|
December 27, 2002ANNOUNCING THE 2002 MAUREEN DOWD PSYCHOBABBLER OF THE YEAR PRIZEThis first annual Horsefeathers prize is named after the New York Times pundit in recognition of her unique combination of fatuous self-regard, shallowness of knowledge, condescension towards her betters and her grotesquely polemical misuse of psychological terms and ideas. A finer example of what Dr. Johnson called “articulate ignorance” could not be found. We're certain the many competitors who fell a little short of our winner will continue to strive towards the standard she has set. This year’s award winner captured the prize for comments he made just before his untimely demise so the award is, regrettably, a posthumous one. When Samuel Johnson advised Boswell: “Clear your mind of cant” he was remarking on the ease with which we fill our minds with nonsense and cliches that we never question. Johnson had in mind the social hypocrisies that we all engage in, and while acknowledging the need for such hypocrisy, he cautioned against believing what we may be forced to say. Cant thinking eases the need for genuine critical thought, replacing it with clichéd and formulaic notions. While Johnson’s counsel holds for all time, even the great Doctor could not have anticipated the cant of our therapeutic age, nor the way we are inundated with it through the mass media. Horsefeathers, taking up Johnson’s injunction as our mission, awards Five feathers to the 2002 Psychobabbler of the Year. The competitors included: 1)The Freud Museum, London, whose spokesman Ivan Ward enlisted Freud on the side of Yasser Arafat's terror apparatus. He assured us that Freud, were he alive today, would speak up on behalf of innocent Palestinian children brutally victimized by pathological Israelis. 2) The U.S. State Dept. utopians, from Colin Powell down who “explain” that the reason why Palestinians commit acts of terror is because they feel desperate and deprived. The therapeutic stance assumes that if we address their grievances with sufficient empathy they will feel better, become happy and civilized. Hatred is never irrational; it is caused by frustration, by insufficient caring, for which we are responsible. Hence the worse the barbarians behave, the more we need to empathize with their distraught state and help them gratify their wishes. This is the Officer Krupke, “we’re depraved, because we were deprived” school of psychotherapy 3) Dr. Carol Wolman informed us that in her professional psychiatric opinion the psychopath on the world scene was George W. Bush who was merely going after Saddam in order to win an “oedipal” triumph over daddy in order to win mommy’s love. What made this a particularly rich example of psychobabble was Dr. Wolman’s citation of the American Psychiatric Assn’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to lend a patina of professional respectability to her diagnosis of a man she clearly loathed. The best psychobabblers, like Dr. Wolman, are relieved of the task of considering what practical policy choices are needed for dealing with the Saddams of the world, in favor of displaying for us their “deeper” understanding. 4) While Dr. Wolman was intent on diagnosing, i.e. pathologizing George W. Bush, Dr. Jerrold Post did the same for Saddam, telling us how the poor man suffered from the after effects of cruel mistreatment in his childhood. The diagnosis Dr. Post offered was designed to warn us against using force to subdue him because “malignant narcissists”, in Dr. Post’s view, are best treated with empathic care lest they become violent. Neither Dr. Wolman nor Dr. Post bothered to mention that the same traumatic early lives can be found in the background of many of the greatest human beings who ever lived—including Samuel Johnson. Clearly it was a difficult choice by virtue of the worthiness of the contenders. Nevertheless our decision was clearcut. The winner of the 2002 Maureen Dowd prize is: 5)Sheikh Salah Sa’adeh. When asked whether young people blowing themselves up in order to kill Jews was a sign of mental health, he replied: "The stream of youths [who seek to] attain martyrdom shows [mental] health and the awareness of Palestinian society, and is not a mistake or an escape from a situation of despair or frustration. Many people come to Jihad, and they are willing to lay down their souls - which is the most precious thing a man has. There is a vast difference between someone who sacrifices money or an offering and someone who sacrifices his soul for the sake of Allah to bring happiness to the nation, and to remove its torment and distress." On July 23, 2002 Sheikh Sa’adeh was killed in a missile strike by the Israel Defense Forces, in their own form of therapy, and in gratitude for his efforts towards improving the mental health of Palestinian youth. The 2002 Maureen Dowd Prize with five feathers is therefore awarded posthumously to Sheikh Salah Sa’adeh. 
