In a message dated 02/14/2003 3:27:00 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:


> jb,
>
> You certainly seem angry at the world - too angry to have a substantive
> discussion. I hope you can find a productive use for all that energy.
>
> For now, I'll get out of your way.
>

These kinds of remarks are funny.  They simultaneously presume to diagnose
and to assume an air of superiority.   For my part, I don't understand why
everyone, at the level of their humanity, is not outraged.  We're talking big
time killing here, and most of our fellow citizens, for the sake of their
lifestyles and smug sense of themselves, are willing, if not avid, to allow
it to happen again.  In Southeast Asia, more than 5 million persons died as a
direct result of U.S. meddling.  Despite the rhetoric of promoting democracy,
its motives were not so noble.  The same has been true for the last 100 years
in Central and South Americas.  Pound, for all of his supposed puerile
moralism, detested war.  On second thought, I guess this must sound puerile
to those who are smug in their warm beds and cheap gas prices.  Indeed, how
committed can one be to a search for the proper action to be so easily swayed
by a little passion, even if one confuses that for angry discharge?
Ignorance might, under some circumstances, be bliss, but it's also oblivion.


joe brennan


They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

Constant apprehension of war has the same tendency
to render the head too large for the body.  A standing military
force with an overgrown executive will not long be safe.
companions to liberty.  -- Thomas Jefferson


"America is a quarter of a billion people totally misinformed and disinformed
by their government. This is tragic but our media is -- I wouldn't even say
corrupt -- it's just beyond telling us anything that the government doesn't
want us to know."

Gore Vidal