DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT -- "LEFT" BEHIND

You gotta love the Democrats. A mainstream media blackout on good news from Iraq, coupled with the Bushies' unspeakable bungling of the information war, turns the national mood bitter and skeptical about the whole Iraq enterprise. Poised to make hay of the President's plummeting popularity as we move into the 2006 election cycle, the Democrats find the one fresh cowpie in the political football field and leap into it with both feet. Then they hit the turf and roll in it.

The irresistible cowpie is the Bush-bashing reflex brought on by full-scale Bush Derangement Syndrome. Between the previously (and deservedly) obscure Congressman Murtha, the saucer-eyed California legislatrixes Pelosi and Boxer, the hair-trigger-tongued Dr. FrankenDean of the DNC, and the Most Unappealing Democratic Presidential Candidate in Living Memory John François Kerry, the public face of the Democratic Party has been a freakish gargoyle of incoherent excess.

Never has any group of political partisans put so immense an effort into ending the career of a politician whose career is coming to its natural end anyway. In recent months the political left has so relished the thought that Bush couldn't win an election against a three-legged tortoise, they have forgotten that Bush isn't, and won't be, running for anything. If they have, in the deep recesses of their consciousness, a glimmer of recognition of this fact, it is clouded over by the fantasy that perhaps they can end his career early by arranging for impeachment, for the "high crime" of -------> not bowing to the wisdom of the Democratic party, the Hollywood left, and the sanctimonious MSM.

Someone please call in the grown-ups to tell these people that not taking their advice is not an indictable offense. Nor does bringing down the President mean that they get to move into his office. (Dick Cheney and several other Republicans are in line ahead of them. And killing the princes in the Tower is not only a bad idea, it doesn't put you on the throne.)

At last, the Bush administration has decided that the news they have been keeping under wraps, to be released only on a "need-to-know" basis, is in fact something that the American people need to know. They have made a start at counter-measures against the storm surge of nonsense that has been flooding the public forum from their political opponents. They have touched on key points, and obtusely ignored others. As usual, the correctives are being best expressed by people not within the administration.

Item one:

It's a lie to say that the President lied to the American people. (Senator John McCain, CBS Face the Nation, November 13, 2005)

Item two:

In a week's time, Iraqis will participate in the most open political contest in the history of the Middle East. They're building the freest society in the region, and the only truly federal system. In three-quarters of the country, life has never been better. There's an economic boom in the Shia south and a tourist boom in the Kurdish north, and, while the only thing going boom in the Sunni Triangle are the suicide bombers, there were fewer of those in November than in the previous seven months.

Meanwhile, Iraq's experiment in Arab liberty has had ripple effects beyond its borders, pushing the Syrians most of the way out of Lebanon, and in Syria itself significantly weakening Baby Assad's regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who's spent years as a beleaguered democracy advocate in Egypt, told the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland the other day that, although he'd opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he had to admit it had "unfrozen the Middle East... Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives."

Toppling Saddam was worth doing in and of itself. Toppling Saddam and trying to "midwife" (in Ibrahim's word) a free society would be worth doing even if it failed. But, as it happens, I don't believe it will fail, not just because of Bush but because enough Iraqis — Shia, Kurds and even significant numbers of Sunnis — are determined not to let it fail. (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, December 5)

Item three:

The testimony out of the Saddam trial is really big — I mean, the witnesses are laying it all out, what Saddam and his accomplices did. Human experience does not get more depraved than this.

Do you have a sense that the world cares much? (And by "world," we often mean the media, and other elites.) I have a sense that it does not — because this testimony is a distraction (or would be a distraction) from the accepted narrative: bad, lying America, imposing itself where it has no business.

This should be the Iraqis' moment in the sun: the chance when they finally get to tell their story, after decades of the worst suffering. Instead, it's all Valerie Plame, 16 words, an American female interrogator rubbing — or not rubbing — her breasts against a detainee, blah, blah, blah.

Outrageous.

Remember this, friends, and you've long known it: Iraqi suffering doesn't count, because that might mean that Bush & Co. weren't so wrong to remove that regime. (Jay Nordlinger -- Impromptus, National Review Online December 7)

Item four:

Progress is visible and practical...It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making.

We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again...

In the face of terrorist threats and escalating violence, eight million Iraqis voted for their interim national government in January, almost 10 million participated in the referendum on their new constitution in October, and even more than that are expected to vote in the elections for a full-term government on Dec. 15. Every time the 27 million Iraqis have been given the chance since Saddam was overthrown, they have voted for self-government and hope over the violence and hatred the 10,000 terrorists offer them... None of these remarkable changes would have happened without the coalition forces led by the U.S...

I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November's elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.

Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. (Senator Joe Lieberman, D Conn., Wall Street Journal,November 29)

And lest we forget, Item five:

We have been sleepwalking through the greatest revolutionary movement in the history of the Middle East, as the U.S. military is quietly empowering the once-despised Kurds and Shiites — and along with them women and the other formerly dispossessed of Iraq. In short, the U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization.
(Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online October 28)

A quaint reminder:

The kind of "wisdom" the President has refused to heed:

"The heart of the challenge all comes back to security. We're not going to have successful elections, we won't have a growing Iraqi economy, we won't have stability there without security."

(Senator Evan Bayh, D-Indiana, CNN Late Edition, December 19, 2004
-- Memo to Senator Bayh: Hand-over of power to Iraqi officials, Iraqi elections, Iraqi Constitution-- all breathtakingly successful, and achieved exactly on schedule, with a punctuality that would be the envy of most American airports.)

R.I.P. -- The English Language

George W. Bush has been accused (deservedly) of doing murder upon the English language from time to time, but the last people in the world who could justifiably point a finger at him in the past week have been the prominent Democrats (listed in paragraph two above) who have tried to convince the public that words don't mean what they mean, and that they didn't say the stupid thing we heard them say with our own ears.

These crimes against language are pernicious. Other word crimes are just comic relief.

I don't know if Barbra Streisand writes her own copy for her personal website or pays someone else to do it for her-- in either case, she deserves to be busted by the diction police. It's painful, but only because there are people who think she has anything intelligent (or intelligible) to say. The full text of her letter to the Los Angeles Times contains the following gems of purple prose for which a high school sophomore should be soundly flogged [my editorial shots in italics]:

I'm almost embarrassed for you in seeing the LA Times being referred to as the "Chicago LA Times" on the myriad of internet sites I've visited in the last few days. [When in doubt about the word "myriad" -- and Ms. Streisand should be-- substitute the word "countless" and see if it works. It don't.] It seems, however, an aptly designated epithet [is that the epithet who gets the car-keys because all the other epithets are too drunk to drive?], representing the feeling among many of your readers that your new leadership, especially that of Jeff Johnson, is entirely out of touch with them and their desire to be exposed to views that stretch them beyond their own paradigms. [I guess we're naked and craning our necks, and you know how painful that can be, especially in the ablative absolute.]

...in firing Robert Sheer and putting Jonah Goldberg in his place, the gamut of voices has undeniably been diluted... [Last time my gamut was diluted, my guitar warped.]

In light of the obvious step away from the principals of journalistic integrity... [Chances are you'll step right into the Vice-Principals, and they're usually BIG trouble.]

Robert Scheer's column, with its often singular voice of dissent and groundbreaking expositional content, [That expositional stuff is great, but everything falls apart when you get to the second paragraph...] has been among the most notable features that have sustained my interest in subscribing to the LA Times.

My greatest fear is that the underlying reason for Mr. Scheer's termination is part of a larger trend toward the corporatization of our media [I dare Ms. B.S. to find one single tiny, independent, revolutionary publisher in 2005 which has not been incorporated under State and Federal tax law], a trend that we, as American citizens, must fervently battle for the sake of our swiftly diminishing free press.

[I don't have any grammatical quibble with this last statement, I'm just sickened that such an elitist estate-owning cow, who lives like the Sultan of Brunei, has the gall to use words like this, as if she had any idea whatever about what it means to live in a country without a free press-- it's an insult to every genuinely oppressed people on earth, and if they weren't too dehydrated they might be tempted to spit on her.]

THOMAS TALLIS: card-carrying member of
the Crown of Creation
“A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” said Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). She would have us believe that human beings are of no greater consequence (maybe lesser) in the cosmos than other living organisms.

Only supremacism makes us think that "our kind"... is more important than the rest. But a broader definition of ourselves is simply that we are all animals.

OK. But apparently some animals are more equal than others-- bulls for instance. Ms. Newkirk has written:

Dear Secretary Rumsfeld:

You have said that you weren't aware of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but I don't want you to be caught in the same position over the torture of another group of individuals who, while different from the average American citizen in many ways, still bleed, feel pain, and experience fear just as we do... Will you please tell me whether your views on bullfighting have changed since you personally "ran with the bulls" in Pamplona? I invite you to tip the scales back a bit by coming to Spain to participate in the Running of the Nudes— also called the Human Race—an alternative to the cruel spectacle that occurs three days later.

(The mind boggles, on so many levels.... I can't speak.)

Ms. Newkirk is correct, of course, that we are all animals. But I doubt she gives much thought to what it is that the word describes: i.e., the fact that animals are so called because they have an anima-- that's Latin for "soul," which points to the fact that Western culture has, for millennia, gone to great lengths to understand the value and define the nature of all living things. (The writers in Latin all bow to Aristotle, who was doing it in Greek 2400 years ago.)

With the great religious cultures (specifically the Religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) came the deepest appreciation of the TOTALLY OBVIOUS difference between the "animation" of human beings and that of other organisms of varying degrees of complexity, and to the inevitable conclusion that the soul of the human alone transcends physical death and enjoys immortality.

How do we know this? The bizarre anthropomorphism preached by the PETA crowd actually manages to focus on a key aspect of the workings of the soul-- suffering-- and just gets it ludicrously wrong. How do we know that anima of the lower animal is a blunted, mortal soul incapable of (among other things) suffering equivalently to a human being? We know, quite simply, because those animals DON'T WRITE POETRY ABOUT IT.

They don't write music, plays, or make paintings. The capacity for suffering compels language, first, and then other creative expressions-- the impulse to language could not be resisted in any being that experiences the depths of suffering (or the heights of ambition or self-consciousness) -- but you can only "smoke 'em if you got 'em" -- lower animals don't.

They've been around longer than we have and have had plenty of time to evolve the evidence of immortality if they had it. When archaeologists unearth the amphitheatre that was conceived and built by the eohippus "community", and musicians can perform on its accoustically-perfect stage the stegosaurus-composed version of the "Magic Flute", I will lay my arguments to rest. Till then -- sorry, folks -- they are blunted, temporarily animated organisms who, left untouched and unimpeded by human beans, will never cure cancer or establish world peace-- nor will they suffer regret about their failure to do either.

This is not scientific (duh), it's just obvious good sense to anyone with eyes (plus the ability to reason, to read, to record, and all that other stuff we immortals do).

What has this to do with Thomas Tallis? He's 500 years old this year, and his immortality is pretty much a given. He was a court composer to four English monarchs during the throes of the 16th-century Catholic-Protestant tug-of-war. He died an old man, peacefully, in his bed. That in itself was quite a feat. He survived the religious tumult because he was a genius who wrote soul-quaking sacred music that transcended denominational conflicts.

Last night I was among the privileged audience that packed St. Patrick's Church in downtown Toronto to hear the Tallis Choir present an unprecedented performance of a re-constructed Christmas Vespers service, as it may have been sung by the Chapel Royal of Queen Mary Tudor, assisted by choristers from her consort's native Spain.

More than an hour of alternating Psalms and chanted antiphons was brought to a climax (and I use the word advisedly) with the singing of a five-line prayer (called by its opening words Spem in Alium, derived from a text in the Book of Judith) in which 94 singers, divided into eight choirs, sang 40 different musical lines-- all at once.

It is impossible for an old medieval Catholic like me not to have a religious response to an experience like this. But there was another, much stronger element to my response.

The separate choirs began in turns, trading off five-voice arrangements in various combinations-- then, in a sudden swell, they were all singing together, a living natural sound that penetrated every cell of the body from all directions, huge yet crystal clear in its multiplicity. And quite involuntarily-- in intense emotion, but without a breath of sentimentality-- I felt my face glow warm and tears come into my eyes.

