Dr. Sanity channels Elton

The New Neo Posted on by

My esteemed colleague Dr. Sanity is at it again.

Here’s another wonderful song parody of hers, this time of Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.”

To refresh your memory (and to better appreciate Dr. Sanity’s–dare I say it–yes, her genius), here are the words of the chorus of the Elton John original:

And I guess that’s why they call it the blues
Time on my hands could be time spent with you
Laughing like children, living like lovers
Rolling like thunder under the covers
And I guess that’s why they call it the blues.

And here’s Dr. Sanity’s version:

And I guess that’s why they all hate the Jews;
Blame them for their failures; and kill them for news
Blow up their children, bask in confusion
Believe that their strengths are just an illusion–
And I guess that’s why they all hate the Jews.

Read the rest, and sing along.

Hezbollah: still Miss Congeniality in Lebanon?

The New Neo Posted on by

Our modern asymmetrical wars, post-Tet, no longer seem to consist of strategic battles fought on the ground by the military, with the winners declared through the gaining of territory and the loss of fighters and equipment. Rather, they are mainly propaganda wars, won or lost in the press and the field of public opinion.

In this country, views about foreign wars are largely shaped by the MSM. So the basic perception here is that Hezbollah, despite its losses in men and materials, won last month’s round with Israel handily. That opinion is probably widely held in Europe, for similar reasons, not to mention Europe’s greater sympathy to the Hezbollian cause.

And perhaps, after all–as that North Vietnamese colonel famously told the American negotiator at the end of the Vietnam War–winning battles isn’t so very important, but rather irrelevant; perception of victory is all that matters.

I don’t pretend to know whom the Lebanese perceive the winner to have been. One thing I think we can safely say is that they don’t regard themselves as the winners. But there do appear to be rumblings in Lebanon, among the people who experienced this war up close and personal rather than filtered through the giant maws of the MSM, that the verdict on Hezbollah is becoming a bit harsh.

Here’s Amir Taheri’s take on the subject. He points out that criticism of Hezbollah in Lebanon has been growing since the war, not shrinking, and that public opinion is against those rightly perceived as starting a useless war in which the Lebanese people suffered. Nor were those Lebanese people consulted, and they appear to be quite angry, despite the payoffs Hezbollah has tried to mount–featuring crisp new money from Iran–to buy them off.

Then there’s Michael Totten, who made a lot of friends during his lengthy prewar sojourn in Lebanon. He sees the unprecedented statements by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora accepting the possibility of peace talks with Israel as a watershed. Prior to the war, to breathe even a hint of the possibility of peace with Israel was committing political suicide.

And of course, perhaps it is; Siniora may have signed his own death warrant, as Alexandra speculates.

To those who say I’m picking and choosing articles that support my own wishful thinking, I plead guilty. But at least I’m acknowledging that fact. Yes, it is indeed my hope that Hezbollah has lost face and support in Lebanon. And it’s my fervent wish that this loss of popularity will end up mattering, that the people and government of Lebanon will muster both the will and the force to excise this entity from their body politic and their society.

And I have another hope, and that is that our own MSM would stop doing the propaganda work of the enemy. I can dream, can’t I?

[ADDENDUM: It’s not short, and yet it’s concise and well worth reading–an article that concurs with the notion that it’s only in the MSM that Hezbollah won this war. Hat tip Pajamas Media.]

{ADDENDUM II: And then there’s this.]

If you only read one thing today…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it should be this (hat tip: too many sources to list).

The Red Cross Ambulance Incident appears to have been an influential hoax, picked up by an uncritical, unthinking, and uninformed MSM and then disseminated around the world to great effect. It took blogger “zombie” a great deal of time and effort to deconstruct the story.

One of the advantages the blogosphere offers is that–and this is no secret, nor is it a criticism–many bloggers have some form of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Now, OCD in its milder form isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s only really a problem if it’s over the top and out of control, such as the Jack Nicholson role in the movie “As Good As it Gets.” But the milder form of OCD merely lends those who demonstrate it an enhanced ability to tend to detail, to persevere and follow through on a line of questioning and research.

