{"id":10407,"date":"2007-01-11T11:23:17","date_gmt":"2007-01-11T16:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/01\/11\/10407.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:43","slug":"cursing-screaming-throwing-thi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/01\/11\/cursing-screaming-throwing-thi\/","title":{"rendered":"cursing, screaming, throwing things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and I have read the speech<\/a> Our Only President gave last night, and I tried, I really did, to come up with a way to analyze the rhetoric of it. It's clearly a bad speech, a defensive speech, and his attempts to make the audience share his assumptions (or his pretended assumptions) were crude and forced. The links between those assumptions and his policy statements were even more forced, in part because YHB is aware, as everybody must be aware, that the new policy is crap on stilts. You can read about the texture of the crap, the height of the stilts, the length of time we can expect the crap to stay up on the stilts before it comes down on our heads, you can read all that elsewhere, and I really have nothing to say about all that that you, Gentle Reader, do not already know. And I find it depressing to say it all again. Even a chorus of agreement from my Gentle Readers, a show of solidarity and support and sympathy, would be overwhelmed by the tedious task of smelling Our Only President's shit, and reminding myself that he really is the only president we've got, and the only one we'll have for another two years.\n

Well.\n

I did note that the speech as it was written did not, as had been floated earlier in the week, call for sacrifice on the part of Americans. He did not look at our young people and say \"I want YOU to join the military\". He did not tell us that we would fight them, if we had to, on the beaches, and in the shopping malls, and on the turnpikes. He did say that \"Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.\" He said the consequences of that failure were \"clear\", but then only vaguely evoked those consequences, mostly by suggesting that \"Radical Islamic extremists\" (unlike the moderate extremists, or the radical moderates, or the extremely radical moderate moderates) would replicate the World Trade Center attacks.\n

I hate to say this, but in service of being a blogger, I will say the outrageous thing that I actually believe: I would rather have another 3,000 Americans slaughtered by terrorists than have another 3,000 Americans die in combat. If I had a time machine and a preposterous debate-round choice, I would rather not have invaded Iraq even if<\/i> it meant there would be another terrorist attack, even one as flukily successful as the one on September 11, 2001. Even if it killed me. You want sacrifice? There it is. I would rather fight them in the streets of San Francisco than in the streets of Baghdad, because if we fight terrorists that come to our streets, we can beat them, even while we are dying. In Iraq, we kill the wrong people and we die and we lose. It isn't me over there, and I'll never have the preposterous debate-round choice, so it's all easy for me to say, but it seems obvious<\/i> that it would be better for the country and the world for us to have suffered a series of terrible bombings than to have ruined Iraq.\n

The one thing that I think is successful about this speech is the thing that I noted as worst about it. It doesn't ask us for anything. It doesn't ask us to pay for the war in money, or in our own blood, or even in scrap metal. It asks us to do nothing. It combines vague threats about the World with confusing details about tactics (and we are not experts in tactics), to the ultimate effect of making us shrug or spit or sigh and go about our business.. Nobody's going to think that Our Only President has at last come up with a Good Plan, but it's clear that nothing in the plan is going to change our lives (those of us who are not already in military families, that is). Then he brings up some more vague bullshit about politics, giving the impression that all this is going to be talked to death anyway, and we don't have to worry about it, and can go back to bed. It asks us for nothing, and we give him nothing, and so he gets what he wants. Victory.\n

Look, the President of the United States is in charge of our foreign policy, and our wars, and that's how it is. All we can do about it is get rid of him and all his advisors the next time an election comes around. Or nearly all. Sometimes, in war, a nation's citizens are called upon to actually do<\/i> something, to enlist or purchase war bonds or leave their jobs to build airplanes and tanks, to grow victory gardens or hang blackout curtains or practice emergency evacuations. And then we do it, or we don't do it, and we can tell from our own reactions and our neighbors' whether we are in this war or not. It's clear from the surveys that we're not, but then, we were never asked to be. Our Only President speaks like a dictator, telling his subjects what the world is like but not asking for our participation or our approval, and because he does not ask, we do not refuse. So the President sends the soldiers (who are already in the army, mostly, and are not therefore to be asked) to maim and be maimed, and we go to the grocery store and buy something for dinner.\n\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/i>:,
-Vardibidian. <\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, and I have read the speech Our Only President gave last night, and I tried, I really did, to come up with a way to analyze the rhetoric of it. It’s clearly a bad speech, a defensive speech, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17936,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10407\/revisions\/17936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}