(Expect more current events posting than usual over the next few days. Sorry. Will try to sweeten it with tech and teaching content as much as possible.)
Those who follow the music business may have seen the recent rant that Charlie Daniels wrote—and his publicist e-mailed out—about “the Hollywood crowd’s” traitorous stance on the war.
What you might not have seen is the response to Daniels by Jeff Wall, a disabled veteran who publishes TwangZine.
I’m not a panty waist liberal. But I’m not a right wing whacko either. I’m just a middle of the road, old half crippled, fat guy doing his best to feed his family, love his kids and keep the lights turned on. As for your statement of “You’re either with us, or you’re against us”, well all I can say to that is fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yoooooooooooooooooou Charlie. Here in America, I got just as much a right to say I think war with Iraq is wrong. Hell, it ain’t even a right, It’s a responsibility. And you dishonor my dead shipmates by saying otherwise. Feel free to disagree with me. I served 20 years to give you that right. My shipmates died for it.
Scott Rosenberg, the publisher of salon.com, wrote a stunning piece about the coming war in his weblog this week. It should be required reading for everyone.
Here’s an excerpt:
In the name of protecting the U.S. from terror attacks, [Bush] is launching us on a campaign of imperialism; in smashing open Saddam Hussein’s dormant nest of horrors, he will spread the seeds of destruction to a thousand new plots. These are not just vague, eve-of-war fears. In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.
We all can use some levity today, I think. So, in lieu of a Homeland Security icon, or a “countdown to the showdown” clock, I present the following things that made me smile today:
www.flickr.com
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