August 29, 2005

THE GREAT RAID: A REVIEW

Anyone who loves America and still believes, with all its imperfections, it is the best country in the world, the World War II generation is still the greatest, and who enjoys the lore of WW II, will love “The Great Raid.”

There aren’t very many of us left, apparently. After it opened a scant couple of weeks ago there was only one tiny theatre in all of Manhattan that was still showing it. It seems that it was much past its prime for current movie going audiences. It was surely the most politically incorrect movie I’ve seen in years. Not by design, but only because it focused on the verisimilitude of the story—and blacks, gays, and women struggling to find their way in a “white man’s world” were not part of this particular story.

I must confess, even as an amateur historian of World War II, who lived through it as an adolescent, I was not familiar with the story that this movie told: The rescue of 500 POWs from Cabanatuan, a homicidal Japanese prison camp not far from Manila, in January 1945. The film is based on the facts that appear in two recently published books: “The Great Raid on Cabanatuan” by William B. Breuer, and “Ghost Soldiers” by Hampton Sides.

It is not clear why such a terrific story has not been celebrated before this time, sixty years on. But, whatever the reason, it is a terrific story and deserves to be told, especially because there are so few still around who are interested. The story goes something like this:

Toward the end of 1944, orders came from the Japanese high command to execute the prisoners of war held by the Japanese. It is not clear how many were killed in cold blood, but it is known that 120 were burned alive on Palawan. And it was feared that the 500 men being held in Cabanatuan, survivors of the the Bataan Death March in 1942, would meet the same fate after MacArthur’s return to the Phillipines in 1944.

Hurriedly, a Ranger company of about 120 men was dispatched to rescue the POWs in Cabanatuan. And as it turned out, all of the men were saved, with very few casualties amongst the rescuers. It turned out to be one of the great rescue missions in modern military history.

One shouldn’t expect this to be in the same class of WW II movies as the really great ones—“The Bridge on the River Kwai” or “The Great Escape”—it is not. It is a low budget movie, without compelling actors, a script that is too earnest and unimaginative cinematically, and burdened by an unnecessary romance. But the last 30 minutes are well worth the price of admission, especially the documentary footage. It will touch you and make you want to cheer once more for the greatest generation.

August 27, 2005

HANK WILLIAMS LIVES!

        What wonderful songs would the great Hank Williams, dead at age 29, have written had he lived to middle age? Horsefeathers thinks the answer has now been given by Delbert McClinton, a similarly gifted, though lesser known, artist and addict, who managed to outlive his addiction. He's listened, absorbed and transmuted Hank Williams's ballads of loss into something his very own, rooted in his own struggles. The 65 year old McClinton's whisky and tobacco roughened Texas voice is perfectly suited to deliver a new elegiac masterpiece, Midnight Communion. In an age of debased popular as well as high art, Delbert McClinton should be recognized as an American national treasure. Go to your imusic store, or Amazon for a musical equivalent of a Gentleman Jack on the rocks.

August 26, 2005

AMERICAN HEROES YOU WON'T READ ABOUT IN THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA

        Whenever Horsefeathers contemplates the work of our MSM journalists we are reminded it was ever thus. Is there any difference between today’s journalists and those described in the 18th century by Samuel Johnson?

“…a news-writer is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit.' To these compositions is required neither genius nor knowledge, neither industry nor sprightliness; but contempt of shame and indifference to truth are absolutely necessary. He who by a long familiarity with infamy has obtained these qualities, may confidently tell today what he intends to contradict to-morrow; he may affirm fearlessly what he knows that he shall be obliged to recant, and may write letters from Amsterdam or Dresden to himself."

        We would argue that Johnson omitted one striking attribute of contemporary journalists, perhaps more visible today than in the 18th century: cowardice. These delicate wordsmiths, educated to believe all conflicts can be ‘resolved’ if we just empathize with our enemies, were the tattle tale children who ran crying to teacher when little Johnny made faces at them. Their whining, carping, infantile coverage and commentary, with its relish in describing U.S. soldiers as helpless children, has placed them firmly on the side of the Bush hating, Islamo fascist sympathizing, Israel loathing political left.
        In order to read up-close accounts of the war on the ground, don’t look to the MSM, but rather to the blogosphere. Michael Yon does not fit Johnson’s description of a “news writer”. Perhaps that’s because he isn't one, and doesn’t file his stories from a hotel bar in Baghdad. He doesn’t work for the MSM, but is supported by grateful blog readers. His latest account of a battle in Mosul is an instant classic, worthy of Pyle or Hemingway, and it introduces us to a genuine American hero, Erik Kurilla. Here's an excerpt, but don't miss the rest, including real time photos of the fire fight.

"...Kurilla was running when he was shot, but he didn't seem to miss a stride; he did a crazy judo roll and came up shooting.

BamBamBamBam! Bullets were hitting all around Kurilla. The young 2nd lieutenant and specialist were the only two soldiers near. Neither had real combat experience. AH had no weapon. I had a camera.

Seconds count.

Kurilla, though dowm and unable to move, was fighting and firing, yelling at the two young soldiers to get in there; but they hesitated. BamBamBamBam!

Kurilla was in the open, but his judo roll had left him slightly to the side of the shop. I screamed to the young soldiers, "Throw a grenade in there!" but they were not attacking.

"Throw a grenade in there!" They did not attack.

"Give me a grenade!" They didn't have grenades.

"Erik! Do you need me to come get you!" I shouted. But he said "No." (Thank God; running in front of the shop might have proved fatal.)

"What's wrong with you!?" I yelled above the shooting.

"I'm hit three times! I'm shot three times!"

Amazingly, he was right. One bullet smashed through his femur, snapping his leg. His other leg was hit and so was an arm.

With his leg mangled, Kurilla pointed and fired his rifle into the doorway, yelling instructions to the soldiers about how to get in there. But they were not attacking. This was not the Deuce Four I know. The other Deuce Four soldiers would have killed every man in that room in about five seconds. But these two soldiers didn't have the combat experience to grasp the power of momentum.

This was happening in seconds. Several times I nearly ran over to Kurilla, but hesitated every time. Kurilla was, after all, still fighting. And I was afraid to run in front of the shop, especially so unarmed..."
See the rest here.

