Friday, March 17, 2006

our long national nightmare is over

The only thing more frightening to the Iranians than the U.S. leaving Iraq, would be -- and this is my preference -- the U.S. succeeding in Iraq. – Thomas Friedman

These are the times that try men’s souls, but then along comes a man with a message. A surprising message, a message of hope. Sometimes it is Jesus. Sometimes it is Einstein. But this time it is Tom Friedman. His message is a shocker, but it will certain buck up LI’s readers, mired as some of us may be in doubt. The message is: the U.S. should succeed (!) in Iraq.

I mean, it is almost incredible that he was able to print that in the NYT. That’s a supersecret strategy. Apparently he was rushed to the Pentagon right away, and as we write he is putting, in big, bold chalk letters right there on the blackboard for Rumsfeld to see: S-U-C-E-D. This is next to a chalk cloudy S-C-U-D and frantically half erased S-E-C-U-D – our messiah is no pussy speller, bitches. But he is going to get it right, and then, oh heavens, the lights over D.C. will be celestial, the angels will sing, and the cuckoo clocks will cuckoo.

Our long nightmare is over. In a sentence that will ring the chimes forever, like Blessed are the poor in spirit, or E=mc squared, he drives this message home: “So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in Iraq would be even better.”

Glory glory hallelujah. Thanks, Tom!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's amazing how far you can see, how visionary you can bbe, from the top of New York City's skyscrapers-when the world is, after all, completely flat. :)

Anonymous said...

'Mr. Friedman lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Ann, and his daughters, Orly and Natalie.'

I thought you could tell he didn't live here--and I remember he diverted some money to a Jewish cause or two that was suspect, but not quite Abramoff, though. A lot of NYTimes people are in D.C., of course.

I thought his piece was better than what he usually writes, though; I usually can't get through one, because he's naturally gross. It's as feasible as anything else that's said by anyone about Iraq and the mideast in general. There are too many opposing views and too much unverified information to have any real idea what the policies should be, because they're always biased by something, even if some of the bias is more 'virtuous' than other of it. Of course, there's the other solution, which I've decided on: read all of it, don't make up too much mind, stop worrying and love the bomb. And I can say this from 5 floors up after having gloried in acres of skyscrapers and their antique charm all afternoon. Of course, you can say that the tacky Mr. Friedman's position at the NYTimes is a 'New York skyscraper, but I have no interest in supporting virtualized New Yorks. I intend to suck every last morsel of the real stuff out before they tell me I can't save Tara.

Roger Gathmann said...

Mr. NYP, let me confess that I find Tom Friedman a hoot -- "the Olive, the Lexus tree and the little train that could" is almost as funny as some sections of the Corrections.

However -- you can't take Tara, man! I myself have personally laid eyes on Margaret Mitchell's sad, sad heir, and my brother once had a job for a real estate company in atlanta that required, among other things, that he go into the abandoned Margaret Mitchell house every two or three weeks and roust the vagrants, who used it for sleeping, shooting up, and excretory purposes. Apparently one of them, years after he had stopped doing that, decided to warm himself with a fire that caught the wallpaper and the ceiling and Scarlet O'hara's ghost's hair, and while the ghost went screaming through the streets the house came tumbling down.
It is another south now, at least in Atlanta.

As far as Gone with the Wind goes, I have to admit, it is a surprisingly good read. As far as pop literature goes, it leaves Ayn Rand far, far back in the dust, and the siege of Atlanta scenes are pretty impressive.

Anonymous said...

Roger--'Gone With the Wind' is one of those things that is almost a biological sport. Not only was the movie process impossibly heavy and firings and feuds nearly sank the enterprise, which made the making another fabulous story. But then the movie itself is as stirring as ever, in the same way that 'From Here to Eternity' will stir and 'Casablanca' will stir. Southerners like my sister often think the Tara and 12 Oaks in the film are still in Atlanta, even though it was built on the Selznick International back lot. The Culver City mansion itself is in the credits as the Selznick logo. You probably know this. I think all of it adds to the mystique, including that there really is a mansion outside Atlanta once owned by the man on whom Mitchell modeled Butler. Have you been there? In any case, I have never read the book, but a lot of people don’t get the movie either. I followed Matt’s LS link to Sontag’s Notes on Camp in list form (it was really always that), in which she said ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ is ‘dogged and pretentious,’ and ‘not bad enough to be Camp.’ You know—that kind of profound thing, by the writer who would bring us ‘The Volcano Lover,’ which would make me physically ill (the half I managed to ingest.)

Love that about Scarlett O'Hara's ghost's hair catching fair--very New Orleans, forms of which a few other old Dixie towns sometimes are able to do too, just not as frequently as they should. Incredible that almost all the very old stars have died except for BOTH the DeHavilland dames.

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