James Lilek’s Bleat for today is a wonderful mixture of wicked barbs at the short-sighted, the nay-sayers, and the otherwise self-deluded. It’s all good stuff. Some excerpts:
[I]t’s always amusing to run up against folks who see the US response to the Twin Towers attack as the conspiracy, but regard the conspirators who planned the attack as autonomous robots summoned up by History Itself. Faced with an actual conspiracy standing naked and bloody in the light of noon, they have to insist that there’s a REAL conspiracy to be found in the shadows.
[…] Likewise, some people see race not as a factor in Life’s Rich Tapestry, but the prime determining factor in everyone’s actions. It is impossible for them to believe that their opponents are not motivated by racism, because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be opponents. On their side, the Shining Path of Pan-Cultural Hand-Holding; on your side, Lockstep Love of Authority, and the Klan. This is the point where I lose interest in the argument. You are the bleakest dink; goodbye.
The handwringing in the press is so severe you can hear the bird-bones of these dessicated scribes cracking as they conjur up the next Horrible Scenario. These people would have been standing in Times Square on V-E day shaking their head in disbelief – did we not understand the challenges ahead in reconstructing Europe? What of the Nazis in the general population? What of the reprisals? What of the Soviets? What of the fearsome social dislocation when all the soldiers come home, find their women working, and beat them back into the kitchen? What of? What of? What of?
I love it. “The bleakest dink.” Remember that one — we’ll hear it again.