OBAMA WANTS TO TRAVEL
ON A FINE CHINESE TRAIN

JUSTIN SAYS "YOU CAN HAVE IT"

[I fixed about a dozen typos -- Justin had had a hard day]

The train was unbelievable, I don't know where to start.

We climbed onto the carriage with our rucksacks to a sight of hoards of Chinese sitting, standing, hanging and perching everywhere imaginable. Everybody stopped talking as the 2 aliens (thankfull pretty wasted by this point) made their way down the carriage to their seat, pushing, climbing, even standing on the locals to sqeeze through.

Once seated a crowd gathered around us just staring with the occasional comment in Chinese. After about an hour of this we got talking to a local boy and spent the next few hours drinking more and helping him speak English, by the end he was fully fluent in almost 6 swear words and our job was done.

Did I mention that every other minute someone is coughing up phlegm which either goes straight onto the floor with the discarded newspapers/ciggarette ash/cashew nuts/locals who couldn't afford a seat, or gets launched out the window with an amazing noise that I've grown to love.

Night time comes so it's time to sleep...yeah right. Even with a travel pillow and a an eye mask it's impossible. Either the food trolley is rammed down the aisle into your leg every 30 minutes, or a local is leaning on top of you snoring (thankfuly they don't dribble), or someone with a megaphone (yes really, at 3am this morning) is standing in the carriage selling socks or newspapers or horns are blowing and at 2am the fella behind me went through his entire polyphonic ringtone collection...twice.

Glad to be off the train but it was certainly an experience. We are shattered.

[Yeah, I know, it was 2005. But my reliable source told the same story just a year ago.]


THINK THE OBAMESSIAH WOULD ENJOY THESE ARRANGEMENTS? :

I signed up to get Barack Obama's Veep announcement, and all I got was this lousy donation solicitation notice.

Colour me shocked.

I'M AS FAMOUS AS AN UNNAMED PERSON CAN BE --

POWERLINE STANDS CORRECTED

The Powerline blog ran this hilarious concocted video, but misattributed the source to the Pythons' Life of Brian. I steered them toward Franco Zefferelli, and my quips made their front page [fer a minute].





BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE --
BUT CLOTHES DON'T MAKE THE MAN

Apparently the U.S. Army can no longer repress its uniform envy, and will be opting to make their Dress Blues the standard uniform, reflecting the extremes of their Marine-Corps-wannabe status.


Good luck with that, guys.



"Flight attendants, final cross-check...."

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD....

Hear that munching sound? The world's termites and maggots are busily nibbling away at the edges of mankind's well-being -- pretty much as we left things when we headed off for more pleasant horizons:





Yeah, I know everybody on the web is using it, but it's kind of irresistable:


Bring the good old bugle, boys,
we'll sing another song
Sing it with a spirit that
will start the world along
Sing it as we used to sing it, 50,000 strong
While we were marching through Georgia.

Chorus
Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from [Ossetia] to the sea
While we were marching through Georgia.

I do recall feeling my gag reflex way back when George Bush looked into Vlad the Impaler Putin's eyes and saw a good soul, or whatever the heck it was. What misgivings I had about John McCain have receded proportionally upon hearing about his other [besides the Surge] moment of prescience:

While it's all looking very bleak, at least we can see a glimmer of hope in the powerful words of Georgian President Saakashvili. Perennial genial lightweight Glenn Beck seems to have developed a rapport with the Saak-man, and let him rip for an hour on a recent show. (a Youtube 3-parter)





MEGA-CHURCHER WARREN HOSTS A
PORPOISE-DRIVEN DEBATE

Normally I have nothing but suspicion toward mega-church enterprises, but California's Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren seems benign enough, and I'm told that his mega-selling book A Purpose-Driven Life is not without substance.

So Warren invited the two presumptive presidential nominees to separate but equal public interviews on matters of faith and principle. Each was to have the opportunity to answer the same questions without knowledge of how the other responded.

