Winding down

Aside from blogger acting crappy, more and more, I am feeling like I don't want to read any more crap about the crapper into which we in this country are diving. It just seems to be getting stinkier, and frankly, I'm feeling as though I've about had my fill and am in danger of choking on it if I don't extricate myself. Maybe it's just the beautiful spring we are having here in central Missouri. Maybe it's my decision to pull up stakes and move out of this dead-end job in this politically backward part of the country. Well, okay, it's beginning to seem as though virtually every part of the country is politically backward.

What is it with we humans? Why are we so resitant to evolving? We birth children and spend incredible amounts of energy trying to force them to be the same as we have been and our parents before us, feeding them the same dense diet with fancy new utensils.

Our new boss (from Fresno) at work gave me a book to read, which I brought home this weekend: Between War and Peace: Lessons from Afghanistan to Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson. Boss says this guy is a "liberal" and a historian, and that I might be surprised. I'm just getting to know the boss, and frankly, I guess I can't say I'm surprised. As I keep telling the new solid waste coordinator: "Have I told you yet how happy I am to be leaving here?"

Here's the jacket commentary:

In his acclaimed collection An Autumn of War, the scholar and military historian Victor Davis Hanson expressed powerful and provocative views of September 11 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan. Now, in these challenging new essays, he examines the world's ongoing war on terrorism, from America to Iraq, from Europe to Israel, and beyond.

In direct language, Hanson portrays an America making progress against Islamic fundamentalism but hampered by the self-hatred of elite academics at home and the cynical self-interest of allies abroad. He sees a new and urgent struggle of evil against good, one that can fail only if "we convince ourselves that our enemies fight because of something we, rather than they, did."

I don't think I'll be needing to read this book.

So it's America's job to counter a fundamentalist religion, eh?

"Self-hatred of elite academics"?! "Cynical self-interest of allies abroad"?! "Struggle of evil against good"!!!!!!!

Well, I hope I can last out the next 2-1/2 months at work. I've already heard way too many stories about the boss' gung-ho special forces son. I did trade him the movie "Gettysburg" for the book (not permanently) and read that one this weekend. There's a character in the book on the Yankee side who fights because he says he wants the right to prove that he's a capable man. He's an Irish immigrant who hates the aristrocracy that was Europe and he sees the South as simply a transplanted aristrocracy. It suddenly occurs to me that this is the very objectionable thing I see as making a huge comeback in our country. Whatever happened to the classless society?

Well, this isn't my home planet. I've already established that. I don't know where it is, or how to get back to it, but I'm starting to feel more and more sickened as time passes here on this one. Perhaps I'm just a self-hating elite academic. I hope when all those people who think they're the "good" side have wiped out the "bad" side, they'll....well, they never will. They'll always find some other "bad" side to fight. And it may be the self-hating elites. Or the self-interested allies abroad. Whoever doesn't agree with them and their interests, I suppose.

If I start winding down here at YWA, now you know why, and you always know where to find the "good" stuff.

In the meantime, here's a nice little article about our new National Intelligence Director. And a Village Voice article: Wanted: Complete Asshole for U.N. Ambassador: John Bolton has left a trail of alienated colleagues and ridiculed ideas. He's a shoo-in for Senate confirmation.

Read that one. You'll wretch. And you always feel better after wretching.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway