Observations on a song
I don't like country. Just to clear that up. I've never been into country music.
I don't care if you think you're some kind of Marxist. I don't care if you're both a hardcore cynic and a flower-wearing peacenik. I don't care if you hate country music, can't stand to listen to it. If you're an American and Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" doesn't stir you up at least a little, you must have been in a coma for the entire month of September in 2001.
I remember when it came out I heard some noise specifically about the line "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way", along the lines of the 'American way' shouldn't include aggression, something like that. People thought it misrepresented some kind of progressive ideals they believe the United States ought to have in which we should be against war, that we shouldn't want to fight. First of all, if you watched the towers fall like I did and somehow managed to not take it personally, then you're Mr. Roboto. Your blood is boiling, your brain IBM. Now, even assuming you're the kind of inhuman so guided by serenity that you didn't get the fight reflex that pretty much every human got that day, I still don't think you could deny that the most logical answer to an attack like that is to seek and destroy every son of a bitch on the planet with mass murder of that scale in their hearts. Personally, I don't see how anybody with a brain or a heart, one or the other, could not agree that the destruction of those who seek to assert their will over others by force and oppression results in a significant net gain for the whole world. September 11th gave us the motivation to get that done now, though we should have been doing it all along.
So anyways, I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you don't believe in the necessity of war in general, you're delusional and haven't ever watched the news. If you believe that those words in their context had anything to do with aggression instead of long-overdue policing of the trash of the world, then you definitely slept late that Tuesday morning and didn't wake up for at least a few weeks.
I don't care if you think you're some kind of Marxist. I don't care if you're both a hardcore cynic and a flower-wearing peacenik. I don't care if you hate country music, can't stand to listen to it. If you're an American and Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" doesn't stir you up at least a little, you must have been in a coma for the entire month of September in 2001.
I remember when it came out I heard some noise specifically about the line "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way", along the lines of the 'American way' shouldn't include aggression, something like that. People thought it misrepresented some kind of progressive ideals they believe the United States ought to have in which we should be against war, that we shouldn't want to fight. First of all, if you watched the towers fall like I did and somehow managed to not take it personally, then you're Mr. Roboto. Your blood is boiling, your brain IBM. Now, even assuming you're the kind of inhuman so guided by serenity that you didn't get the fight reflex that pretty much every human got that day, I still don't think you could deny that the most logical answer to an attack like that is to seek and destroy every son of a bitch on the planet with mass murder of that scale in their hearts. Personally, I don't see how anybody with a brain or a heart, one or the other, could not agree that the destruction of those who seek to assert their will over others by force and oppression results in a significant net gain for the whole world. September 11th gave us the motivation to get that done now, though we should have been doing it all along.
So anyways, I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you don't believe in the necessity of war in general, you're delusional and haven't ever watched the news. If you believe that those words in their context had anything to do with aggression instead of long-overdue policing of the trash of the world, then you definitely slept late that Tuesday morning and didn't wake up for at least a few weeks.
posted by Roger W. at 12:40 PM
1 Comments:
Roger,
I don't know if you saw my last post on the Heinlen stuff. It's a quote by Patrick Henry, and I think it dovetails nicely into the point you're making in this post.
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