Letters

Our friend H. sent us this answer to our question (stolen, of course, from Lenin), what is to be done?

"Since you asked, some short, swift campaign to get the bastards in syria,
jordan and iran to open their fucking borders and let the refugees in and
house them and treat them with dignity."

A friend of ours in Memphis reports on the debilitated intelligence that is driving public opinion:

"I bought a crazed tabloid "newspaper" (Weekly World News) at the supermarket (a first time for every purchase) with the headline "CIA's shocking revelation: Saddam Plans Move to France! . . .he'll be made French ambassador to the US!" I thought this was so brilliantly funny that I was laughing as I came to the register to check out. The cashier looked curiously at me so I explained, holding up the cover. "Well, is he?" said said cashier."

Our friend T. in NYC wrote a literary detective's account of the belligerant's excuses in a letter on St. Pat's day:

"Well, hell, I did have a discontinuous thought re war this weekend. It was a thought as I recalled that Zizek gave an account of a film about a CIA agent sent to get a code breaking gadget from the Eastern Block, a gadget that will allow the West to decipher KGB codes. Arriving in the East, the agent finds everything going wrong; the KGB are onto him. What went wrong, was there a mole? No and no: the mission was a ploy. The CIA already had the gadget, and the agent was sent to make the KGB think that they do not possess it, so that the KGB will continue to use the gadgets.Thus: the "International Community" writ US-UK-Spain asserts that Iraq has gadgets and that anything contrary to that is a ploy. Further asserted by this version of the IC is that until we wage war, Iraq will continue to use such gadgets, and if they are not used, well, this is a further ploy on the part of Saddam; i.e. so long as we think that they have them, they will continue to not use them. There is also an always-already to all this as well: ah ha! Sadaam might not have these gadgets because they are always-already sold to terrorists."

The World Weekly News, by the way, will be crucial to the way we survive this war. Reading the World Weekly News, and then reading the New York Times, has a strange effect -- because so much of the NYT really does read like the World Weekly News. Is that a mere coincidence? Hmm. For instance, read this list of ways you can tell if your neighbor is a time traveller, and then read this report from Baghdad by NYT reporter John Burns about how eager Iraqis are to be liberated by the ever so friendly American missiles raining down on Satan's city. The surrealists recommended automatic writing to free up the poet's soul -- LI recommends the WWN.

"-Lack of body hair -- Modern humans are less hairy than cavemen and evolution experts predict people of the future will be even less hairy.

-Great stock tips -- While time travelers may conceal their wealth and pose as ordinary middle-class suburbanites, their ability to "guess" which stocks are will go through the roof may strike you as uncanny.

-Missing pinky toe -- Scientists say that as man continues to evolve, our pinky toes will gradually disappear over the next thousand years.

-Slips of the tongue -- May refer to current events or people in the past tense, for example, saying, "Boy, George Clooney sure was a great actor."

-Pet dog belongs to an unknown "mystery" breed -- Your neighbor will probably counter that the unusual-looking pooch is "just a mutt."