December 22, 2002HORSEFEATHERS 2002 POPULAR MUSIC AWARDPopular music both reflects and shapes our culture. Was it the 60's that produced rock 'n roll, or the music that created the '60's? World War ll lives in many of our memories through the songs it produced. 'Til We Meet Again, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, Oh How I Hate to Get Up In The Morning--a few bars of these songs and an era of national purpose is evoked. Those songs helped create and sustain the mood. What songs will do this for the young people of today, growing up during a climactic clash between civilization and barbarism? Frankly, Horsefeathers has been disappointed by the musical output generated in response to the attacks of 9-11. Bruce Springsteen's seemed a politically correct attempt to generate sympathy for the victims without naming the villains. A kind of generic rock rhythm supported "poetic" and confusing lyrics that seemed to transmute a villainous act into a religious epiphany. The generic victims were redeemed through "the rising" up to a heavenly abode wherein evil would not exist. One might almost think that the murderous slaughter of thousands of innocents provided the welcome opportunity for religious redemption. The lyrics seemed banal and trite, mostly designed to defuse any anger we might feel towards the killers, as we grasped the deeper significance of these tragic events. If a fireman was climbing the stairs of the WTC, not just to try to rescue trapped human beings, but to get to a blissful heaven, how could we feel outrage when he had been granted such an enviable opportunity? Countless songs have been written, most of them instantly forgettable. The country singer Alan Jackson has, however, written an enormously popular song about 9-11, Where were You (When The World Stopped Turning?), but this is a song about victimhood. While tuneful and easily hummable the lyrics are trite--reminding us to pray, love our families and not take life for granted. No anger is expressed, but rather, sympathy and identification with the victims. While it possesses an admirable simplicity and directness, by contrast with Springsteen's conscious 'artfulness', it nevertheless exploits the easy identification with victims. Haven't we all felt unfair pain in our lives? This is easily equated with the losses of 9-11 survivors. Neil Young was first out of the gate with his song, Let's Roll which, unlike most of the banal, culturally sensitive pop music to follow, did honor our own aggressive response to the barbarians. His lyric included the lines:" The problem with Young's song: it was musically gimmicky, with its ringing cellphones to introduce the tune. It seemed too crafted, too clever by half, and ultimately trite. It was more like a documentary dramatization of Todd Beamer's last moments than a musically original response to the events of 9-11. Although a serious and honest effort it lacked the musical emotional resonance to give it staying power. Horsefeathers has found one song, released since 9-11 that is so fine it deserves to live, so powerful it stirs the blood, so affecting it touches the heart. The lyric, simple, affecting, and direct is rendered overwhelmingly powerful by the equally simple, anthem like martial music, a music that evokes righteous anger and a readiness to take up arms against our enemies. The lyric runs strongly against the politically correct tide that insists on empathizing with our adversaries and reasoning with them. The song: Freedom's Child. The composer/singer Billy Joe Shaver, is a man who has lived a life with more than its share of personal tragedy. Rather than assume a stance of poetic self pitying victimization he chooses the path of struggle and resistance, one which conveys a realistic sense of hope. "Freedom's child" will fight to the death against the enemies of freedom and the song has an infectiously vitalizing quality, despite the real tragedy it evokes. The album: Freedom's Child No effete, liberal, political correctness here. The 2002 Horsefeathers, 5 feathers popular music award goes to Billy Joe Shaver for Freedom's Child.
