Fri Jun, 18 2004
An Implication Of Concepts
Michele is not amused with bloggers posting and linking to photographs of Paul Johnson's murder. Nor am I. At her blog, I quote Solzhenitsyn: "To taste the ocean needs only a single drop." Whether you know it or not, he's talking about the power of concepts. Let me illustrate the thing with a concrete example:
Most children, before they reach adolescence, and one way or another, become familiar in some degree with the concept of beheading. I know I did. We look back in horror at medieval atrocities like burning at the stake. Everyone I know is utterly horrified at the concept, but I have never met a single person who has seen a photograph of a person being burned at the stake. The concept is enough, to a thinking person.
And you might consider that whenever you hear a dipshit like Michael Savage or Sean Hannity telling you that you need to see these images in order to understand what we're up against.
Now, go look at them if you want to. All I'm saying is that the argument outlined by the hysterical dipshits is false. Think about what Solzhenitsyn said. Think about it honestly, and see if you can refute it.
As for bloggers: yes, a good many of them are unconscionable leeches when it comes to this sort of thing. They do this over long periods of time because it sucks in page-views from dolts.
They ought to be ashamed fo themselves.
Something Mysterious
Well. Comes today the grim news about Paul Johnson's murder in Saudi Arabia. Everybody is saying everything about it, but I have in mind something that I have never seen anyone else address.
To begin with, I dismiss all protestations of "retaliation" and everything remotely like it as so much lying bullshit. I have no doubt at all that they would do exactly the same thing to me if they could get their hands on me. They would chop up every boneheaded Peace At Any Cost, Rachel Corrie dingbat on the scene.
An important question remains, however.
Why aren't they doing this here?
It is an abiding mystery, to me, why we haven't gotten hit again in America, if not on the same scale of something like 9/11, then surely on a smaller scale in numbers sufficient to make it hurt like hell, at least in the psyches of fretters and moaners over "why they hate us". And one damned good way to do it would be to start running around America with a video camera, snatching soccer-moms at gas-pumps in little one-horse towns, bleeding 'em out, and dropping tape cassettes in the mail to Live At 5 stations from coast to coast.
If I were one of these animals, I would have this country shitting in its pants 24/7.
I don't understand this.
I might have more thoughts on implications, later.
More: "When Al Qaeda kills Americans in Saudi Arabia, it's not as good for them as killing Americans on American soil. It may show some operational frustration in them..."
Cliff May just said that on CNN's Crossfire. The larger subject of his remarks is about the "Frankenstein problem" that Saudi Arabia has with Wahhabism. However, the matter of "operational frustration" is an important implication of what I have in mind.
Basically, I conclude that the US response to Al Qaeda -- to include the Iraqi operation -- is nowhere nearly precisely geared to the theat. I never thought it would be. (Hint: "The generals are always planning to fight the last war.")
For all their beastly savagery, these people are punks. There is a premise of air combat that talks about "honoring the threat". It was never in my mind a proper thing to honor the threat of Al Qaeda with corps and army-level action. It wasn't even proper for us to honor the threat of Saddam Hussein on that level. One hundred hours of ground action in 1991, and the utterly craven performance of the Iraqi army last year only solidified this conviction in my mind. The Iraqi state under Saddam had to be destroyed -- and anybody who wants to dispute this can go drop dead. They're disqualified from discussion on grounds of aggravated stupidity.
But there is a "center of mass" (Clausewitz’s concept) aspect to all of this that haunts me, and always has. We're swinging an enormous mass at an enemy essentially without a mass, and the implications should be obvious.
This afternoon, I was over in the 'ville. I stopped at a convenience store where I go all the time.
There is a girl behind the counter, there. She's about twenty years old or so. Very pleasant, all the time, with a quick smile and pretty good at her job.
She asked how I was doing, the way she always does. I told her that I was just watching the rotten news. She barely glanced at me and kept doing her thing in the cash register. I told her about the news of Paul Johnson. She never stopped. She looked at me perfectly blankly as she counted out my change. "You know; the guy they captured. They killed him."
Nothing. Not the least bat of an eye.
"They cut his head off."
Not one blink, not one hitch in her motion. Nothing.
She didn't know. She had absolutely no earthly idea what I was talking about.
Here's what I see: whether she knows it or not, that girl has implicitly delegated the responsibility for dealing with these monsters to an organization that simply cannot possibly do so.
And that organization will never be able to move as nimbly as the murderers of Paul Johnson, should they take it in mind to move with real efficacy, like: snatching some soccer-mom from that little girl's gas-pump, not fifty feet away.
I'm barely scratching the surface of my thinking on these matters, but the biggest mystery remains:
Why aren't they doing that?
Go read Bruce McQuain's thoughts on the matter.
Not Me
> From: Mike Schneider
> Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 5:31 AM
> Subject: [I-S] Billy on a Banjo
> There's still time to, oh I dunno, buy a smallish
> apartment building in some Asian tiger with
> relatively loose social customs,...
I'm now having the same problem with you that I'm having with Kennedy, after his recent taking of my name in vain. It goes roughly like this:
"I don't know how many times I'm going to have to tell you."
I am an American, Michael. Try to understand. I've been around the world enough to know -- mind, body, heart and soul -- that there is no place else for me to be. There is no other political ideal worth fighting for than that which was born -- for the first time in human history -- right here on this continent, and which is, to me, inextricably connected to this land.
In his "November 1916" installment of the "Red Wheel" series of novels, Solzhenitsyn brought me to tears with his story of Colonel Vorotyntsev taking leave from the front, experiencing the compulsion to get down on his knees and kiss the stones of the square at the Kremlin, all because of how the history of his homeland moved his heart. I understood that completely.
I don't know how to impart that, but it is as real in me as I am, in myself.
I've told you before and I'll tell you again right now: I would happily die in an American prison before I ever ran away from this place.
This is it: this fight, in this place. When this light goes out, it could be a thousand years before it fires again, if ever.
I'm not going anywhere.
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