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I dunno; I see a little bit of Bonnie Raitt, or even Meryl Streep:
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(PS: Remember, it's not nice to make fun of people's looks.)
Posted on 11/09/2001 3:59:25 PM PST by Pokey78
LAST week in Montreal, it was hard to buy a poppy. Three Canadian provinces had sold out by the Monday, and by the time you read this the rest of the Royal Canadian Legion's entire stock of 14.8 million will likely be gone. That's not bad for a population that barely touches 30 million and includes large numbers of terrorist cells plus the students at Concordia University who openly celebrated the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Evidently, the public has made a connection between September 11 and November 11, though no one seems quite sure what it is: a general expression of solidarity with the victims? Or a renewed respect for the men who gave their lives so we could get fat and complacent and read celebrity features about Britney?
It was a Canadian, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, who made the poppy emblematic, in May 1915: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row, / That mark our place; and in the sky / The larks, still bravely singing, fly / Scarce heard amid the guns below."
Row on row on row. Sacrifice on the scale McCrae witnessed is all but unimaginable in the West today - in Canada, in Britain, even apparently in America, which instead of sending in the cavalry is now dropping horse feed for the Northern Alliance. The only verified American on the ground last week was a 26-year-old New Yorker who found himself following the Yankees' progress in the World Series long distance, having quit his $70,000 midtown dotcom job to go east and fight for the Taliban. Unable to discard its reflexive multi-cultural deference even in the face of treason, the Boston Globe reported that Mohammad Junaid, the grandson of Pakistani immigrants, "has a teddy-bear face and a ready smile".
President Bush, meanwhile, has proclaimed the entire week National Veterans Awareness Week - a nice sentiment but a terrible, tone-deaf name, which makes the armed forces sound like a disease. Actually, most Americans are already aware of their veterans, it's the elites who need reminding - like the chaps at the New York Times and other big papers who carry (by my estimation) less than a tenth of the military obituaries that The Daily Telegraph does. True, NBC's star anchor, Tom Brokaw, has found himself a lucrative franchise cranking out books about The Greatest Generation - the Second World War generation - but Brokaw's designation is absurd and essentially self-serving. The youthful Americans who went off to war 60 years ago would have thought it ludicrous to be hailed as "the greatest". They were unexceptional: they did no more or less than their own parents and grandparents had done. Like young men across the world, they accepted soldiering as an obligation of citizenship, as men have for centuries. In 1941, it would have astonished them to be told they would be the last generation to respect that basic social compact. When we - the Boomers, Gen X, Gen Zzzzz or whatever we're up to now - hail them as "the greatest" and elevate them into something extraordinary, it's a reflection mainly of our own stunted perspective.
Responding to calls for the civic solidarity of the Second World War - "victory gardens in nearly everyone's backyard, the Boy Scouts at filling stations collecting floor mats for scrap rubber, the affordable war bonds, the practice of giving rides to hitchhiking soldiers and war workers" - Katha Pollitt in the current edition of the Nation sneers: "Those would be certified heterosexual, Supreme-Being-believing scouts, I suppose, and certified harmless and chivalrous hitchhiking GIs, too - not some weirdo in uniform who cuts you to bits on a dark road." To the broader constituency for which Katha speaks, those guys in uniform are weirdos - not because they want to cut her to bits but because they're willing to go and slog it out on some foreign hillside, getting limbs blown off by grenades, blinded by shrapnel - and for no other reason than something so risible as "love of country".
It's on the question of sacrifice that the Administration seems to be having the hardest time. Hug your children, advised the President, and shop till you drop. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your outlet mall. But, for most Americans, that's not enough. They're ready to do more, and Mr Bush isn't giving a lead. In Thursday's otherwise unsatisfactory speech, the President finally used the words he should have spoken a month ago, the last words of Todd Beamer before he and his ad-hoc commando unit took out the hijackers of Flight 93 at the cost of their own lives: "C'mon, guys. Let's roll!"
Instead of messing around with Operation Infinite Justice and all the other numbskull names for this war, the White House should have stuck with Beamer and gone with Operation Let's Roll. Two months on, Mr Bush has got the message, ending his speech on Thursday by informally deputising the citizenry: "We have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let's roll." It's not as poetic as John McCrae, but then, in the dust of Ground Zero, no poppies blow nor ever will.
What a hateful mean-spirited thing to say--nothing like that would eve even cross my mind. My first thought was.."She must look like Fran Liebowitz."
*g*
I never finished rockin',
And now I'm gonna roll.
But I still hear them talkin'-
The ghosts of Kosovo.
Absolutely not. That would have tied the phrase into a military operation which may go this way or that and have this association or that attached to it. Beamer's last words inspire us because they express the calm courage we all hope we would display if called upon to do so. They also express an American spirit which I, at least, thought we had, in large part, lost. But nothing was lost. The spirit was still there. Waiting for someone to say the right words. Beamer did that. Let his words stand on their own.
What the President is doing is gradually moving people's minds to a war footing. World War II fell right after the Depression, which had already hardened a generation of Americans. We are entering this from the self-indulgence of the last 8 years, and people are going to gradually have to be brought up to speed.
I said last summer and I still believe it: President Bush is trying to change the character of this nation. He is constantly reminding us of the good things about ourselves, and playing down the bad. He is encouraging those things which will help the war effort, and our nation as a whole.
Mr. Steyn is often right, but on this column he is a bit off. I recommend Peggy Noonan's column for a better analysis both of the speech and the President's mind-set.
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I dunno; I see a little bit of Bonnie Raitt, or even Meryl Streep:
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(PS: Remember, it's not nice to make fun of people's looks.)
More like one-fiftieth in my estimation.
Yes, I do. We can attack Hillary for her advocacy of partial birth murder, but we aren't allowed to notice her countenance.
And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.
This world just ain't ready for me yet.
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