I didn't watch it. Frankly, I'm not all that interested in the faith-related musings of either candidate -- McCain seems a nice enough guy with a nominal attachment to some Protestant community, but I would characterize his mode of expression as pretty much the stuff of the American secular religion: God not particularly distinguished from Country. Obama's religious associations, no matter how much he tries to distance himself from them, are throughly repugnant, and I could never consider anything he has to say on matters theological or spiritual to be anything but tainted and twisted at the root.

I needn't have worried, since at his most reflective he declared one of the defining public policy issues of the modern age to be both theologically and scientifically "above his pay grade." Unfortunately the cool dude from Illinois didn't seem to grasp that big public policy issues have a way of insisting that we craft some kind of legal "specificity" to best keep peace and order in society, and THAT, Mr. Obama, is within the presidential and legislative pay grades -- the buck stops in the District of Columbia.

Obama's attempt at sudden (and thoroughly implausible) humility in the face of a great moral question has only succeeded in keeping alive a hot-button political issue which the feminist left thought it had successfully aborted (as 'twere), thereby resuscitating the appalling Obama record on the fate of infants accidentally born alive after an attempted abortion. For the sake of their mothers' theoretical womb-autonomy, Mr. Obama has supported the legalized manslaughter of the stubbornly alive newborn. And he has stood virtually alone, even among liberal Democrats, on this issue -- a rather distasteful variation on his status as "The One."

So if Nat Hentoff's characterization of Obama as "the Infanticide Candidate" a few months back hasn't quite stuck in the public mind, the pot has now been duly stirred by the Obamessiah's own pitifully clumsy evasiveness at the Saddleback forum. Obama's voting record on Born Alive Infant Protection and Partial Birth Abortion is the scummy bathwater he was hoping would get thrown out with the baby, but he seems to have accomplished yet another pratfall while treading in his own oil-slick.

God love him -- the gift that keeps on giving! Thanks to Mr. Obama's verbal contortionism, Rich Lowry at National Review is writing this, Paul Kengor at Political Mavens is writing this, and Kyle-Ann Shiver at American Thinker is writing this. Hey, Barry, thanks for the memory.

Obama's Saddleback performance was so poor that his campaign is now circulating far-fetched stories of McCain having access to both the questions and his rival's answers ahead of time -- because, as NBC's Andrea Mitchell observed, "he seemed so well prepared."

He was, Andrea.

FOUR YEARS AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY,
TWENTY-TWO YEARS IN THE MILITARY,
FIVE+ YEARS IN THE HANOI HILTON,
AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE U.S. SENATE
WILL DO THAT FOR YOU.

Not to mention having a moderately well-developed set of principles -- translation: you've figured out what the important stuff is, and have pretty much decided what you think about it.

Helps a lot in answering questions, Andrea. Helps you sound prepared.

NBC: still Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puff. (There, I said it.)


WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!

That explains the close competition between American and Chinese female gymnasts, at what has turned out to be a pretty good Olympics hosted by Merry Maoists. Heck, the smog has cleared so much you can see across the street!

Still a bit foggy in record-keeping for the "Birthday Girls" however. The gymnastic coaches tell us that there are definite advantages to pulling off the required stunts when you've got a team of "pixies" as one called them. Last November's Xinhua Newspaper listed [now gold-medal winner] He Kexin as a promising "little girl" of 13 years old. By this summer her birthdate had jumped into the Way-
Back Machine and landed at January 1st (phew!) 1992.

Since the women[?]'s individual uneven bars gold medal was a numerical tie that had to be broken [by restoring dropped lowest scores and averaging to the thousandth of a point], it was of course pretty galling for grown woman almost-19-year-old American Nastia Liuken,to lose to overnight 16-year-old He Kexin. Hey, folks, that's why we call 'em Chi-Coms!

I'm with Jon Stewart on this one (colourful language alert!).




[Maybe if we keep kneeling down nobody will notice how teeny we are.]