I've had this very same reaction before, in quite different circumstances, though the subject was a work of religious art. It was a painting, part of a travelling exhibit from the private collections of the Vatican. I was among the large crowd examining this treasure trove of visual art, several hundred wonders of every sort, when I entered a gallery and my eyes fell upon Guido Reni's painting of St. Matthew and the Angel. Again, tears came instantly to my eyes, without warning.

I am not a big fan of Italian Renaissance art, though it is often considered synonymous with Catholic religious "style." The subject of Reni's painting could be said to have a sentimental appeal, as the old man listens to the sweet angel's dictation.

But what struck me -- struck like a truck, for want of a finer image -- was the sheer, heart-stopping SKILL of the work. It was almost impossible to resist reaching toward St. Matthew and patting his weathered and eminent white head. What was so emotionally moving about the Reni painting, as it was about the Tallis Spem in Alium, was the realization, the unfathomable mystery, that a mere human being created it-- that he first imagined it, saw it or heard it within himself, and then knew what he must do to capture it in a medium by which it may be shared, and preserved.

This is the simplest word for what the human being, any human being, can do-- has always done, universally desires to do-- which the lower animal cannot, that is, we preserve because we have the capacity to imagine what none can see: the future. We grasp transcendance. We are not content to live in and merely utilize our environment. We alter it-- we move things, we build, we kill and cook, we paint our skin, we mark the phases of the moon, we name, we tell what we remember, we concern ourselves that memories outlast our telling-- we find a way to hold on to sights, to sounds, to realizations whose meaning we sense as fit for immortality.

To say that "a rat is a pig is a dog" is an insult to rats, pigs, and dogs (and a bald admission that the sayer is an unobservant dolt). The blunted animae of these creatures vary wildly in their function from species to species. Some exhibit passing concern over the corpse of a dead offspring (heavy on the "passing"-- there are no annual wreath-layings or tributes in the obituary section of the Animal Times). Some mate monogamously, mostly for a season, though occasionally for life. (But we have yet to find a record of widowed whales draped in black seaweed or provided for by Keiko's life insurance policy.) There is evidence for personal attachment on the part of some of the more sophisticated types,like dogs and horses, towards their owner of the moment.

But they don't go to Doggy Heaven when they die, and it doesn't really matter if we kill them (as long as we are not wanton or cruel in the doing of it-- but the wrongness of such cruelty has less to do with the animal's merits than with the unhealthy consequences of practicing cruelty for man's own anima).

There is also no such thing as an "innocent animal" because there is no such thing as a"guilty animal"-- when a pit bull mauls a child to death, it is not put down as punishment for a crime, and it will not go to Doggy Hell for its "sin". We simply eliminate a threat to the higher life-forms whose continued existence counts for something (maybe the child could have cured cancer had she lived-- not an option for the pit bull). The killer pit bull is acting according to its nature, and because it is not immortal it is neither moral nor immoral. It's just a dog-- and in this respect one might say that a rat is a pig is a dog (or hippo, or blue jay, or maggot). They come, they go, they don't write poetry. We remember them as individuals substantially (but not entirely) because their attachment played on our sense of self-importance; and only we, through our ability to preserve the experience of having enjoyed an animal's company, can postpone their soul's mortality.

Thomas Tallis is buried in St. Alfege Church near the River Thames in Greenwich, east of London. His epitaph is as simple as his gift was complex, telling who he served, to whom and how long he was married, that he had no children, but that he was nonetheless immortal. Its last four lines read:

As he did live, so also did he die,
In mild and quiet sort, O! happy man.
To God full oft for mercy did he cry,
Wherefore he lives, let Death do what he can.

Moveon[.org] all the way to Britain

Recognize this from TV?

"A hundred and fifty thousand American men and women are stuck in Iraq,"



goes the voice-over in the Moveon ad, which features empty chairs at the Thanksgiving table and crying widows.

There's a tiny problem with this picture, though, and we're grateful to James Taranto at OpinionJournal.com for alerting us to it. He heard from an Army captain, home from his third deployment to Iraq, and violently digusted by this ad, especially because:

"As they pretend to argue on my behalf, they show a group of soldiers standing around a table in the Middle East... These are not your normal everyday U.S. soldiers though. If you look at the frame they are actually British soldiers. One is in shorts (we don't have shorts as a normal combat uniform) and the others are all clearly wearing British pattern fatigues. So, my point is that these [turkeys] pretend to argue on my behalf and bash the president in the name of my crying wife, and they don't even know what an American soldier looks like! Anyway, it really [ticked] me off."

["Turkeys" and "ticked" are, of course, euphemisms for the language the captain actually used. The rest of the letter was equally salty.]

We're glad that the left-wing extremists claim to support our troops. We just hope they can tell them from the UPS guy and the Maytag repair man. Not holding my breath.

John F. Kerry-- a politician with the courage of his estimates

This just in: Only moments ago Senator John F. Kerry (the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Senator who, by the way, can kiss my purple heart), responded to President Bush's latest speech on Iraq (by all reports, an astoundingly lacklustre affair, especially considering it was given to a military audience, but these days the President excels at nothing so much as being lacklustre).

He claimed that the President created a straw man in denouncing Democratic calls for a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq. "On the Democratic side, we called for an estimated timetable for success."

Senator Kerry retains his status as one of the great political comedians of the modern age.

R.I.P. -- John Muggeridge, T.N.M. (Truly Nice Man) 1933-2005

John Muggeridge knew the burden of having a famous father. I never talked to him specifically about that, but it's such a universal experience among children of famous parents, with a zillion different faces to it, that I think it's a fair assumption about the late Honourable Mr. M.

"Burden" is probably too mild a word-- "curse," perhaps, for those of weaker character and less conviction than this nice man. Having a famous father means, among other things, that no matter how long you live, it is unlikely that the name you share with him will ever be treated as if it is your own. In John's case, it was a really, really famous name of a father who (unlike many in this category) genuinely merited being famous because he had accomplished things of great worth.

