and woman who has been fully exposed to war has ever come back home. Someone else comes back home. Sometimes, it is a better person. Sometimes a worse one. But they are different, all changed in the horror and crucible of war.
Thanx. Bookmarking ping for later....
Bill Whittle is one of the greatest essayists of the 21st century... no... dare I say, THE greatest essayist of the 21st century.
Let me defend my assertion:
No author has put forward such a clear, well referenced, literary type of social, ethical, political and anthropologigical case as Bill Whittle.
No author of essays, save Bill Whittle, has given such a clear tone to every issue that he has addressed.
By choosing "values" instead of "issues" on which to construct essays, Bill Whittle has surpassed every known pubdit to date in his ability to bring cogent thought to the "reason" behind this issues.
Bill's essays stand as a sort of "Federalist Papers" for the postmodern world. He is a voice as shrill and intellectually clear today as was Jefferson in the days of the Revolution.
I have never met Bill, and only know him by proxy, through friends who have chided me for missing his speaking engagements, but I feel as though I know him.
I would readily ride into eternal ideological battle behind General Bill, as his ideas are not silly-blogger-quips. They are not lame partisan attacks. They are based in solid values that are REAL, true and worth defending.
Thank you for your voice, Bill. You are above the rest.
If they are hiding amongst the civilian population to fight, if they are not a part of any identifiable/organized military unit...then they are spies and sabotuers and should be treated accordingly and with dispatch IMHO.
To not do so, only invites more of the esame terror from these modern tyrants and barbarians.
save
Agreed. Thanks for the ping.
BTTT
Long but worth it.
I pulled this gem out: "There are millions of photos of people protesting President Bush. There is not a single photo of people in the street protesting Hitler."
bump the origional article for later my Liege...
Not long ago, I was standing in line at LAX undoing my shoelaces, emptying my pockets of coins, cell phones, iPods, keys, assorted aviation-grade bolts, nuts and washers, auxiliary fuel pumps, Buick transmissions and anything else that would cause the metal detector to explode in a shower of sparks. Directly in front of me was a greasy man with a gray ponytail wearing a sweatshirt that seemed to be covered in yellow fluff, as if he had spent the day removing insulation. I paid him no attention whatsoever.
The TSA guy said “remove your shoes and any metal objects, have your boarding pass and ID visible, and step through the metal detector in an orderly fashion.”
And just as I am about to push the grey plastic stuffholder over the rollers, I, and the 200 people directly behind me, realize that the man in front of me is not proceeding through the metal detector in an orderly fashion. He is, in point of fact, not moving at all.
“Step forward, sir”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not until you say please.”
Ah, here we go. I take a closer look at this guy. He’s got a carry-on “suitcase” that consists of a cardboard box wrapped in plastic tape, but he’s not poor. He’s just rumpled – and not merely disheveled, either – point of pride rumpled. He’s wearing the kind of expression that allows you to see what he’s watching in that private screening room inside his head. It’s the same expression he’d wear if he were that Chinese Tiananmen Square guy holding up that line of tanks. The Standing Up To The Death Machine expression. (Of course, Ponytail knows in advance that the tanks will stop, which is a lot more, and an awful lot less, than that brave Chinese student had to work with.)
“Sir, I need you to step through the screening device.”
“I demand you say please. It doesn’t take any extra effort to say please.” And while that’s true enough, now we’re dealing with the issue of who is in control here: security personnel, or The Delicate Sensibilities of the Perennially Offended.
A supervisor materializes and motions me through. He pulls Ponytail over to the side as well. I hear them going at it not two feet away as I regain the thirty pounds of ferrous compounds I had placed on the conveyor belt. I’m trying to ignore them and get to the gate because this guy is starting to get on my nerves.
“Your job is to provide good customer service,” smirks Ponytail, checking the audience for approval.
“No sir. Our job is to provide a safe travel environment. We try to provide good customer service while doing so, but our main goal is to move people through here as quickly as we can while maintaining safety standards.”
