The World O' Crap Archive

Welcome to the Collected World O' Crap, a comprehensive library of posts from the original Salon Blog, and our successor site, world-o-crap.com (2006 to 2010).

Current posts can be found here.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Code Name: Diamond Head

Or at least, a view of Waikiki Beach from the top of Diamond Head…


…the peak of which is accessed through a World War I-era pillbox, so it’s just lucky for us that the Jews didn’t start any wars while we were on vacation.

Back now, and while catching up on the blogofascosphere, I noticed that Kathryn (Windsock) Lopez saw Oliver Stone’s 9/11 film, and said, “It’s about why we fight.” To which an emailer responded, “I think it fair to state that you do not fight — you never have and, hopefully, never will have to. You are not a member of any of the branches of the armed forces, nor a reservist. You are not, and I am fairly sure, have never been engaged in a combat situation…It does a tremendous disservice to your readers and is extraordinarily disrespectful to the millions of men and women around the world who are in uniform and fighting and dying for their countries.”
 
Amazingly, Miss Windsock shifted and confessed that no, she wasn’t humping a pack through triple digit heat in downtown Baghdad.  But both Cliff May (“There is a war of arms. And there is a war of ideas.”) and Mark Steyn immediately bitchslapped K-Lo and pointed out that “the notion that ‘fighting’ a war is the monopoly of those ‘in uniform’” is crazy talk!  Windsock immediately shifted again, and declared, 

Mark Steyn [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
is exactly the guy you want on your side in a street fight.


So now she’s not only Rambo, she’s Sonny Chiba.

While in Hawaii I visited the U.S.S. Arizona memorial, where 1177 of the 2390 people who died on December 7, 1941 lay entombed.  It’s a sobering monument; oil still seeps from the wrecked vessel, leaving small rainbow slicks on the surface of Pearl Harbor.  The names of the dead are incised in a marble wall in the chapel, and to the side, a smaller wall contains the names of “U.S.S. Arizona survivors who have chosen to be interred with their shipmates.”  The morning we were there, two anchor-shaped wreaths stood in the chapel, an offering from the Chilean navy.

 Flag Flying Above U.S.S. Arizona Memorial
In the museum we found a postcard that reproduced a First World War recruiting poster by James Montgomery Flagg, creator of the iconic “Uncle Sam Wants You” poster:

Back then, of course, our forebearers were so primitive they believed that war was something fought largely by soldiers, sailors, and marines, on the blood-soaked fields of Flanders or in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.  They didn’t realize that one day the Information Superhighway would make combat a truly global phenomenon, so I wondered what kind of poster campaign Flagg would design for a world war in which the battlefield extended from the bomb-torn streets of Fallujah to the crumb-strewn carpet of Jonah Goldberg’s cubicle at the National Review Online.  I think it would go a little something like this:


Followed by a defiant:  Tell It To the Bloggers!

 
England America expects every man to do his duty.  At least until Battlestar Galactica comes on.

14 Responses to “Code Name: Diamond Head”

BLAARGFH! HOW DID EVENTS COME TO THIS?! IT IS A MYSTERY!!1!
I suppose it’s only natural that people who confuse posting messages with enlisting would also confuse an online e-mail tiff with a streetfight.
I think in a street fight, I wouldn’t want Mark Steyn at my back. I’d want him where I could keep an eye on him so he couldn’t run away.
Of course, K-Lo was merely being modest; she’s fighting the war in precisely the way she’s saving orphaned embryos.
You guys are not giving him his due. I bet anything Mark was really, really good. I also bet he always played Chun-Li.
Somebody plays a little CoH (or is it Cov?)
Can’t be COH, their graphics are much more polished.
what happens when the war of arms is directed by a guy too dumb to win a war of ideas
what happens when true military heroes start aligning with pacifists and the ones screaming for war are mainly the chickenhawks, draft dodgers, absentee reserve pilots etc.
maybe Bush the Elder was smart enough not to invade Baghdad because he had fought in a real war, the one started by Hirohitovitz. Maybe Bush the Younger would have known better if he’d marched off to Vietnam to fight against Ho Chi Minberg, who was heavily backed by Mao Tse Tungstein.
Somebody plays a little CoH (or is it Cov?)
That’s Capt.Warblogger from City of Heroes. He’s a level 1 tank. Been a level 1 for the past 18 months, because he doesn’t actually physically fight crime or beat up villains. He fights the idea of crime by blogging indignantly about the existence of villains he’s read about in the MSM; he also occasionally posts the home addresses of other heroes whom he suspects of being unserious in their committment to the War on Crime.
Who’s the chick with the boobs?
Who’s the chick with the boobs?
A patriot. On the frontline of the War of Ideas.
You guys are not giving him his due. I bet anything Mark was really, really good. I also bet he always played Chun-Li.
No, I believe Mark said it would take Guile to win the War on Terror…
You’re right, of course. He probably prefers to battle *against* Chun-Li.
Nice Guile namecheck, btw.
A patriot. On the frontline of the War of Ideas.
Where do I sign up?
Oh. Wait. My carpal tunnel syndrome….*sigh*

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