Impetus
With everyone's enemies in the Middle East doing the human butchery thing over and over again these days as if there's anything in the Koran about how Allah smiles on the headless corpse of a Yankee infidel-- especially the third or fourth time you do it-- Giblets of fafblog offers some analysis that I think is right on.
George Bush thinks they're doing this to "shake our will." Giblets doesn't know about that. I think this is what they do to do anything. This is what they do to get attention. This is what they do to distract people from things they don't want them to see. If they had enough innocent victims on hand, this is how they'd ask each other to pass the jelly. For a while Giblets thought it was just a serious communications-oriented neurological disorder like Tourette's, only instead of swearing a lot you kill people. But I think these guys just like killing people.
This stopped being about Allah or whatever a long time ago for these dudes, and started being some wierd-ass "Lord of the Flies" trip, except this time the fat kid is America, and our fat ass fights back.
[wik] I would have used "Bride of Chucky" instead of "Lord of the Flies" in the above, except then I would have had to think of someone to compare to Jennifer Tilly. There are some depths to which even I shall not stoop.
[alsø wik] Hijinks like these make it easy to believe that on some level we are in a clash of civilizations, especially since most people in what used to be called "The West" before Political Correctness made that unsavory would agree that one thing civilized people do is not behead people. That was tried with some enthusiasm in France and was eventually soundly rejected.
[alsø alsø wik] Not that "The West" is anything but a semifunctional shorthand for an increasingly diverse set of traditions that started, ironically, in Iraq and continue through the Enlightment and Industrial Revolution, not all of which took place in any locale that could be even generously geographically described as being to the west of anything. We do, after all, live on a slightly squashed spheroid. But still. Regardless of what you call it, for us, beheadings are soooo right out. For them, beheadings are soooo right now.
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Our current struggle will be
Our current struggle will be a monolithic undertaking and the fight will last decades. Everything reminds me of the Cold War again.
Except our opponents do not represent foreign gonvernments. Nor are they organized politically and militarily into a bloc of nations. And this war of ideas isn't really policitical. Or based on economical theory. And the bad guys don't have nuclear weapons. Or so we hope. And just like the Cold War, our good friends the Western Europeans are blind to the proverbial enemy tanks massed on the border and are instead dead certain America is the cause of all current misforture.
Now I'm waxing nostalgic for the Soviets. At least with the commies you could find common ground. So it was over drinks, but it was common ground dammit. And they never beheaded businessmen on video.