03-23-2011, 04:36 PM
I don't read newspapers much anymore because they have become the printed version of network 'news'. When they all eventually lose their jobs because they obfuscate the truth or simply ignore it, and soon realize their is no private sector market for their 'talent', maybe then they will have their "Oh My God What Have I Become" moment.
WHEN GOVERNMENTS ATTACK!
Steyn on Culture
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review
It isnât easy being a public-sector-union leader these days. âThis is beyond insane,â said Steve Smith, president of the Providence Teachersâ Union in Rhode Island, reacting to the cityâs latest outrageous provocation. âLetâs create the most chaos and the highest level of anxiety in a district where teachers are already under unbelievable stress. Now I know how the United States State Department felt on December 7, 1941.â
Critics took President Smithâs remark as the usual self-aggrandizing comparison of timeserving desk-jockeys to men of action in the thick of it. Except, of course, that Mr. Smith wasnât comparing himself to anyone in the general vicinity of Hawaii but to a bunch of similarly desk-bound bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Washington. What does he mean? That the Japanese bombs created the chaos and the State Department had to clear it up? Or is it some sort of Pearl Harbor truther allusion? Like brave Rhode Island educators, certain State Department officials knew exactly what was coming but nobody would listen to them?
But Iâm getting ahead of myself. Reporting for the Providence Journal, Linda Borg, mindful of the fact that most of her readers have been educated by members of Mr. Smithâs union, felt obliged to add a more basic clarification: âThat was the day the Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor.â
December 7, 1941: a day that shall live in infamy, but not in Providence.
By the way, thatâs why Americaâs monodailies are dying. Maybe theyâd die anyway, but wouldnât it be more fun and more dignified to go down in flames like a kamikaze pilot or Charlie Sheen than by self-anesthetizing your prose into utter unreadability? As Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise remarked apropos Ms. Borgâs namesakes, resistance is futile. You can try to read on, but the vast J-school-credentialed army of lethal parenthetics will crush you âneath their feet: December 7, 1941, is the day the Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is a U.S. naval base in the Pacific. The Pacific is a large body of water. Water is what your eyes are beginning to do . . .
But wait: Linda Borgâs explanation raises questions of its own: âThe Japanese governmentâ bombed Pearl Harbor? Was the Second World War an epic conflict of bureaucrats, with Tokyo civil servants in imperial morning dress bearing down on beleaguered State Department officials? Or was the Providence Journal self-correcting? Perhaps Ms. Borg originally wrote that âJapanâ or âthe Japaneseâ bombed Pearl Harbor, and a sharp-eyed editor amended it to clarify that only a few employees of âthe Japanese governmentâ participated in the bombing. Or perhaps political correctness is now so ingrained that a Providence reporter reflexively writes like that anyway. As Whoopi Goldberg put it, in response to Bill OâReillyâs careless slur that the Japanese had attacked us at Pearl Harbor: âSome Japanese attacked us.â Doubtless atypical Japanese, from whose unrepresentative ranks no general conclusions can be drawn.
The Journalâs formulation embodies one of the great delusions of our age â that there are bad governments but no bad peoples. âNot all Germans were Nazisâ â but enough were and enough of the rest strung along that the qualification is irrelevant. Not all Afghans are Taliban â but the real problem in that wretched land is not âthe Afghan governmentâ but the Afghan people. A dozen pages of a Flashman yarn has a sounder grasp of the Afghan psyche than nine years of multilateral ânation-building.â Which is why weâre going round and round in circles in an almighty Groundhogistan where a man gets sentenced to death for converting to Christianity under a court system created, funded, and protected by us.
In the Middle East, likewise: There are bad governments but no bad peoples. One hopes that in his involuntary retirement the unlovely Mubarak, who sold himself to successive U.S. administrations as a restraint on the darker impulses of his citizenry, retains enough of a sense of humor to appreciate posterityâs little jest. Even as one of their own (Lara Logan of CBS) was sexually assaulted by a gang of 200 in Tahrir Square in the very hour of the tyrantâs fall, the Western media assured us that this was âthe Facebook revolution.â Ninety-one percent of Egyptian women have undergone female genital mutilation. Not a lot of that on Facebook.
Under the veneer of âstability,â the Arab worldâs bad governments and their peoples diverged. The U.N. declared the PLO âthe sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,â but the Palestinian people begged to differ: In the end, Mahmoud Abbas doesnât represent anything other than his Swiss bank account. Hamas, on the other hand, represents something all too real. A secular kleptocrat ruling over a re-Islamized populace was never a good long-term bet: Even bad governments canât get too out of sync with their peoples. A similar realignment is now under way elsewhere. Mubarak, in the old CIA formulation, may have been a sonofabitch but he was our sonofabitch. In Tunis, Ben Ali was Franceâs sonofabitch. The Bahraini monarchy was Britainâs sonofabitch. As one reader wrote to me, the successor regimes are more likely to be the Muslim Brotherhoodâs SOBs and Iranâs SOBs. Revolutions are not always democratic but they are, broadly, demographic.
