Today I found out that my projected business trip to Kingston, Ontario has been cancelled because of SARS. Here's what I don't get to do:
Interview a man about the Springhill mine disaster of 1958
Film a high-tech hip replacement surgery
Talk to RCMP investigators about a mass murderer from New Brunswick.
Unfortunately, the hospital has been sealed off in an effort to fight the dread pirate SARS, and without the hospital filming the bulk of our trip would have been a purposeless wandering over the featureless wasteland of historic downtown Kingston. In preparation for the trip I wrote a brief paragraph, which I have kept here because, although the circumstances no longer apply, the essential truth of the message remains. Here it is:
I would like to announce... a hiatus! I'm going on a business trip for five days to Kingston, Ontario - Outer SARSland - and won't be back until Thursday. Since I don't have a wee watchamacallit pocket computer, I cannot upload, I cannot blog, I cannot post or publish from the road. I can only scribble things on paper. So here's what I'm going to do over the next week. I'm going to write entries in my notebook and submit the entries as letters to the editor of a local newspaper in Kingston, which I will call The Kingston Whig-Standard for the purposes of argument. If the paper runs my letters, I will apply Silly Putty to my letter and produce a mirror image in newsprint on the Putty's surface. Then: I will apply the Silly Putty to a computer screen and whisper, "Urgent. Go to Diaryland and find Palinode. You can hide there until the brigands have returned to the mountains". If my plan is successful, you can expect a steady diet of palinode. If not, my Silly Putty entries have joined forces with the brigands, and you must barricade your doors as they pass on their cursed mission of rapine and destruction. Sit quietly in the dark when their silhouettes pass across the window. Smother the children. Pray that they do not come in winter.
LALALA
MSNBC has intrepidly reported that its reporters, in a show of intrepidity, have found traces of ricin and botulinum in the flattened remains of an Ansar al-Islam camp in Northern Iraq. Story can be found here. I just mention it because I read it early this morning about five minutes after I dragged myself out of bed, coffeeless and out of sorts, and even in that state I picked up on the evasions in the story. I'm not even talking about the fact that the story waits sixteen paragraphs to mention in passing that there is no evidence connecting Ansar al-Islam with Saddam Hussein and that the location of the camp was in an area outside of Hussein's control (the rest of the piece is actually a different story detailing the history and veracity of the testing equipment, so the real information actually appears at the very end of the story). Here's the jaw-dropper:
In a Feb. 5 speech to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell showed a satellite photo of the Sargat camp and described Ansar al-Islam as 'teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons.'
Um... yeah, kinda sorta. I recall that Powell displayed satellite photos of a camp that was supposed to be a hotbed of terrorist activity, with mobile chemical labs in trucks and a vat of Satan's sweat guarded by ifrits and Saddamite cyborgs. Moreover, Powell claimed that this was evidence of terrorist activity supported by the Iraqi regime. Journalists were escorted to the site and found a few abandoned buildings with no running water or power. The empty site and the group Ansar al-Islam turned out to have no connection with Saddam Hussein or the Baath Party. The detailed cross-section diagrams of mobile chemical labs turned out to be fanciful artist's renderings. And this happened before the British intelligence report with sections plagiarized from a California university student, before the forged Nigerian documents, and of course, before cruise missiles began to land in Baghdad, a city with London's population, in the strange belief that this behaviour will endear us to the largely under-15 population there. It's a bizarre stratagem; you'll notice that bombing the living crap out of a country's cities tends to focus people's anger on the bombers. Remember the mood in America after 9-11 (Elizabeth Wurtzel notwithstanding)? We live in a world being led by simpletons and children, still fighting, as David Rees says, to impress those invisible supermen in the sky.
Anyway. There are plenty of sites you can go to if you want rabid rants about global politics, with writers far more dedicated and passionate than I (think The Agonist and others). I try not to focus too much on political issues on my site, believing as I do that people visit this place for mild entertainment, but sometimes the act of not writing about politics becomes fatiguing. You catch a glimpse of what people in power do with their time and your instinct is to withdraw and hope that the world is not really a pit of avarice and ravening beasts slashing at each other's bellies. Then you get angry at the abuse of power and your own relative powerlessness. Or you sharpen your claws and join the beasts in the pit, which is no option at all, unless you believe that the sneering jibes of people like Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer and David Frum represent something more than opportunistic stroking of powerful egos. These are people who delight in hatred and cruelty, whose pleasure centres are so scarred over that only nothing penetrates but their own barbs. Here's a few bewildering snippets from Jonah Golberg's latest National Review Online column:
"On the treachery of print media: "...the few signs of joy I've seen from the [New York Times] have been when... they could jollily note that Pfc. Jessica Lynch didn't join the army to see combat". Jollily? Did he actually submit a column with the word 'jollily'? Somebody should take this man's adverbs away.
On the capture of Saddam International Airport: "The C-130s will be able to stack up outside Baghdad like Southwest Airlines cattle cars over the Las Vegas skyline on the first Friday night of spring break. Of course, rather than carrying randy Sigma Chis from Vanderbilt University, the C-130s will be stuffed to the gills with the arsenal of democracy � food, water, medicine, and giant shiny drums of galvanized whup-ass paid for, I'm proud to say, with our tax dollars." What tax dollars would those be? Has he not noticed what's happening to taxes in the States these days? I'm thinking that Goldberg has as acute a grasp of politics domestic and imported as those Vanderbilt frat boys he imagines pouring into Vegas.
On the war effort: "...[O]ur troops get closer to patrolling Baghdad � proving that the "special" in Special Republican Guard refers to the fact that they have to wear crash helmets before they get on the school bus". Yeah. Good one. The Iraqi soldiers are retarded, get it? Goldberg better pray that they're not rubber and he's not glue. I think two minutes in Baghdad would make Goldberg drop that bottle of snark he's been swigging from.
On French-Arab historical relations: "We should rename Iraq, France. If the current 'French' object, we can tell them it's a compliment.... Colin Powell could tell them, 'We take you at your word that you are the role model for the Arab world you've always claimed to be! What better way to say so than by naming a country after you?'" How precisely is France a role model for the Arab world? By occupying Algeria for large stretches of the 19th and 20th centuries (1843-1962)? When it comes to imperial occupation of Arab countries, the French are old pros. The States could take lessons from them. Could it be that Goldberg is ignoring or forgetting history altogether in order to score points from the chortling gnomes who read the NRO?
"If having two countries both called France becomes a logistical or bureaucratic problem, we can follow Don Rumsfeld's lead and call the current 'French' [sic] Old France and Iraq, 'New France.' Or, my preferred course would be to call the European France, 'Euro-France' � a la Euro-Disney. The country's been turning into a theme park for years anyway". Unfortunately for Goldberg, 'New France' has been taken by Canada, which went by that name during its earliest days of European settlement. Of course, Goldberg has plenty to say on Canada, which he claims "is just not a normal country". I confess to pure ignorance of what his 'theme park' crack means, but I suspect that Goldberg is in the same position, having simply followed his own throwaway quip into the white spaces at the edge of sense.
And of course, the final sting, the snarky word on the way out the door: "Regardless, all of this can be worked out. Besides, as we've learned from this war already, there's nothing the French can do to stop us". Yes, we're the bad boys now, France. You can keep Robert Crumb.
I should be ashamed of having spent one iota of my attention on Goldberg's column, but this is the sort of smug fare that passes for conservative thinking these days. So for wading through my politics, you are eligible for a reward.
