A friend sent this dance retro. The audience thinks it’s funnier than I do – but so may you. Iowahawk does a letter in the spirit of that “Ahmadinejed fella”‘s letter to Bush. Iowahawk has also used a “California girl” as a Hoosegow Honey. Surely this is a betrayal of Iowa’s attractive felons. Even the genius of Iowahawk and wit of Chris Muir have trouble with the Iranian statement, which seems a parody – at least to Westerners. (Except to those, like Madeleine Albright, who see it as a reasonable approach to negotiations.)
In passing, one is driven to ask (frequently) how could she & Condoleezza Rice be mentored by the same person? Or is Albright’s clearly partisan approach a way of righting some old “sibling” rivalry? Oh, well, we all have our little rivalries & angst. James Carroll, who writes very well if very irritatingly, was on Booktv tonight; I only watched the first couple of minutes but he still works on those old tensions with his father that were central to his earlier book; now, he has the Iraq War, as he had Viet Nam, to use as setting, to give him a larger (perhaps “neutral”, apparently objective, more central) stage for his archetypal battles. But I’m not sure how an audience can interpret the personal.
Max Boot reviews Carroll’s book (I haven’t read it, was at first charmed by Requiem and then came to see it as a way to draw in an audience to what were clearly his own unresolved struggles). I’ve come to believe that if a man reaches his fifties and is still warring (not disagreeing, not slowly coming to understand and forgive, but torn and emotional and irrational) with his father that he hasn’t really left adolescence. Vietnam was just a prop for some people – and now making Iraq Vietnam is a way of rewinning the battle with the old guy.