Remembering Who We Are

As seen on The Agonist, comments to the United States Information Agency Alumni Association On October 4, 2006 in Washington, DC by Chas W. Freeman, Jr. Ambassador (USFS, Ret.):

extremists cannot destroy us and what we have stood for, but we can surely forfeit our moral convictions and so discredit our values that we destroy ourselves. We have lost international support not because foreigners hate our values but because they believe we are repudiating them and behaving contrary to them. To prevail, we must remember who we are and what we stand for...

...when we do restore ourselves to mental balance, we will, I fear, find that decades are required—it will take decades—to rebuild the appeal and influence our post-9/11 psychoses took a mere five years to destroy.

Read the whole thing. It's not your typical weblog sound-byte, but it's well worth it. There are too many great comments to quote them all. Hat's off to Sean-Paul for finding it.

10:45:57 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

I Took the Orange Broom In Hand

I stepped onto the patio and took the orange broom in hand. I walked around the corner.

The barking and snarling stopped. Dogs for miles around cocked their ears to hear what came next. The leaves hung limply in the trees. You could have heard a pin drop.

He knew I was coming.

Go inside, I said.

His head hung low, his back end almost dragging, his tail between his legs, he slunk towards the sliding door, giving me wide berth, watching me closely as he went.

It took me ten minutes to find him. He wasn't on our bed. He wasn't on the couch. He wasn't in Ben's room. He wasn't in his crate. I gave up looking and returned to the computer, and there he was, hiding under my desk. As if to say, See, this is where I come for comfort. See, this is what a good dog does.

And he was very quiet for the rest of the day.

---
The title is a vague reference to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.

I took the orange broom in hand.
Longtime the barking dog I sought,
And there stood he by the walnut tree.
He knew that he'd been caught.

9:46:27 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

He Loves His Books

Sean-Paul has got his nose in the books:

[Agonist/Turkey and the Turkistanis] God, I love books, everything about them. Especially because they don't talk back. They don't cast derisive aspersions, expressly designed to prevent thought, back at me like humans do.

8:57:22 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []