Thank you.

Now I'm a member of the "rabid left" according to one of your critics. Heh. (as Comrade Professor Reynolds likes to say.)

Your post was beautifully written, and the follow-ups were each a piece of poetry, unique in themselves but utterly cohesive together. You should be proud of that post, it was wonderful, terrible, powerful and sacred.

However, your retort was excellent as well. Keep up the good work.

Um. Football?

I think you'll find that football fans are as varied a bunch as, well.

Those bozos, those human parrots, those fools you describe are just as annoying when they cheer professional sports as they are when they blither about politics, though they're much less consequential there. No team ever went to the Superbowl because the dittoheads flooded the talk shows.

(Oops. Back up and try again:)

How about: "We had to destroy the country in order to liberate it"?

(Carved on Rummy's tombstone, for preference.)

As for democracy, I fear the tone in Iraq has already been set by the US Marine Corps firing on the first spontaneous post-Ba'ath era political demonstrations.

I fear for our future.

That's a fine, fine piece, Teresa. I wish that saying "ditto" didn't feel so freepishly silly and inadequate.

Experts: Looters had keys to Iraqi vaults:

----------quote----------
Some of the looters who ravaged Iraqi antiquities appeared highly organized and even had keys to museum vaults and were able to take pieces from safes, experts said Thursday at an international meeting.

One expert said he suspected the looting was organized outside the country.

...

"It looks as if part of the looting was a deliberate planned action," said McGuire Gibson, a University of Chicago professor and president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad. "They were able to take keys for vaults and were able to take out important Mesopotamian materials put in safes."

"I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country, in fact I'm pretty sure it was," Gibson said. He added that if a good police team was put together, "I think it could be cracked in no time."

...
-----------------

What I meant was that the actual meaning of the freepish slogans of the moment usually amounts to "yay rah our side, boo hiss to yours." They have the appearance of meaning, but they don't seem to link up conceptually with other material over time, nor be retained in active memory.

the actual meaning of the freepish slogans of the moment usually amounts to "yay rah our side, boo hiss to yours."

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singin' songs and carryin' signs
Mostly sayin' "Hooray for our side"...
-- Neil Young, "For What It's Worth" (1967)

The head of a U.S. presidential panel on cultural property has resigned in protest at the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum.

"It didn't have to happen," Martin Sullivan said of the objects that were destroyed or stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in a wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s rule last week. Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, said he wrote a letter of resignation to the White House this week in part to make a statement but also because "you can't speak freely" as a special government-appointed employee.

The president appoints the 11-member advisory committee. Another panel member, Gary Vikan, also plans to resign because of the looting of the museum.

Nope, I don't think this has the legs to become a 2004 political issue (at least in this country). I can dream though . . .

It looks like he was one of the most senior advisers to the government on just this issue. They gave the advice, but it wasn't listened to.

Steve Stills (back when he was seen as Neil's peer)

It's truly a wonderful essay.

Peace,
Madeleine

I must say that wherever you were when the muse visited must be indescribable.

That was really something. I'm sorry you had to write it, but if something good comes of this, you made a difference

And it would also seem to be a tad redundant, as my comic book collection somehow seems to be her communal property anyway...

You have been warned.

Not only have you written a wonderful essay, but you've done a great service to those of us dealing with freepers, allowing us to just link to it so say, "What she said."

I've been over at an otherwise remarkable poetry forum having someone accuse me of inventing my interest in antiquities just as something to attack Bush with. I suppose this means I must have also invented a time machine so I could go back to the eighties to somehow influence my then-self to get the degree in anthropology which I now have, forgetting that if I hated Bush that much, I might have better uses for a time machine.

Freeper projection seems to be a real problem.

I've also encountered the "art or babies" thing over there too. Where does this meme come from? Was there some Batman episode I missed where the Joker had Shirley Temple and the Mona Lisa suspended over a vat of acid and Batman could save only one?

Actually, that's more of a Two-Face scheme, but same dif.

For what at least one British conservative thinks about the situation, see Rod Liddle's article in The Spectator.

Just wanted to let you know that I quoted most of this essay on my personal journal, because it just says so many things I've been trying to articulate this past week, in a much clearer fashion than I ever could. Figured I should just be open about my pilfering-with-credit. Thanks for the great writing!

-Scott

You are not alone -- I have been called "that Vera woman was clearly the worst" here for abandoning babies and saving museums:

http://www.tricksy.org/archives/2003_04_14.php

By the way, excellent post on your part.

http://www.sff.net/people/vera.nazarian/news.htp

You basically asked: how in the world can this NOT be a difficult decision?

These are the same people who have always asked "Of what practical use is your discovery?" and say "Everything important has already been invented.", or who can't really understand that the future is going to be really different. In short, Mundanes.

But perhaps 'Mundane' isn't an entirely useful epithet. Virginia Postrel has suggested a new pair of terms that describes a political polarity to replace the old left/right or slightly newer authoritarian/libertarian approaches; Dynamist vs. Stasist.

In short, the view that the past is important to rediscover and remember, in order to facilitate future serendipitous growth and progress, is essentially a Dynamist one. The Stasist view is either reactionary (seeking to impose a recent past golden age when things were 'better'), or technocratic (one where future progress must be imposed from above), and sometimes both. In any case, a Stasist wouldn't assign much value to ancient history, if they think about it at all.

Yes, thank you! That is exactly the heart of my argument that this should be a difficult decision to make. The issue of Iraqi specifics was a springboard for a general theoretial argument on the nature of "what is important."

And it is rather amusing in a sad way to see how some people are incapable of reading just what is written, and instead read what they want to see to support their own tunnel vision.

Mine was a rant not just in support of the cultural heritage but also against such narrowmindedness, such emotional righteousness.

Another "rant" will follow later today as soon as I get home from my night shift and FTP unpload the journal entry.

Read it in about three hours from now. :-)

The whole 'people vs. things' argument completely misses the point that these 'things' are merely the physical embodiment of something that is actually immaterial.

We can always up the stakes a bit. Let's say, a baby vs. an unspecified scientific discovery? Vs. a discovery that *may* lead to a cure for cancer? Vs. all non-human life in Australia? On the planet? Vs. the entire history of an alien civilization? Heck, how about vs. an indisputable example of non-terrestrial life?

Oh, I know, let's just make it one baby vs. freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people. After all, *obviously* saving a single baby's life is more important than something abstract like freedom and democracy, right?

'Things'. Pfeh.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a failure of imagination.

Paula, just in case the needle on my humor-meter is sticking, 'Stasist' is derived from static, as opposed to dynamic. 'Statist' was already taken. I reccomend the book 'The Future and it's Enemies' (synopsis) by Virginia Postrel.

Congratulations, Ms. Hayden. You made very good, very cogent points.

Me, I figured that the 'babies vs. things' argument was blown out the water when not even hospitals were safe from looting. How can you claim saving babies over "value-less trinkets" is more important when you don't even ensure hospitals be secured from these looters? But that's just my two cents.

Anyway, bravo on your stand...

Joseph
(Sorry for my grammar...)

That is pretty much clueless. I have been hearing this from the Left for a while. It reminds me of the pure rubbish that Sunnis and Shiites won't ever work together.

Please read this entry for another view.