And so on. And so on. The Man asks Ponytail for some identification. And just as I am turning to leave, just as I have my carry-on in hand and am walking away, I hear ponytail say, for the benefit of the oppressed masses behind him:
“You people are just like the Nazis!”
And then something happened that I cannot remember ever happening to me before. I’d had that cork in my mouth – you know, the cork you put in your mouth when you see children being dragged nonchalantly down a supermarket aisle, collapsed in a tantrum because they didn’t get the candy bar they wanted; or the cork you put in your mouth when a couple is having a knock-down, drag-out yelling match in a quiet restaurant, or the one you stuff in your mouth to avoid screaming at the guy talking on his cell phone in the movie theater. The it’s not worth it cork.
Well, the millisecond the “Z” sound from “Nazis!” entered my ear, it built up an overpressure wave so intense that it blew the cork out of my mouth, sent it flying through the plate glass windows, through a large avocado green American Tourister hard-sided suitcase and embedded it three feet deep in the reinforced concrete tarmac.
“NAZIS!! Are you out of your goddam mind?! How dare you!” said I.
Now one thing I have learned about the North American Greybacked Strutting Trumpeter is that it is, in fact, a rather easily startled bird.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, man! A lot of nerve! This man is potentially risking his life for your personal safety, and you have the gall to call him a Nazi?!”
Ponytail is looking around, confused now. He was the one who was supposed to get murmurs of agreement and nods of support, not the right-wing warmongering reactionary who he had the misfortune to be standing next to when he made The Stand.
“Just like the Nazis!” he screams, and then, to my utter astonishment, he does a bad Major Hochstetter German accent and says “Show me your papers!”
Then, moral trump card: “I had family taken away by the Nazis!” Well, that ought to shut me up!
“If that’s true they must be pretty goddamned ashamed of you, you goddam idiot! If you can actually compare someone not saying please to having family members murdered in front of your eyes then you have some serious reading to do! My GOD, you’re disgusting!”
There was a lot of nodding and murmuring, and a half-corked “Yeah!” or two.
“Idiot!”
Actually, I think I placed an additional adjective prior to that last “idiot,” but this is a family website.
Now I know some of you are having a hard time believing I came up with all this right off the cuff. And you’d be right. Unfortunately for Ponytail, I’d been practicing this speech in my head for years now; every time I see one of these people with their American flags with swastikas in place of stars, or their BUSH=HITLER signs. Looking back on it, I have a tinge of guilt, quickly dispelled when I realize that he’d been rehearsing his speech pretty much all his life. If he’d kept his cork in I was certainly happy to bite down on mine. But nooooooooooooo.
Then the Supervisor steps up, and now I think I might be in a little trouble. He turns to Ponytail and says, “Sir, now we have a problem. Now you are disrupting security procedures. Am I going to have to ask you to step into my office for an interview?”
“No.”
“Have a safe trip.”
The man disappeared, no doubt ducking through the terminal to find the nearest internet access so he could post his heroic exploits on Democratic Underground.
Just as I’m walking away, I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s the Supervisor.
Oh well. I’ll catch the next flight, I guess. It was worth it. I guess it’s time for my interview now. For disrupting security procedures. Which I did.
“I just wanted to thank you for sticking up for us like that,” he said. “We get that all the time.”
I never really thought about it before. I guess they do. The original screener, the Nazi Latino in his mid fifties, thanks me for defending him. So does a young black woman Nazi in her mid twenties. “We really appreciate it when people get what we’re trying to do. We get stuff like this all the time.”
And I stand there, looking around at the multi-racial, multi-cultural menagerie swirling around me, and I think to myself – yet again – that this whole thing works. Not perfectly, but it works, by God. And I think that this greasy, grey little one-man phalanx of narcissism and protest should in fact bow his head and take a knee to simply be allowed to walk through this gate of miracles and fly six miles high at nearly the speed of sound and nurse his grievances against the people who are in fact protecting him, while he fetishizes and romanticizes those that would kill him in a heartbeat.
I know what I did. I thanked those men and women for what they have done and are doing and continue to do to make my life the safe, pleasant and prosperous affair I am so accustomed to. Sitting there, drinking my $2.00 aviation-grade bottled water, I wondered how someone could seriously make such a comparison: remove your shoes versus forcibly removing your gold fillings.
