Weekend musings, part 1
I don’t have any money so this weekend will consist of me sitting around the apartment idly surfing the internet, drinking coffee, and watching the Doctor Who episode I got in the mail from Netflix. I may get adventurous and scratch my ass. But last night I had all the fun I wanted: I was sitting here clicking my mouse and trying not to fall asleep, as it was only 8:30 and it’s against my religion (Church of Saint Insomnia) to go to sleep so early, when I heard my famous Ominous Trickling Noise coming from the closet where the air conditioner lives. The back of the a/c closet abuts on one of the walls of my bedroom closet. I went into the bedroom closet, and sure enough, the carpet in that corner of the closet was sopping wet. So I called the maintenance emergency guy, and in jig time he was over here. He seemed in a real hurry — he was reeking of some awful cologne that left me itching for the rest of the evening (I ended up taking an antihistamine), so I figure he had a big date planned that my call interrupted. Anyway, he zipped in, observed that the floor of the a/c closet was a puddle, zipped out, came back dragging a wet vac, vacuumed up the water, promised to send some guys over with anti-mold spray for the bedroom closet the next day, and zipped out. My cat, in the meanwhile, was having a heart attack, because of the wet vac, and the stranger stomping in. So that was last night.
I’m reading around the blogs and I come upon this entry by Rand Simberg which puzzles me as to its uncharacteristic moany-ness. He starts off with, “We’re already starting to see dire consequences of Israel’s disastrous war. Al Aqsa thinks that it now knows how to defeat Israel,” and goes on to quote the usual Arab boasting. I’m not sure that the fact that Arabs are emitting their characteristic “we will destroy Israel!” blather means anything significant as to their actual chances — from what I have always heard and observed Arabs, and the rest of the Muslim world, are always boasting and bragging about how they are the baddest cats, and that this or that latest little setback (aka every single battle against any Western force which invariably has ended up with them getting their candy asses pasted) is really not a defeat, they’ve actually won, the war even if they lost the battle, etc., etc., and then their many fans and apologists in the West help them along out of misplaced guilt and adherence to the Cult of Victimhood, one of the tenets of which is the West must never be allowed to defeat any of its enemies in battle, because that is just rude. Leaving all of that aside, I must say I just don’t get the thunderous apocalytic language people in the West, supposedly on the anti-terrorist side, have been using against Israel lately, especially as regards the recent Israel vs. Hezbollah scrim. One can argue, of course, that the decision to attack Hezbollah in the way Israel did (with rockets) was a strategic mistake, and that perhaps other means should have been taken, but rightwing critics are running around like chickens without heads, the way they did when Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. And I was under the impression that up to deciding to give in to the whiners and accept a cease fire, Israel was doing pretty good in the destroy-Hezbollah department. But the Hezbollah creeps made sure all their rocket emplacements were surrounded by a nice human shield of kids and grandmas and UN members, which is somehow Israel’s fault. Sometimes I think that Israel would be better off without the so-called “support” of the Western world, which has lost its nerve. It must be like trying to fight a bully with your squeamish girlfriend clutching at you and shrieking “Oh! Oh! Don’t hurt him! I can’t stand the sight of blood!” So you capitulate in disgust, and the bully immediately starts bragging that he’s really cleaned your clock and he’s gonna go finish you off “next time,” and dummies in the audience start thinking the bully really did win something.
I’ve actually heard a lot of people saying that all this battle with the Muslim world is really Israel’s fault, and that all we really have to do to be safe from being terrorist attacks is to quit supporting Israel and basically let them be destroyed by their enemies. I’ve also had it put to me that it is Israelis who are the fanatics, that the creation of Israel was a crime perpetuated upon the helpless victimized Palestinians by Europeans guilty over the Holocaust, and that the United States was likewise guilted into supporting Israel and are kept in this state of guilt-motivated support by the Jews That Control Everthing, and that therefore Osama Bin Laden’s reasons for attacking the US are really quite reasonable, though of course one must deplore his methods (gee, ya think?). This is a somewhat simplistic rendering of the arguments I’ve been hearing, but not much more simplistic than those arguments, which ignore all those nuanced layer things that liberals are always claiming conservatives don’t care about. So I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I have come to this conclusion: we must continue to support Israel because we already have a policy of doing so, and because they are the only real Western democracy in the area (so far — and since the population of the other countries there seem to prefer non-Western systems of law, they will probably still be the only Western democracy in the area). This doesn’t mean we have to agree to everything they say and do, any more than supporting a friend means you wholeheartedly agree to everything he says and does. But you don’t throw that friend to the wolves to save your own skin. If you do that you are dead, spiritually if not physically. A life bought at the expense of your friends’ lives isn’t a life worth living. True, your friends may occasionally be jerks, or do things you think are really stupid. As long as they haven’t turned actively against you, and are willing to listen to you, you stand by them. If you are willing to dump someone out of your own cold self-interest, you never were a friend in the first place.
Of course I run the risk of being labelled simplistic myself for this stance. Well I’m not sweating over it. Of course the relationships of nations aren’t the same as relationships between individuals (I forget who wrote something — Steven Den Beste? — about this), but there is a correlation. As a matter of fact, people rarely show true friendship to each other these days — we are buddies, fuck-buddies, pals, people who “hang out,” people in the same church group, coworkers, and so on, but how many of us really have someone they can count on to go to when things get tough? And this inability to form proper friendships has affected all aspects of society — marriages don’t last, people stab each other in the back for promotions, and the relationships that do last too often become parasitical ones, and so on — and as well to relationships between nations. With our enemies we act like the guilt-ridden girlfriend who goes back to the man who keeps beating her to a pulp, because this time “he might change if only I was nicer to him.” With our allies we are either the uncool kid trying to get into the circle of popular people at high school (we should be more like Europeans, who are much more mature about issues like sex, religion, and politics than we are, is how this usually goes, never mind the fact that like the uncool kid we can’t tell the difference between cynical apathy and maturity), or else we are like the squeamish girlfriend above, who fears not only icky violence, but how being friends with the “different” guy will threaten her standing with the popular kids, who don’t like the “different” guy. We really need to fix our own psychological problems before we start lecturing Israel on how to deal with their own crazy neighbors.
