(for Thom Gunn 1929-2004)

Perhaps our dances, in a thousand years,
will tattooed be as drums,
And our bright minds, forged by fate,
will in the musk of eons drown.

Our souls will all rise glorified
as a pod of whales weaves waves.
Our flesh, once firm, relaxed as stones
that serve to mark our graves.

Our pleasures seen as ancient rites
describable as dreams;
Our voices, in a million years,
insubstantial as starbeams.

Perhaps our minuets, in a billion years,
will as steel stiffened be.
Our arabesques as smooth and gestural
as drowned paintings of the sea.

Our nods but inclinations
of the folds beneath the eyes.
Our plans but vague intentions
of the wind beneath the skies.

Our breath, a transpiration
of dust immured in dust.
Our lives, a visitation
of a rush light drowned in musk.

All these, our words and scattered songs,
May come, in time, to less than naught,
As Mayan blocks of hard hacked stone
Embalm the skin we once sloughed off.

But now, like rattles kept within
A jeweled bone box, our hollowed skin
Is shaken in the rambles of the park
To frighten schoolgirls after dark.

Film reviews in 5 words or less, #4 The Day After Tomorrow (2004) Directed by Roland Emmerich. Stars Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Ian Holm, and Sela Ward.

Five words or less review: Vote Bush and you'll die.

Comments:
Bush Lied! The Gulf Stream Died!

ROGER SIMON PUTS PAID to the cowardly choices made by the American Left in The New Reactionaries

I feel hugely sorry for the good people in Iraq like Mohammed, Omar and Ali and am deeply ashamed of my old friends on the left. Some of them quietly tell me, after reading this blog, that they... kinda... sorta... agree with me and that it's good that I have the balls to come out front on these things. Then they slink away. Well, I'll tell you something right now. I'm not so brave and I'm not so tough. I'm a big fat chicken, but I try to tell the truth as I see it. These people do not. They are worried about their jobs, being "thought well of" and being part of a club.

Meanwhile, the Zarqawis of the world are winning this war. And I can promise you one thing -- it's a lot more important than George W. Bush, John Kerry, anybody in Congress and the Media and any one single person. It's about civilization versus a death cult. Make a choice!

Simon forgets that for over a century the American Left has been making a choice. From Marx to Engels to Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Ho Chi Minh to Castro -- it's been having a love affair with Totalitarianism for decades -- it always chooses the death cult.

J.D. LASICA reports on David Sifry's presentation with some interesting numbers in: Charting blogdom's rise

Sifry mentioned that Technorati started out on Thanksgiving weekend 2002 as an effort to find out "who was talking about me" in the blogosphere. Since then, it has begun charting an increasing number of blogs -- an average of:

- 3,000 a day in January 2003
- 4,000 a day by that March
- 6,000 a day by June 2003
- 8,000-9,000 new blogs a day by September 2003
- 10,000 at the end of 2003
- 11,000 to 12,000 new blogs a day today.

That's pretty incredible, and it adds up to 2.4 million total blogs that Technorati is monitoring. Not all are active. Of that number, about 45 percent have not been updated in the past three months. And he points out that 2.4 million blogs does not equate to 2.4 million bloggers, because many bloggers have multiple blogs.

IN AN UNUSUALLY TERSE ENTRY, Steve den Beste admits to having 'bad thoughts': The High Cliff Syndrome

When I've read news reports lately about some kinds of obnoxious protests, I have mused to myself, "Perhaps it's time to issue shoot-to-kill orders to security guards." Perhaps if some people who made grandstanding protests ended up dead, it might cause others to start really thinking about the consequences of their behavior."

Obviously I don't think this should really happen. But it does seem to me that a lot of protesters are willing to do the things they do, and say the things they say, and advocate the things they advocate, because they suffer no consequences for it. They have license, but feel no responsibility. There are negative consequences, but someone else suffers the consequences, not the protesters. If such protests had negative consequences for the protesters then protest might become more responsible.