December 20, 2002POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLSIt is a tendency of the human psyche to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. We all employ the mental mechanism of denial to reduce the everyday distresses of life. One of the most painful things each of us must contemplate is our own certain death. Entire religions have grown out of the effort to cope with this certainty. However, even more painful than the idea that each of us must die, is the idea that there are people, including the people who love us, who want us to die. As Dr. Kramer points out,(Does Senator Lott Need a Heart Transplant)ambivalence is built into human nature. Even more difficult than acknowledging that people may wish us dead, is that there are people actually prepared to kill us. How can this be? It offends our liberal sensibilities. Aren’t we caring and considerate and sympathetic to the needs of the less fortunate? Surely, if someone wishes to kill us he must have rational reasons we should address, grievances we can assuage, hurt we can ease. In our therapeutic culture, such hostility towards us requires self-examination on our part and greater empathy. As the British journalist, Robert Fisk said, after he was assaulted in Afghanistan: "If I were them, I'd have beaten me too." This inability of the liberal imagination to grasp a dark truth of human nature-that the urge to kill is as powerful as the urge to create- results in an unwitting alliance with our potential destroyers. Our politically correct, multicultural peace loving utopians join hands with the violent utopians who would kill us. Thus, as Daniel Pipes points out, we have a PBS documentary on Islam that airbrushes out, not only the murderous violence to be found in the Koran, but the constant calls for murder of infidels by leading Imams in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our supposed allies. For many years before 9-11, Muslim terrorists were mounting attacks on Americans around the world, even on the World Trade Center, and telling us they were at war with the West, yet precious little was done. We are gradually learning why—no thanks to the CIA or the FBI. We now have evidence that the FBI itself was infected by a form of political correctness that has quite literally proven fatal. ABC News spoke with two veteran FBI agents who described how efforts to pursue terrorists were hamstrung: ".....Perhaps most astounding of the many mistakes, according to Flessner and an affidavit filed by Wright, is how an FBI agent named Gamal Abdel-Hafiz seriously damaged the investigation. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz, who is Muslim, refused to secretly record one of al-Kadi's suspected associates, who was also Muslim. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz told him, Vincent and other agents that "a Muslim doesn't record another Muslim." "He wouldn't have any problems interviewing or recording somebody who wasn't a Muslim, but he could never record another Muslim," said Vincent. Wright said he "was floored" by Abdel-Hafiz's refusal and immediately called the FBI headquarters. Their reaction surprised him even more: "The supervisor from headquarters says, 'Well, you have to understand where he's coming from, Bob.' I said no, no, no, no, no. I understand where I'm coming from," said Wright. "We both took the same damn oath to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and he just said no? No way in hell." Far from being reprimanded, Abdel-Hafiz was promoted to one of the FBI's most important anti-terrorism posts, the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, to handle investigations for the FBI in that Muslim country." Does it not become more likely every day that the dogmas of political correctness have also hamstrung the anthrax investigation? The one man-Saddam Hussein- who had the motive the money and the means to launch an anthrax attack is the one man who is not on the 'person of interest' list. Instead, political correctness dictates the search must be for a right wing white American male, just as the Washington snipers were supposed to be white male gun lovers. Perhaps the most dangerous province of “we are the world” utopianism is our own State Dept., where building multi-cultural alliances often takes precedence over pursuing the war declared upon us by our enemies. In fact, the very concept of ‘enemy’ is something our diplomats don’t acknowledge. Saudi Arabia, home of Wahabbism, finances terror and imposes barbaric Sharia law on Americans unfortunate enough to have married Saudis, or to have questioned its anti-Christian, anti-Semitic practices. Yet our State Dept. argues that we must regard them as our friends and “adapt” our behavior to their cultural customs. It is strongly suggested that, rather than be offended by Saudi behavior, we should "understand" their customs as valid for them. Public beheadings are simply a cultural practice and we are not entitled to "judgmentally" condemn it. Visiting women must wear burkas or be thrown into Saudi jails, a practice endorsed by our State Dept. multiculturalists. If Saudi fathers are welcome to kidnap children away from their estranged American wives, our State Dept. will 'explain' the Saudi position. And what of our European “friends”? When they adopt a stance of cultural and moral superiority to the “cowboy” Presidency of George Bush, our Secretary of State busies himself apologetically consulting with and accommodating to their demands that we work through the UN. Does anyone point out the hypocrisy of the tut-tutting Europeans who are trading profitably in violation of the UN embargo, with the terror master of Baghdad? Or note the bizarreness of putting faith in an organization that gives equal weight to tyrannical kleptocracies as to democracies? Colin Powell seems excessively pleased with the alliance he has constructed of the worried appeasers. Let us hope their See No Evil reluctance to use force doesn’t have them all holding hands and singing Kumbaya when the anthrax attacks resume. More than a year ago the President observed that in dealing with our adversaries time is not on our side. That being so, the State Dept. approach which has us repeatedly offering ‘one more chance’ to Saddam may have already provided enough time for him to strike a devastating blow on behalf of the Jihad against the West. President Bush: Hurry up please.
