Ah, Romance!
Is this, finally, the death of the Romantics? These head-in-the-clouds dreamers?
I've never seen such a mythological view of the world, as presented by the folks who howled for this war - and I live on the southwest coast of Canada, home of more flakes than Kellogg's. Plus I work in an organic bakery attached to a health food store. Nuts? Flakes? We don't just sell 'em, they work here.
But for all the airy-fairy New Age Aquarian insanity I hear every day, for all the paranoid governmental/pharmalogical/military(ical) conspiracy theories I argue against, there has been nothing quite like the bright-eyed gung-ho optimism that launched the war in Iraq.
The fear was always there, and easy to reach - the fear got the foot in the door. But visions of mothers wearing burkhas, churches being burned down, and daughters being denied all rights could only cow people, not encourage them. So away went the stick, and out came the carrot:
Not only will Iraq become America's bestest buddy in the whole world (they said), but it will be cheap and easy! With our military, no one will get hurt except those nasty folks who really, really deserve it! The people, the common man in the street, have secretly been pining for a convicted felon and con-man to lead them to a new world of buttercups and innocence (and Bic Macs)! Twenty minutes, tops! No new taxes!
Now we end up with a chaotic mess, and three prominent cheerleaders coming to the sad realization that their uniforms are ripped in embarassing places, their pom poms are threadbare, reality is raining on the parade and making thier hair go all flat and they just wanna go HOME!
MOOOOOM!
Somehow, somehow as pathetic as these figures are, all my sympathy for them seems to have been used up. You could see the mistakes they were making, you tried to tell them where it was all going to go wrong, but they were cheerleaders, and you obviously weren't, so they didn't have to listen to you. They, you see, sat at the Kewl Krew table.
I wonder if that makes the crow taste any better?
I've never seen such a mythological view of the world, as presented by the folks who howled for this war - and I live on the southwest coast of Canada, home of more flakes than Kellogg's. Plus I work in an organic bakery attached to a health food store. Nuts? Flakes? We don't just sell 'em, they work here.
But for all the airy-fairy New Age Aquarian insanity I hear every day, for all the paranoid governmental/pharmalogical/military(ical) conspiracy theories I argue against, there has been nothing quite like the bright-eyed gung-ho optimism that launched the war in Iraq.
The fear was always there, and easy to reach - the fear got the foot in the door. But visions of mothers wearing burkhas, churches being burned down, and daughters being denied all rights could only cow people, not encourage them. So away went the stick, and out came the carrot:
Not only will Iraq become America's bestest buddy in the whole world (they said), but it will be cheap and easy! With our military, no one will get hurt except those nasty folks who really, really deserve it! The people, the common man in the street, have secretly been pining for a convicted felon and con-man to lead them to a new world of buttercups and innocence (and Bic Macs)! Twenty minutes, tops! No new taxes!
Now we end up with a chaotic mess, and three prominent cheerleaders coming to the sad realization that their uniforms are ripped in embarassing places, their pom poms are threadbare, reality is raining on the parade and making thier hair go all flat and they just wanna go HOME!
MOOOOOM!
Somehow, somehow as pathetic as these figures are, all my sympathy for them seems to have been used up. You could see the mistakes they were making, you tried to tell them where it was all going to go wrong, but they were cheerleaders, and you obviously weren't, so they didn't have to listen to you. They, you see, sat at the Kewl Krew table.
I wonder if that makes the crow taste any better?
Labels: Politics
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