As I was thinking about this, I realized that there are severe consequences for them even if there are no shoot-to-kill standing orders. For domestic anti-war protesters who hate Bush more than they hate bin Laden, and foreign "allies" who fear and resent America more than they fear Islamic extremism, the result of an American defeat in this war will be death, destruction, poverty, misery, and tyranny for them. Their own best interests require an American victory.

I guess the difference between them and us is that we who support the war can see that, and they apparently can't.

No, they can't. They seem to have a few teeth missing in the gears that drive their morality. The tragedy here is not that this would be their fate, but that so many others would suffer with them.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall:
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Go, wondrous creature! mount where Science guides;
Go measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old Time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th'empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;
As eastern priests in giddy circles run,
And turn their heads to imitate the sun.
Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule--
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

-- Poets' Corner - Alexander Pope - Essay on Man

No fool Alexander Pope, born on this day in 1688, but rather the scourge of fools. A man who would be as much at home on the Internet today as he once was at Bartholomew Fair:

The melting, sweating, human tide was swept this way and that wreathed in the smell of roast pigs and burnt crackling, old clothes and foul breath, tobacco, coffee and ale, its ears assaulted `with the rumbling of Drums, mix'd with the Intolerable Squeakings of Cat-calls, and Penny Trumpets, made still more terrible with the shrill belches of Lottery-Pick-Pockets, thro' Instruments of the same Metal with their Faces'. The cries of nut-sellers and fruit-vendors fought with those of showmen whipping up an audience for waxworks, rope-dancing and music booths, conjuring tricks, acrobats and drolls. Once inside the booths, the impatient fairgoers, sitting on rickety benches or at trestle tables, crunched walnuts and damsons, handed round baskets of plums, pears and peaches, flirted and joked and heckled with cries of Show, Show, Show, Show!' until the players arrived....

Laughter and humiliation, illusion and reality merged in the flesh. Bearded women, Siamese twins, giants and dwarfs, 'monsters' and freaks mingled with the costumed devils and heroes of the plays, the attenuated moral emblems of medieval religious drama. The old play of The Creation of the World came complete with Noah's Ark, flying Angels, Dives rising out of Hell, and -- in 1702 -- 'with the addition of the Glorious Battle obtained over the French and Spaniards by the Duke of Marlborough'. The Fair was present and past, dream, desire and trickery, its pickpockets cunning as its conjurors, its audiences dupes to both. It could itself become the stuff of a morality play...

Not at all unlike the morality play acted out daily within the world of blogs .... discussion boards ... and other online destinations.

Indeed, if Pope were alive today he'd no doubt be posting from a page called Dunciad.com

Poet. Teacher. Mentor.

My Sad Captains
by Thom Gunn

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

Thom (Thomson) William Gunn, poet, born August 29 1929; died April 25 2004....

======

No. Wait. Do not go.

A bracket of dates and life moves forward. If we were like the beasts that we keep that would be the whole of it. But we move forward carrying the past with us. It is true that age and the ever spiraling cascade of experience forces us to discard large files of memory along the way, but if we are wise we keep those memories that sustain us and let the rest pass.

It is 1967 and I’m living with six other crazed young artists and hipsters in The Green House off Telegraph south of UC Berkeley. The Green House was not a special place for the time. It was, in that time and in that place, ordinary. The most ordinary place in the world. If it was neither real nor natural, it was fraught with a strange excitement, fecund with endless possibility. It was built of a metaphysic so loose that the most absurd accident could happen and it would only be a part of the Grand Design. It was a place where revelation and prophecy were daily events, the Second Coming scheduled for tomorrow after lunch, magic considered merely another, older branch of science, poetry an acceptable mode of speech, and caricature a widely appreciated attitude. As far as we know Rasputin, William Blake, St. Teresa, and Walt Whitman had never lived in The Green House, but they would have been welcome if they had wandered in.