December 19, 2002
When I first heard of Senator Lott’s dumb remark I knew I was supposed to feel outrage, but I didn’t really. After all, I wasn’t part of the target population. It wasn’t my people he was offending. In fact, after scrutinizing the quotation and parsing and reparsing, it wasn’t clear to me at all what Senator Lott meant, and consequently what the Black Caucus was so aggrieved about. The worst inference that one could fairly draw from his ambiguous remarks was that he would have voted for Strom Thurmond in 1948 (when Lott was two or three years old) and would have then been in favor of continuing racial segregation. The big question was did he imply that he was still in favor of racial segregation today? Let’s assume the worst, and that in the happiness of the moment, in that old Southern Boy context, he was feeling smug, fat and sassy, and that his politician’s hypocritical guard had gone off-duty at that moment and that his unconscious segregationist feelings began to tumble out of his mouth before he could squelch them. Oops, there they go…. Now, let’s take a poll. Who among you has never let your hypocritical guard down and uttered some tactless remark, with or without realizing it, that hurt someone’s feelings? And who among you has not had mixed feelings toward someone close whom you would not want to know all of what was in your heart of hearts? Raise your hands, higher please, don’t be shy—you see you are not alone. The truth is that, unless you are on the short list for sainthood, most people have had such an experience. Hypocrisy—the discrepancy between what one feels in one’s heart and what one pretends to feel publicly—is the lubricant of civilization, because no one’s heart is pure, because ambivalent feelings are universal and one of the main characteristics of human nature. And the only way that human beings can live in a social context is by practicing hypocrisy—sometimes more, sometimes less. Children and adolescents are always chiding their parents and elders for being hypocrites because they have not yet transcended the inner puritanical guards which they have had to install in order to control their early passions. It is only as they learn to control their infantile feelings that they can let themselves off the puritan hook and stop persecuting their elders. And by the time they themselves become parents and are in positions in which they are responsible for others they are full-fledged hypocrites. That is the nature of social life. It is understandable that the Congressional Black Caucus would put on a dog-and-pony show of racial grievance and outrage—that, unfortunately, is what they are paid to do by their constituents. They and Black activists in general have been professional grievance collectors since the thirties. But then, the NAACP had some serious grievances to deal with—lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, quotidian indecency and acts of humiliation. And Martin Luther King’s dream represented a serious moral vision because it had to do with changing the white majority’s actions toward black America. But times have changed, powerful laws protect blacks from the cruel, unfair, and discriminatory acts of the past, and this has led to the current situation in which any black person who has the ability to rise to the top of any profession cannot be stopped by law or custom. There are now three blacks holding cabinet level positions in the federal government, many black congressmen, many black millionaires, even black billionaires, black models for black children to emulate galore, in sports, the arts, media, show business, science, academics. And although there is still a black dysfunctional underclass who don’t work because they suffer from chronic forms of mental illness and maladaptive behavior—there is an ever growing black working class, middle class, and voting class. But this situation notwithstanding, the Black Caucus goes on to look for more grievances—and political outrage plays well in Washington. The GOP expresses it when and if they get a chance, and now it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to milk it for all it’s worth. The trouble is that what the GOP prosecutes is bad behavior—Condit’s sexual misbehavior, Clinton’s sexual misbehavior, lying under oath, Mrs. Clinton’s greediness—whereas the Democrats want to punish Lott not for having done anything that breaks the law or committed some act against a person, but for something he said. For this indiscretion he has apologized and sought forgiveness from the American black community. But that is not enough. In real life it would be, unless you are a conservative Republican. You are forgiven your racism if you are Senator Byrd, or Senator Hollings. The question of their sincerity, of what is truly in their heart is a non-starter in Democratic circles. But the question that is central in what is becoming one of the most sanctimonious farces in recent political history is how sincere is Senator Lott in his feelings about segregation? How pure is his heart? I can tell you that his heart is no different from anyone else’s heart—his heart is impure. He doesn’t need a heart transplant, his critics need to grow up morally and accept the fact that ambivalence is universal and a major component of human nature. It is what makes us both comic and tragic creatures. You cannot expect moral purity from any human being, especially a politician. The only way you can judge people is by their acts, by their deeds, and in the case of politicians by their voting records and public policy statements. Forget what’s in their hearts, you wouldn’t like what you found, Democrat or Republican.
December 13, 2002SADDAM'S SECRET WEAPONSADDAM’S SECRET WEAPON Yale Kramer It’s not nerve gas, or weaponized germs, or even nukes. Anyone who can remember back to Desert Storm can figure it out. It’s in all the histories of the Gulf War and even if the Iraqis are only a little clever they’ve already formulated a plan to use it. It’s the American journalist and his love affair with victimhood. The problem is can we figure out a defense against it. American journalists, having grown-up and matured professionally during the post Viet Nam and post Watergate years, have ideals, ethical values, and political attitudes that are not the same as yours and mine. They are anti-war, anti-aggression, anti-conservative, anti-industrial, anti-military, ambivalent about free markets, and ambivalently patriotic —some more, some less. They invariably tend to see themselves answering to higher and more universal standards than Homeland and Country. For them The (Liberal) Truth is their God. In practical terms this requires them to be as sympathetic to the enemies of America as to America itself. For them it’s all the same because they still believe what their journalism professor told them—that their true allegiance must be to some abstract ideal—but only if it’s a little left of center. Two other characteristics derived from those above dominate their loyalties: the first is their over-identification with anyone they perceive as a victim or who claims to be a victim; the second is their tendency to see themselves not as mere reporters of the quotidian facts of life, but as changers of the world—political, ethical, cultural reformers. Thus they see their essential function as derived from the tradition of the “non-conforming critic.” They see their job as being skeptical of government policy whatever it may be. Saddam Hussein has a powerful and ready-made fifth column within his enemy’s country, who will be working, if not for him, at least against them.
