somebody should be reading...

Mostly I write for catharsis. My own personal catharsis. Not release, not to open up to the world, not because I think that there's any real effective way to change much of anything anymore and as a consequence I'm not really that bothered by it. I mean, actually, I'm really quite bothered by it and still can't find a way to express it in any meaningful way. Although I do find it interesting that the inventor of the neutron bomb was punished by his mother in a rather odd way--she forced him to eat soap and gave him enemas, which of course, made him throw-up and have diarrhea (and you know what, I'm sure there's some better way to spell that but I really just don't care right now) and he invented a weapon that when put into action would cause exactly those kinds of symptoms in its victims before they succumbed to the radiation. Now, netiquette, as Andrew Sullivan would lead us to believe, should prompt me to give you a link, his name, and at least one cross reference and maybe I should also go post comments all over the place about how awesome this post that I just wrote was and maybe somebody should link to it and then yay! somebody is reading my blog. I hate netiquette. If I feel the need to provide a link, then I will, but mostly the process of accumulating links is about as tedious as filling out any form in triplicate. In the same way that the vanity of myspace permeates the music world, so too does the utter inanity of the post/comment process only reinforce whatever the reader already believes. We live now is self-contained spheres of thought and information--whereas before, Before Blogs, BB, I like that, everyone had access to much the same information. We shared the experience. And now, every pissed off liberal living in Amerika thinks that Buschitler is the worst thing since Richard Nixon and we are faced with the very real threat of balkanization, of the United States splintering into multiple self-contained factions, each with their own memes, their own beliefs, their own historiers, each fighting against each other, each unable to see that our strength is our common belief in the imperfectibility of man and the reality that we need each other, now more than ever. I think of my own family, split politically, and thus split in actuality, living in two separate worlds that never intersect.
I think of the reality that we can't win if we can't wake up and realize we're in a war. And what can one man do, what can one man do in the face of such, ambiguity, such shameless inattention to the fact that life can quickly descend into the short, brutish, Hobbesian nightmare that we have never had to experience. In fact, we relish in this absence of fear by exploring it through our postmodern obsession with apocalyptic scenarios (Terminator, The Matrix, even Harry Potter is a sort of battle between good and evil in an end of the world sense, and of course, Lord of the Rings, which if you're a liberal and you've seen it and you can't find the right parallels bewteen Tolkien's work and today, move!) yet we are so totally unprepared for even the mildest of emergencies.
But we are on the very brink of an apocalyptic scenario: say Israel finds Iranian Revolutionary Guard units acting in collusion with Syran agents in southern Lebanon providing Hizbullah with material, logistical and leadership support, the United States provides Syria and Iran with a timetable for ending their support of Hizbullah and Iran says forget about it. Granted, Assad the younger might blink, but the madmen of Iran won't. They've been waiting for this moment for too long to miss an opportunity such as this--the Iranians are devious--why let such a valuable asset like Hizbullah go to waste for nothing?
Indeed, why? Iran has nurtured Hizbullah for the better part of the past twenty years, and since Shiite's in Lebanon are politically underrepresented despite nearly constituting a majority of the population it would be ridiculous for Iran to allow what would eventually become a friendly sharia abiding satellite expire prematurely.
This leads me to the following: the Iranians are either about to test a small scale nuclear weapon and basically follow the US's own lead as it did during World War II when we told the Japanese that we could continue using nuclear weapons on their cities unless they surrendered or, and this is the more probable option, they are trying to test the operational capacities of Hizbullah and Hamas against Israel and see Israel's response and of course, how long the "international community" allows Israel's response to continue. It would be interesting to see how the "international community"would try and stop Israel if Israel were to prove uncooperative in cease-fire arrangements.
Let us not have any illusions about what faces us: open confrontation with Iran. Syria's association as Iran's proxy won't last the first two days of conflict with us. Hizbullah and Hamas wouldn't survive either. Of course, all of this ignores the fact that what we are dealing with now is not Sunni Wahhibism, rather, Shiite extremism. Never mind that the basic disagreement between the two is over whether only members of the Prophet's family can rule or not, but the phenomenon of Islamofascism is not isolated, it is across the board. Only Sufis appear to be immune. The train bombings in India, as in Madrid and the attack in London all Muslims. Ask Israel. They know. What we as a civilization don't want to believe is that for them, for the Islamofascists, this is as much about pride now as it faith. It really has sort of veered swiftly away from the religious component and has embraced an arrogant and simplisitic form of cultural pride that goes beyond superiority--it has wandered into the realm of the insane, and clearly, any religion that forces free men and women to submit to a theocracy would lead to insanity because the demands of such a system are so contrary to human reality. Never perscribe, always describe. That's a rule I have that I try to follow. Sort of like where life can exist, life will exist. Or, it doesn't matter that you don't want. That's irrelevant. Sorry, I'm trying to sum up my sayings.
The only way to beat somebody who thinks they are better than you is by stomping them into the ground. If they really are better than you, they'll win. But free men and women will always triump over the statist and theocratically oppressed peoples. Which is why we should view the recent events in southern Lebanon as an opportunity. An opportunity to finish off the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world: Iran. And it is an opportunity that will not last.
Ahead one quarter impulse.