Because there’s a war on, I’m trying to stay in school. But because there’s a war on I’m trying to leave school. I’m also trying to become a poet for reasons that are now obscure other than it seemed like “a good idea at the time.” Off the kitchen in The Green House is a small mud room with a screened window. Nasturtium and morning glories have twined across the screen and late into the night I sit scribbling and typing one attempt at poetry after another only to abandon most of them at first light. Dawn always reveals a small pool of crumpled sheets filled with errors, false starts, bad endings, failed metaphors, forced similies -- all the detritus of trying to learn to use words.

It had not been my habit to throw anything away the previous year. Everything I wrote seemed to my young mind to be touched with light. Now I knew it had been garbage and had destroyed most of it. How did I know that? Because I had been fortunate enough to find myself in a poetry composition class taught by Thom Gunn.

How many teachers do we have during our formal schooling? Two or three dozen? Fifty at most. How many do we remember? I remember three. A science teacher and a drama teacher in high school, and Gunn. I don’t remember Gunn because of how or what he taught, although that was part of it, I remember him because of who he was.

I remember the craggy, pitted face easily moved to laughter and a sensibility moved to kind despair when he was forced to experience a particularly bad line. I remember that the class was formed of about 12 students and that on any given day at least ten were baked to a crisp. But that didn’t mean Gunn didn’t get our attention. How could he not? He was not only an elegant poet, an inheritor of the Tennysonian tradition in English poetry, but he was an elegant man.

He commuted in from his other life in San Francisco on a powerful motorcycle in leather and Levis. Then, before taking up his duties as a teacher, he’d change into what had to be bespoke English Suits and cowboy boots. It was a look that the students in his class mired in the hippy-regalia of the time could not hope to emulate. But it was a look that spoke of refinement and manliness at the same time. It was not too much to say that we worshipped the man.

Unlike other “established poets” I’ve run into here or there over the years, the hours spent in Gunn’s class were never about himself or his work. We were always asking him to read to us from his work, but he never did. What we were there to discuss, he always reminded us, was our work and the work it obviously needed.

And work we did. I’ve never pushed so hard on the craft as I did during that semester. Because that was what Gunn was about, the craft. Not your feelings or your petty psychosis, not the confessional spew so popular at the time. Gunn had little patience for that even though he was invariably kind about pointing it out. What Gunn was interested in teaching was the one thing he knew he could teach: the craft, the rhetorical shape and the internal beat, the way in which you could put words together to get a specific emotion back from the reader; the painting techniques of poetry; how to draw from life with words.

Most of the time, you failed at the craft since you’d been taught that craft was a foolish tool and that emotions were all that mattered. But slowly, with his remarks in class and his reactions to the work you submitted, you came to understand that you were actually improving. In hopes of improving more, you bought his books and internalized his poems. I have all his books now, the oldest of which I bought in 1967. I’ve read through and around in them many times and they never fail to enhance and expand my life.

Gunn was kind and unsparing with his criticism, but he held back his praise. Somewhere I still have a sheet of paper with his polished handwriting telling me how vivid and effective he thought it was. I kept it pinned in front of wherever I was writing for years. It strikes me now that I’d really like to find it.

In time the class ended, summer came on, I left the University and fled to Europe. Several years passed and I was working in an office south of Market Street in San Francisco. I was walking back to the job when, waiting for a light, a motorcycle pulled up next to me at the curb. Black motorcycle. Helmeted rider. Bespoke English three-piece suit. Cowboy boots.

Recognizing me he lifted his visor and smiled that smile that made the day brighter. Held out his hand and we shook. The light changed and I said, just to be clever in the way that young men are, “Man, you gotta go,” a phrase that opens one of his motorcyclist poems, "On the Move." He laughed, nodded, hit the throttle and faded away down the long boulevard.