August 23, 2005

NOUS ACCUSONS

The French, a lying bunch of slimy human beings, have done it again!

In 1894 it was wrecking the life of a respectable, loyal army captain named Dreyfus who happened to be both powerless to protect himself and a Jew.

Now they want to do it to a great sports hero, Lance Armstrong. The French, unable to win the Tour de France, honestly are now trying to steal Armstrong’s triumph by allegations, insinuations, rumors, and outright lies. Armstrong has won the Tour seven straight times. Now, a French sports magazine, L’Equipe, has accused him of using a substance called EPO—a red-blood growth drug for anemic people—in the race of 1999, Armstrong’s first. Forget that the company that owns the Tour De France is the same company that owns L’ Equipe, forget that that company has been trying to discredit Armstrong in one way or another since he began taking honors away from the French. Forget that there was no test for EPO in 1999 and it didn’t begin to be tested for until 2001. Forget that Armstrong has been tested before, during, and after all of his victorious races and never found to be using any drugs.

L’ Equipe alleges that it got hold of Armstrong’s urine sample of 1999, sent it to a lab and it came back positive for EPO. Of course they cannot prove what the chain of possession was over the past six years, or even whether EPO can be retained for so long without oxidizing and degrading. But for the French, those prancing snail-swallowers, it is enough to spoil, enough to make a discrediting accusation, to win their kind of sport. Now they can all relax and cherish the doubt that they have now cast on the outcomes of the last seven Tours de France. “You see,” they will say to each other at the café this winter, “Armstrong didn’t really win after all, he used drugs.”

But hold on. Another great champion of the Tour de France, five-time winner Miguel Indurain, says, according to Reuters, that these accusations against Armstrong are “part of a campaign designed to discredit the American rider….They have been out to get him in France for a number of years.” (Click HERE to read the rest.)

And don’t hold your breath waiting for France to tell the truth about this matter. It took 100 years for the French Army to tell the truth about the Dreyfus Affair. (Click HERE to read about the Dreyfus Affair.)

FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE ACADEMIC FIFTH COLUMN

        Just as the world of Islam has its "scholars" promoting Jihad against Jews and other infidels, so too do our Universities abound in Middle Eastern "scholars" like Juan Cole. Taking their cue from the late Edward Said, they spend their scholarship depicting the evils of Israel and America, of Bush and the Zionist Neo-Cons, biting the hand that feeds them while hiding behind "academic freedom" and tenure. Juan Cole's frequent blog attacks on the American effort in Iraq had been criticized by journalist Steven Vincent, before his recent murder in Iraq by Islamo-fascist death squads. Cole responded to this horrific crime by spreading rumors designed to posthumously ruin Vincent's reputation, while suggesting he was responsible for his own murder. Typical leftist academic behavior, but apparently Cole didn't realize that smearing a dead man's reputation would not go over well with his wife.
Here's her response, thanks to Murdoc Online:

August 22, 2005

IN IRAQ THE HANDWRITING IS ON THE WALL--OR SHOULD BE

Look, let’s face it. Much of the United States force will be leaving Iraq next year. The handwriting is on the wall, the scent is in the air, the feeling is in our bones—more than half of our troops will be out of Iraq by election day of 2006.

Of course the President and his minions have to go through this elaborate minuet of qualifications—if this or when that—and reassurances that we won’t quit until the job is done.

Well, hell, the job is done. It was mostly done after we rolled into Baghdad, a month after the war started. And completely done when we killed Saddam’s unbalanced sons and captured the pathetic, grizzled old man. Because by then we had achieved the regime change that was necessary to rid the Middle East of the threat of starting another world war by lobbing chemical or biological weapons into Israel or yet another neighbor (after he had already done so against Iran and Kuwait); or selling such weapons to terrorists; or becoming a nuclear rogue state, like Iran or North Korea, down the road—such dangers were past for the near future.

The icing on this pre-emptive war cake is the considerable sum of unintended consequences which have come to pass since the war started: Pakistan is now an important ally of the US and a catcher of important terrorists; Libya has given up its nuclear program; Egypt now is expecting its first contested election for president; Syria no longer occupies Lebanon. All as a result of America’s pre-emptive military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We need do nothing else than what we have already done to feel a sense of historical accomplishment and a realistic protection of our nations interests.

The Bush exit policy from Iraq is misguided because it is defined by factors over which our government has little or no control—a recipe for quagmire pudding—such as creating a defense force which is highly enough motivated to protect the new Iraqi government and its laws; such as getting all the different factions in Iraqi politics to agree to something that none of them wants; and eliciting compromises for the sake of the greater good from people who do not understand the mechanism of political compromise, having known only “all or nothing” for fourteen centuries.

A more appropriate exit strategy would be one which is defined in terms of our own needs and factors which we can control. In such a case we would withdraw our troops at any date that would be convenient for us and our interests.

In fact it might be in our interests to leave a small force in the non-Arab part of Iraq—the mountains of Kurdistan perhaps—for the purpose of Special Operations and Intelligence, and to project a military presence in an unstable part of the world that says “we are here to protect our interests, so don’t screw around with us.”

Today’s exit policy remains uninformed by the realities of culture and human nature. The policy still has as its dominant vision, unrealistic as it may be, that Iraq can be made into western-like unified nation with a strong central government. And it is to that strong central government that the newly minted Iraqi army is to pledge its allegiance and the lives of its men.

It is easy to understand, given these chimeric visions, why it is so difficult to develop an Iraqi army that will stand and face a determined enemy.

Our soldiers fight for their country because there is a country to fight for—it has a history, an accepted set of values, a set of beloved icons, and, most important, their homes and loved ones.

There is, of course, nothing of the sort to inspire Iraqi soldiers. There are no symbols of unity or recent history except Saddam, no leaders who are accepted and beloved by all the people of Iraq. Why should Iraqi soldiers feel like sacrificing their lives for meaningless abstractions like “democracy” and “rule of law.” It is only the wildest optimism and childish hope to think that a large component of the Iraqi Army will stand up against a determined enemy for any length of time without the American Army backing them up, or without their officers threatening to shoot them if they try to desert.
If our war planners can give up their ideological fantasies and accept the realities of human nature, they would see that Iraqis will fight for something they understand and love—their families, loved ones, communities, villages, tribal leaders, even their god. Instead of fearing local militias, the US should cherish, train, support, and equip them, even though they represent a tendency in the direction of a weak central government for Iraq.

