Friday September 05, 2003

REMEMBRANCE DAY. Lileks today:

This reminds me of a gentle tut-tutting I got from some guy on a webpage I stumbled across post 9/11 -- he was just so... bemused at how I’d lost my grasp on reality. I had been describing my reaction to the men who’d kill my daughter for the glory of Allah: give me the gun, show me the cave. The author of the piece suggested I would be perfect for the role of the WW2 black-out warden who scolds people for half-closed windowshades.

Why, it’s almost as if I thought we were at war, or something.

Oooh, I gushed, jumping up and down in my poodle skirt and cradling my "Gallery of Regrettable Food" to my chest, he noticed!

My official position is that everyone's entitled to a personal, even a personalized, reaction. My own personal reaction in those days was that we had gone through something terrible and hysteria was not helping. It still sort of reminds me of when Harry Carey Jr., crazed with grief at the savage murder of his girl, went running at the Comanche in The Searchers and got himself killed. I don't think the Duke loved the girl any less because he didn't follow suit.

Well, that was then, and this is... then, I guess. We're ramping up to the Memorial and encouraged to get mad. At whom? The Talented Mr. Bin Laden? I have no love for the surviving "Islamic fascists," and if I worked myself into a grand mal seizure over them I imagine it might momentarily banish my disappointment that we have conducted our struggle against them haphazardly, leaving thousands dead, a fat albatross of a ruined nation in our hands, and murderous would-be viziers stoking oil-fires of resentment against us. But that would bring no victims back to life, no honor to their memory, and no solution any nearer.

I think the worst thing we could do to the folks Lileks wants to murdalize is put their ignorant, feudal, vengeful, priest-ridden, savage way of life into the past tense, forever. I have a hunch that in the long run it will take more convincing than killing. Call that bleeding-heart traitorousness if you like. I prefer to call it what we did back when we used that strategy against the Soviet Union: victory.

If you think shaking fists at the cave-dwellers will speed that event, God go with you. If you prefer to shake your fist at me for showing insufficient respect for your shaking fist, have fun. Ignorance is my only real enemy, and I know it is too weak to prevail.