For some portion of the time he was famous, this father (Malcolm) was also infamous, for a host of quite dubious achievements, which undoubtedly made being his son just that little bit harder-- though my one conversation with John about his childhood revealed that, as for most young children, parental infamy is much less a problem than parental instability ("stability" applied most pointedly in the monastic sense, as in "attached to one place," which the Muggeridge family was decidedly NOT.) Perhaps, insofar as John put down roots in one place and made it his real life's work to become patriarch-in-residence to an extensive clan, he could be classed a "rebel."

It is no small irony that Malcolm, who spent a considerable number of years having a hellish effect on his family, came to be the one affectionately dubbed "St. Mugg" by those who knew him (and therefore knew this was a stretch)-- putting yet another wrinkle in the famous-father-fardel for a son who, I suspect, would have both deserved the title more and enjoyed it less. In recent times John has been more quietly dubbed "Lord Muggs," with the accompanying "Honourables" etc. that the title implies. (When we reach the point that a word like "honourable" has been too beggared of meaning to communicate anything to a world of the lip-pierced and ear-drum challenged, a photo of our gentleman will suffice to define it-- "click on the icon...")

If you want to know about the famous Malcolm Muggeridge, Google him and go crazy. I know who he was, I've seen him on television, I've read him (not extensively); I never met him, though I think we were in Ontario at the same time-- the closest I came to brushing his greatness was that the obstetrician who delivered my three kids is a formidable Jewish spinster who became his very good friend out of a shared love for small people temporarily confined to wombs.

In that, John and his father were of one mind. John was a tireless champion of life, not least by living it with such grace, but also by wielding a hefty pen in the crusade against its cheapening.

In one respect (at the very least) John outpaced his famous father in perceptiveness, and that was that he preceded him into the waiting arms of the Catholic Church. I know none of the details, but I suspect in John's case this had something to do with presenting himself into the waiting arms of his wife, Anne (Cassandra?) Roche, a formidable writer, prophetess, mom, and Newfie in her own right. After the publication of her book The Desolate City: The Catholic Church in Ruins (1986) there was a nomenclature shift, which I suspect tickled all concerned: John became "Anne Roche Muggeridge's husband", and Anne became "Malcolm Muggeridge's daughter-in-law."

I have never met Anne, and even if I were to be introduced now I could not really meet her, since she has been imprisoned by something in the Alzheimer family for several years. John's good friend Danielle Crittenden sees in the loss of the husband the final goodbye to the wife, whom he kept alive through memory and anecdote. It would be one of God's great mercies if Anne were to be less than fully aware that her most faithful daily visitor comes no more.

It was through the community, or perhaps more accurately, the "web" of our Catholic parish that I met John Muggeridge. We both have had the privilege of holding several regular spots within the purview of the two parishes run by the Toronto house of the Congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. I had previously met one of John's sons, Chas, through pro-life activities, and met another, Matt, when he took a job with a good friend of ours, who lives and works out of the rented rectory next to our church, St. Vincent de Paul (the priests all living next to their other one, Holy Family). Matt's then-new wife joined our choir, a fecund little schola where all sopranos younger than me soon become pregnant. As John was gradually leaving this world, Matt and Eve were welcoming their third daughter into it. (It's a tight and comprehensive little web, the wonder of entomologists and the envy of spiders everywhere...)

John and I were among the "usual suspects" who attended the same lectures, courses, and liturgical celebrations for which the Oratorians are justly famous. But more recently our link was the weekly celebration of the Tridentine Mass. When the Oratorians were granted permission for one Old Mass per Sunday (my hands do a little spasm in typing those absurd words-- permission! It came to this!) John was among the small crowd who sought out there a relief from those qualities of post-1970's ritual which have never, in all these decades, ceased to grate in some way, even at their best as carried out by people with good liturgical sense (like the Oratorians). Early on I gave it a couple of tries, to see if it was the Mass of my long-ago memory. But it wasn't. For one thing, there was no music, and it was "lower" than the lowest Low Mass of my childhood. (As in: almost totally silent.) I couldn't really see the point, except it did remind me of what it was like to be left in peace to pray.

But about a year ago, when the Oratorians decided it was time to up the ante on the attractions of the Tridentine and make it a sung Mass, I leapt at the chance not just to enjoy from the pew this return to past glories, but to do something I had never done back in the Good Old Days: to sing the whole thing myself. So I joined the little schola, and learned how to chant.

[Just for the record!-- do not let me give the impression that we weren't singing along with an awful lot of it when I was a kid. People say about the pre-Conciliar Church that everyone was a spectator in a clericalist world. That's a HUGE LIE, not to put too fine a point on it.]

John Muggeridge was among those happy few whose thirst for the dignity and peace of the Tridentine Mass was satisfied a thousand-fold by the introduction of the sacred music. (And the happy few took little time to double in number once the sung Mass was instituted.)

I can't say I knew John well, or shared too many lengthy conversations with him. But it was always a pleasure to see his perpetually smiling face at these events which formed the cultural core of most everyone in attendance. To the degree that I have assisted in buffing and refitting and showing off for glory the treasured relic of the chanted Mass, so that it gave spiritual pleasure and comfort, and deepened that smile, seen radiating over the coffee and cookies in St. Vincent's hall, then I guess I was a friend-- and his regular spot in the pews (on the left, sort of front-ish but never the first row-- he was a good Catholic after all!) will seem unaccountably empty. Requiescat in pace.

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'

The New York Times calls itself "The Newspaper of Record" but the folks in the editorial aerie may live to regret that anyone is keeping a record of anything they say.

They've been caught in full pants-down mode by American Future which presents an instructive little log of the ever-shifting editorial opinions about the Iraq Question from 1993 to 2005. Let's see now-- 1993 was when George W. Bush was starting the first of his four terms as President-- no, WAIT! SOMEONE ELSE WAS PRESIDENT when this whole mess started! That explains why the Times now takes a position 180 degrees from where they used to stand! Back in the good old days, according to the Times, Iraq had WMD, Clinton was weak-kneed in not going after Saddam, Hans Blix was a dork-- and that's only in the first of three instalments!

Hats off to Demarche and Schulman, with a tip of the hat to Instapundit for pointing it all out, as well as linking a great post on Urban Legends about the Iraq War over at American Enterprise Online. Money quote:

Urban Legend: Helping democracy take root in Iraq was a postwar rationalization by the Bush administration; it was an argument that was not made prior to going to war. In the words of a November 13, 2003 New York Times editorial, “The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq.”