Such militias will learn to fight quickly and effectively if they are protecting what they care about.

August 20, 2005

MULTICULTURALISTS TAKE NOTE: ISLAM'S LATEST GIFT TO THE WORLD

The World Health Organization is moving to stem the global spread of the polio virus, which now affects mainly Muslim countries and regions. Polio was nearly eradicated from the world three years ago, but several Muslim-dominated states in northern Nigeria, which has one of the last endemic pockets of the disease, stopped all vaccinations from mid-2003 to mid-2004 because of swirling rumors that the vaccine was a Western plot to make Muslim girls sterile or that it contained the virus that causes AIDS. Since then, it has spread back to 16 other countries, and all the cases have been traced to Nigerian strains.

According to the NY Times (click HERE) the disease spreads “along the highways skirting the southern edge of the Sahara, and public health authorities believe that many pilgrims heading for Mecca carried the virus. There have been large outbreaks in ports on the Red Sea, which separates Africa from the Arabian peninsula….

“In May, the disease was found in Indonesia, the world's fourth-most-populous nation. There are now more than 200 cases of paralysis there, and health authorities are in a fierce fight to contain that epidemic, which is still spreading to new areas.
“Because many people in Indonesia travel back and forth to China, the Philippines and Malaysia, the risk of the disease spreading to those countries is very high….

Why this news is buried in the back of the Times while a story that tells the world the hot news that some patients may have to wait many hours in doctors’ waiting rooms is on the front page can only be explained by the Times’ need to protect the notion that all cultures are equal and that there is nothing intrinsically pathological about the Muslim culture.

August 18, 2005

HANAN ASHRAWI: A MODERATE? UNTIL SHE REACHES FOR HER KALASHNIKOV

A couple of nights ago Horsefeathers’ EuroWatch Reporter caught Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” examination of the events in Gaza concluding with an interview with Hanan Ashrawi, whom Koppel repeatedly referred to during the interview as a “moderate.” Here, forthwith, are our reporter’s notes:

“Ashrawi is indeed an expert at getting influential journalists to describe her in whatever way she chooses to portray herself at a given moment.

“Ashrawi’s father was one of the founders of the PLO and while she often portrays herself as a Palestinian, she was actually born in Lebanon. And because she has a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Virginia, the American press is always careful to address her as Dr. Ashrawi and to emphasize her faculty status at Bir Zeit University.

“What the mainstream American press has forgotten, however, is her role in the late sixties and seventies when she appeared proudly in photographs as keffiyah-wearing, Kalashnikov-slinging, and “non-moderate.” At that time, her great and good friend, German pundit Rudolf Augstein (a notorious womanizer and champion of anyone who killed Jews and Americans), provided much coverage for her in his highly-regarded weekly news magazine “Der Spiegel.” No one in the journalistic world knows how to exploit and re-use photo-ops like the Germans.

“The fact of the matter is that the mainstream German press openly promoted and supported global terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s, devoting much space to the depiction of such questionable characters as Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and their cohorts as romantic, attractive, and courageous freedom-fighters. The Ashrawi stories, were Augstein’s attempt to help her reinvent herself as a soft-spoken, solid person who now has journalists describing her as a “moderate.”

“Ashrawi’s relationship with Peter Jennings from her days as a student in Beirut is thought by many to have been responsible for Jennings’ smirking coverage of the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich. It engendered outrage at that time on the part of commentators closely watching the way in which the events were portrayed to the American public.”

SIXTIES NOSTALGIA: CINDY SHEEHAN AND MADNESS AS TRUTH

        Horsefeathers has refrained from commenting on Cindy Sheehan on grounds that psychopathology is best dealt with in the privacy of the consultation room, and that deranged individuals should be quietly led to treatment, not encouraged to dramatize their delusional ideas for the evening newscast. One doesn’t require the 70+ years of combined clinical experience we possess to note the detachment from reality this woman exhibits. Her obvious rage at her son, her trashing of his life, her paranoid fantasies about the 'neocons' and Israel, her Bush hatred, her self inflation, her weird affect, the strange smile as she articulates barnyard epithets---all these should make clear to even the dumbest journalist that she is in need of psychotherapy, not publicity. Yet this remains unmentioned by her supporters in the media. The elephant in the room, overlooked by her activist friends, is that Cindy Sheehan is deranged. Why no mention? It is quite unconscionable that bored and lazy Bush hating reporters, have promoted Sheehan's story as one of a contemporary moral exemplar, a Mother Courage, the perfect representative of our therapeutic culture. Cindy Sheehan suffers, she's a victim, her son was snatched from her by the big bad government, and this loss, according to Maureen Dowd, gives her ravings unchallengable moral authority.
        All of this struck Horsefeathers as both detestable, but also strangely familiar. Ah yes, it all came back, the Sixties. We are old enough to remember that era, when mental illness was deemed a 'myth', and in fact was celebrated by leftists everywhere as the route to higher truth. That truth always inculpated Capitalism and Amerika in the very same way that Cindy Sheehan and friends are doing. It all sounded increasingly familiar and drove us to the bookshelf. We opened our copy of Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticiy. In this series of lectures given in 1970, Trilling, the last great spokesman for sane Liberalism, noted the simultaneous rise of the therapeutic culture we now live in, along with the decline of Freud’s influence on that culture. Freud’s tragic sense of the inevitable limits imposed on personal pleasure by life in culture was challenged by Freudo Marxists like Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault and Norman O. Brown. They refused to accept that human nature is limited, forever conflicted and imperfect. Not only did these thinkers argue that capitalist society enforced repression, but in a brave new socialist world order repression would be thrown off and polymorphous perverse pleasure would be freely available to all. Repression and conflict are not built into human nature, they argued, but are imposed on us through bourgeois family life. Trilling pointed out the surprising corollary of this line of thinking: if society imposes it’s repressive “normality” on us, then “madness” would represent a rebellion against this crushing imposition. As Trilling put it: “..it is..an act expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome the coercive situation; and whether or not it succeeds in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society—thus interpreted, insanity is said to be a form of rationality and it is society itself that stands under the imputation of being irrational to the point of insanity….” Trilling went on to note the tendency among radical psychiatrists to find ‘truth’ in madness. R.D. Laing’s collaborator, psychiatrist David Cooper put it this way in his introduction to Histoire De La Folie, “Madness, as Foucault makes so impressively clear…is a way of seizing in extremis the racinating groundwork of the truth that underlies our more specific realization of what we are about. The truth of madness is what madness is…” Interestingly, that ‘truth’ always turns out to be in service to utopian political fantasies.
        While socialism may have failed in the real world, it lives on in fantasy. It appeals to the longing to transcend and escape from human nature. There will always exist the yearning to return to an imagined perfection of early childhood, and this is why the infantilism of the left is not refutable by logic. All it takes is a Cindy Sheehan, a woman in the grip of paranoia, grievance and victimhood. For the children of the Sixties, the Maureen Dowds and our wordsmiths of the media and universities, Sheehan's bizarreness certifies her as a truth teller.
        So think of the Cindy Sheehan phenomenon as an attempt by the left to keep hope alive, to make a heroine of a mad woman, in service to a higher cause. Yet perhaps some of those using her to make their points should be reminded of something else Trilling said toward the end of his essay The Authentic Unconscious, "..who that has spoken, or tried to speak, with a psychotic friend will consent to betray the masked pain of his bewilderment and solitude by making it the paradigm of liberation from the imprisoning falsehoods of an alienated social reality?"
        Yes, Cindy Sheehan has been transformed by her witless supporters into a 'paradigm'. We should all emulate President Bush, by refusing to allow her attempts at emotional blackmail to weaken our resolve in the war against totalitarian Islam. That would be best for Cindy Sheehan too.

