The Crow's Eye: I Wonder Why

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 6, 2010

I Wonder Why

I don't trust public statements made by public officeholders. Whole lotta empty grammar. Lies. Half truths. Shit, really.

But I do wonder why Graham would argue in such plain language for the tilting of leviathan towards an attack against Iran:

"...not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime."

Well, plain for an elected Republican. I don't expect a politician beating the drum for war to actually say or write, umm: "To kill all their eighteen to twenty year old draftees, to poison their waters, to murder their mothers, to slay them where they sleep and where they eat, to drop so many tons of explosives that they finally knuckle under and accept whatever regime we install as a replacement."

Still...

Why, Lindsay?

To whom do you signal?

2 comments:

Peter Ward said...: The buildup to Operation Liberation From That Antisemitic, Misogynistic and Theocratic Douchebag is back in play. Over at the Post, Ignatius is on it:

The Obama administration hopes that an isolated Iran will eventually seek a compromise on the nuclear issue. But as Karim Sadjadpour argues in Foreign Policy , this regime with a "victimization complex" needs America as an enemy, perhaps more than ever.

With the midterms over, war on Iran is hip again...; November 7, 2010 at 12:51 AM
Anonymous said...: Graham's closeted status has him posturing tough, to deflect the tutu-and-slippers image that follows him around. That's because he's only barely closeted -- he's not really, though he thinks he is, and he's always posturing tough to fight off the image many have, that of Paul Lynde or Isaac Mizrahi. Fairly common stuff among the Log Cabin Republicans, really.; November 7, 2010 at 12:24 PM

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This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.