Reality: The President argued the importance of democracy taking root in Iraq before the war began. A February 27, 2003 New York Times editorial shatters the very myth the paper was perpetrating just nine months later: “President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night [in an American Enterprise Institute speech] of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a ‘free and peaceful Iraq’ that would serve as a ‘dramatic and inspiring example’ to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East, and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time.” President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union made the same case…

Like most everything else, the Bush administration and the Republicans have failed to take full advantage of the fact that people who do 180-degree turns in their opinions can't really get away with it in the era of instant communications. The turncoats among the federal Democrats are completely exposed, and can come up with no better explanation than that they weren't adult enough to make an informed decision about sending soldiers to die. (And of course that's someone else's fault, despite the fact that only SIX senators bothered to read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting to go to war-- one of whom was NOT minority leader Harry Reid.)

Clearly, when they were passing out the intelligence some people were AWOL.

Yay for me! My hit counter shows 1000 total visits as of today! Look out, Daily Kos, I'm gainin' on ya.

THANKS


Thanks for the snow, Mr. Weatherman-- it's kind of cute. Arctic wind? Not so cute.

There are many things to be thankful for today, though not among them is the fact that I live in Canada and am at present too far from family to celebrate American Thanksgiving as we once did (Canadian Thanksgiving having passed last Columbus Day). I am looking forward to having a daughter-in-law inviting us down for dinner next year....

Most days I wake up being thankful that neither Al Gore nor John Kerry is or ever was President, but I would be even more thankful for an opportunity to carry out a fairly rough "intervention" on the current President, who needs a slap upside the head and then a couple of hours to bring him up to speed on what's in the newspapers he's too busy to read. It's painful to think that Ronald Reagan is the only President in the past forty years for whom the word "squandered" should not appear in the first paragraph of his biography.

At the end of the day (which we hope will not also represent the end of the future for the Middle East, and thus, basically, for the rest of us if we give it long enough), will history write that more damage was done by the Pathological Liars' Party or the "Compassionate" Weiners' Party?

Anyway, The Truth Is Out There (thank you, Mulder), and it is fascinating. Do not pass "GO", do not collect your $200, but go directly to the Brookings Institute Iraq Index compiled by Michael O'Hanlon. It will knock your socks off. More to the point, it will knock every other sentence out of the mouth of that sad old man, John Murtha (who, if he had any real friends, would have been quietly sedated and planted in front of Monday Night Football re-runs by now to keep him from further hurting his own reputation, having opened his mouth and relieved all doubt, as the saying goes).

Pay particular attention to where the casualty spikes were, both killed and wounded, for American troops, coalition troops, and Iraqi civilians. (Hint: The only people for whom the situation has been getting increasingly dangerous in the past YEAR are Iraqi policemen.) Readers will not be pleased with all the data (opinion surveys of Iraqis about the impact of troop presence are a little discouraging) but it tells a much different story than most of what one hears from politicians and media hacks. Biggest day-to-day concern for ordinary Iraqis, by a huge margin: Security? No. Electricity. Also, nearly 20% of American fatalities are non-hostile. It's a dangerous job.

Mudville Gazette also sticks it to Murtha pretty good, with actual figures instead of foggy generalizations-- interesting stats on the wounded (about 55% are back in combat in 72 hours, only 18% require evacuation, amputees make up about .03%). None of this is easy or positive, but it puts things in perspective.

Gateway Pundit traces Murtha's history of similar bloviations
Had we only known he was a serial bloviator, we could have gotten him some therapy.

Letter from the front via: Marine Mom

And a comment about the military's increasing hate-hate relationship with the media-- this is the only way that Iraq is genuinely, indisputably, and thoroughly like Vietnam, except that back then the media succeeded in making at least some veterans hate themselves too-- but mostly they just hated the media and how it turned the people against their soldiers. Not this time. The soldiers have met the enemy and they know who he is-- and they know who's on his side back home.

Anyhow, I'm thankful that all sorts of people I've never met are taking care of all my kids on Thanksgiving Day-- they'll have more fun than I will, and will eat better too! Thankful for the freedom to read, to write, to bounce around the world, to vote the bastards out, to sing Gregorian chant. I can't complain, really-- but I'll find a way.

MURTHA MADNESS

I was so horrified, so disgusted, so stunned, so totally appalled by the grandstanding pronouncements of Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha-- that the Iraq war "cannot be won militarily", that our troops have "done all they can", that "our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency" -- I resolved to write him immediately and tell him off. then I went to his website and did a closer inspection of what is pompously referred to on the home page as "Important Speech on the War in IRAQ" (italics as found), and I realised that, among other things, these are the meandering bloviations of an ill-educated and incoherent old man whose stylistic atrocities would be mocked by the elites of his party if he were not now so useful to them.

There are so many factual errors and fatuous mischaracterizations of the military reality that a careful "Fisking" would be quite lengthy-- something for a later day, if I fell there's anything left to say about it. But by far one of the most offensive statements he made in his speech on the floor was just a few sentences from the end. "Because we in Congress are charged with sending our sons and daughters [sic] into battle, it is our responsibility, our OBLIGATION, to speak for them. That's why I am speaking out."

No, Congressman Murtha, you do NOT have an obligation, or any right at all, to claim to speak for the adult members of our volunteer military. Your being a decorated veteran does not give you that right, nor does it give you the "absolute moral authority" once claimed for Cindy Sheehan during her fifteen minutes of exploitation by the radical left. Such moral authority as you might have does not outweigh that of Senator John McCain, who opposes your position in every respect. (And if you had hoped to achieve his level of authority and prestige, don't waste your breath. At the very least, he can put an intelligent sentence together.)

And here, Congressman Murtha, is another Marine you do not speak for-- my kid, who has a pretty good weblog, and this is what he thinks of you and your fellow anti-war Democrats and weak-kneed Republicans:

...what I see right now is incredibly disappointing. I see Democrats using every roadside bombing as a bat to smash in the administration's face, every death as a statistic to score political points because they know the war has made the president bleed, and they like the smell of his blood. I see Republicans using every criticism of the war as a big index finger to point back at the Democrats and say, "those quibbling bastards, they're not patriotic and they don't support our troops when they ask why we don't have enough body armor and why every speech the president makes on the subject sounds exactly the same."