I never saw him again, but like all teachers and mentors that have touched our lives, he’s never really been absent. More than once over the years, I wanted to seek him out if only to thank him for what he’d added to my life. That always seemed beside the point. Now, to my regret, it is too late. Still, when I think of him or read his work as I will until my time arrives, I’ll always carry the memory of those classes and the long nights working amid the growing pile of crumpled paper on the floor in The Green House. In the end, that’s what the great teachers and poets leave us, the memories that live, the memories we choose to carry all our lives.

“But what can I do?”
“Do what God puts in front of you.”

On the radio news at 3 AM this morning, the phrase “Camp Pendleton Marines today in Fallujah....”

It’s early and dark, but I’m awake and sitting down with coffee when I hear those words. I hear them often these days. News of a brutal firefight in and around that forsaken city on the far side of the world is always attached to that phrase. Less often, but more distressing, the phrase includes “...were killed in action.”

I always wonder if among those killed were any of the young marines I stood next to for a day last January. ( Small Moves ) It was a fine day and we helped the Marines pack up Spirit of America’s free school supplies and medical equipment for distribution to the people of Iraq. It was something I could do, so I did it.

I always think of those Marines whenever I hear the phrase. The private who asked me what I thought about God. The other who talked a lot about the big wheels he was planning to buy for his new Jeep. The ones who cooked us hamburgers. Brave men and, as always, very young.

Most of them are gone from Camp Pendelton now. Only a third of the base’s compliment remain there. The rest are somewhere else “...today in Fallujah....” They and their brothers in arms are always in my thoughts these days, as I know they are in the thoughts of hundreds of millions of other Americans. I wish them all God speed and a safe return home. And yet I know that not all will have those things.

Like millions of others I want to know what, in any small way, I can do to help their mission, support their sacrifice, and hasten the day when they can return. Like millions of other Americans, I am frustrated by the fact that whatever I can do or give is small and unworthy compared to what they are prepared to do and give. Still, I look for ways to help, as I think all decent Americans do now. And so today I found myself driving back to Camp Pendleton in Southern California.

The purpose was to attend an event in which Spirit of America would turn over some of the video equipment they’d purchased as a result of their amazing fund-raising activities of the past month. The idea was to raise money to equip a few people in Iraq with the basic means of creating and broadcasting their own television. A kind of grass-roots antidote to Al-Jazerra, the project suddenly, with the help of big media’s Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henniger, took off. What began with a goal of $100,000 ended with a sum in the region of $1,500,000. As I write a loose coalition of bloggers is still plugging away hoping to add another $50,000 to the pot. As I drive into the entrance to Camp Pendleton, I’m thinking that this has to be one of those small miracles you read about but seldom get to witness. Why am I here? I’m not quite sure. I’m just doing what God put in front of me. Lately I’ve found that’s not a bad route to follow.

It’s a small group gathered at the main gate waiting for our escort back into the base to Camp Margurita where the event will be held. Jim Hake’s, the guiding force behind Spirit of America is there with the usual suspects and more suspects still the way. It’s a smaller group than last time because, frankly, there won’t be that much to do. In time everyone arrives and we convoy back into the other America behind the hills that’s the Camp Pendleton Marine Base in Oceanside.

The first thing you notice is that Pendelton is quiet these days. Training continues and the life of the base goes on, but at a lower level of intensity than last January . Everything seems emptier and it is. In January you could see the helicopters moving about in the near and far distance. They seemed to be everywhere. Today, only about four all day. In January, there was artillery practice visible against the hills and a lot of machine gun fire from the practice ranges. Today, just one range with small arms fire.

The barracks and the parking lots at the Camp are almost empty. The base Exchange holds, at 10 in the morning, just the woman assigned as cashier. Instead of patrols of Marines and platoon formations, you see Marines at most in groups of three or four. There’s activity here and there, but once off the main road it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the Camp is, for the most part, on hold --almost, but not quite, holding its breath. After all, considered as a town, Camp Pendleton is a town that gets very bad news every day. It has learned, long ago, how to deal with that news, but that doesn’t mean that dealing with it requires more courage and heart daily than the comfortable suburbs that ring it on three sides use in a decade.

