Insert A Trite Metaphor for a Corral #39

Posted on January 27, 2007 in Roundup

Anti-war rallies attracted tens if not hundreds of thousands across the country. Oh, I remember the days when we opposed the First Gulf War. But how lonely it was in the beginning of this one, when we had the absolute chance to listen to our own CIA and to the UN special investigatory panels. The new batch of war haters is “I supported this war in the beginning but –” and that is supposed to make them more sincere, more real than the opposition of those of us who never supported the war. It’s a bit like the rejection perpetrated by the witch hunters of the 1950s who villified anyone who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War as “being too early”. I am afraid — given the tepid opposition from the Congress that we elected to stop this war — that we’re too late. Next stop: Iran.

• The defining issue of the 21st century is going to be religion, says Nobel laureate [[Wole Soyinka]] of Nigeria, and our challenge is going to be fending off all kinds of fundamentalism.
• Stephanie Simon resolved to live a life without whines and lasted all of fifteen minutes. I don’t think that the point is to avoid complaining: it’s to save the energy for the things that mean something.
• The aborigines aren’t going to like this: a cave yielding a museum’s worth of ancient Australian marsupial fossils appears to demonstrate that what killed off the biota was not climate change as previously thought, but newly arriving humans’ use of fire.
• Success is skin deep. In a similar story, University of Buffalo researchers say that they have “found the first evidence” that being rejected for the way you look hurts. Someone hasn’t been listening all these years if you ask me.
• An explanation of borderline personality disorder.

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