A Pilgrim’s Digression

When a writer titles a piece “The truth about…” you can safely guess that what follows is chock full of the writer’s opinions. Everyone wants their opinion to be accepted as truth. Some people make a career of passing off opinion as truth, like the con man who thrives by passing fake hundred dollars bills to unsuspecting store clerks.

Thus Michelle Malkin’s column, today, is titled The Truth About Haditha, and as one might expect there is little truth in what she writes and lots of opinion.

Since March, when Time magazine first reported the story, there has been a storm brewing over charges that several marines murdered about two dozen Iraqis, including women and children, following an IED attack in the Iraqi town of Haditha. I make no claim at knowing “the truth” about what occurred at Haditha. However, my opinion about the Haditha incident is that when the final military report is released in the next week or two, in terms of its destructive, demoralizing effect, Haditha is going to make Abu Ghraib look like a Boyscout jamboree.

To some extent, Michelle Malkin’s rationalizations and attempts to cast doubt on what the hated “mainstream media” is reporting about Haditha can be seen as an understandable response to something that is going to be extremely painful for the American people to hear: on November 19, 2005, some marines murdered Iraqi civilians–women, children, cripples, and the elderly–apparently out of vengeance for the loss of one of their own.

And yet, much of what Malkin writes is not merely a consciously defensive gesture meant at warding off the great pain to come. For Malkin, the defense of the indefensible is instinctual. Among Conservatives generally, the defense has begun quietly; but I guarantee once the military releases its findings, other apologists will join Malkin in going to great lengths to either justify what these particular marines have done, or else to discredit and verbally assault all those who dare utter a word in reproach to the soldiers in question or America in general.

In her very first sentence, Malkin has already begun sharpening her ad hominem knives by referring to Congressman John Murtha as John “Cut and Run” Murtha. Then she goes on to trot out the old O.J. defense, “Innocent until proven guilty.” Her use of such a fatuous argument is almost too banal to merit comment, except that she has probably derided Democrats for the same sloppy thinking. The American public is perfectly free to, in Malkin’s words, “render a verdict” or not, and there is no shame in reading the papers and blogs and over the course of time, coming to an opinion about a topic.

I’ve just never been particularly persuaded by those who scream “innocent until proven guilty” when some beloved person or cherished idea is under assault. Just as people who claim to know the truth about something rarely do, so people who insist on reserving judgement until “all the facts are in” have probably already made up their minds. At the very least, they have made up their minds to ignore the facts and defend whatever position they took to begin with.

Malkin also introduces irrelevancies into her argument, in order to cloud the issue with emotion. In an apparent nod to the “truth” mentioned in her title, Malkin writes:

I also know this: Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, the Marine who was killed by a roadside IED (improvised explosive device) that day, followed a proud family tradition of military service…One of his fellow Marines said Terrazas’s body was split in two by the bomb explosion that rocked his Hummer while on patrol that morning.

To my mind, it is simply not relevant that Terrazas “followed a proud tradition of military service” or that his body was ripped apart by the bomb. Terrazas was the victim of an unrelated murder. If Malkin wants to argue that the Marines were temporarily insane because of the death of their fellow soldier, she ought to hire Alan Dershowitz or some other famed, leftist defense attorney to defend the accused marines. Temporary insanity is one of the most ridiculously abused defenses available to a defendant.

It remains to be seen whether or not Haditha was the hottest battlefield in Iraq that day, as Malkin contends. According to the New York Times, initial reports were that the 24 civilians were killed by a roadside bomb. The claim at the time was not that the victims were hit in crossfire, nor that they were bombed accidentally from the air, accidents typical of the fog of war. Therefore the claim that the victims were blown up by an insurgent bomb must have been an outright lie on the part of the marines initially reporting to their superiors about the incident. This suggest that the “fog of battle” defense won’t fly, either.

As it turned out, a military investigation concluded in February that “among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines’ story were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest” (Military inquiry said to oppose account of raid).

If you get close enough to someone to put three rounds center of mass, you are close enough to determine that you are shooting a woman, a baby, or a crippled old man. Battlefield or not, marines are trained to cooly and calmly deal with the stress of battle and make decisions that do not result in dead women and children. Thus the idea that these killings were accidental or the result of terrorist action seems unlikely at this point, based on what military investigators have already found.