According to Atkinson, Colin Powell, “…attuned to public opinion and the geopolitics underlying any military venture… sensed a growing unease over the incessant pounding of Baghdad.” Baghdad now the victim, the Americans now the bullies. The effort to kill Saddam was something the country could accept, “but killing women and children, however inadvertently, was quite a different matter, particularly when television so vividly displayed the carnage. Another massacre like [this] would destroy the allies’ moral standing, Powell felt, and anyone who doubted that failed to understand war in the age of modern telecommunication.” [Italics mine.] There is no doubt that fighting a war requires a certain capacity for ruthlessness. And a review of the events suggests that there was barely enough to go around between the military and civilian leaders. It is not surprising, then, that the end of Desert Storm came in such an ambivalent and controversial manner. Saddam is ruthless—he can murder his political enemies in the blink of an eye, he can poison gas his own people if it suits his purposes, without fearing that his “moral standing” will be diminished, he can order the plundering and ruin of a neighbor country with no loss of sleep—and he is a master of duplicity and conniving. And now that he knows our weakness—our journalists: his fifth column—he would be a fool not to exploit their credulousness and anti-governmental attitude even more than he did in 1991. He would be a fool not to welcome as many American journalists as he could find. Not to wine them and dine them. Not to feed them all the news he could to show them that poor Iraq is only trying to defend itself and its people, their homes and their families from the powerful war machine of the greatest super-power in history—Iraq the victim of George W. Bush’s bullying policies. Show them devastated houses and apartments, with broken, bloodied cribs and armless teddy bears. Show them bombed out schools with writin’ and ‘rithmetic still on the blackboards. Show them crushed mosques and hospitals without electricity or water, feverish children dying of the unsanitary conditions. You get the idea. The idea is to pull at the heartstrings of the media people, to make the folks back home begin to have doubts about this war. Where are these weapons of mass destruction that Bush and his gang keep hollerin’ about? Is this fanatical pursuit really worth all this pain and suffering we are inflicting on these poor people, these poor innocent kids? To make even our fighting men feel like shameful bullies, “pickin’ on these poor bastards who can’t even shoot straight; like shootin’ fish in a fuckin’ barrel. Jeez, how long we gonna keep torturin’ these bastards?” The idea is to give the Democratic Party some talking points, give Europe some talking points, give the Arabs some talking points while the clock ticks closer and closer to the beginning of the next election cycle in November of 2003. Bush has about a year to pull this Iraq thing off, then Saddam just may be able to spoil a military and political triumph for the President, and instead leave him with a hard-to-defend messy compromise. Is there any counter-attack against this “Victim Defense” strategy? Yes, only one, and it’s simple and cheap, but it requires the President and his team to tell Americans what Saddam’s secret weapons are—the people’s trusting nature, their sense of fair play, their goodness of heart, their belief in the goodness of others. They must be warned that the enemy will try to use the American media for their own propaganda, and that some journalists will fall for it. This message must be repeated as often as possible. Americans must be warned that when they are fighting a ruthless and unscrupulous enemy it is not immoral or ungodly to harden their sensibilities and to remember that if children are sick and dying in Iraq it is Saddam who is responsible for their suffering and that he could end their pain and unhappiness in the twinkling of an eye.