Our small convoy of about a dozen or so cars pulls into a virtually empty parking lot. We walk back behind the deserted barracks to the warehouse where a lot of the video equipment is being stored before shipment to Iraq. Down the hill and across the valley, a platoon or two is having small arms practice. Sharp popping bursts of fire punctuate the morning. Then as I walk into the warehouse, I have one of those strange moments we’ve all had to get used to in the last few years.

In the warehouse, the Marines on duty are pumping Pink Floyd into the speakers. It’s an odd 21st century American moment. If I stand edgeways in the doorway one ear hears rapid bursts of gunfire in the distance and the other hears:
No navigator to guide my way home
Unladened, empty and turned to stone
A soul in tension that's learning to fly
Condition grounded but determined to try
I know it is best not to make too much out of a random epiphany, but there it is for what it is.

A friend of mine in who worked in rock and roll for years once told me it’s dangerous to listen rock too closely in emotionally charged situations “because it will just come and get you.” I think that I know now what he meant.

With the arrival of the rest of our group, the Marines turn off the music and we get on with the business of the morning. Unlike the January function with its packing and collecting, today’s much more of a media event and, after putting a few Spirit of America stickers on boxes and equipment, there’s really not that much to do.

Still, I’m glad to be there. In a bit a group of about 15 school children show up. Four and fifth graders, they’re up for anything their day brings. What it brings them right away are Spirit of America tee-shirts and baseball hats. Bonanza! All the boys and girls put them on right away. A few minutes later group of five extremely cute girls are standing around talking among themselves and as I pass them I remark, “Ah, you must be the Spirit of America Cheerleaders.”

“We are?,” says one. “Okay. What’s our cheer?”

I’m caught. Not prepared for that. I think for a minute and, in my befuddled state, can only come up with:
“We’re the Spirit of America!
The Spirit of America!
The Spirit of America!
Now!”

Pretty lame. Until you see five small American girls doing it with real heart. Then it takes on a whole new dimension. It is, after all, the singers and not the song.

The boys, by the way, a busy chasing the Marines around and begging them to autograph their baseball caps. The Marines are initially non-plused by this, but politely comply to the delight of the boys who immediately set out to collect the whole set. The Marines do not disappoint.

Fred Brookwell of Greystone TV Productions got wind of the Spirit of America project via the Wall Street Journal, and has organized a full production crew to cover the event. In time other media, local and national turn up. Jim Hake handles the questions with aplomb, and the elegant Lady Doughan of Spirit of America’s umbrella organization Cyber Century Forum is lucid and charming and sharp as well.

Seeking to be vaguely useful I volunteer to go off and find some coffee, but driving through the base I just seem to pass one mostly empty barracks and deserted shop complex after another. There’s no doubt about it, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force is not, for the most part, at home. I manage to find some coffee and return, but things are pretty much wrapped up. We chat about what more we can do and we all promise to carry the work forward. I say my goodbyes.

On the way out, though, it is clear that the Marines are not quite finished with me since, as the small arms practice continues, they’ve gone back to Pink Floyd in the warehouse -- although at a lower volume. The last thing I hear over the gunfire is:
He's haunted by the memory of a lost paradise
In his youth or a dream, he can't be precise
He's chained forever to a world that's departed
It's not enough, it's not enough

On I-5 heading north out of Oceanside, you have to drive though a 20 mile stretch in which Camp Pendleton takes up both sides of the road. About five miles into this stretch you pass a group of airplane hangers. In front of the hangers is a large concrete wall about fifty yards long. On it, in large letters, are three words: DUTY. HONOR. COURAGE.

Thirty miles later I’m home in the Laguna Beach Hills. From my deck I can see north to Long Beach and out to sea beyond Catalina Island. It’s a good life. A safe life. A beautiful life.

And tonight, I’m going to tune into the news and no matter where I turn I’m going to hear “Camp Pendelton Marines today in Fallujah....”

