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Oh, there's the entering graf with all the
relaxing domestic atmospherics of Jasperwood. Sometimes that's all there is.
Sometimes he's setting you up for the hammer blows. All he needs really is a
little ammunition, and today's news media, with its post-modernist
sensitivities, is only too willing to
provide:
A peaceful
weekend. At least here. There’s a bloody child on the front page of the
newspaper. The Strib subhead calls them “Islamic guerrillas” and
“fighters” and “militants,” because you know one
man’s terrorist is another man’s disciple of God who practices his
sharpshooting so he can nail children in the back at 50 paces.
I've often thought that real comic
genius lies in noticing everyday things that are hysterical, but that the rest
of us are too busy with our lives to notice, and place in context. We see them,
but we do not notice them. The fact that we have seen them is the hook the comic
exploits, our shared awareness of the laughter ready to happen, needing only a
shove from a pro. Lileks is not a comic, but a careful observer of the world we
live in. Sometimes the things he sees are humorous. Often they are not. The
by-now standard reference to guerrillas, versus terrorists, in Beslan would
probably not have caught my attention - I have come to a point in my life when I
read the newspapers like politburo observers used to read
Pravda
and
Izvestia
back in the days of the Soviet empire: I look for what they
don't
say, I read between the lines. The code language used to avoid the possibility
of offending anyone's sensitivities, or choosing sides in an existential war
between freedom and tyranny I find uninteresting - it bears so little
resemblance to the world as I see it. In some distant part of my consciousness,
my eyes register lines like this, while my mind moves
on:
“This week’s bloodbath in Russia shattered the notion that innocents
are taboo terror
victims.”
Only now is such a notion
shattered, Lileks notices.
His genius
then, lies in noticing. Go there, read him, share his despair at the kind of
mind that could formulate a sentence like that in September, 2004. Also
deconstructed are playwright/actor Wallace Shawn, and sadly, comic artist Art
Spiegelman.
Artists are sensitive
souls, who thrive in times of peace and prosperity. I can understand them
wishing that the times we live in were different - I wish they were too. What I
cannot understand is how these sensitive observers of the world around us can
see what we have seen and still, somehow find a way to lay the blame for it all
on BUSHCHENEYHALLIBURTON (ed. Don't
forget
AHSCROFT).
Sailors
are forced to be pragmatists in order to survive. The ocean is our environment,
and it cannot be reasoned with, nor wished away. You must deal with the sea as
it is, and not as you wish it might be. If it does not conform to your desires,
you must modify them or perish. If the ocean doesn't conform to your world view,
you must challenge your
assumptions.
Perhaps that's the
difference between sailors and artists.
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