Malkin then goes on to state another irrelevant but, as she says, “incontrovertible fact”:

There are countless numbers of anti-war zealots on the American Left rooting for failure. They believe the worst about the troops. They’ve blindly embraced frauds who’ve lied about their military service and lied about wartime atrocities. They’ve allied themselves with socialist kooks and coddled murderous dictators. They are looking for any excuse to pull out, abandon military operations and reconstruction, and impeach the president.

They insist on giving suspected foreign terrorists more benefit of the doubt than our own men and women in uniform. And that, I know, I am not willing to do.

How this has any bearing on the issue at hand is beyond me. Even if true that the left is “rooting for failure,” just because the left supposedly want to “believe the worst about the troops” is no reason to defend murderers or malign those who speak out against the murderers. It’s almost as if she is is saying, “Since the Left is ready to believe the worst, we must put our blinders on and believe only the best.”

In a way, that has been the attitude of the Right since the beginning of the war in Iraq.

Finally, in her last comment, Malkin not only departs from the truth, but she takes a red eye flight to Wonderland when she states, “And I will remind you that while the murder of civilians is and remains an anomaly in American military history, it is the jihadists’ way of life.”

Which part of this specious argument to deal with first. Let’s take the last premise, “It’s the jihadists’ way of life.” Again, this is irrelevant. The Japanese were murderers, too, in many ways far more vicious than the Islamic terrorists we face today. During the occupation of Nanking, Japanese soldiers used Chinese men and male children for bayonet practice, and what they did to women and girls was infinitely worse. No one would seriously claim that therefore the Allies had the right to murder Japanese civilians in similarly barbaric ways. Malkin suggests exactly that; or at the very least, she suggests that somehow the crimes of these marines are somehow mitigated by the evil of the enemy they face.

While I am on the subject of World War II, let’s address Malkin’s point that “the murder of civilians is and remains an anomaly in American military history.” Apparently, Malkin does not consider dropping a bomb from the air to be murder. Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki…maybe those bombings were necessary–I am not disputing that–but what else is it but murder when you knowingly drop massive, incendiary bombs on a civilian center?

If you read Paul Fussell’s book, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, he recounts how much like today’s Pentagon, which asserts with confidence that its bombs are so accurate they never hit an unintended target, during WWII the military asserted much the same thing. In 1945, it was a new kind of bomb sight that supposedly rendered bombing so accurate; but the bombardiers who actually used the sight and did the bombing knew that it was likely they were killing an untold number of civilians each time they released a payload.

Fussell also relates stories of what even Malkin would consider murder: for example, soldiers in the Pacific who were so deeply bitten by hatred for the Japanese that they executed Japanese soldiers who surrendered.

The murder of civilians is an “anomaly” in the American military? Come on, Michelle. Grow up. Conservatives are the ones who are supposed to be tough as steel; tough enough to shrug at civilian casualties in war. Conservatives are the ones who remind us that war is hell, and that we on the left are a bunch of sissies for worrying about “collateral damage,” as dead civilians are known in military parlance. Some Conservatives (Michael Savage) have even argued that it is necessary to be even more brutal in our prosecution of war, if we are to truly intimidate and defeat the terrorists. Conservatives know as well as anyone that the murder of civilians has been a prominent feature of war since time immemorial.

Just yesterday, in a story titled Letter on Korean War Massacre Reveals Plan to Shoot Refugees, The Washington Post reported that in 1950, with approval at the highest levels of Government, the United States Army committed a mass murder of hundreds of North Korean refugees trying to escape to the South. In a rather ironic twist of fate, the company that followed orders and initiated this slaughter was George A. Custer’s own 7th Cavalry regiment. The massacre at No Gun Ri was kept secret for fifty years, until 1999. The reason such acts seem anomalous is that for one thing, the government tries very hard to keep such shameful incidents from ever coming to light, and for another thing, the American people willingly participate in ignoring such stories because no one wants to believe that it could ever be true.

Perhaps one of the most terrible consequences of what those marines did in Haditha is that now, the media is going to start asking “How many other Hadithas are there?”

When Malkin finds out the answer to that question, she might have to spin us a new definition of the word “anomaly.”