In Japan, a confident victor transformed a deeply ingrained national culture: The Japanese people beat their swords into karaoke machines â to the point where, even in a mild aside, the Providence Journal is embarrassed to suggest we ever had any quarrel with them. Thatâs the luxury of victory. Itâs a bigger gamble when you havenât won yet.
from National Review
WHEN GOVERNMENTS ATTACK!
Steyn on Culture
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review
It isnât easy being a public-sector-union leader these days. âThis is beyond insane,â said Steve Smith, president of the Providence Teachersâ Union in Rhode Island, reacting to the cityâs latest outrageous provocation. âLetâs create the most chaos and the highest level of anxiety in a district where teachers are already under unbelievable stress. Now I know how the United States State Department felt on December 7, 1941.â
Critics took President Smithâs remark as the usual self-aggrandizing comparison of timeserving desk-jockeys to men of action in the thick of it. Except, of course, that Mr. Smith wasnât comparing himself to anyone in the general vicinity of Hawaii but to a bunch of similarly desk-bound bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Washington. What does he mean? That the Japanese bombs created the chaos and the State Department had to clear it up? Or is it some sort of Pearl Harbor truther allusion? Like brave Rhode Island educators, certain State Department officials knew exactly what was coming but nobody would listen to them?
But Iâm getting ahead of myself. Reporting for the Providence Journal, Linda Borg, mindful of the fact that most of her readers have been educated by members of Mr. Smithâs union, felt obliged to add a more basic clarification: âThat was the day the Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor.â
December 7, 1941: a day that shall live in infamy, but not in Providence.
By the way, thatâs why Americaâs monodailies are dying. Maybe theyâd die anyway, but wouldnât it be more fun and more dignified to go down in flames like a kamikaze pilot or Charlie Sheen than by self-anesthetizing your prose into utter unreadability? As Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise remarked apropos Ms. Borgâs namesakes, resistance is futile. You can try to read on, but the vast J-school-credentialed army of lethal parenthetics will crush you âneath their feet: December 7, 1941, is the day the Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is a U.S. naval base in the Pacific. The Pacific is a large body of water. Water is what your eyes are beginning to do . . .
But wait: Linda Borgâs explanation raises questions of its own: âThe Japanese governmentâ bombed Pearl Harbor? Was the Second World War an epic conflict of bureaucrats, with Tokyo civil servants in imperial morning dress bearing down on beleaguered State Department officials? Or was the Providence Journal self-correcting? Perhaps Ms. Borg originally wrote that âJapanâ or âthe Japaneseâ bombed Pearl Harbor, and a sharp-eyed editor amended it to clarify that only a few employees of âthe Japanese governmentâ participated in the bombing. Or perhaps political correctness is now so ingrained that a Providence reporter reflexively writes like that anyway. As Whoopi Goldberg put it, in response to Bill OâReillyâs careless slur that the Japanese had attacked us at Pearl Harbor: âSome Japanese attacked us.â Doubtless atypical Japanese, from whose unrepresentative ranks no general conclusions can be drawn.
The Journalâs formulation embodies one of the great delusions of our age â that there are bad governments but no bad peoples. âNot all Germans were Nazisâ â but enough were and enough of the rest strung along that the qualification is irrelevant. Not all Afghans are Taliban â but the real problem in that wretched land is not âthe Afghan governmentâ but the Afghan people. A dozen pages of a Flashman yarn has a sounder grasp of the Afghan psyche than nine years of multilateral ânation-building.â Which is why weâre going round and round in circles in an almighty Groundhogistan where a man gets sentenced to death for converting to Christianity under a court system created, funded, and protected by us.
In the Middle East, likewise: There are bad governments but no bad peoples. One hopes that in his involuntary retirement the unlovely Mubarak, who sold himself to successive U.S. administrations as a restraint on the darker impulses of his citizenry, retains enough of a sense of humor to appreciate posterityâs little jest. Even as one of their own (Lara Logan of CBS) was sexually assaulted by a gang of 200 in Tahrir Square in the very hour of the tyrantâs fall, the Western media assured us that this was âthe Facebook revolution.â Ninety-one percent of Egyptian women have undergone female genital mutilation. Not a lot of that on Facebook.
Under the veneer of âstability,â the Arab worldâs bad governments and their peoples diverged. The U.N. declared the PLO âthe sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,â but the Palestinian people begged to differ: In the end, Mahmoud Abbas doesnât represent anything other than his Swiss bank account. Hamas, on the other hand, represents something all too real. A secular kleptocrat ruling over a re-Islamized populace was never a good long-term bet: Even bad governments canât get too out of sync with their peoples. A similar realignment is now under way elsewhere. Mubarak, in the old CIA formulation, may have been a sonofabitch but he was our sonofabitch. In Tunis, Ben Ali was Franceâs sonofabitch. The Bahraini monarchy was Britainâs sonofabitch. As one reader wrote to me, the successor regimes are more likely to be the Muslim Brotherhoodâs SOBs and Iranâs SOBs. Revolutions are not always democratic but they are, broadly, demographic.
In Japan, a confident victor transformed a deeply ingrained national culture: The Japanese people beat their swords into karaoke machines â to the point where, even in a mild aside, the Providence Journal is embarrassed to suggest we ever had any quarrel with them. Thatâs the luxury of victory. Itâs a bigger gamble when you havenât won yet.
from National Review