Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had he from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About his neck was hung.
So I’m reading the Wege (check out his anti-Paddy’s set—and why would you be up in arms against the good saint? Well, he needs to get back down here and finish the job), and he points me to this Tom Tomorrow post, which in turn directs me to among other classics this shining piece of punditry courtesy the Ole Perfesser, from back in April of 2003.
You remember: VI Day. Don’t you?
Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen’s cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn’t rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a “quagmire” were wrong—again!—how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong—again!—how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error—again—and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about “civilian casualties” now seem almost disappointed that there weren’t more—again—and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American “liberators” were proven wrong—again—as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn’t stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It’s probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.
Nah.
I have a dream. And in that dream there is a memorial, somewhere on the idyllic campus of the University of Tennessee. The particulars do not matter much: a small pedestal, a little fountain in a quiet corner somewhere, an eternal flame by someone else’s memorial bench, even a mere cornerstone. So long as there is enough room for a simple plaque: and on that plaque, the above words are carved. Over it, perhaps, a title:
LOOK ON HIS WORKS YE RAVAGED AND DESPAIR
(Of course I went back and looked at where I was in April of 2003, when the Zipless Cakewalk tumbled Saddam’s statue and flowers hung just for a moment in the air, and it turns out I was maybe too worried about libraries and vases and not enough about the people, and all I can say was the libraries and the vases were as much as I could grasp from there and then of the enormity of what we’d done; the staggering awfulness of how far wrong we’d gone, and every day since then the news as filtered and stunted and slanted as it’s been has driven the enormity and the awfulness home, again and again and again and again and AGAIN—)