What I don't see is our leaders in D.C. coming together, turning to that 18-year old lance corporal who's tens of thousands of miles away from his home and scared shitless, and saying, "No matter what, kid, we got your back." Nope, that kid has become a knife our "representatives" are slipping between each other's ribs in the hopes that one really good deep thrust will hit the other guy's heart...

...I do not claim to speak for my colleagues or the Navy/Marine Corps team. I'm speaking for myself. And I'm disgusted with politics in general right now. It's one thing to listen to different newspapers and media outlets wrangle back and forth about how we should be there, how we shouldn't, how we're winning, how we're losing, how we're beating terrorism, how we're creating more of it. They're not in charge. They can afford to be whiny, judgmental, narrow-minded and hypocritical because their editors aren't the ones who say, "Kid, I'm going to send you to a foreign country where you may very well die or be crippled for life." At the end of the day, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal can act like schoolchildren; our political leaders can't.

But they're not stepping up to the plate. They're not saying, "Kid, I got your back." I can tell you right now who I think's got my back. My family; my friends; my fellow students here, who once we're all winged will become my copilots and wingmen in combat; my instructors, who I know are giving me the best training they can to increase my chances of coming home in one piece; our commanders, who have the huge responsibility of thousands of lives in their hands; and God.

All those other folks bitching back and forth in the Beltway, seeing who can scream louder, come up with the most outrageous rhetoric, and impact the poll numbers the hardest: you disgust me. You discourage me. You disgrace this country. You're so lost in clouds of your own noise that you don't hear the grunt on the Syrian border saying: "Honorable Mr/Ms/Mrs So-and-So, I gotta turn my back on you so that I can point my rifle forward to cover my squadmates and kill the enemy. Will you cover me?" None of you have an answer for him. You'd better come up with one, because right now, he's worth more to this country alive than you are.

LOVE YOUR FREEDOM? THANK A VET.

[Take a deep breath. Start again.... Despite having had my hands on a computer for several years now, what I know about the beasts could fit into a thimble, with room to spare. So periodically the dog eats my homework. (See Friday’s post.) It’s called a SAVE button—I’m told they’re very useful.]

So Veterans’ Day (called Remembrance Day in Britain and Canada, which has a nice ring) was two days ago, and most of what’s worth saying about it has probably already been said.

My own cyber-vaporized remarks included some development of my ongoing frustration with President Bush—but apparently he got wind of my disapproval and addressed my complaints in his speech to military personnel in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. It’s a ten-pager, if you print it out—quite a mouthful. I guess that’s what comes of trying to do about two years’ worth of damage control in one afternoon.

I gave myself a surprise one night last week when I was watching the news— Bush came on, giving an unrehearsed response to the news of some terrorist incident or other, and before he got ten words out, I grabbed the remote and switched the television off. The response was so quick and deliberate that it could only remind me of what had become my habit between 1993 and 2001, hitting the kill-switch every time the face of William Jefferson Clinton appeared.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate— for one thing, I still tend to switch him off to this very day; also,the reflex didn’t really kick in until 1995. Whereas the need to look away from Bush is born mostly of sheer exasperation (combined with that reluctance we all have to watch someone invite public scorn— like when we lower our eyes when an untalented child, drunken uncle, or manifestly unqualified Supreme Court candidate mounts the stage) -- my Clinton reflex is born of profound visceral disgust, and I can name the day and place it began: June 6, 1995, Normandy, France.

There was never any question that President Clinton must attend the ceremonies marking the 50^th anniversary of D-day. This was compulsory, by virtue of his office, and his personal suitability was not an issue. Too bad nobody told him that. It is testimony to the monumental self-absorption which he has never ceased to exhibit, that he managed to make the D-day commemorations all about him, never missing an opportunity for the well-rehearsed lip-tremble to be captured in the endless photo-op.

Never did he show a milli-second’s acquaintance with the humility which would have been appropriate to a man, raised to the world’s most powerful position, who had evaded serving his country in Vietnam by sending written supplications to influential people who shared his professed loathing of the military. Never could we detect that the heroes of D-day— ordinary Americans who sacrificed their lives in acts of extraordinary courage— inspired in Bill Clinton one instant’s blush of much-deserved shame.

The pinnacle of this revolting display was Clinton’s “solitary” stroll down a section of the broad beach dubbed “Omaha” – followed at a discreet distance, of course, by the cameras. At one point the president squatted down and fiddled in the sand, leaving behind, for the benefit of the paparazzi, a small cross made of pebbles— his spiritual meditation on this historic place.

Later the word went out that this was all a set-up, arranged by his advance-men, because there are no pebbles on Omaha Beach— an accusation so extreme it was hard to imagine it being made if there were no substance behind it. But that assumption is what the authors of smear-jobs always rely on (the “Bush lied” mantra being the prime current example), so I reserved judgment at the time. (It is also alleged that presidential staffers knocked over gravestones near the D-day beaches so Clinton could be seen re-erecting them.) The whole D-day pageant had afforded quite enough to be disgusted about without worrying over pebbles on a beach. I was moved to write a short poem on the subject, a parody of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

Eight years later I walked Omaha Beach—lots of it. I can confirm: you’d have to go for miles out on the sands (where Mr. Clinton and his micro-cairn were photographed) before you found enough pebbles to put into a line. His Kodak moment had been a fraud.

While we're on the subject of that particular beach: public ignorance of just about anything to do with history is abysmal and frightening-- everybody knows that. No doubt there are millions of Americans whose total understanding of the events of D-day has been derived from Saving Private Ryan-- and frankly, that's not half bad. The film as a whole was founded on a stupid, very 1990's premise, but the first 25 minutes are so good that I think Spielberg ought to have gotten some kind of medal for it.

However, they are no substitute for a trip to the site itself. And no trip to the Normandy Beaches is complete without visits to (a) the American cemetery, and (b) every museum you can find, large and small (with the possible exception of the new Canadian one at Juno Beach, which is AWFUL-- Canadians are remembered in several other museums much much better than they are memorialized at their own-- it's a scandal).

