Reading notes

James Wolcott wields words with intelligent skill that leaves adamant dumb-doers virtually sliced into Julienne fries. I usually engage his work with both admiration and laughter. In this Vanity Fair piece, though, it’s only admiration, because even James can’t make this topic funny:

It doesn’t seem to dawn on our pundits and leaders that when two dozen Iraqi police recruits are murdered by a car bomb it sends a shock wave through entire communities, leaving untold grieving widows, parents, siblings, children, friends, and co-workers behind to nurse their pain and rage. Imagine the impact it would have if 50 police or army recruits were wiped out over the course of a week in this country. Now imagine 50 dying every single week with no relief in sight and tell me the U.S. wouldn’t be suffering a national nervous breakdown. But the Iraqi dead are discounted as the Price of Democracy. …

When someone addresses the war with candor and outrage, it seems to violate the Geneva Conventions of the mind of which George Orwell wrote. On May 17, George Galloway, British member of Parliament and a ferocious opponent of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, used the witness chair at Senator Norm Coleman’s subcommittee investigating the oil-for-food scandal to turn the tables and hold in contempt Coleman, Rumsfeld, and the Beltway’s war-hawk lobby. He railed with such eloquent, unrelenting, unwavering, concentrated, righteous magnum force that the senators were reduced to ashen figures by his flesh-and-blood intensity. So unprepared and unaccustomed were they to hearing a hot serving of unadulterated disrespect and mocking irony that they didn’t know how to respond other than to sit there and hope their heads didn’t fall off.

(Links to video of Galloway’s “righteous magnum force” available here.)