And I have to think that no matter what I am doing to help, no matter what I ever manage to do, I’m still going to hear:

“It’s not enough. It’s not enough.”

Embrace -- A painting by Robert Fulghum
Click to enlarge

My good friend and author Robert Fulghum is blogging. Well, he's a bit retro and doesn't consider what he's doing as "blogging," but rather as "NEW STORIES." No matter.

Lately he's been at the village he lives in when in Crete, and we've been getting semi-daily reports on bug racing, contessas of dubious lineage, and what he's reading. If you know Fulghum's writing, and many millions do, you might consider putting his new stories page into your toolbar favorites folder. You never know what you might find. Here's a sample:

April 19, 2004
Kolymbari, Crete, Greece
Written Sunday, April 18, 2004

BUG OLYMPICS

"So what is it you do in Crete?" People often ask me that. As if to imply that it would be boring sitting on a beach in Greece doing nothing year after year.
A funny thought, since, outside, as I write tonight, it is cold and windy and raining. And the closest beach is too rocky to sit around on, anyhow. So what do I do?

Today, for example, after attending a funeral, I sat by a fire all afternoon reading the thoughts of Epictetus, the 4th century BC stoic philosopher. Born a slave, he became famous for his lectures, which were written down by his student, Arrian, and collected into a manual, The Enchiridion. That little book, by the way, has never been out of print in more than 2,000 years.

Sample: "Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not."

Sample: "Things and people are not what we wish them to be nor what they seem to be. They are what they are."

Sample: "We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them."

Epictetus was a Stoic. And as I age I find increasing favor for their point of view. If you want to read more, get a modern translation: The Art of Living, a new interpretation by Sharon Lebell, HarperCollins 1995. There is also the Loeb Harvard Classics two-volume set in Greek and English if you want all there is of Epictetus.

That's the serious side of today's endeavors. On the other hand . . .

Last night some silly friends and I drank a little too much wine and started the Bug Olympics. The first event is the Rolling Down Hill and Walking Away contest. Each one of us found one of those little fast-crawling armored pill bugs. We touched them gently to make them roll up into a ball, and then using a piece of paper, scooped them up, held them in line at the top of an inclined cookie sheet, and let go at the count of three. The bugs rolled down and out onto the stone floor. The first bug that got up and walked away was the winner. My bug, Manolis, won 5 times in a row. Gold Medal Bug. And no harm done to the bugs, I think. (Wonder what the bugs think?)

Tonight all Greece will shut down at 8:30. The two top soccer teams will go at it in Athens. Panathinaikos and Olympiakos Piraeus. If one is not there in front of the TV, one will not know exactly what happened. And one will have nothing to talk about tomorrow. If the Turkish air force attacks Greece tonight between 8:30 and 10:30, the prime minister will say Greece cannot come to fight now. But he will say that, in two hours, half of Greece will be really mad and ready to kill, so maybe the Turks should pick another day.

I wondered what Epictetus would say about such matters, being wise and all.
Sample: "Once you have deliberated and determined that a course of action is wise, never discredit your judgment. Take a stand. Don't be cravenly noncommittal."

With that ancient philosophical admonition in mind, I went off to the Argentina Taverna to support Panathinaikos! And tried not to step on any Olympic Bug competitors as I went out the door.

Afterward. Tuesday. A 2-2 tie. Satisfying to all in that the game was played hard and well. Epictetus would have been pleased. As he said, speaking of skillful ballplayers: "None of them considers whether the ball is good or bad, but only how to throw it and catch it. For where a man has proper reason to rejoice, his fellow men have proper reason to share in that rejoicing."

N.B. -- Since I have found that whatever Fulghum is reading is well worth reading, I added the Amazon links. Fulghum does many things, but he does not surf. Nor does he have email, so furgeddaboutit.

Spirit of America and The Victory Coaliton need you help and your dollars now. Unlike many charities, 100% of your donations go to the projects taken on by Jim Hake and the Volunteers of Spirit of America.