Our trip there was a graduation gift to our eldest son, before he officially joined up with the Marines. He wanted to see major sites for both World Wars, so we travelled to Normandy, Belgium, and the Marne, especially Belleau Wood, where the Marines came into their own in 1918 holding off the advance that got within a few miles of Paris, and further forging their reputation as the Kick-ass Few and Proud.

This was June of 2003-- just a few months after the invasion of Iraq, when Americans were (ahem) not too popular in France. (There had even been some grave desecration.) We went there with some trepidation, prepared to be met coolly if not with hostility. We were not prepared for the greeting we got.

To this day I can't tell anyone about it without choking up-- the American and Allied flags, not just in "official" locations (we arrived on June 8, and there had been the annual ceremonies) but still hanging on the balconies of private homes; the permanent sign, in English, painted on a restaurant window: "We welcome our liberators"; the 20-something museum guide who, when thanked for his presentation by several American vets (probably of Korea), looked them square in the eyes and said, "No-- thank YOU." Apparently in France, at least in Normandy, parents still tell their children the important facts of their history.

Here are some of those important facts:

American casualties, June 1 - September 14, 1945: 30,000 dead - 110,000 wounded (minimum)

French civilian casualties (over roughly the same period): 15-20,000 killed or missing

Apparently there are French people who think it was worth it.

Those of us who grew up during the Vietnam war, and were in high school while class-mates were still being drafted for it, had a pretty clear notion of what it meant to have headed for the National Guard, and I have no illusions about George Bush’s or Dan Quayle’s motives for pursuing that option. (May I refer anyone who is still confused about Mr. Bush’s service record to the definitive chronologies, here and here.) But regardless of where or why or for how long you carry it out, it takes gonads of steel to fly a fighter jet, and Mr. Bush did it well.

It also took steel gonads for Bush to do what the previous president and his partisans in Congress had balked at doing: to acknowledge that war had been declared against the United States (August 1996) and certainly by September 11, 2001,it was time to make answer. There is a case to be made that it takes steel gonads to persevere with a war that is increasingly unpopular, especially when that unpopularity is due to selective, manipulative, biased, and occasionally treasonous reporting, in the media and in the halls of government.

Unfortunately it seems to be the president’s view that remaining mute in the face of outrageous abuse and slander from America’s elected representatives, and their “527” accomplices, is also an exercise in flexing those gonads. If that's what he thinks, he is dead wrong.

It’s the gonads of steel that are truly AWOL now—and have been for months, maybe years. What Bush has been exhibiting is a fatally misplaced sense of purity, that makes him reluctant to dignify the slanders with a response and to get down in the dirty trenches of political warfare to defend his vision. He did have one. Some of us remember what it was, and still believe in it. But let it be clearly understood—it has never been about believing in him.

It is one of Bush’s critical flaws—one that has probably always been characteristic of him (and might make him underqualified to be president) is the degree to which his method of operation is deeply personal. This was an asset to a governor of Texas (the least powerful governorship in the 50 States). But it makes for scales on the eyes of a president.

There is nothing unusual about a president bringing his inner circle with him to Washington— Clinton brought half of Arkansas. But Clinton’s people were there because they shared his keen and ruthless political instincts (except for Vince Foster, apparently— whatever the facts are on that mystery, he was clearly a fish out of water in Washington). By contrast, Bush’s inner circle got there mostly on loyalty. They are not without talent, but they seem to get jobs unrelated to the talents they have.

Oh Scott McClellan. The Anchoress called him a “milquetoast.” She is entirely too kind. One hears many different things about Ari Fleischer, not all of them flattering, but as the guy facing the wolverines in the Washington press corps every day, he was a master. It was distressing to learn that he was leaving, and when McClellan stepped in I was convinced this had to be a temporary measure until a grown-up could be hired. From day one McClellan has struck me as the worst possible choice for his job, with the look of a sweaty, dough-faced prep-school prefect living in perpetual fear of being wedgied in the boys’ john and stuffed in a locker.

He’s supposed to be the president’s goalie, for cripes sake—the guy sent out with mammoth pads, huge gloves, a giant stick (way bigger than everyone else’s), and a helmet/mask decorated with the fangs of some wild animal. Scott McClellan stands in the goal-crease wearing mittens and wet pants. But some of this mystery was cleared up recently— I found out he’s an old hand from Texas. Spare us another unqualified crony.

All the real evidence suggests that George Bush in not unintelligent or incapable. But I think David Frum (former Bush speech-writer, who basically admires him) was right on the money in his 2003 book The Right Man, to see Bush as “impatient, quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed . . .” — and we can now add to that excessively reliant on instinct, personal ties and loyalty rather than dispassionate rational judgment.

Frum went on in the above-quoted sentence to say that “outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity," and Frum stands by that assessment (or at least he did prior to the Harriet Miers debacle, against which Frum led the most organized revolt). Well, he knows better than I do— but the well-founded charges of cronyism, coupled with Bush's personal tardiness in responding to Hurricane Katrina and his breathtaking tardiness in responding to the Democrats’ slanders of both his administration and our armed forces in the field, speak to me of a kind of mental laziness, which is just inexcusable.

We’re all grateful that the president went on the much-belated attack on Veterans’ Day against the tsunami of lies which has threatened to sweep away all that remains of his moral authority (which was once quite considerable, and well-deserved). I for one am tired of making excuses for the inexcusable, and of the painful prospect of watching him bumble through another press conference regarding issues and events about which any fully engaged person should have one or two good rhetorical punches always to hand. The idea that the Bush administration is in some way inherently evil continues to be one of the stupidest things any left-wing partisan could believe in—evil is so much more clever than any of these people.

Though Veterans' Day may be past, the season is still ripe for paying tribute to our men and women in uniform. They deserve vocal support, and not just from my Iraqi and Iranian house-painters!

And there's a certain Frenchman who could put many Americans to shame-- I'm thinking of our guide at Belleau Wood, Gilles Lagin, a young family man, mechanic by day, who spends every spare moment (and no small amount of cash) studying and preserving the legacy of the Marines who fought for the soil on which he was raised.

