re: "Four Years In"
Vanderleun at American Digest has quite a way with words.
Money quote(s):
"Four years into the most gentle war ever fought, a war fought on the cheap at every level, a war fought to avoid civilian harm rather than maximize it. Picnic on the grass at Shiloh. Walk the Western Front. Speak to the smoke of Dresden. Kneel down and peek into the ovens of Auschwitz. Sit on the stones near ground zero at Hiroshima and converse with the shadows singed into the wall. Listen to those ghost whisperers of war."
"There were children and other living things on the planes that flew into the towers. They all went into the fire and the ash just the same. But they, now, are not important. Nor is the message their deaths still send us when we listen. That message is to be silenced."
"Four years in and they are upset that their party of the 90s has been so long interrupted; that their raves are foreshortened; that their sleep is persistently shaken by car bombs beyond the far horizon; that their time at the mall can not be entirely, completely, and utterly without guilt."
"We shall overcome. Overcome who? Your fellow citizens? Certainly not the enemy. You'll not get over on this one with your Ghandiesque platitudes, unless you are ready to all go like lemmings over the cliff and onto the spikes. You don't strike me as the kind of people with that level of commitment. You strike me as the kind of people who like to prance, rant, and chant, and then go home for a nice chilled Chardonnay and a slab of grilled tofu. Then you spend an hour bitching about Bush before taking a bong hit and sucking up some MTV. I know you well. I was you."
"You will return when your children are slaughtered in their schools. You will return when one of our cities burns. You will return when your cities freeze in the winter, your drinks warm without ice in the summer, your iPods go flat as you walk streets with few lights, when your electricity is rationed, and the shelves of your store are bare. You will return when the crops fail and the trucks cannot run.
Look around you. Everything you have, everything, is there because of oil. The brute fact of the planet right now and into the next few decades is that without oil, the machine that enables you to be you runs on oil. If that oil runs out, your nation, any nation, will do all that it can to get it back. And you will be back not "with peace, but with a sword" of a terrible fire. In your name. In all our names."
&
"If we leave because of your pouting and pique, we will return because of your stupidity. There will be blood after and blood later and fire to follow. That war will not take four years. It will take an afternoon at best, but decades of digging out will follow. A million may die here but many millions will die there. What follows will make the Great Depression seem a mild recession. History will unfold in ways we cannot now fathom. The American experiment, still young, may falter. Other forces, not so easily congenial to freedom, may rise. The utopian world you seek will be set back a century at the least. We will all have to bear the brand of that fire, but on your foreheads the mark will be sharp and deep. And we will know you for what you are. Worse still, you will know.
Four years in and the only way out and out now would be to quit. Capitulation is not a policy. It is merely procrastination. There is a way out, but it is years away and many people, people who swoon easily in the light sun of this war lite, do not have the ability to endure war; even so tepid a war as this. They do not have the simple patience.
It is in patience alone that our enemies outstrip us."
Money quote(s):
"Four years into the most gentle war ever fought, a war fought on the cheap at every level, a war fought to avoid civilian harm rather than maximize it. Picnic on the grass at Shiloh. Walk the Western Front. Speak to the smoke of Dresden. Kneel down and peek into the ovens of Auschwitz. Sit on the stones near ground zero at Hiroshima and converse with the shadows singed into the wall. Listen to those ghost whisperers of war."
"There were children and other living things on the planes that flew into the towers. They all went into the fire and the ash just the same. But they, now, are not important. Nor is the message their deaths still send us when we listen. That message is to be silenced."
"Four years in and they are upset that their party of the 90s has been so long interrupted; that their raves are foreshortened; that their sleep is persistently shaken by car bombs beyond the far horizon; that their time at the mall can not be entirely, completely, and utterly without guilt."
"We shall overcome. Overcome who? Your fellow citizens? Certainly not the enemy. You'll not get over on this one with your Ghandiesque platitudes, unless you are ready to all go like lemmings over the cliff and onto the spikes. You don't strike me as the kind of people with that level of commitment. You strike me as the kind of people who like to prance, rant, and chant, and then go home for a nice chilled Chardonnay and a slab of grilled tofu. Then you spend an hour bitching about Bush before taking a bong hit and sucking up some MTV. I know you well. I was you."
"You will return when your children are slaughtered in their schools. You will return when one of our cities burns. You will return when your cities freeze in the winter, your drinks warm without ice in the summer, your iPods go flat as you walk streets with few lights, when your electricity is rationed, and the shelves of your store are bare. You will return when the crops fail and the trucks cannot run.
Look around you. Everything you have, everything, is there because of oil. The brute fact of the planet right now and into the next few decades is that without oil, the machine that enables you to be you runs on oil. If that oil runs out, your nation, any nation, will do all that it can to get it back. And you will be back not "with peace, but with a sword" of a terrible fire. In your name. In all our names."
&
"If we leave because of your pouting and pique, we will return because of your stupidity. There will be blood after and blood later and fire to follow. That war will not take four years. It will take an afternoon at best, but decades of digging out will follow. A million may die here but many millions will die there. What follows will make the Great Depression seem a mild recession. History will unfold in ways we cannot now fathom. The American experiment, still young, may falter. Other forces, not so easily congenial to freedom, may rise. The utopian world you seek will be set back a century at the least. We will all have to bear the brand of that fire, but on your foreheads the mark will be sharp and deep. And we will know you for what you are. Worse still, you will know.
Four years in and the only way out and out now would be to quit. Capitulation is not a policy. It is merely procrastination. There is a way out, but it is years away and many people, people who swoon easily in the light sun of this war lite, do not have the ability to endure war; even so tepid a war as this. They do not have the simple patience.
It is in patience alone that our enemies outstrip us."
posted by Consul-At-Arms at 12:13 AM
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