I still remember the day my mother took me to the Mason county, West Virginia, health department for my pre-Kindergarten checkup. It was a sunny, warm day, probably in May or early June 1978. We drove there in our white, mid-seventies model Dodge Dart with mustard-yellow vinyl interior.

That car is still sort of the primal car, for me. We owned it for so long–until at least 1985–that it is the usual form of transportation when I am having one of those crossing over types of dreams in which past and present mingle bizarrely. On trips to Parkersburg to visit family, I used to stretch out on the back seat and look at the sky passing overhead out the rear window. No one wore seat belts in 1978, least of all children.

Cars in those days had flat bench seats, as well, which made stretching out and (probably) copulating much more comfortable. I don’t speak from experience on copulation in old cars, however.

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On April 16, Brendan turned five years old.  I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that fact.  I thought we still had a baby, but as it turned out, we are now raising a little boy.

Apparently, the fifth birthday is a big one, because everyone in the family wanted to give him a birthday party.  One weekend, we travelled to West Virginia so my family could give him a party; the next weekend, we travelled to Pittsburgh so my wife’s family could give him a party.  We had planned to give him a party back home in Virginia, as well, so he could have some friends over, but after all the partying we did in other places, we were sick of it.

And by then it was early May anyway.  A month of birthdays.  That’s probably why now, Brendan is still saying, “On my next birthday, I want…”, because he probably expects his next birthday to be next week.

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Thanks to my friend David for an interesting quiz he pointed me to (I am home today with a sick child, so I have time for quizzes). By asking some difficult questions, it tells you what kind of Christian apologist you are.

Here are my results. As I told David, I have no idea what a fideist is. It sounds like it’s from the Latin “fido,” so that means I must be a faithful dog lover. Seriously, though, I think this time the results of the quiz are pretty right on the mark. I do tend to be an anti-rationalist when it comes to Christianity. The absurdity of belief in Christ is the attraction, to me.

You scored as Fideist. You are a fideist! You love to read Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth. Knowing God is a personal thing, so you believe that the best case for Christianity is made on a subjective level. Fideist 63% Classical Apologist 43% Evidentialist 30% Reformed/Presuppositional Apologist 7% Atheist 7%

What kind of apologist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Whether a person is a Senator, Congressman, Congressional staffer, page, or other federal employee, people come to Washington with high hopes at the prospect of doing rewarding, meaningful work. Especially in regards to the Congressmen, I often wonder at how quickly they pass into obscurity after leaving Washington, despite the vauntedness of their ambitions.

Unless, like Duke Cunningham, one distinguishes one’s term in office with hedonistic scandal involving bribery, prostitutes, and pleasure boats, a Congressman is rarely remembered beyond his date of “separation” from the Government, as it is quaintly termed in HR lingo.

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Last Thursday, I had an unfortunate experience with a beggar that I have been struggling to find a way to write about. I’ve become quite calloused in my response to panhandlers, and what I have to recognize about myself is that the callous was always there, really. I have just covered it with a silky veil of hypocritical pity.

I first visited Washington, D.C., when I was a senior in High School in 1991. That year, I took a class called Humanities, solely for the reason that every year in April, the teacher took her students on a class trip to Washington. Probably many other people took the class in order to go on the trip as well; certainly, they did not take the class because they were eager to read Oedipus Rex or learn to appreciate the high art that is Mozart’s Così fan tutte.

I have an excellent recall of many things that happened on that trip, chief among them an incident that occurred on the way to Ford’s theatre.

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Yesterday, myself and a co-worker, whom I shall call Dwight, ate lunch together in the Rayburn House Office Building cafeteria. When you first come to Washington, finding an inexpensive, but good place to have lunch on Capitol Hill is like finding a good lover in a crowd of high-priced, low quality prostitutes.

It takes wallet-depleting trial and error, and a willingness to occasionally taste something nasty, but when you find her you go back again and again.

The Rayburn cafeteria is a real find. It’s easily the best of the cafeterias in the House and Senate offices, and it’s also very cheap. The best meal is the turkey and dressing with mashed potatoes. For $5.50, you get a delicious, heaping plate of food plus a Diet Coke. Yesterday, for the same price, I got two stuffed green peppers in tomato sauce and a side of green peas.