And this tendency, marked in many bloggers, allows them to have uncovered a phenomenal phenomenon, to wit: the number of hoaxes perpetrated both on and by the media. From the debunking of the Rathergate memos to Pallywood to Green Helmet Guy to the present sordid and alarming story, the Red Cross Ambulance Hoax, it took the time and perspicacity available to bloggers to uncover some exceptionally disturbing–and historically influential–trends.

How long has this deception been going on? How much of world opinion has been formed by what amounts to deliberate lies, spread and perpetrated by either a naive or actively colluding media (I vote for naive, but others may differ)?

“Unsatisfactory” is diplomatspeak for bad, bad, bad

The New Neo Posted on by

France gives Iran quite the tonguelashing: Foreign Affairs Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy describes Iran’s refusal to halt its uranium enrichment program as “unsatisfactory”.

“Unsatisfactory” is such a tepid way to describe what Iran is actually doing, which is to defy and mock the entire international community, and to continue blithely with its nuclear brinksmanship.

“Unsatisfactory.” It’s a term that conjures up my grade school report cards. Remember those report cards, fellow boomers?

Well, I happen to have one of mine from third grade, circa 1950-something:

Not an “unsatisfactory” among those grades, I’m proud to state. Satisfaction all around. And note that my better marks were in reading, writing, and spelling. There’s a certain consistency in my life, I guess.

As there is consistency in diplomatic life. That’s probably why John Bolton isn’t regarded as the diplomat’s diplomat; he’s much too blunt for that. Diplomacy is all about nuance and appearances, about allowing others to save face while deals are cut behind the scenes.

I hope that some deals are being cut behind these dismal scenes, because there’s absolutely no evidence that Iran is negotiating in good faith. Here are a few clues that there might be at least some sort of method behind what appears to be the diplomatic madness:

State Department officials, on the other hand, pressed to “keep the temperature down,” as one American put it….”The thinking was, even though we all know the Iranian response doesn’t amount to much, before rejecting it out of hand we should remember that at least two members of the group have a Security Council veto,” one European diplomat said, referring to Russia and China and their historic aversion to penalties. He referred to the strategy as “giving Iran the rope to hang itself.”

Even though diplomats–especially European ones–are not known for hyperbolic rhetoric, this “enough rope to hang itself” routine seems an exaggeration, to say the least. And speaking of exaggerations, I think the UN could give Iran an infinite amount of rope without there being quite enough for it to “hang itself.” Because all of this delicate diplomatic maneuvering leads, in the best-case scenario–to what? Sanctions.

And to “weak sanctions,” at that. China and Russia both have substantial economic interests in Iran, and are loathe to shoot themselves in the foot, to coin another hyperbolic metaphor (but then, I’m not a diplomat).

What are some of these sanctions China and Russia might be persuaded to get behind? Why, “a ban on travel by Iranian officials and curbs on imports of nuclear-related technology.”

I am sure that the mullahs are shaking in their robes. I was probably more terrified of getting an “Unsatisfactory” on that third-grade report card than they are of whatever the diplomats might impose on them in the way of penalties.

To editors: thanks for all the fish

The New Neo Posted on by

Back in the 80s I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.

I opened the first page of the first book in the series without much expectation, started reading, and immediately realized I was encountering a most unusual and almost endlessly entertaining and quirky mind, one that could truly be described with that overworked word, “unique.”

I’m not sure what made me look Adams up yesterday. I was tired of thinking about politics, perhaps, and the phrase “So long, and thanks for all the fish,” was roiling around in my head for some reason. I remembered that Adams had died suddenly and way too young some years ago, and I became curious to read more about him.