Trying to look older than we really are: isn't that doing a reverse triple Pelosi in the tuck position?

AT LONG LAST

Olympic-sized kudos to Canada's Ian Millar, 61-year-old king of the mounted.


He's won so many compe- titions and been in so many Olympics (eight) I had not realized that he had no Olympic medal to show for it. The Canadian team won their silver, the first national medal in 40 years.

Sad that Millar could not share this long-awaited prize with his wife and pardner, Lynn, who died last year, after working by his side at the equestrian arts for more than three decades. The long and lanky horseman, with his seemingly perpetually sunny face, dedicated his medal to the angel he knew was riding with him.

Millar's long-time mount, the aptly-named Big Ben, didn't live to share the moment either. Strange that the magnificently huge horse never brought Millar Olympic glory -- though now that he's dead and isn't here to defend himself, we are given to understand that he could be a bit distracted by all the adulation and tended toward overconfidence!... Well, we can forgive him a little vanity.

Ben's friend In Style has carried Millar to glory at last -- extra measure of oats, please.

FRACK!!!!!

WE'RE BACK!

Sunday, 6 a.m. here:

Sunday, 6 p.m. (7:30 in Newfoundland) here:

ACK.

[P.S. If it's not frackin' obvious, number 1 son has now got us hooked on Battlestar Gallactica]

SEPARATED AT BIRTH:

Sen. Harry Reid *** Froggy from Our Gang
















[hat-tip: Monday afternoon caller to The Dennis Miller Show ]

IT'S BEEN A QUIET WEEK AT LAKE WOBEGON.....

But here in remotest Newfoundland, it's been a Newfie-palooza.

It was all work and no play for several weeks while house and garden underwent further transformations, much of it geared toward looking all pretty for the Unveiling of the Plaque, following our recent heritage restoration award.

Then, at the appointed moment, scores of the curious descended upon the old house on the cove, and sniffed out every nook and cranny to their satisfaction. Local political bigwigs made their little speeches, the little girl with the big voice sang Oh Canada, and Ode to Newfoundland, the veil was dropped, and the good times rolled.

Say, what's up at the big house?



Well, in the living room there was....



And in the dining room there was....



And in the kitchen there was....



Ya don't git one 'o these every day, eh b'y? It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood.



MEANWHILE, BACK ON PLANET EARTH....

Satire was in fine fettle, both over the pond, from Gerard Baker at the Times of London:




And over at Scrappleface, where we'd expect nothing less: "McCain backs Timeline to get Obama Out of Iraq."


Even Letterman got into the act:




Yeah, I know I'm days behind the news curve -- we're a little slow out here at Lake Wobegon, b'gosh. Another ten days, and they'll be dragging me onto the plane back to civilization. Pass the Screech.

DEVIL DIALOGUE

This morning's exchange between Dennis Miller and "Salman," Miller's Ed McMahon, regarding the prospect of huge crowds greeting Barrockstar Obama in Germany :

Dennis: So a million people show up. Who cares what Germany thinks? I don't care if TWO million people are there....

Salman: I know how many WON'T be there....

Dennis: How many?

Salman: Six million.

RIM SHOT!!!!!!

AL GORE -- TREE KILLER


Americans for Prosperity does a little Michael Moore number on a recent Algoriffic Environmentalcase Event. [hat-tip National Review Online]




Heh.



Also at NRO:

"If God didn't want us to eat cows, he wouldn't have made them out of steak."

The Book of Numbers,
ch. 19, v. 1-2.

Hmmmmmm.

א וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה וְאֶל-אַהֲרֹן לֵאמֹר.	1 And the LORD spoke unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying:
ב זֹאת חֻקַּת הַתּוֹרָה, אֲשֶׁר-צִוָּה יְהוָה לֵאמֹר: דַּבֵּר אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְיִקְחוּ אֵלֶיךָ פָרָה אֲדֻמָּה תְּמִימָה אֲשֶׁר אֵין-בָּהּ מוּם, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-עָלָה עָלֶיהָ, עֹל.	2 This is the statute of the law which the LORD hath commanded, saying: Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer, faultless, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke.

