Age doesn't necessarily confer correctness of cause --or wisdom

Achieving the age of grandparenthood does not, contrary to some writers and editorialists--“Raging Grannies incensed by war,” 13 February, by Erika Slife, in Florida’s Sun-Sentinel-- confer wisdom.

Yes, age does confer years. It connotes a softening, sometimes, of one’s former calcified rebellions. Merely attaining a weight of decades emphatically has nothing to say about judgment, though TV sit-coms, dramaturgs and journalists seem to equate immediate mental acuity to such demographics, unless doddery humor is the target. Nor is it particularly enlightening to have to wade through comfortable assumption-land in regard to females’ being of a certain age and thus recipients of some magical consequent superiority.  When was the last (or first) time men in their 70s or 80s were cited using a cutesy appellation, Gramps, as in “Grampas leave their rockers to foment over school lunches” or some such? Was Harry Whittington, at 78, gleefully headlined “Grandpa takes birdshot and hits the dirt” with the recent regrettable Dick Cheney hunting accident?  Never, that’s when. The nomenclature and verbiage for men having attained a decade or two over the age of average voters does not come off as adorable or jolly to the average reader. No one sizes them up by their offspring count. One might never learn that older men have any grandkids at all. And that is how it should be. For both sexes. Yet in daily papers, surveys and op-eds, older women are often dubbed “grannies” (whether they have grandkids, for that matter, or not). And for their part, respectful grandchildren—the usually male descriptive historians of the issue of the moment, script or movie sequel—assign an unearned merit badge of false homage to political positions taken by these PC-approved ‘persons of years.’ Though few would have cavils against any group, mature or not, fighting to restrain over-development (although what constitutes too much? A developer would have one definition, a firebrand environmentalist, another) and ecological degradation, it is not clear that any organization called Grannies has any corner on moral rectitude when it comes to military engagement, what we abbreviate as war.

Who indeed likes war? Even the Bush Administration, amidst waging battle against a foe that is frustratingly amorphous, frighteningly amoral yet enormously tenacious, does not ‘like’ war. It does what it must; what centuries of conscience and decency and birthright have determined as necessary in the teeth of overwhelming barbarity and threat. Simplistic objections to being in such a conflict, however, do little to clarify for the public the issues at hand. In the past, though ostriches would object, both world wars were undertaken as a last-ditch effort that was unarguably successful at vanquishing the then-foe, fascism and nazism on the unstoppable rise. The battles that followed, in Korea, Viet Nam, the long Cold War, and loci from ethnic fastnesses in Eastern Europe to sorry dumps like Mogadishu, owe their impetus to festering disarray and wounds inflicted that could not be medicated by the diffident slow oxygen of diplomacy’s hiss. Grannies vocalizing against the deadly toe-to-toe now in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and Iraq, will not stop the juggernaut of ferocious Wahhabism that threatens to annihilate the Western model of life we have been waking up to for several hundred years on this side of the Atlantic. The gauntlet has been thrown down repeatedly by those who think us dim-witted, cowardly and afraid. To retract our response will be read as a fatal failure of nerve that will do the historical obvious: Invite further, and deeper, incursions and attacks.

The people implacably improvise-bombing the transport vehicles of Baghdad and Fallujah, decapitating ‘peace’ workers and independent contractors, kidnapping and slaughtering Christian girls whose only sin lay in being too geographically close to the deadly intolerant sword of the religion of peace—these sanguinary engines of hate-filled DNA will not celebrate the bombastic earnest of feisty oldsters by laying aside their weapons and laser-guided destructive devices. A trivial cartoon can ignite their myriad militancy. A foam-flecked sermon can bring out millions to burn down our civilizing influences. The heavily Syrian- and Iranian-funded ragtags will not forget their sworn screeds of imposing dire shari’a law on our entire polity. Nor would such raging killers exempt such grannies, or their progeny for that matter, from their schedule of killing the kuffar, infidel, despite their naive championing of a cessation of effort. At the risk of tautology: No one here favors war. But the race to national extirpation via intolerance, using weaponry too ghastly to focus on for long, is decidedly on.  We no longer have a choice in the matter. As the President says: We must win. Unless, of course, losing to such implacable thugs and its unthinkable consequences is an option. Even for grannies, closer perhaps to the dreamless who cares? of eternity than the rest of us, it is not. And cute, as in condescension and patronizing nomenclature, has nothing to say about that. Celebrating the unavailable Column B of stepping away from defending our way of life and the future of our actual lives is a dereliction of duty no less important because, for some unstated PC reason, it is considered indelicate to expressly state.

Perhaps such interest groups as the Grannies could stick to their knitting, protesting environmental ills that can be alleviated by placarding or impacting their elected representatives. Lethal, egregious, committed fanaticism won’t stop to applaud and chuckle

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Behead those who dare besmirch our besmirchers

What the nearly global ‘cartoon riots’ reveal is not comic. But apologies are not the answer. In fact, apologizing is diametrically the wrong tack to take in regard to this latest wrinkle in Islam’s delinquency to the universe.

