Prize for George Bush.
The American criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize event is what the TV stand-ups make of the peculiar fact of a president who campaigned on a peace platform, and who received the Nobel Peace Prize nomination just eleven days after he became POTUS, and who now makes a speech arguing the "Just War" theory about a war he has just relaunched in Afghanistan in league with the kleptocratic tyranny of Hamid Karzai. America allied with the Forty Thieves. The comics make not much of the dreary facts, though the framing of the Russian rocket test as a Christmas Star over Oslo for the coming of Obama is edgy. Jay Leno's remarks are the most class-based and subversive, citing a "peaceful" economy of joblessness and idleness. There is a general impression in this mash-up that the comics are intimidated by the facts. The counterfactual is to imagine what this lot of gifted pot-shotters would have made of George W. Bush accepting the peace prize, or even Bill Clinton the same. The facts of Iraq, now about to become the second grandest oilfield in the Gulf, support a conclusion that the Bush administration freed it of the savagery and sadism of the Anbar province gangs and their cowardly cronies in Damascus and Riyadh. (Al Qaeda in Iraq as the neighborhood Not-So-Smart weapons.) But that is an argument to be made in the revisionist histories to come. For now, the praise of POTUS Obama as a peacemaker is trite. That these comics do not directly attack POTUS Obama as a fraudulent award recipient is the measure of their timidity. And when satirists are reluctant to call POTUS Obama the "Queen of Hearts of Afghanistan" (peace prize first, then war, then surrender, then arguments, then diplomacy, then indifference, then entente with the House of Saud), the narrative is blurred, cribbed, out of time, propaganda, discount-rack muzak.
No One Laughed.
There was the absurd in Vietnam; there was the grotesque in Iraq. What is there in Afghanistan? POTUS preaching on "Just War." No one laughed. The piety is thick as dust. What I have learned about Afghanistan in 2009 does not support POTUS Obama's assumptions at Oslo of the future. The comment of "enlightened self-interest" was particularly pompous, self-serving, ahistorical, condescending, vain and fragile. Leopold of Belgium was a grand benefactor in Europe, a prince of peace and generosity to his French-speaking charges. Leopold's "enlightened self-interest" was to order the Congo River basin enslaved, plundered and depopulated. POTUS Obama read these lines without discernible humility:
"We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest--because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity."
I liked the Russian contribution to the Nobel farce in the form of a Christmas star over Oslo just before Obama arrived, signifying, perhaps, not so much the coming of Christ, as a babe in the (manger) woods.
No, the late night comics (or comics in general) will not be brutal with Obama. The sharpened end of brutality’s stick remains reserved for Republicans who are thought to have thick (elephant) skins and can take it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the ban on brutality was never sanctioned under the rubric of 'civilization'. Only, those on the receiving end were more precisely delineated - this would include minorities… and, of course, women - bringing to mind a quote from the film, 'Elegy' ('08): "When you make love to a woman, you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life."
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
The gutless Jay Leno could not even make a decent joke about his former rival David Letterman's interngate. Was Letterman's trysts with his interns before or after his bypass surgery? It makes you wonder how Letterman's has the gall to make fun of Tiger Woods or Cheney's health. Maybe the uber rich Leno (the car enthusiast) can take GM off our hands. He's probably a better mechanic than a comic.
ARE WE THE COPS OF THE WORLD? IF SO, THAT WOULD MAKE US PEACEKEEPERS.
Heard Newt Gingrich, who is sounding presidential [Newt/Hillary '12?], say that POTUS should have sent the widow of a soldier who died in Iraq to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. His logic was that the US has sacrificed a huge number of lives from WW1 on in an effort to secure peace throughout the world. This makes the US very different than other countries. And from Kosovo to Iraq to Afghanistan is the only Western nation to risk our lives to try and save Muslim lives. [Forgive me for not doing Newt's argument justice. He was very eloquent.]
Phil Ochs's angry song "We Are the Cops of the World." has, unfortunately, become a political reality, as Europe is happy to let us clean up the world that they colonized and made a mess of.
For example, during the Vietnam War, I always loved to listen to the massive French criticism -- as if Dien Bien Phu never happened.