PEOPLE HAVIN' FUN WITH
OBAMESSIAH CAMPAIGN GEAR

[found at LUNDESIGNS, h/t Powerline]


OBAMA ROAD crew:


Alternative Campaing Logos:











Alternative posters:
















I actually saw this one in Houston -- several times:

TONY SNOW,
1955-2008

R.I.P.

Between the painting, wallpapering, plant-potting, and such here in outer Newfoundland, I've hardly had time to even absorb, much less mark and opine upon, the passing of Tony Snow. We all knew it was coming, but tried to play ostrich about it anyway.

There's been lots of retrospective on the 'net -- one of the benefits of having it, so as to preserve and reproduce words and voices out of the past -- again, too much to absorb any time soon. But while stumbling around in search of who might be saying it best, I was moved by the all-too-human response of Mark Davis at RealClearPolitics:

Like Tim Russert before him, Tony Snow brought an infectious passion and likability to his craft... His 17 months at the White House press room podium made predecessor Scott McClellan look like the useless shlub history now reveals him to be.

When Tony Snow took over that post in Spring 2006, one of President Bush's key problems was the passionless ineptitude that poisoned the delivery of his message. Snow fixed that in one day, establishing a style of addressing the press with conviction and humor. There had been no one like him before, and I don't see anyone equaling him again.

[He] never let go of his passion for life, even as cancer slowly robbed him. Now we are the ones who have been robbed. Tony Snow should have been able to see his kids grow older as he grew old with his bride, and we should have been able to enjoy his sunny demeanor during political clashes lasting well into the middle of this century. It is his gifts, the kind he shared with Tim Russert, that are sorely needed, not just in government and on TV, but in our entire national discourse.

I am sad and angry and I miss him. My faith tells me I'm not supposed to grumble so much when God calls people home. Well, I'm sorry. While I know there's some great talent gathering in heaven, I simply was not done with them down here.

Having gotten that off one's chest, the more gracious reflection was the President's:

I know it's hard to make sense of today. It is impossible to fully comprehend why such a good and vital man was taken from us so soon. But these are the great mysteries of life -- and Tony knew as well as anyone that they're not ours to unveil.

The day Tony was born was also the day that many of his fellow Catholics pay tribute to Saint Justin. Justin was also a gifted thinker and writer, and a powerful witness for the Christian faith. Because of his beliefs, he suffered many times of trial, and in the year 165 A.D. he was arrested. Before he received a sentence of death, he was asked: "If you are killed, do you suppose you will go to heaven?" Justin replied: "I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it."

Tony Snow knew that, as well. That brought him great peace. When talking about the struggle he waged so admirably, he said that no matter how bad times may sometimes seem, "God doesn't promise tomorrow, he does promise eternity."

And so today we send this man of faith and character and joy on his final journey. Tony Snow has left the City of Washington for the City of God. May he find eternal rest in the arms of his Savior. And may the Author of all creation watch over his family and all those who loved him, admired him, and will always cherish his memory.

Requiescat in pacem.

MICHAEL RAMIREZ of Investor's Business Daily remains the pre-eminent editorial cartoonist of the day.

(hat-tip Dennis Miller Zone)


HEH. Oh yeah.

July 15 DISPATCH from MICHAEL YON

It's been my privilege to have supported former Green Beret and self-embedded reporter MICHAEL YON for the past three years, as he has consistently produced the most impassioned, vivid, and informed reporting from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like all his enrolled supporters, I've received regular email notice of his latest dispatches, with links to his website for the full texts, always signed "Very respectfully," for he has always respected the relationship built with his readers, and fulfilled his end of the bargain by offering them the raw truth, positive or not.