Well, these are the consequences of not knowing about what life is really like, outside of the Sanctuary.
It deserves to have every word read aloud.
bttt
Thanks for the ping. It was well worth the read.
why do otherwise intelligent and educated people so despise and detest American society, which has achieved more in the way of individual rights, science, arts, medicine, diversity, cooperation and prosperity than any other in history? Why would they oppose such a society when it is trying to bring these blessings to people who have spent thirty years cowering in dark places, fearful of letting the slightest word slip, or betraying their entire family with an askew glance or unguarded moment? Why would someone so viciously oppose freeing a People who have lived for a generation in total, abject fear?
It’s because they have never lived it. That is what I mean when I say reality has left their building. How many people would be opposing the war in Iraq if they had to watch, actually witness, three or four hundred thousand people being shot in the head in front of their families? At the rate of one life taken every single second, with one unique and irreplaceable person being extinguished every tick of the 60 Minutes stopwatch, going without sleep or rest, you would be at it for three and a half days. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Every face unique, every one someone’s son or mother or precious grandchild. Bang. Bang. Bang. All night and all day, every second for three and a half days. How long to wipe out your entire family? Four seconds? Eight? Thirteen? We have found that many in Iraq, more will follow, believe me.
How many children – four or five year old boys and girls – do you need to see raped in front of you before you change your mind about Iraq? Fifty? Fifty thousand? Will that make a dent in your stainless steel belief system? How many cries for mercy in the muffled corridors of prison basements? Ten thousand? Ten times ten thousand? They were there. They happened.
They just didn’t happen to you. Not in Berkeley. Not in Manhattan. Not in Santa Monica, or at Columbia University. Not in your Sanctuary. If they did we wouldn’t be having this discussion, would we? You’d be dead, and it would be your relatives begging for good and powerful people to come to their rescue to stop this horror.
There’s nothing “progressive” about what these people believe. It is refined selfishness and moral cowardice. I can understand not wanting to go overseas and lose blood and treasure to solve other people’s problems. I can at least understand that. But these “progressives” should be thanking whatever they take to be sacred – which is nothing – and hit their knees in gratitude that better, braver people have built them the kind of Sanctuary where torture and state-sponsored murder are so far from their closed eyes that even the act of imagining such horrors is beyond them.
How far from the reality of human nature do you have to be to see our culture as a curse on the Earth, rather than being the only ones willing to roll up our sleeves, shoot the wolves that are eating our kids, go out into the blizzard to collect some firewood and then paint the goddam house?
Wow, that covers so much but worth the time to read it all.
Best Essay I've read in quite a while.
Tet gives it ***** !
Joanie I sent you this in an E but will ping you
to the thread all the same.
Hope you are doing great.
Stay in touch.
t.
Thanks all for bumping the thread. I had a feeling that there'd be unanimous applause for this essay.. I am going to pass it on to everyone I know and I hope you all will do the same.
Wow! Great find! Thanks for posting that, especially with the captions that made me check it. Really a breath of fresh air. I read all the way down to the bottom of his page. I intend to read every one of his archived posts if they are as good as these two. I especially enjoyed his 7/11 analogy to the pyramids.
Interesting how all these Freepers recongized quality so readily.
This is how it ended:
But there is hope for us. We can change. I can change, and I am as stubborn a cuss as they come. And there is hope here, on these pages. Not my pages -- I’m but a speck of flotsam in an electronic ocean. But these pages, these ghostly pages pulled from the ether down highways of colored light. These pages may be able to save us.
Because now, for the first time in human history, a small person can talk to millions. The defeatism and cynicism of our betters is no longer the only voice we hear. Now, for the first time, we common people, we citizens, can speak directly to each other about life within the Sanctuary, and those unseen people, those builders and maintainers of decency and civilization have at their command a tool with which to make their voices heard. We can patrol and repair these crumbling walls from within and man the gates ourselves.
There are millions of us. Millions. And we do not have to go gently into that good night.
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