Op-ed
Brian Cherry aside, there’s something to be said for gargantuan, untrammelled, homicidal anger, and if Hindrocket and Michelle Malkin had been here yesterday, I would have been saying it into their ears, which I would have been holding like a hand of pink, cartilaginous playing cards as the rest of their biomass cooled on the floor.
There was one of those missing-white-woman dramas for a brief, wobbly time yesterday, involving the London transport system, a particular bus stop, email not working properly, and (signally) someone having stayed home from work with a cold. [update: see comments below]
Now see, I’m speaking for myself here, as a liberal and a Dean-then-Kerry supporter and a sometime member of the ‘liberal media.’ I don’t like terror, myself, personally. I didn’t like 9/11, nor the anthrax scares, and I think ‘Spanish Bombs’ is a great Clash song (it’s iPod Friday again), but bombs actually going off in Spain are quite distressing, speaking for myself personally.
This isn’t an uncommon mode of experience here on the so-called left. I think most of us feel similarly.
But there are some people who do like terror, and this is one of them, and this is another. Here are some more of them.
Without fear — recycling fear, generating fear, whooping up vast buffets and open-bar stag- and hen-parties of terror; swimming in others’ terror like synchronized Esther Williams swimmers — without loving and reveling in terror, these people are nothing. These people, in short, are terrorists.
They are not ‘aligned’ with terrorists, or ‘supporters’ of terror — they’re not ‘objectively pro-terror’ in that Orwellian sense that we’ve all heard so much of lately. They are terrorists.
Today I’m not so angry, so instead of wishing them harm, I hope for God’s attention on them, because God is the only judge of souls. Tomorrow I’ll think they’re funny again, in addition to being grotesque and evil. But in the interval, in this brief calm in-between things, I wanted to type and post that word, evil, without having it be behind color screens and blinders, suggested and tangented but not said in its own naked four letters.
If there were a bar here I’d open it for free drinx for everyone now. Soapbox dismounted.
Huh?
Amen.
Quite so.
Dude, you rock.
Now let’s see some ugly kittens.
Well done.
Huh?
The context is sort of scattered through the comments from yesterday.
Malkin and Hindrocket used the London bombings as a convenient excuse to attack ‘the left’ for being ‘pro-terror,’ while I was trying to get in touch with my sister there. It was a close call — she’d stayed home from work instead of going to that bus station that’s in all the pix now.
Which brings one back to 9/11 and the genuine terror of tracking down who’s alive and who might not be, and finding out later that people you knew had been killed, etc. Not ‘terror’ the way Malkin and Hindrocket use the word, but terror. Being terrified.
This wasn’t what I wanted to write about these things, and I hope I have something colder and smarter to say about it later.
There is no Santa. God is also fake.
There is no Santa. God is also fake.
Thanks, I’ll bring that up at the next Quaker meeting.
I always thought Dick Cheney was a terrorist for saying that bad things would happen to us if we didn’t vote for Bush in 2004. That was, after all, clearly the intent.
Very astute comments, Gavin. And I’m glad that your sister is okay.
They are evil and they are wrong. One thing that can be said about al Qaeda and their ilk is that their objectives are clear, they are evil, but they are clear, and they wrap it in a ridiculous religious justification, whereas the motives of Malkin are not clear, perhaps she herself is getting rich from the niche she fills, fine. But her supporters, what is their motivation to be taken in and recycle and spout the lies, hatred and falsified rationales. Do they want to feel like they are in a club? A false minority persecuted by a non-existent liberal majority? You can’t just abdicate your mind without thinking, these people need to learn the rhythms of their thought and hate, it is like pretending to like football, you kind of have to know what is going on a little but and then you can simple-mindedly talk the talk. Why do they do this? What the hell can their motivation be? Most of the wingies I know personally are reasonably intelligent, but then they go into this glassy-eyed world when they literally start spewing Rush-isms. Half of the arguments I have never even heard, and early this week it seemed like they were reveling in the attack- as if they were throwing up thanks to God that what they had been told was true. In a way they were hoping for this if only to make some ridiculous political point.
Thanks for that. As much as we like to mock them, let’s never forget how dangerous their beliefs are to a free and open society. Their’s is the politics of oppression, secrecy, and consolidated power in the hands of the few. The United States, on the other hand, was founded on the ideals of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Two completely different concepts, really. Just sayin’…