As analysts Daniel Pipes and Michelle Malkin have noted, it is the essence of maintaining our very lives and independence to assert and defend our correct rights to self-expression. Should we foolishly and outlandishly bend to their triumphalism of droit du religion--only Islam of all isms must be respected and obeyed, evidently; all others may be trampled upon by these disrespectful and violence-worshipping people--we will have succumbed to the ugliness of dhimmitude and the squalor of inevitable decline under their ceaseless and envious bullying.

The recapitulation after four months of cartoons only a few of which, by the way, were authentically drawn by cartoonists in response to a request for depiction of the islamist issues relevant to today, of these mostly innocuous depictions, is a ploy of several Middle Eastern autocratic/dictatorial governments involved, predominantly Syria. The vociferous rubbish indulged in by this mind-poisoned scourge--does not a single male Muslim work, ever??? anywhere in the Middle East?--is a potempkin front to rattle our infidel cages. Be assured they are state-sanctioned showcases: See what we can engineer, when we put our minds, matches and feet to it!? Side B: Look at our fireworks, ye mighty, and be afraid, be very afraid.

The mass of the rampaging and artificially ramped-up crowd hardly devours its own media, and is moreover largely unacquainted with Danish, let alone Chileno or adjuvant news. The technique of priming the rage of the unhappily underemployed was flogged similarly by the nazi tyrant 65 years ago to distract from economic, sociological and communal woes that bore little resemblance to the proximal 'cause' of the demonstrations, however.

No country should apologize. Unless the weasel states apologize to the West for their canker acts of decapitation, name-calling and retail rewriting of history. If these same vile states of insult continue to lambaste and caricature Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism, they must learn that turnabout is just fair play.

A major lesson must be extrapolated from one of the placards held aloft in one of these demos: 'To hell with your freedom,' it read.  The concept that they willingly lap up their lack of freedom is an ironic statement no government bloviation can obscure. Their message is plainer than mud on a mollusk: We want to be preliterate and pre-modern. We know enough English to tell you our mindset, but we don't have a farthing's-worth of regard for what you hold dear, even if it would look good in our breakfronts for the occasional hudna.

Eventually, their Jurassic, ignorant exceptionalism will be penetrated by the futility of defending the dank feudal they have sold their souls to in a bad bid for virgins or rescue.

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Steeling themselves

The Steelers/Seahawks Game. I was invited to a SuperB party downtown, and went late, as I had other obligations. And beginnings are always more uneventful than the closing hours, if you’re honest about it. As I traversed  the empty streets, vacuumed of all but clueless tourists (sorry, but it’s true) in Times Square, I realized how sacramental--yes, holy--are the lineaments of The Game.                            

Any major Game. Baseball World Series! Super Bowl!

What about the Olympics? The Olympics have far less a grip than the purely, ethereally American elixir of the Game of Games.  In the company of my male friends and swains, I watch them watch the giant screen, maximally testosteronic. And marvel at their drive to demonstrate how strong and powerful was each man in his ordained, beer-infused and –reinforced shrunk-space, as he shouts "That's what I'm talkin' about!" and "F**kers!" "Moron--how could he pass that ball like that!?"  "Damn!" and less choate gems of masculine expression for the listening absorption of their observant and more quiescent females.

These men are all urban hominids, Manhattan genus, with no dog in the fight. Save for the bets most had made, likely, paltry amounts in a pool. Yet the shouting was full throttle, unanimously for the closer of the embattled teams, the Steelers. All men reduced—or raised? —to the level of organic beings, stripped of careers or interests or professions of echelons higher than coarse cries in dark places.

You realize, a private XX smile, how primal, at heart, when the opportunity to drop the XY veneer presents.  A joyousness that transcends the individuated jobs and interests of these boosters, something I hunt when I go to football games or baseball at the large stadia, or soccer or hockey in Madison Square Garden or like venues in nearby temples. Roosters traders in the pit are in similar flux. Luxuriating in the purely visceral exploration of time, money, trading, the shifting vicissitudes of the up-and-down of the day. Hoarse with self-assertion and generous risk.

The evisceration of differences is transformative, magical. A large carafe of beer and a spicy wing, and poof! thousands of years of incremental cosmetic reformation and reconfiguring fly, pruned away in the flash of a ten-spot, an amphitheater and a pigskin ball. It is a gorgeous panoply, perhaps to other females as well: At one time sexy, comforting-- raucously erotic.

One quickly moves to the myriads of private engagements after the game. Especially when our side has won, with the male still engorged with vigor and ass-shoulder-buddy with his maleness and his friends the county over, and thus, happily suffused with the juices that inspire erogenous and other fierce physical exaltations.

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