August 13, 2005

"FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS...

...and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence".
---John Adams

        Horsefeathers just completed his civic duty, serving as a juror in a civil lawsuit. The plaintiff, a local politician, while knocking on doors, soliciting votes, slipped on his next door neighbor’s steps—the first one on the way down, he said, and fell. He picked himself up, to the accompanying laughter of his 2 fellow pols and continued on his vote soliciting way. Some days later he checked out the stoop he’d slipped on, called a lawyer who hired an engineer to take photos, and claimed there was an icy, scooped out area of the step, on which he slipped while holding the hand rail on the side. His lawyer’s questions drew a portrait of a faultless, civic minded citizen, trying to help his community, while his neighbor neglected to care for and maintain his property. In support, the lawyer submitted photos and asked his client to circle the ‘scooped out area’ at issue. He did so. Then the fun began. The defendants’ lawyer laid the groundwork by raising questions about plaintiff’s ‘good citizen’ persona, pointing out that he never mentioned the incident to his neighbors, who were out for the evening. He then returned to their property, uninvited, with an engineer and never told them he did so or that he planned to sue them. Some good neighbor! Pausing, and then, straight out of an Agatha Christie mystery she asked a seemingly irrelevant question: “Mr. X., do you ever wear dress shirts”? “Yes”. “What is your sleeve length?” “34inches” She then proceeded to draw out the chronology, until: “Mr. X. In your deposition did you swear to tell the truth?” “Yes”. “And in your deposition you said you slipped while grasping the hand rail?” “Yes” “And you slipped on the first step?” “Yes” “Well, Mr. X the engineer’s report puts that spot you say you slipped on 68 inches from the handrail and with your 34 inch arm length you couldn’t have stepped on that spot, could you?” “mumble, mumble. I’m not sure I actually held the hand rail, blah, blah, blah” “But you say you told the truth in your deposition, right?” (sheepishly)”Yes.” “And Mr. A. you also told the truth, did you not, when you said you slipped on the first step?” “Yes.” And yet, on the photograph where you were asked to circle the area on which you slipped, you circled the second step…” It was all over for Mr. A., whose touching story of faultless victimhood collapsed. It quickly became clear he was just another scam artist hoping to game the system out of a few hundred thousand dollars. Facts are stubborn things, while stories can mutate infinitely.

        Horsefeathers knows this much about human nature: it is a universal tendency of childhood to make up self comforting stories. A central feature of such stories is that they blame others for one's own failings. A litigious society keeps alive the hope for reparations. Childhood, after all, constitutes a series of blows to ones self regard. His majesty, the infant, is constantly reminded how helpless and dependent he is. At the same time, the enormity of his sense of self importance makes it hard to tolerate this fact. As time passes it becomes necessary to accommodate to one’s limitations and to external reality. Every time a child learns something he is reminded of his ignorance. Many so-called ‘learning disabilities’ are simply the expression of an intolerance for the narcissistic injury entailed by recognizing that someone else knows more than the student. It's easier for some to say "The dog ate my homework", than to acknowledge the problem was too difficult. So we all try to recapture our injured sense of greatness. We tell ourselves stories. We identify with greatness. We stand before a mirror, adopting the widespread stance of Joe DiMaggio and imagine that if we swing at the precise moment he is swinging and he gets a hit, we are the cause. Yet even these childish dreams eventually give way, for most, to maturation and the need to accommodate to the real world. Better devote more of that time imitating Joe Di to learning algebra. Best to accept the fact that nearsighted, slow moving Jewish boys from the Bronx are not going to make it to The Show. Learn to enjoy the play of those who possess greater skills. Mentally manage the game, thereby harmlessly retaining a piece of that early grandiosity.

        It is the contention of Horsefeathers that human beings never entirely relinquish their omnipotent childhood fantasies of a perfect Edenic world where unending satisfaction reigns. These fantasies may be expressed in the form of harmless individual daydreams or as shared fantasies of a benign religious nature. They can also, however, inform less benign utopian political ideologies, like Nazism, Communism, totalitarian Islam, and because of their origins in childhood longings, they are not refutable by facts. They are efforts to recapture the lost perfection of one’s own imagined omnipotent childhood self.

