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| Mark Steyn: metaphor versus reality |
| 2007-10-29 |
| . . . enjoyable as they are, pop-culture metaphors aren't really of much use, especially when you're up against cultures where life is still defined by how you live as opposed to what you experience via media. It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation's Vietnam "quagmire," older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam – the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot – but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store mélange of "The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse." Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go – except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class. It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it – sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself – but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll. There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 Steyn is always worth the read.. |
| Posted by: Red Dawg 2007-10-29 19:12 |
| #2 Actually there is a more sinister (and cowardly) aspect to the Left's retreat into fantasyland: The real Jihad is terrifying, as are the other terroristic ideologies. All you have to do is read Michael Yon's article on what Al Qaeda would do to children and you'll have nightmares for a week. Faced with this fear, (and very real danger) it is easier and safer to let out all your rage at someone (like Christians) who aren't going to kill you. That is why the Left hates Bush so much. They can't admit they're afraid of those little brown people and they don't want to sound like a bunch of right wingers. They also don't want to admit they have no idea how to defend themselves. So they define the problem as a rightwing conspiracy and then they can ignore the threat. Al |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2007-10-29 18:50 |
| #1 I like this part: "Happy the land for whom crossfire is purely televisual and metaphorical. But, when it turns real, it's important to know the difference." |
| Posted by: newc 2007-10-29 11:24 |