Despite a wide-ranging and probably frenetic mind, and varied interests, Adams’s creative output was narrow rather than wide. His lasting oeuvre, his literary contribution, was the Hitchhiker series itself. That’s not anything to be ashamed of; it’s a great accomplishment to have entertained and amused people at such an extraordinary level of wit.

As a writer and ideaphoric myself (although admittedly one of a lesser degree than Adams) I wondered how he managed to harness his freewheeling brain long enough to do the sort of sustained work necessary to create so many novels.

I got my answer in Wikipedia:

While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet) Adams developed problems keeping to writing deadlines that only got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was completed. He was quoted as saying, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Locked in a hotel suite with his editor. So he got by with a little–or perhaps a lot–of help from his friends.

That’s true of a number of authors, I believe; we just usually don’t see the workings of the behind-the-scenes handlers and shapers and coaxers and helpers. Editors, for example, are often very instrumental in forming the work, even in motivating the writer, but only the insiders know for sure.

Spouses can act as literary helpers, as well. As inspiration, of course, but also in more practical ways. Some day I may write a piece on the marriage of Tolstoi and his wife (that’s quite a segue, Neo–from Doug Adams to Tolstoi). I happen to be a minor expert on the subject of the Tolstoi marriage, having read a number of books many years ago on the subject, notably this one.

The story isn’t pretty, although it starts the way most marriages do, with love. The relevant part in terms of this essay, however, is that Tolstoi’s wife Sonya, who was responsible for overseeing the day-to-day matters of his estate, who gave birth to and raised thirteen live children as well as having several other pregnancies, was also Tolstoi’s scribe and sometime editor.

Yes, in those days before there was Word there was the written word, penned by the human hand. Every night after her other duties were done (not that they were ever done; you know what they say about women’s work, and she had more of it than most) Sonya carefully transcribed a fair handwritten copy of what her husband had penned in messy draft form.

Here is a description of Sonya’s efforts, based on a book William Shirer wrote about the Tolstoi marriage:

Sonya had the burden of copying her husband’s almost illegible scrawls into her meticulous handwriting. She copied War and Peace seven times. Shirer calculates, “Since it runs to 1,453 printed pages in my edition that means that her fair copy came to at least 3,000 manuscript pages. So she must have written down in her own careful handwriting 21,000 pages.” (Actually, Sonya’s burden was much greater than Shirer envisions. Like most English translations, Shirer’s edition is well shy of the Russian original. My Russian-language edition of War and Peace contains 1,544 pages; an equivalent English version would have more than 2,000 pages.)

I think Adams’s editor probably had it easy in comparison.

Please allow me to introduce myself: the Klinghoffer case and sympathy for the terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

Thomas Sowell writes with clarity and succinctness on one unusual and especially troubling characteristic of the enemy we now face: its undeterrability (hat tip: Pajamas Media). Undeterrability makes this fight different from previous ones. It makes efforts at peaceful negotiation directly with that enemy worse than futile; it makes them dangerous.

There was one sentence in Sowell’s column that especially caught my attention. In describing the nature of the enemy, he harked back to the 1985 Achille Lauro incident, in which 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by Palestinian hijackers and his body dumped overboard.

Sowell asks:

What kind of people would throw an old man in a wheelchair off a cruise liner into the sea, simply because he was Jewish?

What kind, indeed? Human beings, for starters, not devils. But that doesn’t mean we need to sympathize with them. And certainly we would be well within our rights to call Klinghoffer’s murderers Nazi-esque, in targeting this particular man and treating him with such brutality merely because of his Jewishness.

I recall hearing the news of the hijacking and the shocking manner of Klinghoffer’s death. At the time I had no context in which to place it; it seemed an inexplicable atrocity that chilled my blood. But it was incomprehensible, and so its significance as a signpost to the nature of the enemy was muted and blurred. It’s only in retrospect that I’m able to say, “But, of course.”

There’s another thing I neither noticed nor comprehended at the time, but that I’m certainly aware of now. And that was the almost immediate post-modern interest of some in understanding–empathizing with, and even sympathizing with–Klinghoffer’s murderers.