December 11, 2002HAROLD PINTER, CANCER SURVIVORGratitude has never been a prominent feature of human nature. We all tend to feel a sense of entitlement for our good fortune. Nowhere is this more obvious than amongst our creative and intellectual elites. These people frequently asssume their talent exempts them from ordinary obligations, and that they possess indispensable expertise which they are only too glad to bestow on their benighted and limited fellow citizens. Curiously, Harold Pinter begins an incoherent (creative?) diatribe against the West, particularly the United States of America, by recounting his medical/surgical battle with cancer. We are encouraged by the juxtaposition to conflate his cancer with what follows: a diatribe against America. In the vitriolic denunciation("..the American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary.") that follows, is there any recognition that his life was saved by the medical and surgical advances made by Americans and Brits and Israelis working in democracies that encourage the untrammeled pursuit of scientific knowledge? Don't hold your breath. Instead, there are warnings about the illness of the West, Pinter being the diagnostician. For all of his denunciation of the West, I rather doubt that Pinter flew to Gaza hospital for treatment, nor am I aware of any bio-medical advances in the Islamic world, for which Pinter sheds crocodile tears. Along with a characteristic lack of gratitude he displays a sense of entitlement that makes it quite natural to take his good medical fortune for granted. In fact, this article uses his cancer experience as a bona fide validating his political stance--as if, recovery from cancer lends special weight to his denunciation of America. In my own experience recovering from cancer I found myself deeply grateful for the treatments available, thanks to the advances of Western science. However I kept that gratitude to myself. I didn't consider its metaphoric potential for larger literary-political meaning. Perhaps that's why I'm not a playwright, since I would never consider the potential for using my illness as a vehicle for denouncing my country and lending support to Islamic totalitarianism. Pinter deploys his writer's passion in a depraved defense of a people whose major contribution to civilization is the perfection of suicide bombing. Contrast Yasser Arafat, devotee of death, with Israel's first President, Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann was a scientist who felt that the state of Israel should be a bastion of democratic freedom wherein the pursuit of scientific knowledge was primary. The country's strength, he believed, would come from this pursuit and it has remained by and large true to his vision. The Weizmann Institute he founded has become one of the world's foremost centers of bio-medical research, pursuing enquiry into the causes and potential cures for the cancers that afflict patriots and traitors alike. One of the strengths of Western democracies is also one of its vulnerabilities: it grants freedom to the scientific pursuit of knowledge but it also celebrates creative artists, like Pinter. It flatters their sense of entitlement, condescension and ingratitude, and gives them a platform to externalize their self-hatred and to rage against the very society that coddles and cossets them. And still, forgiving those who would destroy us, we offer them the best of our medical science to give them more time and energy to gnaw incessantly at the hands that feed them.
