Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Existential Threats
Yet another rant by Simon


OK, campers — time for today's thought exercise.

Pretend, just for a moment, that the President of your country is a total douchebag. A smirking bigot who milks religious prejudice for political gain. An anti-Semitic, homophobic jerkwad who treats indisputable scientific and historical facts as, at best, untested hypotheses. A tyrannical hyena who fecklessly utters terrifying threats against sovereign nations. A power-mongering shitheel who's gutpunched a modern country until it staggered backward in the direction of the Middle Ages.

I know, I know. But try to picture it. Stretch that long imagination of yours!

Got it? Good for you. Now let's say that a seriously huge, badass foreign power has decided that your President is a threat to the security of the region and, indeed, the very globe. You might even be inclined to agree; fact is, if President Scumbucket choked on a lamb shank or a pretzel or something, you'd be unlikely to slip on a black armband.

But here's the catch: The danger posed by your leader, the big foreign government declares, necessitates that bombs fall on your neighborhood, your electricity grid, the closest hospital, the little market where you buy vegetables, all nearby sources of potable water, the buildings housing ancient treasures of your civilization, TV and radio stations, etc. Perhaps one of these bombs will fall right on your home, scattering the limbs of your relatives and pets into an interspecies jumble.

As much as President Creep makes your gorge rise, you might be thinking that this is not the preferred way to bring about regime change.

So as the weird reverberations of Ahmadinejad's visit to New York begin to subside, as the Liebermans, Podhoretzes, Cheneys, Bushes and other bloodthirsty excuses for human beings populating the political class amp up their demand for military strikes right now just in case Iran might one day build a nuke, I want you to forget about the leaders for just a moment and pretend you're just somebody who lives on a street in a city where bombs might go off.

Speaking personally, even if I believed our weapons could surgically scrub only evil leaders off the planet without collaterally singeing the flesh of the innocent, I'd still be agin it. America should finally hang up its illegal-foreign-intervention jersey once and for all. It was always wrong, and now it isn't even accomplished competently. But the fact is, our bombs aren't as smart as our leaders say they are. They can't tell a Caligula-like dictator from an apple-cheeked schoolchild, and guess which one is better equipped to survive an explosion?

Once again, I rant about this because we Jews are going to hear a lot, right in the wake of making our yearly amends for tiny wrongs and insults, about how Tehran going up in flames is somehow good for the Chosen. Even though Jews will be among those blown to bits by those righteous explosives. Even though Jews will suffer reprisals from idiot terrorists who glory in the extension of the war against the Great Satan. Even though Jews will be blamed by certain parties for how it all turns out, regardless of what we do or say.

Once again, with my full throat, with the flying, curly locks of all my Semitic forebears urging me on, I say: Fuck you, Neocons. Fuck you, Joe and Norman and Dick and George and fucking AIPAC. Go to hell. Even those of you who are nominally Jewish are not good for the Jews.

Once again, I say that if I really thought that being a Jew meant I had to go along with this destructive nightmare I would become an Episcopalian. But it doesn't. Jews have been great, strong voices against misguided militarism for eons. It's time for us to speak up, VERY LOUDLY, against a new, disastrous war in Iran.

7 comments:

Lucy Arin said...

I'm blown away by your eloquence. So well said!

Anonymous said...

i'm not sure i can hate lieberman any more than i already do, but i can try!

Simon Glickman said...

Wow, George, that's the first negative comment we've gotten, as well as the first that's labeled me both idiotic and a moron. Not sure what you mean by "yourselve," though. Did you initially intend to pluralize "yourself" and then change your mind?

Oh, and have a beautiful day.

S

Vleeptron Dude said...

Yo George --

The most important order of business, and the reason I've stalked you, tracked you down and found your muy nifty blog ...

What's the exact headline of Esquire's 1992 article/interview with Slayer? It's absolutely my favorite headline of all time, even though the specifics of it are getting Fuzzy with time.

Well -- then there was the Village Voice headline of the review of the movie "The Basketball Diaries":

He scores! He shoots!

So anyway I found you and to ask you this Profound Question, I'll have to leave a Comment on your blog, and the most recent post is about Ahmadinejad.

I think what's dismayed me most about the US media reaction to his visit is how clueless everyone's been about America's incredible strength and virtue of free speech. All over the media spectrum everybody's been screaming to shut the dude up, and everybody's been bashing Columbia University for allowing him to speak.

I've been here and there around the planet. I got to tell you -- people all over Earth drool at America's willingness to let assholes publicly spew their nonsense and mental illness. They wish their government had the guts and clarity to do the same.

It's really been an insult to my pride in America to listen to a thousand yahoos screaming that we made a big mistake letting Ahmadinejad speak.

Free Speech isn't and never was about the freedom to publish Boys' Life or Norman Rockwell illustrations. It was *always* about the unpopular and offensive fringe of the public dialogue. *That* is specifically what the authors of the First Amendment had in mind: crap exactly like what comes out of Ahmadinejad's mouth.

All other governments with lower free speech standards base their systems on the assumption that people (they mean You and Me) are so stupid that they're incapable of analyzing what a fool like Ahmadinejad spews for themselves. The government is obligated to protect You and Me from our unsophistication and our naivete.

btw, if I got it right and not second-hand, I really like Ahmadinejad's answer to a question about Iranian oppression of homosexuals. Apparently he replied that Iran has no homosexuals, and therefore has no problem and no repression.

Lieberman is insane. I cringe every time somebody in the media points out that he's a Jew. If we end up blundering into a war with Iran, I hope the media tags it Lieberman's War, and I hope it sticks.

Vleeptron Dude said...

oh merde i meant SIMON!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm just waking up and haven't shot up any coffee yet.

Simon Glickman said...

Vleeptron: I believe the title was "Five Out of Five Kids Who Kill Love Slayer," which was indeed one of the best headlines of all time.

I agree with you about Ahmadinejad, and believe in general that stupid reactionary gasbags should be given plenty of opportunities to expose their idiocy. That guy doesn't scare me.

I've said many times that no outside terrorist group can ever destroy America. They can kill some people, blow up some buildings, do some horrible damage, but they can't take us down.

America can only be destroyed from within. Unfortunately, our system has a bad case of constitutional termites; I'm hoping 2008 will mark the tenting we so badly need.

Simon

Phyllis said...

Speak truth to power!