        Once long long ago, Liberalism was a fact based system of ideas which took into account reality and acknowledged human nature’s flaws and imperfections. Its aims were not utopian but pragmatic. Just as may occur to mature individuals, liberalism since the 1960’s has undergone a regression to childhood modes of thinking, and now constitutes a utopian ideology having more in common with totalitarian Islam than with the mature philosophy it once represented. It has an infantile quality, as anyone who reads Maureen Dowd can attest. Its rage is the rage of a frustrated young child, as any reader of the left’s websites knows. Its self flattery and compensatory scorn for its ‘stupid’ opponents is reminiscent of nothing so much as the behavior of children in a sandbox. It requires scapegoats for the failure of perfection, usually Jews or their functional equivalent—George Bush.

        On Sept. 11, not just the WTC and the Pentagon were struck terrible blows; the whole structure of utopian liberal ideas---multiculturalism, political correctness, the UN, treaties of disarmament, transfer of wealth to poor countries, etc.---with their implicit benign assumptions about human nature---were also dealt body blows. The initial response of many was to awaken from dreams of sweet reason, realize war had been declared on us by totalitarian Islam, and strike back at the enemies who wanted to destroy us. Human nature however, does not change easily, and as time passed, the regressive impulses of liberalism began to show themselves again. The ceaseless efforts began to “understand” the grievances of our enemies. Political correctness made its comeback as psychological trauma services, scenting big federal grants, swung into action. Suddenly the attacks were about "feelngs", rather than about war and its imperatives. In truth all the psychological 'help' offered proved unnecessary. There was no epidemic of 'Post-Traumatic Stress Dsiorder'. This was just another self flattering effort to show our caring, empathic nature and that we would never, ever think of doing violent things to our enemies. Just look at the recent reaction by the Punditocracy to Congressman Tancredo’s remarks that if there’s a nuclear attack on America we might retaliate against Mecca and Medina, the symbols Islamo-fascists hold dearest. Why the uproar? After all, the great symbols of our culture were attacked on 9-11. A mature person would understand that dealing with conscienceless savages who target civilians might require the use of vigorous countermeasures. However, the MSM is full of wordsmith intellectuals, the hothouse flowers of our culture. These were the now grown up children, whose narcissism was endlessly flattered because they used words deftly. Teachers smiled and praised them. They did well on their verbal SAT’s. They studied literature and art, took few hard science courses, courses that didn't reward glib use of words. These were not the kids who used their fists to establish themselves when schoolyard bullies called them ‘kike’. They were not the ones who led the way on the ballfield or who showed you how to take apart a car engine. Instead, they were the children who composed essays on what they felt when their goldfish died. They were the children who first waved their hands at the teacher when asked to read their deathless prose to the class. In sum, our future journalists were the first to leave the room when the fight began. And they still are.

        The mainstream media, in the grip of a regressive longing to recapture the days of wordsmith glory, in an age where martial skills are needed more than phrasemaking, is hell bent on undermining the war effort. They are, in effect a Fifth column in our midst, but it is cowardice more than treachery that animates their efforts. Their fear leads to denial and that denial takes the form of creating a smog of forgetfulness combined with ‘blame it on Bush’ around the war launched on us. When is the last time you remember seeing actual video of the poor souls jumping from the WTC to their deaths? The MSM have decided they need to protect all of us, whom they imagine possess the same delicate sensibilities they do. Throughout World War II images of Pearl Harbor were shown in newsreels regularly. The scene of the USS Arizona listing and burning was seared into every moviegoers mind. 9-11 has been denatured and neutralized by the commissions whose investigations proceed on the assumption that our defects and deficiencies were the central cause. They have been trivialized by the MSM's focus on “feelings” of survivors, as if they were victims of a natural disaster, rather than targets of totalitarian savages. The kernel of truth in all the denial is that, yes, the Clinton administration did mimimize the first attack on the WTC, denying it was an act of war, and proceeded as if these were simply criminal matters. Crime of course is an annoyance, but no big deal. Nevertheless, we need daily reminders of what actually happened on 9-11, to counter the sleep state induced by the Mainstream media and their allies on the left.

        The recent release of oral histories provided by immediate survivors of 9-11 is an opportunity for such a reminder and should be read by all, lest we forget. Here is one brief excerpt that contains some of the stubborn facts we need to recall:

"Somebody yelled something was falling. We didn't know if it was desks coming out. It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other ... we saw the jumpers coming. We didn't know what it was at first, but then the first body hit and then we knew what it was. And they were just like constant ... I was getting sick. I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn't have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit."
Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman
All the interviews are available here.

        We know very well, from our many years of clinical experience, that human nature will employ the mental defense mechanism of denial to avoid knowledge of the worst, to explain it away and recapture the sense of safety and security that existed before the horror. However, there are times when denial can cost too heavily. Neville Chamberlain learned that shortly before he died, but too late for Western Europe and the world. Let us hope we can stay the course, despite the childishness of the utopians in the media, universities and Democratic party.

August 12, 2005

IRAQI IMPASSE: FEDERALISM OR NOT

Now the world waits as the Iraqi Constitutional conference struggles to meet its August 15th deadline to complete a new Iraqi Constitution, which is scheduled to be ratified by the Iraqi people on October 30.

The framers have come to a serious impasse however—should the structure of the government be strongly central or loosely central—a federation of three or four states based on ethnic mores? Iraqi Kurdistan has been more or less autonomous for many years; now the Shia of the south have called for a similar organization. Only the Sunnis from the central—oil poor—section of Iraq have demanded a strong centralized government, fearing that they would lose control over the revenues from the north and south.

The American view of this issue is to back the Sunnis on this matter, presumably to persuade the Sunnis to give up their outlaw proclivities, disavow their insurgent brothers, and join the other civilized factions of Iraq so our soldiers can start coming home.

More than two years ago Horsefeathers confronted the current situation and came to a different solution. Here is our reasoning:

APRIL 8, 2003
IRAQ IS NOT, HAS NOT, AND WILL PROBABLY NEVER BE UNIFIED—AND WAR IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF ITS HISTORY
The closest that Iraq has come to national unity in its short history of about 80 years has been during the reign of the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The social, cultural, and political forces of the region have been so powerfully centrifugal for the past 1300 years that it required the constant threat of a murderous strong man to hold the elements of the polity together.

