[lit-ideas] Re: Don't Panic
- From: "Lawrence Helm"<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 05:19:47 +0000
John:
I don't recall doing any fulminating. If you are referring to any of my
responses to Julie or Ursula, perhaps fulmination is a bit strong for what I
was doing. Or if fulmination must be used it ought to be in connection with a
cry of anguish at being sucked back down the rabbit hole -- and it seems so
much larger than now than that, as though lots of things my size have been
sucked down there. Actually, I confess to a wee bit . . . perhaps more than
that . . . of irritation at listening to a repetition of the mantra -- some
variation of bad, bad, bad old Right Wing nut case picking on all those nice
little Baathist Iraqis, Saddam never did nothing to no body and he looked so
good standing up there shooting off that AK47, so manly, so . . . so you ought
to be ashamed of yourself he was a nice man but you went ahead and killed him
and those 300,000,000 innocent Iraqis, but did you care, oh no. You rubbed
your hands with glee and mumbled kill, kill, kill while drool ran down your
chin and off that swastika tattooed on your chest to drip onto your
blood-soaked hob-nailed boots.
I was, you see, born in 1934 and have lived through one more war than you;
although I'm not sure what that means. I was actually in the Korean War but
learned much more about it from reading a few books later on than I ever
learned over there. Of course books can't convey the feeling of walking post
on a dark night a month after a purported attack by North Koreans with the
base's one Thompson Submachine gun which I only knew how to shoot in theory. I
was stationed at "intelligence" bases at K8 & K30 if memory serves me. Also, I
was on K30 on the Island of Cheju-do when the truce was signed. There were
about 30 of us manning an early-warning station when the South Koreans opened
up a nearby (by near I mean about 100 feet) prison and just let all the
prisoners go. Why they did that I never learned. In theory they could go back
North if they so chose, but many of them went up Chuju Mountain and we could
see their fires burning at night. We heard that a couple of members of the
Army Unit a few miles away had gone hunting and ended up dead with their boots,
rifles and other assorted possessions missing; so we walked around with
bandoleers making X's across our chests, several grenades hooked to our belts
and M1s which never left our hands.
But enough of me. It seems that you accept the idea that the current threat
that we talk about is legitimate; so what remains is to consider the 1) the
best means of defense, 2) the best method of deterring our enemies, 3) the best
method of keeping the Middle East (that region of the Islamic civilization most
given to fulmination) quiet. If we have any responsibility in the region and
just about everyone thinks we do.
But perhaps you think I'm whistling in the dark to conceal my true feelings
which are, PANIC. Actually my feelings are far from that. If the current
congressional majority forces us into a premature withdrawal from Iraq and this
is deemed by the Islamic Militants to be encouragement by Allah to their
militant efforts and there are several outbreaks of fulmination to the
disadvantage of our allies and to us, we'll I might just chuckle at that. If
the watchman yells and yells and no one listens, what is he to do when the
barbarians storm the gates and wake the citizens with fulminating balls of
burning pitch (in wars that precede the both of us)?
But then I got to the end of your occasionally mild note and discover that
someone is being accused of wanting to vaporize half the world, and "that's
just nuts." Now, who are you calling "nuts?" Actually I don't remember anyone
wishing to vaporize half the world. I recall some right-wingers wanting to
vaporize the Left and Right Coasts, but that's just in the U.S., not half the
world.
Lawerence
> ------------Original Message------------
> From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Thu, Jan-11-2007 7:34 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Don't Panic
>
> The words "Don't panic" appear on the first page of The Hitchhiker's
> Guide to the Galaxy. They seem to me appropriate when I read
> right-wing fulminations on the danger of Militant Islam and the horror
> of impending U.S. defeat in Iraq.
>
> I was, you see, born in 1944 and have lived through "the fall of
> China" and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Talk about being threatened by
> a devious, fanatical and ruthless enemy driven by an totalizing
> ideology dedicated to the destruction of the West, I've been there
> before. There was no question, moreover, that our enemies did, indeed,
> have weapons of mass destruction. In elementary school I learned the
> drill of crawling under my desk, shutting my eyes and putting my face
> to the floor to protect my sight from the glare generated by atomic
> explosions. Growing up in one of the major centers of the U.S.
> military-industral complex, I quickly learned, too, the cynical
> version of the drill, "Bend over, put your head between your legs and
> kiss your ass goodbye."
>
> That the Reds were out to get us was a constant refrain in the mass
> media I grew up with. Half the science-fiction I read projected either
> a post-nuclear (now we'd say Mad Max) sort of world or one in which
> the Russkies or Chinks had won the space race. When I was in college,
> the domino theory was all the rage. Remember that one? Should sound
> familiar. If we didn't stop them over there, they'd be in California
> or landing troops on Long Island.
>
> Doesn't make me Polyanna, though. Those were dangerous times. George
> Kennan's containment memo was spot on. I was glad that the world's
> strongest military was standing eyeball-to-eyeball with the bad guys
> and making it perfectly clear that anyone looking to destroy the
> U.S.A. or its allies better not hope to survive the experience.
>
> There were also a couple of reality checks. The Chicoms and K-coms
> fought us to a standstill in Korea. We got to see the last
> helicopters lifting off the roof of the embassy in Saigon. We heard a
> lot about the suffering of boat people who fled the debacle in Vietnam
> and of those who were left behind. It seemed pretty clear that the
> military experts who had warned us against a land war in Asia were
> right.
>
> Containment was messy. So were all those nasty little conflicts that
> kept popping up in places like Angola. But then the Berlin Wall came
> down. The USSR imploded. China became a major trading partner. Vietnam
> is almost spoiled but still the destination of choice for adventure
> tourists looking for a bit of what Asia used to be.
>
> So, is Militant Islam dangerous? Damned straight.
> Do terrorists armed with WMD pose a terrifying threat? No question
> about it.
> Do we still need a strong military? Yes.
>
> We also need something like a Marshall Plan for the Middle East and
> the help of allies equally committed to a smart, basically police plus
> SWAT teams, approach based on good intelligence, to going after the
> bad guys. Too bad we didn't learn from the Israelis experience about
> th shithole you can fall in trying to do the job with tanks and
> fighter-bombers, killing lots of bystanders and stimulating
> recruitment to the enemy's side.
>
> What we don't need is panicky voices telling us that to be safe we
> need to vaporize half the world. That's just nuts.
>
> John
> --
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
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