The opera “The Death of Leon Klinghoffer,” produced in 1991 and written by composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman, includes beautiful arias for the terrorists. It was received with accusations by some that it glorified terrorism, and kudos by others for its evenhanded treatment of the perpetrators’ grievances.

In previous years, an opera on such a theme might have featured the terrorists as traditional villains steeped in evil, with thunderous and dissonant music to signify the horror of what they did. But in this version, they were given sonorous and lovely melodies to sing and sympathetic words to portray, whereas the Klinghoffers and their associates were apparently portrayed as petty and materialistic bourgeoisie.

To have taken this particular incident–in which a helpless and innocent man in a wheelchair was murdered in cold blood, his body dumped overboard–and somehow turned it into a vehicle for Palestinian grievances seems to me to be multiculturalism gone mad.

Who wrote the opera? The librettist, Alice Goodman, is an interesting tale herself. Born and raised as a Jew in Minnesota, educated in literature at Harvard, married to a British poet, she became an Anglican priest and opera librettist.

You can listen to Ms. Goodman discussing the opera here, in a BBC interview that features part of an aria from it by one of the terrorists (or maybe it’s a recitative; I’m no opera expert). Despite having read about the opera fairly extensively prior to hearing the clip, I was still surprised at the emotional tenor of the singing. Yes indeed, without even being able to decipher the words of the libretto, just hearing the music and the voice of the kidnapper made it clear that he was being given a respect and a certain esthetic elegance and dignity that could only serve to elevate him in the eyes of the listener.

Then I listened to Ms. Goodman speak (an aside: why does she have a British accent? Is this some sort of affectation, is it a requirement for the Anglican clergy, or has she resided in Britain so long she’s taken on the speech patterns?).

Ms. Goodman’s answer to the question of whether the opera is anti-Semitic or an apology for terrorism is an interesting one. She says no (no surprise there); she believes that the charges of anti-Semitism and the rest are a result of her showing the terrorists as “human beings.”

I disagree. I happen to think that terrorists are most decidedly human beings, as were Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and–well, every other human being who’s ever lived. We all know how Hitler loved dogs, and was a vegetarian. To be evil does not require that one be a devil; being a human being who does evil will suffice. I believe in treating people as human beings, but that does not require giving evildoers a forum and writing lovely arias for them to sing.

Ms. Goodman says she speaks not just as the librettist, but as a priest, when she recognizes the perpetrators as human beings with ideals–wrongheaded, yes, but idealistic nevertheless–as though idealism somehow has a value in and of itself. Perhaps she’s never heard about the road to hell, and what it’s paved with.

Ms. Goodman acknowledges that the music and the words Adams and she wrote for the terrorists who committed this atrocity were lyrical and heartfelt, and she understands that this fact created “a dissonance difficult for some people to take.”

Count me in as one of those people. I guess I’m just not highly evolved enough to understand the convoluted mental gymnastics required in comprehending how that doesn’t constitute some sort of sympathy and apology–if not for the devil, then for the human beings who perpetrated this heinous act.

Who’s got it tougher, men or women?

The New Neo Posted on by

Fausta has written a new riff in an attempt to answer that ancient question: is it a man’s world, or is it a women’s? Who’s got the better right to sing the blues?

In the end, though, I consider the question truly unanswerable. Unquantifiable, unmeasurable, and unknowable.

My own take on the matter? Everybody Hurts (click on the link and scroll down, then click on “Watch” under “Everybody Hurts.” Enjoy a good cry.)

Snakes on a plane, spiders in the house?

The New Neo Posted on by

Nope, I haven’t seen the movie “Snakes on a Plane.” I just wanted to get your attention, and the subject matter is actually tangentially related to the topic of this post. The ads for the movie are quite enough for me, thank you very much.

Not that I’m especially afraid of snakes. I’m not. But neither am I a good candidate for “Fear Factor.” I’ve never liked horror movies, either, ever since I was allowed as a five-year-old child to attend one, taken to a Saturday matinee by my eight-year-old brother. Too much information, far too soon, for this imaginative youngster.

And those uniformed matrons who patrolled the theater aisles with whips (remember them, folks of my tiresome boomer generation?) didn’t help, either, although the thirty-five cent admission was a great attraction. And, by the way, my brother always got Good and Plenty (yuk and double yuk) whereas I was a Nonpareil gal.

But I digress.

It’s spiders I’m interested in, because this is spider season in my home. Living in the semi-country within a small city, near a wooded area with deer and wildlife and all that good stuff, I tend to forget how much of that wildlife intrudes on the house in the summer. Despite the obligatory screens, spiders and insects (see; I’m aware that spiders are not insects; I looked it up) find their way inside quite readily, to make themselves at home.

I am happy to say I’m not one of those people afflicted with arachnophobia. I can even kill one if need be, without flinching or carrying on (no chickenhawk, I). I believe that any spider who comes into my house uninvited (and they are all uninvited) is fair game.

Today I noticed that, almost overnight, my house had turned into a maternity ward for spiders, particularly the ground floor–I guess they don’t do stairs. Little hanging egg casings had burst to reveal small dark particulate mounds of–something or other.

And here’s where the mystery deepens, and I must humbly ask, once again, for the help of my wonderful readers. I’m stumped, because those small dark mounds don’t look all that spiderlike. In fact, they look somewhat like ants. And they look dead. But that’s not the way ants reproduce, is it? Nor, according to this, is it the right time of year for little ant babies to be hatching. And why would they be hatching dead?

At any rate, they’re gone now, swept away by that great broom which no doubt features prominently in their nightmares–or in the horror movies ants and spiders would make, if they only could.

The Israeli left takes a hard right

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve quoted William Lloyd Garrison before, and I’m going to do it again:

With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plea; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

A while back I wrote about a group of Israeli peace activists whom the recent war in Lebanon has changed into hardliners convinced that Israel is now in an existential war against an implacable enemy dedicated to its destruction.

Well, it’s not just an isolated peace activist here and there; it seems to be a trend. Allison Kaplan Sommer offers a piece that appeared in the British Daily Express by Michael Diamond, telling of the shift to the right on the part of a great many Israelis who had previously considered themselves members of the “sane left.”

Diamond speaks for many who once considered the Palestinian position to be a case of a reasonable grievance against an injustice. Believing that “with reasonable men I shall reason,” these Israelis therefore advocated the return of the territories and the 2000 pullback from southern Lebanon, strategies they predicted would be met with a softening on the part of Israel’s enemies.

But it didn’t work out that way, although it seemed to the left as though it should have. Instead, the pullout from Lebanon six years ago, and the more recent withdrawal from Gaza, led to a moment of clarity that crystallized as the Katushas rained down on Israel and the press of the world mourned the plight of the Lebanese and ignored the context of what was actually happening there.

The intent of the enemy was exposed, and it turns out it was not the end of the “occupation;” it was the end of Israel. The two-state solution that had been pursued so vigorously was a sham, because the “reasonable men” were not in charge on the other side.

Where were those reasonable men? Perhaps they’d all been killed off a while back by the tag team of Yassir Arafat and the mullahs of Iran, as well as a few decades of civil war in Lebanon. Perhaps they were terrified and silent. Perhaps they’d emigrated. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

So Diamond and others on the Israeli left found to their surprise and shock that they were dealing with tyrants, after all. And in dealing with tyrants, as Garrison said, there’s only one way to deal, and that’s to give them no quarter. But the Olmert government was neither willing nor able to do that.

“Give no quarter?” Aye, there’s the rub. When the Jacksonian impulse to wage all-out war is unleashed against aggressive enemies–a resolve that drove the Allies to wreak carnage on the Axis powers in order to utterly defeat them in World War II–it can lead to results that are hideous to contemplate, especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

Take a look at the comments in response to Sommer’s post. Most of them are from people wrestling with the consequences of their newfound knowledge that the current Mideast situation is not going to be solved by diplomacy, by half-measures, by wishful thinking, by restraint–or, in Garrison’s words, by reason or by pleading. But oh, how much we (and they) would like it to be!

Here is an example of the questions being asked:

…people continue to talk about “We have to win this war” without really explaining HOW. Ok, so appeasement doesn’t work. Let’s concede that point. Now what? Nuke the crap out of the arab and muslim worlds? All 2 billion of them? Will that solve the problem? (I’m thinking not) I think it’s hard time to stop pointing out the obvious, and start offering some realistic, pragmatic and constructive solutions.

But no one can come up with them; the cupboard appears bare at the moment. So the following is the reluctant response. It’s a description of the terrible choices faced by those who find they are dealing with tyrants rather than humane or reasonable men. These choices were faced, and made–first for appeasement, and then, reluctantly, for war–many years earlier by the members of “The Greatest Generation”:

The Allies fought, not because they wanted a fight or were sure they could win one, but because it had become understood that the consequences of not fighting were impossible to accept. To an apparently increasing number of us, there is a sickening feeling that we are now in a situation analogous to the 1930’s. Our side has not yet reached the conclusion that another great upheaval is inevitable, and we are casting around in increasing despair for the alternatives””which is why there is so much division amongst us. But war it may be, whatever we all want.

How to defeat an ideology? First, by presenting a compelling one of your own and second, by showing would-be supporters of your enemy the hollowness and evil of the one they are now tempted by…the rotten fact is that an ideology that places triumph of arms at its center will probably have to experience at least several shattering military defeats. I’m afraid I don’t see much chance of anything less transforming it into something that can live with the rest of the world.

Try as I might, I don’t see it either.

[NOTE: It seems that the stock of the Likud Party has risen.]

[ADDENDUM: Ralph Peters says, “You can’t win if you won’t fight.” Get ready for Round Two.]

Idle idyll on the asphalt

The New Neo Posted on by

Two days ago I got a flat tire.

I was in a hurry, as usual, racing to meet a friend for dinner, and as I pulled out of my driveway I immediately heard the sickening “flub” and felt that pulling to the side that signaled the nasty news. Drat.

Off to the gas station, which was still open. But the tire wouldn’t fill with air. This was much worse than the usual flat–this tire was a goner. Finito.

No, of course they didn’t have one in stock that matched the others. And these days spare tires are those little doughnut thingees that don’t allow you to go over fifty-five miles per hour, and the next day, as luck would have it, I needed to do a lot of highway driving. So the doughnut fix would be a very temporary one.

Yesterday I resentfully resigned myself to spending time I didn’t think I could spare driving over to the discount tire place. I resentfully resigned myself to spending money I didn’t want to fork over purchasing the mate to the others.

Plus, the waiting room in a discount tire place was not exactly where I wanted to be. There were the usual plastic chairs and car magazines from 2003 (it was a very good year), along with the gumball machine and the water cooler. There was a woman chattering on her cellphone, laptop perched in a place one doesn’t usually see it–her lap–frantically doing business, multitasking away.

I went outside for a moment to get my own cell phone before returning to settle in for the wait. But before I reentered the room I stopped for a moment. And when I stopped, I realized something: even though I was in a strip mall gazing at acres of asphalt, a Lowe’s, a Radio Shack, and all the usual trimmings, it was a beautiful beautiful day.

And not just a beautiful day. It was a glorious day, a spectacular day. It wasn’t just the blue sky and the fluffy white clouds and the perfect seventy-two degree temperature. There was something in the air, some freshness and cleanness, some mix of ions and light and smells that made it seem like air from a different time and place, a better one. It struck me that I needed to stay outside and simply breathe in that air, and relax.

So that’s just what I did. And when my car was ready, it seemed as though the wait hadn’t been nearly long enough.