Posted on 05/10/2003 11:16:11 AM PDT by Stultis
The awful truth: arrogant America got it right
By Joanna Murray-Smith
May 11 2003
Last week, George Bush appeared on the front page of the International Herald Tribune in military gear. Earlier, he had made an appearance on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been deftly positioned for the cameras with the sea in the background, disguising its actual position (off San Diego).
What this told us, not that any of us needed it explained, is that US presidents get away with presenting themselves in the vernacular of Hollywood. The public not only gets, but seems to like, politics with production design.
Subsequently, an opinion writer in the Tribune noted that British journalists who witnessed this absurdity had remarked that if Tony Blair had tried such a stunt "the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel". In this regard, Australians owe more to their British antecedents than their American amigos. We don't accept pretension or phoniness in our politicians, even in the pursuit of national pride.
One of the remarkable and fascinating things about living in Europe, as I have for the past five months, is to observe at close hand the vast cultural and political differences that coexist within remarkable physical proximity - a hallmark of the northern hemisphere. America juggles the gravitas of power with the comic absurdity of show-biz. England comes to the party, but laughs behind its back. In Italy, France, Germany, London, they shake their heads in wonder at the world's most powerful democracy's intolerance of criticism, even (and perhaps especially) from within its own borders.
Here, in Italy, where I am living, the people I meet don't talk about the war. In social situations, we all laugh about Bush and his marionette vacant-eyed performances, John Wayne meets Ned Flanders (unlike our own Mr Burns), but no one can quite foresee the opinion of others about the war. Suddenly the neat divisions of pro and anti, liberal and conservative, once written in neat ink, havebeen smudged by reality's thumb-print. The simpleself-definitions of the past don't work in the same way.
Two months ago, one could readily announce one's participation in an anti-war march. Now, many of us are caught in a grey blur. The black and white feelings of recent months have become smudged in the aftermath of what your everyday ingenue (Holly Golightly) might describe as a Very Confusing War. Ideological convictions began to founder at the sight of rejoicing Iraqis. People tried to find nice ways of saying that the casualties were few enough to warrant the outcome. And liberals like me had to ask themselves if in the end American hypocrisy mattered enough to outweigh the actual result - if confused and cynical motives (oil, presidencies, imperialism etc) could diminish the simple humanitarian triumph.
My generation grew up inside the recriminations about Vietnam, in part through the movies. We were raised inside a distrust of political administrations' motivations, their propensity for accurate judgement, for justice. We had engendered within us a pervasive sense of the barbarity of war that was (and is) not only intellectual, but emotional.
No one likes to U-turn in public... on wives or husbands, political beliefs, dinner party opinions. We like to state our case and stay true, fearful that any re-evaluation will make us look like intellectual sissies. It can't have been easy for the communists of the 1950s to watch the tanks roll into Hungary and see that juggernaut crush their belief system - a belief system not only at the core of their political lives, but for many, their entire lives. Hopefulness, conviction, passion, then, as now, must sometimes be sacrificed to reality's infuriating complexity - but it sometimes takes courage to admit it.
Many of us from other Western countries, Australia included, have an entrenched view of America that oscillates between fury and hilarity at its blinkered patriotism, at its presidential high-jinks with Bush as cowboy, complete with wardrobe, at its growing Fox and Friends right-wing self-congratulation and its seeming inability or refusal to search its own soul.
And yet, the World's Policeman did something no one else could or would do. It could have all gone horribly wrong, but it didn't. Civilians died, young men and women paid all kinds of prices and both Western and Iraqi children who lost fathers or homes have had their personal maps drastically redrawn by the hand of fate. But the fear and the torture is over. America, in all its infuriating arrogance, acted. Not so long ago, I dreaded this. And now, I have to admit, I was wrong.
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/10/1052280480071.html
Yes, I've had a powerful sense of alignment with this Iraq war, that all these layers of things have come into a sort of momentary syncronism -- kind of like a motor hitting top-dead-center or a cornfield moving into that perfect angle where it resolves into orderly mile-long rows. We've been presented with a chance to kill a whole flock of birds with one stone. In going to war with Iraq, we've liberated the Iraqis, put an end to Saddam's WMD threat, sent a message to the islamoterrorists, rattled the cages of Syria, Iran, North Korea, etc, chopped off the UN at the kness, made France and Germany look weasely, humiliated the radical anti-war Left, taken the first step in detoxifying the Middle East, polished up the prestige of the American military, and moved a long way towards taking the post-Vietnam tarnish off the moral legitimacy of large-scale American military unilateralism -- and I'm sure I've missed a bunch. Our effort in Iraq so far has been an extraordinarily high-yielding proposition.
Intersting. She knows that movies are fiction not fact and yet she admits that they have played a major role in shaping her world view.
No wonder she didn't know truth when it bit her on the butt.
Scott Lindlaw, The Associated Press, wrote "Officials also acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the vast sea as his background instead of the very visible San Diego coastline." But he does not mention it in earlier columns.
Time magazine: "Then there was the carrier's position, which had to be tilted to obscure any view of the nearby coastline."
If you are interested, here is the NIMA Distance of the Horizon calculator.
The tallest building on the San Diego skyline is the Manchester Grand Hyatt at 151 meters. I think that's close to the height above sea level given it sits on the coastline.
I was not able to find out how high the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln is above sea level when sailing. I did find the dimensions specifying a height, keel to mast of 206-foot height and a 38.4-foot draft. Additionally, the tower sits "seven stories above the flight deck". So I'd guess the flight deck sits about 100 feet above mean sea level.
So, if you were standing on the flight deck looking for the roof of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, could you see it?
Distance to horizon from flight deck: 13.46 statute miles
Distance to horizon from Hyatt: 29.96 statute miles
Line of sight: 43.42 statute miles
Makes it plausible, but not very likely.
Also, I was able to find reverse angle photos at Lincoln's website and NavSource Online which does not show a visible shoreline.
The man is a fool. Most Communists have never had a moment's difficulty in making back-to-back 180s when the party line zigged or zagged or turned inside out.
But these same Euroclymers just loved x42's performance at Normandy with the rocks on that rockless beach. Or what about dragging a carrier from San Diego all the way to Hawaii for a photo op? It is Culturally Grande when an Approved Leftist does things with no other reason for them at all, but when a conservative C in C makes a very appropriate gesture at the end of a war...?
Dumb Americans by a plane flight home to watch their kids performance over the weekend, only to fly back to their business meeting on Monday.
Impractical, but critical to the perception of their charges. Whether it be your own kid or for the President, his troops.
America has it right.
Very well stated.
Could it be they are self-proclaimed intellectual elite, that are living in their own fantasy. When reality knocks them down, they become confused and bewildered.
I sure wouldn't consider any of them intelligent. Absolutely, no common sense.
"...not that I intend to be gracious about it or anything, mind you..."
Bush made a big impact on nearly everyone, including the Perky Jerk, who refused to even show a still image of The Flightsuit the next day on her communist-alqaeda-soddomy loving morning show.
Bush has the world's attention, while the world's commie-libs have been relegated to suffering with a nuclear-strength knicker twist.
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