CSotD: True believers and a sad goodbye
Skip to comments
He told us so. Ruben Bolling reposts a Tom the Dancing Bug from 2002.
As was noted in the comments yesterday, it's not like nobody saw this coming. But nobody in power saw it coming, or, if they did, they pretended they didn't.
I railed against chickenhawks, but it's not that simple: Some of the people who got us into this mess were veterans themselves.
It's almost easier to forgive the outright liars and charlatans. Well before 9/11 or any of that, Cheney had provoked guffaws with his farcical "search for a vice-presidential candidate" for W to run with, a search that turned up … himself.
After that transparently ridiculous bit of self-serving mummery, his search for WMDs was really a case of — how you say? — "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, won't get fooled again."
But by then we'd already elected a president who couldn't even pick his own runningmate. We'd made a choice.
Which puts me in mind of this piece that Adam Felber posted on his now-mostly-defunct website back in the run-up to the war.
It's not the Cheneys and Rumsfelds that are distressing, really, so much as the McCains and Powells, the ones who should have known better and whose motivations don't seem to have been entirely cynical.
Or, in McCain's case, didn't seem cynical until he switched to the Dark Side in order to run for president.
But here's what I learned in the 60s: True Believers can change the object of their belief, but not the ardent nature of it. Because they believe in black-and-white, in absolute truth, if they find that some aspect of their trust is false, they completely swap directions and believe in the absolute truth of its polar opposite.
Which is how you end up with nuns helping supply arms to guerrillas and so forth. I briefly dated a woman in 1970 who wound up in the Weather Underground shortly thereafter; we broke up nearly before we got started because she was fixated on radical politics and I certainly wasn't.
One of my roommates later remarked that, when she was a freshman, she was the cute preppy girl who dressed just-so and wouldn't let him copy off her paper.
I saw it over and over back then, I see it over and over now. True Believers accept everything one side says and nothing the other says, and if they decided LBJ wasn't telling the whole truth about everything, then surely Che Guevara must have been.
This is why the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks, as well as the Michael Moores and Keith Olbermanns, provide such comfort: They possess the gift of absolute truth and clarity.
Also in the Sixties, I'd get annoyed with historians who took the long view, who would say, "It's always been like this," and give you examples.
I didn't want examples of how things had consistently gone wrong; I wanted examples of times somebody stepped up and fixed them.
Turns out there weren't so many of those, and they mostly seem to have involved rising from the rubble. Like the alcoholic who can't stop drinking until he's lost his job and destroyed his marriage, and, unfortunately, he, too, tends to go to the opposite extreme, from the guy who can't stop drinking to the guy who can't stop talking about how he stopped drinking and how you should, too.
So, while we're on the subject of "truth" and before this whole Iraq thing totally implodes, here's a reality check: What is this a picture of?
Well, here's what it's not a picture of: It's not the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon as victorious Viet Cong poured into the city and American troops bugged out.
First of all, it's not the embassy; it's an apartment building where a lot of American civilian personnel were living.
And it was the North Vietnamese Army, not the Viet Cong, that made the final push on Saigon and, in fact, had carried the burden of combat operations for the final years of the war.
As for our bugging out, American combat operations had ceased two full years earlier. By this time, we were long gone as a military force.
I point this out because there is chatter now that Obama is "sending troops back in" when he is simply sending reinforcements to secure the embassy and, if necessary, aid in evacuating Americans.
One day, your grandchildren will be telling you what happened in Iraq. You might want a record of the facts, not to persuade anyone of them, but simply in order to assure yourself that you have not gone senile.
Don't expect them to believe that, either.
Charles Barsotti
One of the New Yorker's most recognizable cartoonists is gone. Charles Barsotti died Monday of cancer at 80, apparently peacefully and, after all, at an age where you are permitted to check out without too many regrets.
Still, damn.
Barsotti's simple style masked an observational wit that went beyond the "yup, that's the way they are" observations that can make New Yorker cartoons seem a bit lackluster and even self-celebratory.
He also had a gift for the outright silly. It's a combination I particularly like, and I'm not the only one marking his death with sorrow over the loss of that voice on the page.
Here are some for-instances:
Here's NYer Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff's remembrance of him, with some more cartoons.
People who knew him personally seem to have liked him a lot. Whatever else he accomplished, that's awfully good.
Comments 1
Comments are closed.