| Submit your comments on this article |
| If I could write... |
| 2001-12-30 |
| If I could write, I'd like to write like P.J. O'Rourke: A child of nine or ten, wearing a F**K WAR T-shirt without the asterisks, harangued some police officers. The officers could not keep straight faces. Most of the other demonstrators were of college age, with subdermal ink, transdermal hardware, and haircuts from the barber college on Mars. But people my age were present too, and beginning to resemble Bertrand Russell, especially the women. Then I saw him: a hippie in a walker wearing a hearing aid. Sic transit generation gap. Or Mark Steyn: If you're wondering what the secret of my success is, it's as simple as George W Bush himself: know nothing. In this war, expertise is vastly overrated. Nothing is so certain as that, when a man appears on television with the words "Professor of Middle Eastern Studies" under his name, everything he says will prove to be utter rubbish. Likewise, all the fellows with decades of experience in the Muslim world, such as Robert Fisk of the Independent. (Sample Fisk headlines: "Bush is Walking into a Trap", "It Could Become More Costly Than Vietnam", "There is No Easy Way for the West to Sort This Out".) Even if one cannot rise to the Rutkowski challenge, surely one should be expected occasionally to get something right, especially if one works for publications that jeered endlessly at what a moron Bush is. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |