THIS MODERN WORLD

Back in the mists of history, the New York Times Week in Review used to occasionally feature cartoons by the likes of myself, and Ted Rall, and Ruben Bolling. But that was a different regime — these days, there’s limited space for editorial cartoons, which kind of disallows the excessively verbose practioneers of our form. And part of the reason for this is that the editors of the Week in Review took some of that space and devoted it instead to snippets from the monologues of late night comedians. Like this from Jay Leno (my transcription from the print edition):

Gay marriage now legal here in California. In fact, you hear who got married today in San Francisco? Rice and Roni. Yeah, finally got married.

Thanks, New York Times, for sharing these small pearls of humor-related writing activities. Rice and Roni? I am doubled over with laughter, so great is my amusement.

William Kristol is, of course, the man who helped to kill health care reform in the nineties, with the wildly successful Republican talking point that “there is no health care crisis,” leaving us fifteen years later with a bigger mess than ever. This is a man who understands the power of words, and the extent to which they can triumph, at least momentarily, over reality.

Today, he attempts to redefine the meaning of a recent MoveOn ad:

The ad is simple. A mother speaks as she holds her baby boy:

“Hi, John McCain. This is Alex. And he’s my first. So far his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog. That, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. And so, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him.”

I’ll even grant Kristol his point that little Alex isn’t in much danger of being sent to Iraq by a McCain administration, given that Alex would only be nine years old at the end of an excruciatingly unlikely two-term McCain presidency. Nonetheless, the meaning of the ad is clear: this is my child, and I do not intend to sacrifice him on the altar of an unnecessary, and unecessarily prolonged, war.

Hard for any parent to argue with that.

At least, not until the master propagandist plies his trade:

Here’s what the mother of an actual soldier has to say about the remarks of the mother of the prospective non-soldier in the ad:

“Does that mean that she wants other people’s sons to keep the wolves at bay so that her son can live a life of complete narcissism? What is it she thinks happens in the world? … Someone has to stand between our society and danger. If not my son, then who? If not little Alex then someone else will have to stand and deliver. Someone’s son, somewhere.”

This is the sober truth. Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.

* * *

The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

And the sole responsibility of others.

Note how deftly he replaces the implicit understanding that Iraq is a disaster borne of the grandiose fantasies of neocons like himself with the assumption that our imperial adventure is necessary to our very safety — and having made that conceptual leap, proceeds to note matter-of-factly that young parents whose dreams for their childrens’ futures do not include an appointment with a roadside IED some twenty years hence in a country we should never have invaded in the first place … are simply being selfish.

And from there, of course, it is a short hop and a skip to the conclusion that such parents are motivated by their irrational hatred for the troops.

You have to admire the sheer, breathtaking chutzpah of it all — particularly given the crowning irony that Kristol is one of the many architects of this war who themselves never served in the military, and who are entirely comfortable viewing the necessary sacrifices of wartime as the sole responsibility of others.

Iraqis have recently been comparing the US-Iraqi “agreement” now under negotiation to the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930. The treaty, imposed by England under circumstances similar to today’s U.S. occupation, was deeply hated in Iraq.

Of course, most Americans have no idea what the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 is. So I thought it would be useful to post the text of the treaty—which used to be essentially impossible to find online—together with an examination of the many parallels between it and what Bush has been demanding. It’s all over here.

As you’ll see, it appears history actually has direct relevance to the present day. Who knew?

Bernard Chazelle visited the West Bank recently to work with the math programs at several Palestinian universities. He wrote up his distressing (and sometimes encouraging) experiences, complete with lots of pictures, here.

This is from a letter John Adams wrote to his wife Abagail in 1777; it appears at the end of HBO’s John Adams miniseries:

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

And here’s Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri this morning, explaining why Congress is making it legal for giant telecoms to wiretap us:

When the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.

So maybe Adams would have been better off not bothering. Canada didn’t, and they seem to be doing okay.