Today Yon's email headline reads more bluntly than the linked text on the website, but the message is the same. Today he feels confident enough to tell his correspondents this:

"We have won the war in Iraq."

No one who uttered those words, short of General Petraeus himself, could be more readily believed than Michael Yon.

We are there.

Our soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen have bled [Sgt. Major Prosser, Deuce Four, at right], but the prize has been victory.

The road ahead is not without pitfalls, but the conclusion -- the real "mission accomplished" moment, is in sight.

On the other hand, Yon is equally blunt in saying that the war in Afghanistan -- never really over, despite reports to the contrary -- is indeed being lost. But it is not unwinnable, if the same determination put forward in the Iraq surge strategy is applied there without delay.

If there is one massive IED embedded in both roads ahead, it would be the election of Barack Obama as president. (That's me speaking, not Yon, who declines to comment on such matters.)

Stay tuned.

SCREECHED-IN!!!

This evening we were welcomed into the fellowship of honorary Newfoundlanders by a ceremony known as "screeching in." It involves various religious postures and distributions which could perhaps be considered a bit blasphemous if it weren't all fer the laughs, ya know.

To start with, ya gets in a semi-circle with yer shoes off, ya see, and den ya kneels down on da floor. Den da skipper, 'e serves up the goods to all assembled, while the first mate reads off some quotated bits to teach ya da symbolism der.

First ya has a Purity peppermint nob, standin' for da sweetness o' da fraish air an' such. Den ya gets a chunk o' hard tack (also by Purity -- I t'ink we has a genuine sponsor tie-in deal goin') to remind yas of the hardships of life on da rock. (Do I detect a smatterin' o' "Why is this night different from every other night"? Ahoy-vay, matey.)


Den we moves on to a taste of fat pink bologna, which symbolizes.....well, ya got me.





Next we stands up and, after stumblin' half-arsed through the Newfoundland national anthem, we begins a one-by-one Catholic-style veneration-like ritual, where each initiate has to come forward and "kiss da cod" -- its fraish, an' gutted, and straight out o' de oice -- an' it looks at ya wid a sorta com'ithery expression, its nasty little wormy mustaches hangin' down and it eyes wide with curiosity. So we kisses da cod, der.

Finally, we gets to da Prodestant portion o' da program, where buddy comes out wid little trays all covered with tiny glasses full of liquid, kinda low-church communion-like. But they was all filled with Screech, y'see, that fine old Newfoundland drink which is a kind of rum spiked with ethanol er somethin'. And ya takes yer shot glass, waits until everybody has one, and then ya knocks it back in one great whack.

My guess is that in the ordinary way of things, this last ritual would have continued until most of the assembly was proudly horizontal. But there were kids involved (who got nothin' but cranberry juice) so that was the end of it.

We gets our official certificates and a copy of the anthem, and was packed off to dinner.

Later this evening, skipper comes round by the house to give us a special prize: we got the promiscuous cod! -- head, tail, eyeballs, wormy things, and all -- to wrestle with for dinner tomorrow.

'Twas a fair evening. Yis, b'y.


AND ON THE HORIZON....

The aforementioned "kids" who also got screeched-in were the crew of the Concordia, a tall ship that doubles as a school for high school students. This group was the summer session class, just four days into their sailing career. They arrived this morning. A taste of old times for this once busy harbour. A fine sight.

"Oh beautiful for spacious skies...." --
What am I doing up here?

YO!!!

HOW DID YOU SPEND YOUR 4TH OF JULY?

1,215 of America's best spent it doing this:

[hat-tip Bob Krumm via Instapundit]





I spent mine in the fresh air of Newfoundland.

Stars and Stripes, flown briefly in Iraq on a CH53, flapped languidly in the ocean breeze.

Beautiful here too. Also spacious skies.

Ain't the same, though.

The Great Seal of ObamaNation:


IT'S GONE, BABY, GONE!






But not before somebody could come up with this:











Some things just cry out for parody.
When it happens, answer-- oh yes, answer.



