A Pilgrim’s Digression

The New York Times has an article today speculating that Microsoft is girding itself for war with Google and Yahoo. Judging from the picture of Microsoft chairman Steve Ballmer attached to the article, I would guess he is the cave troll the company is going to use to batter down the gates of the Google citadel. I’ve never seen a picture of the man in which he looked even half-way human-like.

And yet, although people have long noted the general creepiness of the man [see the Ballmer Monkey Dance video], no one as yet has remarked upon his resemblance to the Frankenstein monster in Young Frankenstein.

The resemblance to Peter Boyle is uncanny. Here are some shots for comparison.

By the way, in that last shot of Ballmer, I think he must be praying that Longhorn actually meets its next proposed release date.

On Sunday, I bought my first lawn mower and weed trimmer. Talking about such things as lawn care machinery, I feel rather like Hank from the cartoon King of the Hill. But I have indeed discovered a new found interest in the subject.

After a couple weeks in which the yard went un-mowed, it had reached such an unruly state this weekend that either I had to break down and buy a mower, or else I was going to have to commit to using a regular lawn care service. Despite my professed non-work ethic, I decided to undertake the care of our lawn myself.

A few weeks ago, I paid a man from the neighborhood to mow our lawn, and he did not do a good job. He missed too many spots, and since he only used a riding lawn mower, there were some places he refused to mow at all because he said the slope was too steep or the grass too high. So I figured if I wanted it done right, I would have to do it myself.

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Every time a new Bin Laden audio tape surfaces, he is always portrayed as “desperate” for relevance. We’ve got him “on the run” or he “sounds weak and tired.”

Never mind that this is a man who has eluded us for four years, but who still has the resources to make press releases.

Now we have the Zarqawi video [Zarqawi Taunts U.S. In Video], and we are hearing the same kinds of wishful thinking. He’s “desperate” to prove he is still relevant; or he realizes the insurgency has lost. Or as an Iraqi aide to PM Jafari said, “Now [Zarqawi and his terrorists] have seen that the government has broken the deadlock, they are feeling this might be the last chance they have to survive.”

Spare me. I’ve heard it all before. Every milestone, every election, we have been treated to the same wishful thinking: this election, this milestone, will break the back of the insurgency.

Call me defeatist if you want, but I am tired of the wishful thinking. That’s all we have now: wishful thinking. No plan, no more money for reconstruction, just the fervant wish that the Iraqis will get their act together and that the insurgency will just evaporate like a bad dream, so we can get the hell out of that snake pit.

The Zarqawi video is interesting on a number of levels, mostly for its details, not for what Zarqawi says. In terms of what he does say, he also engages in a bit of wishful thinking when he says that American troops aren’t willing to fight and that they take drugs and commit suicide. There are a small number of troops who are drug addicted, and there have been suicides, but that’s really irrelevant and means nothing, in terms of whether we are “losing” the war against the insurgency.

What is more interesting to me is that Zarqawi does not wear a mask. Apparently, he considers it pointless, since his face is already known. However, that may prove a mistake, since now American soldiers looking for him have a more recent portrait.

Zarqawi looks fat and healthy. His face is chubby and tanned. He hasn’t been spending any time in a spider hole.

Also, I haven’t heard this remarked upon, but in the scenes in which Zarqawi is holding or firing a rifle, the rifle looks like an American rifle, possibly even an M4. I’m no expert; however, it certainly is not the standard issue terrorist Kalishnikov.

Zarqawi may wish to prove that he is still a factor in the insurgency, but I would not get my hopes up that this means the insurgency is on its last legs or anything, as Dick Cheney has so often repeatedly told us.

What it does mean is that like a gopher, Zarqawi has stuck his head out of his hole for the first time since 2003. This is our chance to whack him, if we can. It’s a good chance, too. I won’t be surprised if this video results in his capture or death in the next few weeks or months.

But maybe that is just wishful thinking as well.

President Bush caught a break yesterday. One of his favorite authors, Natan Sharansky, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he not only defended the President, but aggrandized him as “the dissident President.”

On a typical day, the President Bush I see on TV is difficult to recognize in the pages of the Journal; even the pencil drawing of him that accompanies Journal articles is based on the official portrait of Bush made in 2001, in which the President still looks like a smirky young man who has just pulled the biggest fast one ever devised by a frat boy. Hardly the beaten-down, saggy-eyed President we know today.

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There is an article on blogging at “Opinion Journal”, the online op-ed page for the Wall Street Journal. Titled Disinhibition Nation, the author, Daniel Henninger, contends that the Internet is breeding a generation of social misfits who not only do not learn acceptable social behavior, but find among other anonymous bloggers justification and respect for their anti-social behavior.

As well as citing the recent case of a wanna-be cannibal who also happened to be a blogger, Henninger points to the extreme language used in comments on political blogs. Curiously, as examples of this “intense” language, he only quotes the cursing common on Democratic/Liberal blogs.

After reading his article, I have to believe that on Conservative blogs, everyone calmly drinks virtual tea and whispers quietly in proper English about their beloved fellow patriots in the Democratic party. Meanwhile, a soft cuckoo clock chimes in the background.

And of course, no comments are allowed on Henninger’s article. Believe me, I looked; I’ve become quite used to scrolling to the bottom of an article and voicing my opinion. When the comment box isn’t there, I feel slighted.

Speaking for myself, I was a social misfit long before the Internet. I haven’t found myself less inhibited by my blog. So far, I have not experienced any urges to cannibalism. And although I may occasionally mutter a “fuck” or some other curse, when Republicans irritate me, I don’t think my language is exceptionally intense. I realize full well, I am not the norm. I wouldn’t be a misfit, otherwise.