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I think the intense heat generated over the issue of illegal immigration, and the anger among Conservatives, is out of proportion to the problem. The people I hear on the radio often talk about illegal immigrants as if the crime they committed is somehow tantamount to mass murder. I don’t understand that. Few people propose that someone bilking the welfare system should be taken out and shot, but it is not uncommon to hear someone propose that the border patrol should be able to shoot people crossing the border illegally.

On the Chris Core show on Monday, he had a caller, an African-American man no less, who was extremely angry over illegal immigration. The caller actually proposed that the National Guard should be placed on the border where they would be allowed to shoot people entering the country illegally. Core took him seriously, too. It was really astonishing.

Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times. People today more readily express themselves in overblown, angry rhetoric, than in reasoned, modulated tones. It’s a simple thing to sit in your car and call a radio show and suggest that a National Guard soldier take aim and shoot dead a Mexican crossing the border illegally. What the telephone bloviator does not consider is who is doing the shooting. What kind of man could pull that trigger?

These Guard soldiers are citizens who, when their two-week shift is up, will go back to their jobs as a school teacher or fireman or construction worker, or whatever. Do you really want citizens who are capable, let alone allowed, to shoot people for crossing a border?

People use that kind of hyperbolic language all the time, however. Leakers in the CIA should be taken out and shot as traitors–I’ve heard that one just recently on the Michael Savage program. I don’t think otherwise normal people talked like this, before the rise of Conservative talk radio.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying talk radio should be silenced. I just wonder if people realize how talk radio has changed our discourse in America from one of calm, reasoned debate to fiery attacks and denunciations?

There’s a great, brief post over at the New Republic that pokes fun at Conservative book titles. How angry they are! I don’t know which is funniest, Anne Coulter’s The Church of Liberalism: Godless, or Sean Hannity’s book title, Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberals. Yes, Liberals, he is equating you with terrorists and despots. Rejoice in your malignancy! Thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s blog for the tip about that New Republic post.

In 1971, was it common to hear people say that Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers story to the New York Times, should be taken out and shot as a traitor? I’d be interested in hearing from people who were alive and paying attention, back then.

I listened to the President’s speech on immigration Monday evening, without having heard any of the pre-speech analysis that too often predetermines the after-speech response. Setting aside the content of the speech, for a moment, I thought it was a good move on the part of the President. For a couple days, he took back the news cycle and made his ideas the focus of the reporting, rather than the stasis and infighting that seems to have gripped the Republican party.

Whether this will stop the Republican party’s slide towards defeat in November, I don’t know, but it does prove one thing: Democrats cannot expect Republicans to sit on their hands and let the Democrats take control of the Congress. There are six months to go, and Republicans can still turn things around quite easily.

The speech itself was a very careful speech, however, markedly different from the bold, challenging statements the President has made at past times of crisis. The ideas he offered seemed middling, to me; they were parsed in such a way as to not incite the Conservatives further, and not to alienate the Hispanic immigrant bloc. Unfortunately, judging by reaction I’ve heard and read, the President nonetheless suceedded in doing both. Conservatives aren’t happy, and Hispanics are organizing against his plan (Immigrant Supporters to Counter Bush Speech).

The boldest statement he made was in the beginning, when he admitted, “We do not yet have full control of our borders.” And this was bold solely because it begs the question, “Why don’t we have full control of our borders? And who is responsible for that failure?”

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There is one topic close to my heart, which I have never written about here at my blog. Dear Reader, I have never told you of my love for The Simpsons.

This is a love that stretches back in time to the very beginning, to the year 1989, before The Simpsons was even a television program.

In 1989, I was but a newly pubescent youth with little taste, and my parents liked to watch The Tracey Ullman Show on Sunday evenings. Tracey Ullman’s comedy has been an acquired taste for me, but at the time, I did rather like the short cartoons starring the Simpsons family that aired in between Ullman’s sketches.

When the Simpsons got their own program, I watched more out of curiosity than obsession, at that point.

Obsession came soon enough, however; and it was greatly facilitated, unintentionally, by the growing discontent with the program among parents and educators. Bart Simpson was a bad influence, it seemed.

I was a freshman in High School in 1989, and sometime in that first year, kids began wearing Bart Simpson t-shirts to school. Most seemed harmless enough, even then, except that Bart was viewed as such a delinquent.