P.S.:

Saw film of Kite Runner.

Pale and shrunken version of book. "Hassan" best actor of the pack.

Save your money.

Even the New York Times
has noticed that this is a little bit

DISTASTEFUL,

not to mention

PRESUMPTUOUS

THEATRE OF KABOOM:

BLACK WATCH

Scottish National Theatre production,
presented in Toronto at the
Luminato Arts and Creativity Festival

We (me and the spouse) were at a considerable disadvantage watching this play because almost the entire cast had thick Scots accents. While I'm better at deciphering this than a lot of folks, for me the accents rendered about 60% of the dialogue incomprehensible. [Correction: 60% of that portion of the dialogue not consisting of the F-word, which turned up at least twice in every sentence.)

Accoustics in the hockey arena venue probably exacerbated the problem, but this is a "promenade" style production, performed with the audience on bleachers incorporated into the set structures and playing area, so it's always going to be in a sound-challenged environment. The audibility problem meant that I never heard the names or ranks of any of the characters, which made it impossible to know which actor was which, and how well he was developing his character.

On the other hand, we were at a considerable advantage over the entire rest of the audience, in that we were attending the play as guests of a couple whose son is an officer on active duty with the Black Watch, and who has served with the regiment in Basra, Iraq.

So there.

As a piece of theatre, Black Watch is a powerful, well-crafted, and well-acted drama with original touches that successfully integrate the flash-backs and historical background material with the present context of post-war interviews. And it is respectful enough of its subject and its audience to avoid being a rank piece of agit-prop.

That's not to say that the play has no point of view, about both the military and the Iraq war. The slant was clearly there, and when it was most intrusive it rendered the play just, well, silly.

This is perhaps best illustrated by listening to director John Tiffany talk about how the "daft" behaviour of the Black Watch Iraq veterans became the catalyst for Gregory Burke's script. Here's a telly-trailer advertising the play in Britain, which gives a good impression of the production style, and includes the artiste's-eye-view of what the play has to say.

Okay, so the vets are acting a bit crazy and getting into trouble with the police, and the playwright decides to interview them to get their perspective on their war experience.

One is led, quite deliberately, to believe that this makes the play "truth" or "reality," as opposed to an entertainment, selected and constructed of component bits shaped consciously by a writer (Burke) who grew up as a "forces brat" -- one who has developed very specific viewpoints about nationalism, militarism, and the Scottish society in which he had to find a place for himself after having lived abroad in the British military community for a number of his formative years.

In addition to that background, there are a few truths with which everyone attending Black Watch should be armed before permitting it to shape one's opinions about this or any other war:

(a) The perceptions of any ten soldiers must not presume to represent those of tens of thousands of their comrades; and there isn't a single soldier alive who, in the glow of attention from a reporter, will not be tempted to embroider on the facts [as Shakespeare advises us, they might well "remember, with advantages," something they have earned the right to do], not necessarily in a self-serving lie, but in a game of yanking a malleable journalist's chain. Furthermore, there is the God-given right of every soldier to indulge in the Gargantuan Gripe, as defined so astutely by LT G at Kaboom;

(b) We have it on good authority -- from the above-mentioned young officer in the Black Watch -- that the men under his command were inclined to daft behaviour and getting in trouble with police before ever setting a toe in Iraq. He had tremendous affection for his men and felt that they made terrific soldiers, but they were, by nature or nurture, rough, short-fused, hard-drinking, street-fighting, and half-mad at the best of times. The discipline of military life may have been the best thing that ever happened to them.

That's not to say that their service in Basra was not terrifying, frustrating, and perhaps even ill-conceived. As recent events have highlighted, the situation in Basra was different from most of what has gone on elsewhere in Iraq, most explicitly in the fact that Al Qaeda was barely a factor-- inter-tribal civil warfare has been the nature of the beast all the way along, and the British, rightly or wrongly, came to believe they could not contribute to the solution.