WAS OBAMA CHANNELING KIPLING IN HIS PEACE SPEECH?
The White Man's Burden
by Rudyard Kipling, 1899
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Ironic quote considering 9 times out of 10 it's a woman who's done the defeating in the first place!!
John and Michael,
Your generalities and abstractions about the "military society" are way, way off the mark. Michael, you speak as if the military just on it's own, up and went to Afghanistan and remains there today because it likes to beat up on the tribes. I can't understand the rational basis -- perhaps because there isn't one - of the anti-military snark of some Americans. Your military, our military, is built to fight and win wars. So yes, they want to win, their creed and their doctrine assist them in doing so. That doesn't mean they are somehow pumped or jazzed up to fight like a bunch of Roman legionnaires. They're there because their Commander-in-Chief put them there and said do your best to end this successfully. In pursuit of that goal, they study, train and fight in a way that is most conducive to "ending it successfully." Now, you might have a different opinion of that studying, training and fighting, but somehow those helpful details didn't enter into the broad philosophical and abstract notions in your discussion.
Imperial rage? Americans want empire like they want a hole in the head. Rage? Who? What? Why? Soldiers are out in the hinterlands doing the bidding of the Commander in Chief that we the people elected. Therefore, they are to conclude that they are doing the bidding of their people and their country, are they not? Grandly pronouncing their presence out there "imperial rage" only fuels their opponents as they've now got validation from the West that that's what America is doing. AQ and the Taliban are doing pretty well with their strategic communications, they don't need our help. It also doesn't hurt the Taliban or AQ to be painted as undefeatable or twenty feet tall, or as having vanquished mighty armies since the beginning of time, by western sources no less.
Michael and John, this is your military. They are not some separate society, as the paranoid liberal narrative relentlessly maintains. They are Americans from every walk of life. They are American society, they're not separated from it. This is not only an irrational view but an inexplicable one, as this is the military upon whom your life would depend, and who's only reason for existence is to defend you. Yet, you are advancing the notion that they have independently rushed to Afghanistan out of a pumped up "imperial rage," of their own volition, and because they somehow are just like the Roman legions. This has no connection to reality.
If you voted for Obama, you voted for this strategy, and you stand behind the deployment of these troops. Trying to rhetorically undermine their chances not just for success but for survival is hard to fathom. This is especially vexing because you end only with a jab at this supposed separate society, and say nothing about what you would have them do instead. Should they withdraw now? Should we just pull out now, or what? If they're repulsively "proud" of fighting, and we don't like it, why don't you advocate an immediate withdrawal. As it stands, you are only taking cheap potshots at people risking their lives for us. What is your helpful, constructive alternative? I'm ready to jump behind a full immediate withdrawal right now, if that's what you and your ilk think is best.
WHY ARE WE IN AFGHANISTAN?
I don't buy 'Imperial Rage'. However, I do think POTUS didn't talk about 'winning' in his West Point speech because, as John & Michael have laid it out, Afghanistan is not winnable in any traditional sense of the word. But 'What is winning'? We 'won' WW2 and lost the peace along with Eastern Europe. We 'lost' Vietnam, but didn't seem to really lose anything by losing. We 'won' the Gulf War -- but didn't go in for the kill and take Baghdad. Was this right or wrong? Time will tell. The Korean War doesn't seem to be 'won' or 'lost' yet, because we're still there and still negotiating.
I think most people know 9/11 is a 'just' reason for this war. And, even though it has evolved into a Vietnam-like quagmire, there's a big difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Cambodia didn't have nuclear weapons. Pakistan does. Pakistan's weapons are threatened by Islamic extremists. That threatens us.
I remember air raid drills in elementary school because of the Red Threat, but I never felt really threatened growing up in the 50s. I was downtown when the towers fell. I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of dirty well-dressed people walking up Broadway like zombies. That evening I saw one more thing I never thought I'd see -- soldiers and military vehicles lining Houston St from river to river. I never thought I'd see soldiers in NYC. I never thought I'd be asked for an ID to get back to my home. But I was. So, maybe it's not that unusual that today I feel Islamic extremism is a far bigger threat to the West than Communism ever was. Take, Europe. Oh, I think Islam already has.