We spent seven (!) fascinating hours in his company, covering the battles from every angle, walking amid the trenches on the pivotal hill-top (where Marines had dug in 85 years to the day before we got there), and pausing at the beautiful cemetery and awe-inspring chapel in the valley below. Gilles has built his own museum of period military artefacts (and often contacted the descendants of the missing whose dog-tags or other identifiable items he has found), and has cultivated an ardent admiration for the United States Marine Corps since he was 9 years old.

What's French for OO-RAH?

Once you’ve finished Mac Owens’ salute to his fellow Marines and their 230^th birthday, have a closer look at the Corps from here:

Marines home page
Leatherneck Magazine
From the Hall to the Shores -- milblog
Scuttlebutt and Small Chow-- a great history of the Corps, and one of the most beautifully designed websites you'll ever lay eyes on

From the parents: Marine parents, Moms, and more Moms
And even though they're Army, take a look at Some soldier's Mom and Keep My Soldier Safe

Want to know the TRUTH about what's going on in the Big Sandbox? Check here:

Arthur Chrenkoff-- Blog has now ceased, but he's the pioneer in Good News From Iraq/Afghanistan (scroll down to "The Rest of the Best"). Until you read this, you have no business even having an opinion about the war, much less expressing one.

Chrenkoff's mantle taken up by Good News from Iraq (good sounds too)

Michael Yon -- self-embedded reporter (you can support his work through pay-pal)-- gritty, on the ground, this is the REAL THING

The late (murdered by terrorists in Iraq) Steven Vincent reported from In the Red Zone (also his book title)

U.S. Central Command

Military History and a keen eye to the present from Victor Davis Hanson

Military weblogs (active and retired):
Lance in Iraq
The Mudville Gazetter
The guys at the Fourth Rail
Blackfive

Civilan Support Groups (GIVE! GIVE! GIVE!):
- California businessman Jim Hake got the ball rolling with Spirit of America-- building the future of Iraq, winning hearts and minds
- Film and TV star Gary Sinise co-founded Operation Iraqi Children, which he supports through his Lt. Dan Band -- he doesn't just write the checks, he's been there
- Valour IT gets lap-tops for disabled veterans
- Make contact and provide needed stuff to troops in the field by being a Soldiers' Angel
- Reading material for troops at Books for Soldiers and Books for Baghdad
- Snacks and personal need items through Treats for Troops
- Homes for disabled vets -- help build a new Fisher House for military families to be near their wounded soldier's hospital
- Get special gifts to a wounded soldier

America Supports You is a Department of Defense initiative, but civilian-driven

I just spent five hours writing a fantastic Remembrance Day post with dozens of links to things military, and lots of hugely insightful thoughts about the last two presidents, AND MY COMPUTER ATE IT.

I feel like I've been shot.

If I have the heart I'll reconstruct it. Meanwhile, Happy Birthday Marine Corps (230 years) as celebrated by Mac Owens at NRO.


And we'll give the annual nod to Major John McRae with the least heeded words of his poem:

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

There's a whole lot of "breaking faith" happening now among American leftists who would gladly throw away the lives of their military and of hundreds of thousands of victims of jihadist oppressors, if it meant they could administer the fatal blow to George W. Bush's regime. Fortunately, whether they believe in it or not, there is an afterlife and a final judgement. Not that we should have to wait that long for them to be dealt with.

A Jarhead on "JARHEAD"

Sometimes my baby boy still does what I tell him.

He's the one in Marine flight school (just about to get "winged," having just passed his big instrumentation test) and I told him he had to get out and see Jarhead ASAP so I could hear what real Marines had to say about it. Apparently they made up about 90% of the audience in attendance down there in Pensacola-land. His general comment was "thumbs sideways" sporting a fashionable khaki "neutral"-- he puts it best in his own words (I keep telling him to be a military journalist).

Money quotes (PETA discretion advised):

The training scenes (apparently borrowing the formula of Full Metal Jacket) were reminiscent of my own experience at TBS ...I don't know if I buy the machine gun shooting live rounds right over the Marines' heads. On the other hand, we participated in several live-fire exercises at TBS which, despite all our safeguards, are inherently dangerous. As for the paintball-guns: we used those. (And they're the most fun you can have without setting a small animal on fire).

But what about the soul of the story? What was it trying to tell us? I was never sure... Was it trying to tell us of the monotony of warfare? That's nothing new: Roman legionaries could have told us the same thing... Though when it comes to Marines being deadly, brutal, and somewhat insane, I'll let you all in on a little secret: true or not, we cultivate that image because when it comes time to go into battle and Abu Musab Whoever learns that he's got Marines charging toward him, he's already half-terrified. And if he's scared, we've already beaten his mind, which makes beating his body that much easier and much less costly for us.

Ooh-rah. (And, no, they don't say it every other sentence.) And that business about "already half-terrified"? Oh yes-- confirmed from many sources, over many wars.

Duly noted: My other baby boys occasionally do what I tell them too. All this is pretty amazing, since it's a very long-distance affair, receiving their Canadian-based orders, as they do, in:

Providence






and

Inner Mongolia

THE FRENCH DISEASE

The first place-name reported as the fires erupted in suburban Paris was "St. Denis", a name which means only one thing to me: the birthplace of what we now call "Gothic" architectural style.


The abbey church there, today sadly marooned among warehouses and other inglorious structures, was once home to a Benedictine monastic community whose 12th-century Abbot, Suger, masterminded the overhaul of the existing Romanesque church to embody his new theology of the meaning and power of light as an image God, by incoporating all the latest ideas and construction technologies of his age. Under his supervision (really his micro-management, it's fair to say) St. Denis became the model for architectural innovation all over Europe, its style transported almost immediately to Canterbury, England, among other places.


Ironically (it now seems), St. Denis was the first building in Christian Europe to fully exploit the structural possibilities of the pointed arch -- a feature borrowed from the architectural wonders of Moorish (Islamic) Spain.


So I think about St. Denis, and the Jihad-fuelled rage now literally inflaming the Muslim ghettos around it, and in cities across France-- and I whisper through clenched teeth, "Don't you dare. Don't even think about it."

Rose Window