Free Republic

First of all, let’s start this little journey by mentioning The Gloom. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib. Bodies hanging on bridges. Prisoners standing on boxes. Listen troops, let’s get this straight right off the bat: it’s only a catastrophe. It’s nothing more than a major disaster. I’m not being cynical, or arch, or “ironic.” I am deadly serious. We have seen two months of what looks like non-stop catastrophe, and we will see more, and maybe worse, before we are through. Here is my well-reasoned, historically researched, deeply nuanced opinion: Tough shit. This war will be over when we say it is...

In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians—not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined. On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped 1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese bodies were found in the charred remains—a number greater than the 80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam...

<.........Here’s a math quiz for you: During the 30-odd years he was in power, Saddam Hussein murdered at least 300,000 of his own people. These are the ones we are finding in mass graves in Iraq. Another 300,000 – at least – were killed in his war with Iran and his two conflicts with the US. Those are bare-bones, undeniable, non-speculative, minimums. That darling arithmetic works out to no less than 20,000 people a year killed by that lunatic, or about 1,700 people a month. So how many innocent people have not died as a result of the Iraq war?...

I’ve been thinking about Power. Thinking about what real power entails, and more importantly, wondering if there is a way to defeat that ancient and highly reliable adage and perhaps find a way for a nation – mine -- to wield power, enormous power, without being corrupted -- enormously. The use of power is straightforward, and throughout history we see salvation or ruin as a direct result of the application of power. But the moral use of power: that is a Jackalope; it’s a Snark – easy to talk about, but damned hard to catch. But chase it we must,...

POWER Lately I’ve been reminded constantly of a remark that James Lileks made to me in an e-mail regarding the Writing of Essays and Other Deep Thoughts. He’s a perfectly ripe mango of annoyance, that fellow; if the man weren’t so funny and spot-on I’d like and despise him far less. But no – my admiration for him continues to grow and soon murder will be the only way for me to adequately express it. We were talking about this process in an e-mail exchange, and he said that when we chase the rabbit down the hole we never know...

<..........It has been our long, bloody and noble history to rise to this idea of individual responsibility; because if it is indeed correct, then it – alone – is the liberator of ourselves as a species. Individual responsibility frees us from our past, from the fate of our birth, from the millennia of class and caste and of failed ideas that have kept so many in bondage for so long. If we indeed do have the ability to control our own selves, then we can free our own minds from the river of history and experience. Those on one side...

<p>There’s a strange cloud that’s settled over our modern society. It’s a pervasive sort of bland contempt for an ingenious collection of lenses and mirrors that can reveal a giant ball of hydrogen, helium, methane and ammonia, billions of miles away, surrounded by untold millions of ice fragments in delicate orbit, yet one which will ascribe to the most banal unknown a life-changing, quit-your-insurance-job-and-live-in-a-tree status.</p>

<.........We can all agree that a campaign of unrestricted Islamicist terror poses a serious and immediate threat to this country. The fact is, given the means, these people could hurt us very, very badly, and that threat continues to be addressed. But I am interested in a much deeper and more dangerous threat. This threat can not only hurt America; this threat can kill America. I don’t say such things lightly. But this threat is so subtle, and so pernicious, that it is going to take us a while just to be able to fully identify it. Once we go...

HISTORY Life during wartime. There’s nothing I can say about the parade of still pictures, the faces on the television – except, perhaps, that they all seemed to share a fierce pride in their eyes, photographed for the first time in their Marine Dress Blues. Surely their families are proud of them. I certainly am, and I never got to know any of them. And now, I never will. Names scroll in little yellow letters across the bottom of our glowing screens: Sergeants, and Captains, and Privates. These men have died for us. More will follow. You may be against...

Confidence Next time you look at the moon, challenge yourself to think of something: there are footprints up there. Footprints, and tire tracks. Also three used cars, and one golf ball. Why are they there? Because we decided to go to the moon, that’s why. What a typically arrogant, unilateral, American conceit! Damn right it was, and that footprint – you know the picture – will still be there, unchanged, a million years from now. In ten million years, it might begin to soften a little around the edges. But in a billion years – a thousand million summers from...

EmpireAccusations of “Imperialism” are flung at us so frequently, and met with so little defense, that it is actually shocking to see how easily such a simplisme charge can be overturned. To be Imperial is to possess, or hope to possess, an empire, and these slanders have been made for about a century now. The Cambridge International Dictionary of English defines “empire” as “a group of countries ruled by a single person, government or country.” Oxford paperback dictionary calls it “a large group of states under single authority.” Cambridge goes on to define “imperialism” as “a system in which a...