To be fair, the play Black Watch does give he impression that the soldiers have no quarrel with military missions or discipline (though I would be interested to know from our young friend whether there is any basis for the play's portrayal of a certain slackness in protocol during the more boring stretches of the mission-- something most playgoers would fail to notice, but we military parents do not). What the men do object to is the fact that they were trained to fight, but spent far too much time pinned down inside a fortification, from which they ventured out on patrols that all too often made them sitting ducks.

From what I have read, that is not an inaccurate picture of how it went for the Brits, and for many of the Americans before General Petraeus took command. However, we also have it on good authority (from our young friend, and from the best reporter on the scene with the British, American journalist Michael Yon, here ) that the Brits, including the Black Watch, had a bellyful of some pretty serious fighting.

(c) It is clear from headlines all over that it doesn't take immersion in combat to produce a global outbreak of young people behaving badly. Vast numbers of so-called disaffected youth lash out at society and each other with staggering regularity, and so-called experts offer a thousand reasons why: unemployment, broken families, drugs and gang violence. Combat trauma is at least an easily identifiable source of hostility. But I would suggest that, among the sparks that set off eruptions of uncivil behaviour must be the frustration born of minds incapable of formulating an expression of their feelings.

In times past [not that long past -- say, 50 years], the letters and reminiscences of ordinary soldiers bore witness to the benefits of a substantive basic education: men looking for words to tell of their fear, shock, longing, and suffering, could find them at hand, because the building blocks of conventional schooling had set them to reading Aesop's fables and Caesar's wars, and to memorizing poems, speeches, and passages from the Bible. They had listened attentively while teachers read to them in school, or families told stories and sang ballads to pass the leisure hours. They had paid heed to the experiences of people other than themselves, so that when it came time to put their own experiences into words, and into the context of the human story, they had the tools and the vocabulary to do it.

Young people for whom education has been a self-referential skid over the surface of randomly arrayed information can often find no words to communicate their reality. They can be heard to complain that they have ideas but just can't express them. Not so-- the sad truth is, if you have no words, you have no ideas, period. You have feelings-- twinges and pangs and impressions, ricocheting around an empty box -- but you do not have ideas. Can anything be more isolating and frustrating than that?

And the most evident symptom of this vacuum in our modern age?: the relentless resort to the F-word.

If there is one scene in Black Watch which does speak the truth about the fight in Iraq better than any other, it is the slow motion enactment of a suicide car-bombing. The vets in the pub talk about it to the interviewer, so the audience (if they've been listening carefully -- and could understand what they heard!) knows what's coming.

The scene switches to the dusty Iraqi townscape, with the squad taking measured steps, armed and armoured to the teeth, while describing what they see: two officers and an interpreter go to meet a car which has approached in a suspicious manner.

The men wait and watch, and then suddenly a massive flash-pot and explosion sound go off at the curtained end of the playing area. The curtain drops to reveal three men suspended on wires, nearly upside down and at contorted angles, a good ten feet off the ground. Their clothing is shredded and red with blood, and over the next thirty seconds or so, they make their writhing way to the ground, as their personal serial numbers and the numerical designation of their degree of injury are called out over a speaker. When they finally land, the action goes back to a real-time flurry of emergency procedures as the injured are evacuated.

This slow-motion picture of the bomb's concussion matches many a description I have read, usually from the survivors of an IED rather than the observers. It was, in my view, the most evocative and brilliantly realistic passage in the play. Which is why the finale -- a much-admired sort of "advance-of-the-troops ballet" -- seems, by contrast, absurd and foolish.

The production uses the march in formation, with drums and bagpipes, which will appeal to any audience, perhaps in spite of itself-- in spite of what many will disdainfully identify as obsolete, jingoistic spit-and-polish pageantry.

As the small company do their arm-swinging, high-stepping march and hard right-face turns, running and re-forming all over the playing space, they begin to fall down one at a time, as if wounded in battle. This would have been totally trite but for the fortunate touch that each fallen man was rescued and picked up by his fellows, rejoining the formation for its next charge.