Right now a fund-raising drive is on to make this coming week one that will count in the battle to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis throughout that blighted country.

I've personally helped this fine organization at events such as getting school and medical supplies to Iraq. I can assure you that this is one group that talks the talk AND walks the walk. For every dollar you give, 100 cents gets to those in need.

Some give all. You can give some. Click on the banner above. Just do it.

Roger Simon continues his wordsmithing with: "Blogaganda "

"I think we need a new term for a kind of blog that is beginning to appear on the Internet, which does not solely represent the opinions of its "innocent" author. Perhaps someone will come up with a better one, but I am proposing the simple "Blogaganda" to describe the new blog by Mohammed Ali Abtahi, a Vice President (no less) of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

"Blogaganda" -- so let it be written, so let it be done.

This cogent observation just in from bitter sanity

The difference

Someone asked me the other day, "You compared building democracy in Iraq to the US experience with Germany and Japan after WWII. How come it's not going like that?"

People have come up with a lot of reasons - both before and since the fall of Saddam - why Iraq would not be like Germany or Japan: level of previous exposure to democracy, degree of international legitimacy for the effort, presumed cultural incompatibility of Arabs with democratic polities. Some are more plausible than others, of course, but most of them are quite subtle.

But there's one reason no one talks about, that's about as subtle as a neon sign: the war isn't over.

Imagine if, during WWII, we had tried to occupy and reconstruct France before defeating Germany. Imagine Vichy collaboraters being funded by German money and smuggled German weapons. Imagine German special ops units coming across the border periodically and blowing people up. Imagine the press telling us that all this proves the French didn't want us or our "liberation" in the first place and we should give up and go home.

Now imagine ignoring all this and doggedly proceeding with rebuilding French infrastructure, hoping all the problems will Just Go Away. Folly, yes?

In Iraq, we've got Iran funding an uprising and, most likely, sending in commandos under cover of the pilgrimage. In Fallujah, we've got a lot of old-line Saddam collaborators, and possibly Syria funding and providing military fighters, via Hamas. We've had Saudi-funded terrorists coming across the borders all this time. (Ask the Iraqis - they know Arab from Arab, and they know the people coming in to blow up Iraqis aren't Iraqi.) And we wonder why there are problems in Iraq?

There are problems because the war is still going on; winning one campaign does not conclude a war, and (media and politician nitwits insisting on locutions like "the Iraq War" notwithstanding) we ought to know better than to think it does. To whatever extent we succeed in Iraq, it becomes an ally in this war - and to whatever extent it becomes an ally, it becomes a target for the enemy.

The infamous gardening expert from the Regan Nursery Dr. Leda Hortaculture has located the center of white heat and hate on the Internet:

"A recent study conducted by the Electronic Fearmongering Foundation reveals that the internet's most vicious flame wars are not waged over such hot-button issues as politics, abortion, gun control, or even the Cruz-Cruise breakup. No, the number-one foaming-at-the-mouth psycho-cyber controversy turned out to be whether or not the bud union of a grafted rose should be planted above or below the surface of the soil...."

Also recommended in this essay is her 5-Step Program for "Planting a Rose," with such helpful advice as "Establish a Hole." Handy thing for planting a rose, what?

Civilization is incidentally not something that exists primarily in external objects -- in art and architecture and books and music, which are only the external gestures of the thing; nor even in the graceful manners which reveal its presence regardless of outward dress. It is rather something that is carried within each of its members; forms of nobility that are contagious alike to savages and to our children. It is the creative power that builds all these beautiful things, and which, when it passes, watches the desert and jungle reclaim them -- watches the desert and jungle in turn reclaiming the heart of man.

It is everything -- moral, aesthetic, ethical -- but especially, civilization is moral. It turns men outward, lifts them above the animal contemplation of immediate need, and towards the requirements of God and our neighbour. And as we have chiefly forgotten today, it is in its very nature sacramental. It is the lifting up of entire peoples in a mysterious aggregative act of prayer.

-- Easter MMIV

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