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Thursday, January 06, 2005

Nothing about the MLA today

Just an apology to everyone for the horrible loading times that have been plaguing this humble blog lately.  Apparently it’s taking about 15 minutes for people to view this page, and that’s if they’re working with a high-speed connection; folks with dialup have had to wait an average of three days, which is almost as long as some people waited in line to vote in Ohio.

It’s a hosting problem, folks, and we’re going to fix it one way or another, we promise.  It has nothing to do with powerful government forces trying to shut down my revolutionary discussion of the Modern Language Association!  It is simply a technical matter, and we have our wrenches at the ready.

In the meantime, then, if you haven’t seen them already, two incandescent paragraphs from the Poor Man:

The way that normal, non-hallucinating people of any political persuasion can help the soldiers in the field, the people of Iraq, and, not least of all, themselves, is to appreciate the true situation as best they can, and to demand accountability from our political leaders when the situation is not handled effectively. The true situation is that there is a large and popular insurgency in Iraq, made up of disparate interests, but all drawing their strength from the long-standing popular discontent with the American and coalition occupation, a discontent based on a very understandable dislike of foreign armies, and fueled by the thousands of Iraqis we have killed, intentionally or not, to say nothing of Abu Ghraib - here, 6 months later, almost completely forgotten. This is the reality that was apparent to journalists well outside the “Sunni triangle” last March, as well as to the Marines who first “liberated” Baghdad. True, many soldiers in Iraq have been in places where people were nice and glad to have them, which is great, but misses the main point. Kennedy was shot on a sunny day, but most newspapers didn’t lead with the nice weather.

Appreciate this. Understand that the people killing us in Iraq aren’t motivated by Gore Vidal or inspired by Susan Sontag or organized by Michael Moore or in cahoots in any way with any of the right’s celebrity piñatas - not literally, not metaphorically, not if you look at it in a certain way, not to any infinitesimal degree, not in any sense, not in any way at all. They do not lead a clandestine international conspiracy of Evil which has corrupted everything in every foreign country plus everything in America not owned by loyal Bush Republican apparatchiks; nor are they members of such a conspiracy; nor does a conspiracy remotely matching that description exist. To think otherwise is, literally and to a very great degree, insanity. It is insane.

I wish I had written something even remotely like this.  In fact, unless I miss my guess, the Iraqi insurgency has not issued so much as one statement of sorrow at Ms. Sontag’s recent death, and Muqtada al-Sadr has so far failed completely to thank her for her distinctive and pathbreaking work as an American public intellectual. 

Thank you, Mr. Poor Man, sir, for this post and for all you do.

And oops, I almost forgot.  Although its prose is nothing like the Poor Man’s, my latest Nation essay is out today.

Posted by Michael on 01/06 at 08:47 AM
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