Mesopotamia, consisting of three major provinces centered around Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, had been loosely governed by the Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire for about four hundred years. In no sense did these three great cities with their distinct cultures, sects, religious values and tribal networks think of themselves as unified, even though they paid obeisance to one ruler, the Caliph in Constantinople.

The Ottoman Empire, having bet on the wrong horse in World War I, was dissolved in 1918 and the region of Mesopotamia came up for grabs. The bureaucrats of France and England then cobbled together a kingdom for Prince Feisal I and called it Iraq. It had no other reason for its existence as a nation state except to serve the political interests of Great Britain and France. The British, to whom Iraq was mandated by treaty, wanted to pay off their debts to the Arabs and keep the mineral rights of Iraq in their sphere of influence.

The constitutional monarchy with Feisal at its head lasted from 1921 until his death in 1933. And although Iraq officially became independent in 1932, it remained under British protection unofficially through World War II. Shortly thereafter, without Britain’s parental guidance, Iraq became politically unstable. From 1946 for the next twenty years regime followed regime through revolutions, coups, military dictatorships, and assassinations, until one man emerged who was unscrupulous and brutal enough to murder all of his rivals—Saddam Hussein.

Among the ordinary people residing in the three sections of the country there has never been any natural, economic, social or political inclination to unite or to stay united as one integrated nation—the elites notwithstanding. Even during the long reign of the Ottoman Empire there was no unity in Mesopotamia. There was little allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople, and what held the provinces together were local loyalties to one’s clan, tribe, village, town, religious sect, or ethnic group.

Furthermore, such local loyalties have, since time immemorial, been the breeding ground of rivalries and wars at all levels—clan, tribe, religious sect, and ethnic group. The Middle East, and Iraq in particular, because of its heterogeneous population, has always been a land of violence and war. No doubt that is why every man in Iraq must own an assault rifle. It is part of the core culture.

A SWISS CONFEDERATION?

Remember Orson Welles’ famous speech in The Third Man, in which he says “…you know what the fellow said: In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed; and they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

It was a great line, but not quite true—at least not the part about brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace in Switzerland. Nowadays we tend to think of Switzerland as stable as the Alps and the Swiss Franc, the symbol of peace and neutrality, and a country that runs like a clock without having to be wound. That’s not the way it always was. In fact until 1848 it was as warlike and unstable as the rest of Europe had been for the previous thousand years. It had constant wars with Austria, France, and Italy. It had countless internal and civil wars amongst its own cantons. Until 1848 its 26 cantons were sovereign states, each with its own currency, laws, customs, passports, etc.

Even today it can be divided into four distinct language sectors—French, Italian, German, and Romansh—twenty-six cantons, and within these, 3000 communes. Each of these is autonomous and Swiss citizenship can be conferred only by one or another of these communes.

The central government is relatively weak and controls tariffs, communications, transport, water conservation, the postal service, and the monetary system. The government is administered by the Federal Council, which is a seven-member collegial board, an organization of equals with a rotating presidency, with each member presiding over a federal department. It is as though the U.S. cabinet administered the government without a president.

The real power over people’s everyday lives resides in the cantons and communes. They decide who votes, and for what; they decide on the criminal and civil code of each canton, and how much shall be spent and for what purposes.

When Napoleon conquered Switzerland he tried to impose French law on the Swiss. It was a complete disaster and lasted only as long as Napoleon. The Swiss are a stubborn, proud people and over the past 700 years have developed mores and values which they prize. And that is what the organization of the Swiss government reflects—a jealous guarding of the values and cultures they wish in their respective autonomous cantons, and an acknowledgment of some degree of central regulation as a necessity in a modern world.

One could do a lot worse than use a Swiss paradigm for the new Iraq. Four states—a Shiite state in the south, a Kurdish state in the north, a Sunni state in the center, and a religiously mixed state in the city of Baghdad. Each of these states would develop and control the political and ethical values of the citizens of each state without much influence from the central government. The people of each respective community would choose their communal leaders as well as those who would represent them in a central constituent body.

The central government would look after functions that require a nationwide purview—commercial codes, monetary system, water control, transportation and roads, and, of course, oil revenues.

History suggests that the centripetal forces in Iraq are so powerful that sooner or later there will be a splitting up or loosening up of the respective ethnic areas from one another. If the Middle East and the world are extremely lucky the separation will be worked out by statute; if not it will be worked out by force of arms between the ethnic areas.
The fact is that it really doesn’t matter too much one way or the other. If the three states split up they will be in no different position than they were before Iraq became a nation eighty-four years ago. Doubtless the various factions will fight over oil, water and electric power. But eventually the Iraqis will tire of fighting and find a compromise. Perhaps the solution they will eventually find will be oiI from the north and south for peace from the Sunnis. It may take months or even years, but eventually they will tire and settle their problems the way they have for many centuries.

August 11, 2005

THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH ABOUT PETER JENNINGS

Even as the testimonials continue to pour in [CLICK] about how friendly, or how cool and suave Peter Jennings was, Debbie Schlussel in FrontPageMag provides us with some news not about how he looked, but about how he thought. Not only was he unlettered in history—starting out as a rebellious high school dropout—but he was consistently biased in his coverage of the Middle East in favor of the Arab cause. From the time he fell under the spell of Hanan Ashrawi in the course of their very close “friendship” he gave up any objectivity or journalistic impartiality about the Arab-Israeli conflict. [Click HERE] for Schlussel’s detailed coverage of a story that you won’t see in the mass media.

August 05, 2005

WHAT WOULD HARRY TRUMAN DO TO MECCA AND MEDINA?

A friend of Horsefeathers sent us the following statement Harry Truman made (Memoirs, pg.422) after the Atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We've since had 60 years of peace with Japan and are now at war with a more dangerous foe.

"We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26th was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."

Forget Churchill. Where is a Harry Truman to put the fear of our righteous wrath into our enemies?

HARD WORKING CONGESSMEN TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE OF HUMAN NATURE, BASEBALL DIVISION

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself."
--Mark Twain

        Horsefeathers certainly regrets the use of the drug du jour, steroids, by ballplayers, just as he regretted the past use of amphetamines, marijuana, uppers and downers of all kinds, including alcohol as stimulants to better performance. Just as he regretted the enormous quantities of aspirin he downed himself, each time he pitched a game in high school, and just as he regrets the shoulder pain that lingers 50+ years later. Just as we will regret,in the future, the new designer drugs now being developed. But then again, there are lots of things we regret about human nature and one of the least of them is the performance enhancing 'cheating' by ballplayers. Parenthetically, one of the great features of baseball is that it has its elaborate rules, but also acknowledges efforts to bend the rules---'stealing' bases is admired. Stealing signs is common. Trying to deceive the umpire is part of any good catcher's skills. Fielders routinely pretend to touch a base, hoping to gain a split second advantage. At least in the instances of steroid use so far exposed, the only actual physical risk is to the ballplayer. When human nature manifests itself in the form of millions of jihadis seeking to explode their way to utopia, we think that's what our government should be addressing. Instead, we have our representatives rushing for the TV cameras to denounce and threaten Rafael Palmeiro for lying about steroid use! We could use some of that fierce passion applied to Islamic jihadis, but that might be dangerous, so our spineless representatives look for easy targets. Their shameless posturing seems to confirm another of(see above) Mark Twain's observations: "There is no distinctly native American criminal class... save Congress."
        Tim Marchman, in our opinion, far and away the best baseball columnist currently writing, starts his column today with the question "Why should congress care?" and goes on to write: "The ongoing clown show that is the response of Congress and Major League Baseball to the game's steroids crisis reached a new low this week with the announcement that the Government Reform Committee, as part of a perjury investigation, requested documents relating to disgraced Orioles slugger Rafael Palmeiro's failed drug test, and that MLB and Palmeiro were complying with the groundless request.

The involvement of Congress this year with baseball's drug problem has been almost entirely characterized by ridiculous posturing and outlandish grandstanding, but this latest absurdity is the clearest evidence yet of the essential unseriousness of our elected representatives, who really ought to be ashamed of themselves.

"If we did nothing," Rep. Tom Davis, the committee's chairman, asked a reporter, "I think we'd look like idiots. Don't you?" The rejoinder writes itself."
See the rest here.

August 01, 2005

ARAB DEMOCRACY IS STILL THE MOTHER OF ALL OXYMORONS

Winston Churchill once quipped “You can always count on the United States to do the right thing—once it has exhausted the alternatives.”

Now we begin to hear whispers and murmurs from the Pentagon that soon, perhaps as early as next Spring, we will begin standing down in Iraq.
In an article in the New York Times, July 24, 2005, John Burns suggests that a new realism has begun to assert itself among senior leaders in Baghdad and Washington: “The first signs that America's top officials in Iraq were revising their thinking about what they might accomplish in Iraq came a year ago. As Iraq resumed its sovereignty after the period of American occupation, the new American team that arrived then, headed by Ambassador John D. Negroponte, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer III.
“The new team called the departing Americans "the illusionists," for their conviction that America could create a Jeffersonian democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein's medieval brutalism.”

Long before that time Horsefeathers (April 2, 2003) warned that “Arab Democracy” was the mother of all oxymorons. We said at that time:

“Somehow in the months-long struggle that the Bush Government has been carrying on with Old Europe over how to deal with the Iraqis, some of the Administration’s sound and realistic policies have come to be corrupted by the high ideals and chimeric visions of the past. A form of Utopianism is on the loose, a neo-Wilsonian urge to make the world safe for democracy again.

“Early in the formation of Bush’s Iraq policy the aim was simple and militarily achievable—“regime change.” Then came “liberation of the Iraqi people,” and, finally, “the ultimate goal of regime change is liberal democracy.” It does not require the mind of a policy wonk to see that the idea of “liberating” the Iraqi people and transforming them into liberal democrats is a way of sugar coating the naked aggression that is implied in getting rid of the dangerous threat of Saddam. It represents a fear of our own power and of the assertion of our appropriate role of leadership in the world of nation states. Our enemies and rivals call this “unilateralism” or “imperialism.”

“Most opponents of the idea of building a democratic nation in Iraq have also opposed the war to depose and replace Saddam. Horsefeathers does not oppose the war to rid the world of Saddam but only the plan to radically rebuild a nation in our own image that may not want to be changed. There are sound psychological and historical reasons for our view that democratizing Iraq is a fool’s errand.

“Like a guilt-ridden, frightened child who is afraid to assume his rightful responsibility lest his parents—“old Europe”—get angry with him and withdraw their affection and esteem, we make up rationalizations and fantasies that fly in the face of facts and history. So we have to tell ourselves and the hand-wringing appeasers of Europe that the Iraqis are waiting for us to liberate them, that they will dance in the streets when we arrive, that they are lining up to buy copies of the “Federalist Papers.”

ABOUT THE CHANGING OF HEARTS AND MINDS

As some of our readers may know, Steve Rittenberg and I have been practicing and teaching psychiatry and psychoanalysis for a combined total of 75 years. We may not know a whole lot about many things, but about hearts and minds, between us, we know a thing or two. And I can tell you that it’s very, very hard to change hearts and minds. You can change behavior easily enough—all you have to do is put a pistol to somebody’s head and tell them to do what you want, and the chances are they’ll do it. But even with people who are very intelligent and highly motivated to change, it is extremely difficult to change a person’s basic attitudes.

What does all this have to do with post-war Iraq? Well, nation-building, bringing liberal democracy to Iraq, requires changing the attitudes of millions of individuals, most of whom are barely literate, unworldly, uninformed—or worse, misinformed—and happy to have an unskilled job, a roof over their heads and some food on the table. They are not unsatisfied by a life that a CNN journalist, or a Columbia University assistant professor would find boring or degrading—a regular job, a family that’s not starving, and Baghdad TV for a couple of hours every night. The only change they want is more of the same—a little more pay, a little more room, a little more food, a TV that works all the time. They already have a spiritual life—non-secular—that satisfies them. They are not interested in becoming multi-lateral or widening their spiritual horizons. The point is that most Iraqis live simple, unchanging lives and want them to continue that way. This is not to say that they are worse than people in other cultures. On the contrary, they are very much like people the world over. Most people do not want their lives to be transformed. They want to maintain the status quo. In fact people are probably hard-wired for it, the Constancy Principle, some call it. Please, no big changes.