But if silence is the alternative to a raucous, obscene, offensive, and completely open forum for discourse, I’ll take obscenity. I know those who believe social discourse should be controlled will disagree, but to me, the great thing about the Internet is that even cannibals can have a blog. Even fools can express an opinion and be roundly laughed at. Those who can’t reason can utter curses instead. And even social misfits can feel that someone cares, and for a little while, the loneliness dissipates.

Pay No Attention [a poem]

Pay no attention to ill tidings;

Pessimism is harmful to morale.

Feel free to disregard

All those of an opposite opinion.

They are either loons or traitors.

Truth is simple, if you don’t think about it.

Ignore those who say otherwise.

Or else denounce them publicly,

With reference to their moral failings.

Dismiss the 2,370 killed

[April 18, 2006; 12:15 PM].

The number is paltry, really,

Compared to previous wars.

Especially when only American dead are counted.

Pay no attention.

Be proud.

Join us in our pride.

Don’t be one of the doom and gloomers,

One of the naysayers on the loony left,

A dead-ender, or a cut-and-runner.

Be one of us, the proud and the brave.

Look, People, freedom is messy,

And we never said it was going to be easy.

Or if we did say it was going to be easy,

We have changed our minds.

It is our prerogative to change our minds

As necessity dictates.

Unlike our dastardly opponents.

Do not throw our words back at us,

As we do to you.

They did greet us,

Perhaps not with flowers,

But they greeted us nonetheless.

Some were even happy.

Pay no attention to all the negativity.

Our good intentions make us irreproachable.

If our actions in furtherance of our good intentions

Sometimes fall short of the ideal,

These are the bad acts of a few lone evil-doers.

They aren’t one of us.

Pay no attention to them.

You can be proud

Of our noble men and women,

Not to mention our brave leaders,

Who daily suffer the stab in the back

From slimy, traitorous internal enemies.

Nothing else matters

But our pride.

Be proud, be proud.

Done. Done. Done.  The hard part of moving is over. As of about eleven o’clock yesterday, we are officially living in a new house, with all our stuff around us. We still have to clean our old house, in hopes of getting our security deposit back, and there is still plenty of unpacking to do, and there are still a myriad of little jobs to do around the house.

But as Lynn says, we’re not on a deadline anymore. We’re done with deadlines. We are living in our new house, and we’ve got months or years to do whatever it is we feel needs to be done next.

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The cable guy is coming today to turn on our cable at our new house, but we aren’t actually moving until next Tuesday. Thus, since he will also turn off our cable at our old house, I will be out of touch with my blog after about three o’clock today. We aren’t moving into the new house until Tuesday, so I am expecting a long, painful Internet detox over the next few days.

Like Robinson Crusoe, it’s primitive as can be…

Everything is coming together very quickly now. In addition to having the cable and other utilities turned on, we are also having some furniture delivered today. Back in February (maybe even as long ago as January), we bought a new kitchen table with chairs, an oak computer armoire for my office, and a couple matching oak bookshelves. We kept postponing delivery because we knew we would be buying a home within the next month or two.

In the end, it has taken longer to buy a home than we imagined at the time, but I’m glad we held off on the furniture delivery. Our current house is in full-blown “move” mode, meaning the place is rapidly beginning to look like a warehouse. Having more furniture in this place would have cluttered things up even more.

In other news, we are starting to worry that our current landlord is looking for an excuse to keep some or all of our security deposit.

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Monday as I worked, I listened to almost the entire three hours of the Rush Limbaugh program. Much of the program was taken up with a discussion of a film premiering at the end of the month, United 93, which concerns the events of 9/11 from the perspective of passengers of United Flight 93, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.

At least one other film, a made for TV movie that received good reviews, has been made on the subject, so it’s hard to tell what a Hollywood production adds to this well known story. Yet Oliver Stone has a 9/11 movie in production as well, so apparently there is an audience for these kinds of films. Hollywood execs don’t expend money on a film unless they think it will make a pile of money for them in return.

My question is, will you see it, or will you skip it?

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Recently, I’ve been interested in reading more about terrorism in the 1980’s and the response of the United States to terrorism. I think my interest was first piqued a few months ago, when I read a post on the blog of a Conservative who sometimes stops by here, Crazy Politico. Titled The First Duty is to Remember, it’s a well written personal account of the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut by an eyewitness to the aftermath. It is an event I had largely forgotten over the ensuing years.

While looking for information about the bombing, as well as the 1998 embassy bombings, I came across an article published in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence. Titled “Explaining the United States Decision to Strike Back at Terrorists,” the article attempts to explain why United States Presidents have only occasionally chosen overt military action as a response to terrorism.

Published in the summer 2001 edition of the journal, this article by Michele Malvesti provides a fascinating look into what is commonly termed “the pre-9/11 mindset.” Malvesti also provides some interesting facts and statistics.

For example, she states that “Over a 16-year period, from 1983 to 1998, more than 2,400 incidents of international terrorism were directed against the citizens, facilities and interests of the United States throughout the world. Over 600 US citizens lost their lives and nearly 1,900 others sustained injuries in these attacks.” To me, those figures are pretty staggering, although without a doubt we lost more citizens in one day on 9/11/01 than we lost in that entire 16 year period. Yet still, the numbers are pretty startling, when placed together, undistinguished by context.

Of the six hundred terrorism-related deaths over that sixteen year time period, 241 of those deaths were of U.S. service members killed in the Marine Barracks bombing in 1983. That bombing was an act of war, if there ever was one. It was later laid at the feet of Syrian and Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah agents. Yet by the standards of the Bush Doctrine, President Reagan’s response was inadequate.

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