December 10, 2002OUR FRIENDS, THE SAUDISMore on Adel Al Jubeir: David Tell
December 04, 2002OUR FRIENDS THE SAUDIS EXPLAIN HOW HITLER WAS MISUNDERSTOODADEL AL JUBEIR ON CNN WEDNESDAY December 4, 2002 On CNN THIS MORNING BILL HEMMER QUOTED A SAUDI TEXTBOOK WHICH CLAIMS THAT MUSLIMS MUST CONFRONT THE INFIDELS-- JUBEIR'S RESPONSE: WE ARE TRYING TO PURGE ABOUT 5% OF THE TEXTBOOKS AND CHANGE SOME OTHERS. I'M NOT FAMILIAR WITH THAT EXACT QUOTE BUT YOU MAY BE TAKING IT OUT OF CONTEXT. IF YOU TOOK SOMETHING THAT ADOLPH HITLER SAID OUT OF CONTEXT IT MIGHT ALSO SOUND INCITEFUL WHEN IN FACT IT WAS NOT REALLY INCITEFUL. Once again, by taking things our of context the Jewish controlled media has given Hitler and the Saudis a bum rap.
December 03, 2002BAD JOKE IN BAGHDADThe other day, the Washington Post revealed that the new UN inspectors have never had background checks and that some of them have little or no experience or education in their presumed fields of expertise. Furthermore some of them appear to have—what shall we say—unusual backgrounds for this kind of work. Washingtonpost.com:
“McGeorge does not possess a degree in one of the specialized fields -- such as biochemistry, bacteriology or chemical engineering -- that the United Nations says it seeks in its inspectors. U.S. and U.N. officials said a background check apparently was not conducted on McGeorge or any of the inspector applicants. “An Internet search of open Web sites conducted by The Washington Post found that McGeorge is the co-founder and past president of Black Rose, HORSEFEATHERS imagined, therefore, what it might be like on Harvey John “Jack” McGeorge’s first inspection. The scene is in the office-show room of the ALI-AKBAR CAMEL HARNESS COMPANY. There is a small sign hanging on the wall that warns “NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTIONS ALLOWED Proprietor Mohammed Mohammed” Jack: Hi (he smiles and extends his hand) Ah’m Harvey McGeorge, but my friends call me Jack. Mo: Welcome, God is great! May his blessings be upon you forever. Jack: Ah’m with the United Nations. (He looks around and sees many articles of leather hanging from the walls.) Ah’m afraid I have to inspect your premises for weapons of mass destruction. Ah see (he refers to the sign on the wall) you have no weapons of mass destruction here. That’s very good, I’ll make a note of that. Mo: Yes, Pasha whatever you wish. My house is your house. Jack: Ah notice you have all this leather equipment on your walls. Mo: Our finest. Would you like to see any of it, Pasha? Jack: Oh, yes. May I? You know I know leather. I’m an expert in leather, you might say. Mo: Of course, Mr. Jack. What would you like to see? Jack: How about that (he points to a harness) that looks very exciting. You know I was the founder of the Leather Leadership Conference back in the USA. We also have a French affiliate, Les Amant de Cuir. Y’all understand French? It’s a kind of little joke. Mo: Put it on? Of course, Pasha, anything. Jack: (Tears off his shirt and puts on the harness, feeling the leather sensuously.) Ahhh, this feels so good, I mean this is very fine leather. (He glances at himself in the mirror on the wall.) Yessss. How do you get it sooo smooth? Mo: Oh, that is a trade secret, Pasha. I cannot reveal that even to you. Jack: Bet it has to do with those huge tanks of liquid Hydrogen out back behind the shop? Mo: Oh no. That’s nothing. Ah…ah, it’s to keep the goat’s