I could have lived with this part, despite its flirtation with triteness. The silly aspect was that it had been preceded by the commanding officer calling the lads together to prepare them for some sort of pivotal confrontation the next day, speaking of it as if it would be a do-or-die turning point in the war for Iraq. He ended his pep talk by calling them to attention and then counting down to the rush into battle-- as if fighting in Iraq was ever, at any time, this type of "big push, going over the top" exercise resembling the trenches of the Great War.

What nonsense. Nothing in the Iraq war, ever, has been a matter of sending wave upon wave of men into a battle line, marching and falling and pushing onward in the fashion evoked by the finale of Black Watch. The toughest fighting has been house-to-house urban warfare, up stairs and down alleys, avoiding booby-trapped rooms or bodies, picking off snipers before they pick off you.

People often accuse the military of fighting the last war, but in the first war of the 21st century it is the spectators -- the pundits, the carping politicians, the mouthy celebrities -- who have been fighting the last war, and the one before that, and the one before that, doing their level best to see a quagmire through every cloud of desert dust. [Early on Donald Rumsfeld tried to fight the next war, the long-distance high-tech robot war of his imagination -- we all saw how well that worked out!]

Playwright Burke, of course, would likely claim that his finale was not trying for the realism claimed for the rest of the play. Rather, it was a universalizing of this particular war into all wars, in all times. "In the end, we aren’t witnesses to the soldier’s experiences alone," wrote John Heilpern in his October 2007 review in the New York Observer, "but to a dance of death."

Blah blah blah. Ho-hum. Talk about trite.... Not to mention irrelevant.

There remains among those who deplore this war an astonishingly stubborn refusal to see that it is a conflict unprecedented in human history: a war that transcends nation, race, territory, and the concept of armed forces as history has understood them. Universalizing any war is a simpleton's game, insulting to all who lived through it and all who desire to learn from it. It is also a game which has never been more pointless, and morally indefensible, than it is now.

I would urge anyone who has the opportunity, by all means, go and see Black Watch. But keep in mind the caveat that it is but one version of one slice of this war's still unwritten history. And it doesn't hurt to have actually talked with one of the "lads" to make sense of the story.


WHAT I'VE BEEN READING:

THE KITE RUNNER,
by Khaled Hosseini

Life in Afghanistan, from the end of the monarchy to the beginning of the end of the Taliban. Excellent. Must rent film.



Tim Russert, 1950-2008
R.I.P.

I've probably only seen Meet the Press a couple of times in my life -- I don't do TV on Sunday mornings. I've seen many a clip from Russert's famous interviews where he dredges up extensive quotations and confronts the speaker with contradictions between his words then and his words now.

I've watched Russert moderate political debates, and have to say that the last one I saw him do was not a credit to his reputation as a fair and insightful questioner.

Sometimes I think I've heard his voice most often doing public service ads for the local radio station in his home town of Buffalo, New York, since I am a frequent listener to WBEN (known affectionately as "Radio Free Canada")-- those ads have now come to an end, and I'll miss them.

The "all-Russert, all-the-time" bathos visible on the major networks, especially CNN, since the man's death has been a spectacle I imagine he would not have cared for, celebrating the mythological importance of news punditry rather than the man himself. But amid the din were enough comments, from enough people who knew him well, representative of every possible viewpoint on the spectrum, that it's fair to say he must have been a helluva guy as well as a newsman of higher caliber than just about anybody else in the business. The arid desert of mainstream television news just got a whole lot dryer -- that can't be good for anybody.

Russert wrote two books: one about being a son, and one about being a dad. Good choice for immortality. Requiescat in Pace.

ATTACK OF THE LITTLE CAT FEET

Evening in St. John's, Newfoundland



OPERATION "DEMOGRAPHIC BALANCE"

experiences a SURGE:


We welcome a third little boy-sprout into Generation Next.

Hola!