> > Would you have wanted Kelly to cheer your death?
>
> He would have! You read any of his stuff the last year and a half?
> Every time I picked up the paper and saw his byline in the editorials he
> was ranting about how you and I are unspeakably eee-vil traitors.
>
> Max Sawicky says Kelly was a fine battlefield reporter back in 1991. I
> don't know because I didn't read too much of his war-reportage stuff.
> The last few years though, he's been an editorialist and his output was
> genuinely imbecilic McCarthyite rubbish, down there in the muck with the
> likes of Coulter and O'Reilly.
>
> But all that's besides the point anyway. I get paid by the hour, he was
> an influential, rich right-winger. Do you think he'd have given a shit
> if I got killed?
>
> Fuck the rich. Especially the right-wing rich. I start caring if they
> live or die the day after any of them start caring if I live or die. If
> I feel an urge to get all weepy over this incident, maybe I'll mourn the
> nameless, faceless dead grunt who was driving the truck when it
> crashed. Who unlike Kelly didn't have the option to say "I'm off to the
> Hilton" any time he felt like it.
>
> Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net
============================
It would be a **huge* mistake for the left to think of the right the way the right thinks of the non-WASP world.
TP: "You write there are different war myths -- myths that fuel conflicts. What type of myth do you see animating the discussion today in the United States as it looks at Iraq?
Hedges: "Well I think the myth is remarkably similar from war zone to war zone. At least, as it pertains to how the nation that prosecutes a war looks at itself.
"We become the embodiment of light and goodness. We become the defenders of civilization, of all that is decent. We are more noble than others. We are braver than others. We are kinder and more compassionate than others -- that the enemy at our gate is perfidious, dark, somewhat inhuman. We turn them into two-dimensional figures. I think that's part of the process of linguistically dehumanizing them. And in wartime, we always turn the other into an object, and often, quite literally, in the form of a corpse.
.......
"So that we're now at a process -- Freud argues that all of life, both for the individual and within human society, is a battle between Eros, or love, and Thanatos, or the death instinct. And that one of these instincts is always ascendant, at one time or another.
"I think after the Vietnam war, because of the terrible costs that we paid, because of the tragedy that Vietnam was, Eros was ascendant. I think after the Persian Gulf war, where we fell in love with war -- and what is war, war is death -- Thanatos is ascendant. It will, unfortunately, take that grim harvest of dead, that ultimately those that are intoxicated with war must always swallow, for us to wake up again." http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6657
Leftists need to tap Eros rather than enjoin Thanatos in a fit of self-righteousness like the right has.
Ian