milk cool, Pasha. Nothing more. Jack: (Still admiring his looks in the mirror. Absently.) Goat’s milk? Mo: Yes, Pasha. The government requires that we give goat’s milk to our workers every day. Jack: (Absently) And that’s how you keep it fresh. Very nice. Very considerate. Are these the reins? Mo: Yes, they’re made of horse hide. Very tough and strong. Jack: Tough? I need to see something really tough. (Pause) You know for the inspection. Could you pull them a little tighter? Mo: Tighter? Yes, but I don’t want to hurt you, Pasha. Jack: Don’t worry about that. We have to test these things. (Mohammed pulls tighter) Oooh that’s good. Tighter! Good, good! What’s that on the wall? Mo: That is a camel whip. Camels are the laziest of beasts, you know. You must show them who is master. Jack: Master, yes, yes. Let’s do that. Let’s play a little game, kind of. You be Mohammed the great camel driver and I’ll be the lazy camel. I’ll get down here (he gets down on all fours) and you give me a little twitch. Go ahead. Go ahead. Mo: (Utters the Arab word for giddap as he flicks the whip) Giddap! Giddap! Jack: Harder please. Tighter. Harder! Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’m a lazy camel! Oohh, oh oh, oh! (The curtain begins to fall) Jack: Mohammed, ah know some of my inspector friends will want to stop by for more inspections…harder. CURTAIN
December 02, 2002WAR OF IDEAS: POMOS VS. AMERICA (CONTINUED)"The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. - Winston Churchill, Royal Society of St. George, April 24, 1933
“…this anthology attempts to decenter the Jewish Holocaust from the ubiquitous discussions of genocide, reparations and U.S.-Israel relations. Our exploration of the arbitrary centering of the Shoah within a number of other discourses, in terms of addressing its presence and affects on the reparations debates, history of genocide, U.S. foreign policy and a number other sites represents a step toward its rightful displacement from these spaces. The Jewish Holocaust, citing its supposed uniqueness, cannot continuously be used as the yardstick or point of reference for all incidents of genocide and xenophobia. This project urges a critical interrogation by moving toward an understanding of how a “Holocaust Industry” influences national and international communities, discourses and debates. We therefore attempts to displace the “Holocaust Industry” from these discourses while centering the specifically national, and more generally genocidal histories which the Jewish Holocaust’s current hyper-visibility inherently stifles our understanding of.” While they start with Israel and the Jews, inevitably they arrive back home, in the United States, where they teach our impressionable youth that Islamo-Nazi fanatics who wish to kill us are simply responding to our own “terrorist” oppression of 'Native Americans', 'People of Color' and the world's poor but noble savages(See Judith Butler). There is little question that Churchill correctly described the weakening of the will to defend our civilization induced by such ‘thinkers’. What they never declare openly, but is a prominent part of their subtext: we got what we deserved on Sept. 11. Clearly, these Pomo ideologues would welcome the opportunity to write “the end”, to the “narrative” of America. It is up to the rest of us who value Western Civilization to expose and confront them at every turn.
<< Back to Horsefeathers |