So much for the psychology of it.

IN THE ARAB WORLD TRIBALISM TRUMPS ALL

In the last thirteen hundred years, only one Islamic country has become a working democracy—Turkey. But in all that time there has never been an Arab democracy. And perhaps there never can be. Some would say that Arab ideals and representative democracy are incompatible, that in an Arabic Islamic state authority and religious authority have always gone together.

The majority of Arab states reached independence shortly after the Second World War. For thirty or forty years now the Arab states have been free to make whatever political or social arrangements they choose. Under the cover of some weird conglomeration of nationalism and socialism they all chose autocratic power.

The reason is that the influence of fundamental Islam in the Arab world makes it deeply inhospitable to democratic and liberal principles. While the citizens of longstanding democracies accept a set of basic assumptions—the rule of law, majority rule, equality before the law, the idea of a loyal opposition, the separation of church and state—Arab societies lack such essential democratic concepts and instead vest authority in the word of Mohammed, his interpreters the imams, and the tribal leaders.

The essence of Arab societies is tribal identity, kinship networks, and conceptions of collective honor. These are what organize and regulate the relations of everyday life. In such a context democratic principles are meaningless and incomprehensible. How could a modern democratic bureaucracy function, for example, if officials remain loyal primarily to tribe or family? There can be no such thing as disinterested public service. Public office becomes a means of benefiting your family and harming your enemies, not applying rules fairly.

Modern working democracies developed in different ways. And although they all share the political values mentioned above, their respective governments can be quite varied—the United States, Switzerland, Singapore, the United Kingdom—all democracies and all somewhat different.

One thing that they all share though is a basic requirement of all functioning democracies: a class of people who have a strong devotion to and understanding of its principles—a professional bureaucracy. The more experienced and traditional, the more robust and stable is the government. Iraq has no professional, public-spirited, bureaucratic class, nor has any other Arab nation. What substitutes for one in Iraq are the members of Saddam’s extended family and his cronies from Tikrit. In Saudi Arabia, of course, it is the 7000 Saudi Princes.

And experience with nearly a hundred newly independent countries all of which “intended” to become democratic suggests that only a tiny handful, those largely influenced by Western values—Chile, Poland, Hungary, Taiwan—show any real gains in this direction. The rest, from the Congo to Uzbekistan, suffer from endemic corruption, illegitimate elections and a wide array of political ills that derive from the absence of a modern professional bureaucratic class that values the basic democratic ideas that come only from being trained and educated in Western democracies.

George W. Bush was wrong when he made bringing democracy to Iraq the goal of this war. High–minded and noble maybe, but romantic and unlikely.

History has also taught those who are disposed to listen to it that democracy is extremely difficult to bring about among people. It took most of the countries of Western Europe hundreds of years and countless wars to accomplish modern democracy countless wars—ethnic, religious, and economic wars; revolutions, counter-revolutions, persecutions and civil-wars. Democracies do not get born overnight. And for our leaders to believe that Iraq could develop into a working democracy in the foreseeable future was a lapse in judgment and historical grasp. Tribalism is part of human nature; it took centuries to rise above such human tendencies in Western democracies, and if Iraq lasts that long may take centuries for democracy to work there.

BUT ALREADY WE HAVE WON IN IRAQ

The direct benefit of the Iraqi war has been “a regime change”—the main aim of the Bush government—which, when translated into common language, means that Saddam and his psychotic, unstable sons will not be able to traffic with terrorists. The possibility of causing Middle East mischief in Israel, Iran, or Kuwait through the use of terrorist agencies by providing high grade biological or chemical weapons or dirty radioactive bombs has now been significantly reduced.

The indirect benefits are even greater: Pakistan, which was anti-American for many years is now an ally and has been cooperative in capturing Al Qaeda agents, putting pressure on anti-Western madrassas, and stopping the transfer of nuclear know-how to rogue states; Libya has given up its nuclear program; Syria has withdrawn its armed forces from Lebanon, thus allowing Lebanon to hold freer elections; Egypt is about to hold its first contested election in decades; Saudi Arabia has begun at least paying lip-service to the idea of more open political processes.

Although none of these, individually, may be considered transforming, taken together they suggest a trend that is in the right direction—toward more democratic processes in the Middle East. All from taking an aggressive stance with a dictator who prided himself on possessing one of the most powerful armies in the world.

John Burns closes his NYTimes piece by suggesting a policy change that is close to Horsefeathers’ own: “Some senior officers have said privately that there is a chance that the pullback will be ordered regardless of what is happening in the war, and that the rationale will be that Iraq - its politicians and its warriors - will ultimately have to find ways of overcoming their divides on their own.
“America, these officers seem to be saying, can do only so much, and if Iraqis are hellbent on settling matters violently - at the worst, by civil war - that, in the end, would be their sovereign choice.”

Won’t such a strategy—leaving central and southern Iraq to the Sunnis and Shiites—lead to civil war in Iraq? Very likely. But the fact is that Iraq was never an integrated nation. It was cobbled together by a cadre of French and English bureaucrats after the First World War for their own respective national interests, and to pay off debts in their fragile relationships with the Arabs.

History has shown, again and again, that very often the only way to solve problems between states, nations, peoples, religions, tribes, and all groups of enemies is by war. The polite, highly civilized Western democracies which have a common currency, socialized medicine, and three-week ski vacations didn’t start out that way. From the fall of the Roman Empire in the Fifth Century until 1991—about 1600 years—there were civil wars, and revolutions almost constantly. Even peaceful Switzerland, which hasn’t had a war since 1848, was at war for seven hundred years before the Swiss got tired of fighting. If you let them, these things have a way of working themselves out. It may take a few hundred years but eventually they do reach an equilibrium.

Our regular armed forces have no place in the middle of a political/guerrilla war. They have done their part and now it’s up to the Iraqis to fight it out amongst themselves—which is part of the process of historical change.

<< Back to Horsefeathers