However, for whatever reasons, the school administration finally decided to take action, and all students were forbidden to wear any clothing depicting Bart or the Simpsons generally. The t-shirt that may have been the principal instigator of all this fuss was perhaps this one, depicting Bart asking, “I’m Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?”

Instead of squelching interest in the TV program and its bad boy, Bart Simpson, the ban only increased my interest. I started watching more intently, just to see what all the brouhaha was about.

It’s difficult to recall why the Simpsons was so controversial, but it basically had to do with the depiction of a dysfunctional family on TV. The Simpsons don’t seem particularly dysfunctional today, but in that first season, Homer did choke Bart a few times, out of anger.

In 1989, the Cosby Show was still at the top of its run, and dysfunction was considered somehow dangerous to the mushy minds of Americans who (gasp) might conclude that dysfunctional families are (double gulp) normal.

Yes, Maggie, there is no Santa (Homer is Santa Claus). And when he’s not completely ignoring his children, Dad likes to lie on the couch in his underwear, drinking a Duff while his children watch a violent cartoon, named “Itchy and Scratchy,” on TV.

To me, it was completely refreshing to watch this depiction of how family life is not supposed to be, slightly exaggerated though it might be.

When I went away to college in the nineties, I did not always have cable, or a TV for that matter, so I watched the show only irregularly. This was before the era of DVD. I don’t know if the Simpsons was ever released on VHS, but I probably couldn’t have afforded them anyway. Do you remember how much it used to cost to buy a set of VHS tapes for an entire season of a TV show?

When I graduated college in the mid-nineties, I started watching the show again. Then a few years ago came the DVDs. Last year, I began renting a DVR from my cable company, and so I have even been able to catch up with this season’s episodes. Sometime next year, we can look forward to the first, full-length Simpsons film, the contents of which is a closely guarded secret. Anticipation is running high, in my household.

And then there is my toy collection. Oh yes, no pop culture obsession is complete without action figures and Burger King happy meal toys.

Last weekend, in addition to unpacking and shelving my books in our new home, I also unpacked, cleaned, and shelved my Simpsons toy collection. Here are a few pictures for you.

My collection is housed on two tall bookshelves. This first picture is of the top half of the two shelves.

And here is the bottom half.

And here is a close-up of the whole Simpsons family in their living room and kitchen.

These figures were released by Playmates toys between 2000 and 2005. Most of the characters from the TV show were molded into a figure. My biggest disappointment is that even though both George W. Bush and his father have appeared as characters on The Simpsons, Playmates never released a figure of them. It would have been the best-selling figure they ever made.

Besides these figures, I also own a set of the original Simpsons figures released back in the early nineties. My mother-in-law found these for me in, of all places, a thrift store.

I also own complete sets of the Burger King Simpsons toys given away a couple years ago. One of the benefits of having a child is you can buy kid’s meals without feeling like a complete fool. However, how good can you feel about yourself, ultimately, when you are buying Burger King food for your kid so you can have his kid’s meal toys?

If you look down in the lower right corner of the photo of the lower half of my collection, you’ll see some plush Simpsons dolls. These are the seed kernel of my collection. They were a Burger King giveaway from 1990 or 1991. I bought them all. However, when I went away to college, my evil step-brother sold my toys, as well as some other vintage items I had been saving, namely an Atari with about twenty or twenty-five games.

About a year ago, I replaced these lost items via eBay, at a cost of about $25.00. Most Simpsons toys and collectibles are still fairly priced on-line, the exception being the “Treehouse of Horror” playsets in the Playmates line of toys. Some of these sell on eBay for more than a hundred dollars because they come with multiple figures and were rarely found in stores.

Because I don’t have these sets, my collection is incomplete. I do intend to buy these last items one day, however.

Right now, Simpsons collecting is rather slow, with the end of the Playmates line last year. McFarlane toys has a new line of sculpted scenes from the show, such as Family Couch Gag, but it’s unclear how many of these products McFarlane is going to make. Only one, Ironic Punishment, is currently available. Mine arrived a couple weeks ago and resides on my shelf with the other toys.

In closing, one thing I want to make clear is that I don’t collect toys solely in order to display them. Brendan plays with my Simpsons toys. I encourage him to play with these toys, because that is what they were created for, ultimately. I am not the kind of Collector who keeps toys in sealed, pristine packages (c.f., episode 1104, “Treehouse of Horror X”).