When we catch our breath, I’ll go into detail on how great the South of France was, but then again, most people already know that it’s a beautiful, elegant and epicurean delight, so I won’t go sprinkling this blog with any more clichés. Besides, pictures are definitely worth a thousand words in this case, so if I get about 50 of them up on Flickr then I think our vacation will be better shown.
The fact that it was so easy to forget our imminent departure from Cambridge made Saturday’s reentry all the more of a shock (not to mention the 95°F heat and the cab had no famous American Air Conditioning!). So we’ve thrown ourselves into packing once more. It feels as if it will never get done, and always be in a state of near chaos.
I’m still a bit jet lagged, getting up before dawn and near exhaustion at this hour (9:30 PM), and I’m a night person! So, I’ll make this entry a bit short.
I think I should acknowledge the new set of right-wing bloggers who have discovered me. Apparently I’m just a man without a country, because even Cambridge, MA is too American for me. I had no idea that ‘leftists’ (which I guess, is what I am) had appropriated the term ‘liberal’, and that 9/11 taught us that the left had destroyed the country. There’s more, but just read the comments on the previous entry to get the rest of it.
OK, without getting too much into a debate, the way I see, it, 9/11 was indeed a tragedy. It was an awful, horrible, hateful thing and the people behind it are the worst excuses for human beings the planet has produced for a long time. But the bigger tragedy is that the US populace got so scared, so screwed up, that they were willing to follow anyone who said that they had The Answer and would Make Them Pay for What They Did. The Republican leaders who claimed they knew what to do, in black and white, confident and heroic language then took advantage of that vulnerability and gullibility to drag the country into war with Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack (yes, that’s a fact and we all know it now — only the truly deluded dispute it) . So it’s a tragedy, but not the kind of tragedy of 9/11. It’s something more farcical, showing how easily an uneducated and irrational population is persuaded. It’s a tragedy that the country I grew up in just doesn’t exist any more, not because of 9/11, but because of what the shock of those falling towers allowed people to get away with.
Final thought: I’m thinking about how to explain that I really do feel as if I’m being forced out of this country. If I stay and fight, I fear eventually that I’ll end up in jail or worse. I’m not contemplating anything illegal, but these days people are really getting spirited away in the night, the way it used to be in the old Soviet Union. It’s mostly just people who have some connection to the Middle East, like that poor soul who at one point worked for an Islamic charity that it was revealed had funneled funds to the terrorists.
Let me put it this way. It’s not as if I went off my rocker and became an underground activist. But I feel like a passenger in the subway car, sitting still on the tracks, but the train going by the opposite direction is moving with so much force and dominating the windows, so I feel as if I’m drifting forward (we’ve all felt something like this optical illusion at some point in time). So I feel the country lurch further and further to the right, and hence, I also feel that my place within it is less and less clear. If being American means being ultra-religious, intolerant, arrogant and wasteful, then I guess I don’t want to be one of those. Call me crazy.
LOL! Obviously your trip to France has been invigorating.
There’s a lot to unpack in your analysis of post 9–11 America. I don’t have the time to address all of it, but the reference to people who have disappeared in the night is hilarious. Were you referring to Mr Muntasser of Logan Furniture fame? He wasn’t spirited away in the night by black helicopters David, he was arrainged in federal court for lying to immigration officials and the IRS among others. It’s no different than our Irish American neighbors who used to do fundraising for the IRA 20 years ago. It’s illegal!
I checked with the owners of one of my favorite blogs and they have extended an invitation for you to do a guest post, perhaps on your experiences in France recently. It won’t exactly be the warm fuzzy echo chamber you are accustomed to, but I find most of the posters are civil and fair-minded and it is an excellent chance for you to demonstrate your commitment to diverse viewpoints.
What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe we’ll talk you into staying?
Anyways, check out http://discardedlies.com/ and I hope to see your guest post soon.
Hey papijoe! Good to see you as always.
Welcome back David. Thank you for your acknowledgement. I’m sorry to say that I still haven’t had the chance to read through your entire blog yet. I really should though, shouldn’t I? It really isn’t fair for me to judge you based on a bio & a few posts. Perhaps you will take papijoe up on the invitation to post over at DL. Like he already said, most of the posters there will give you a fair shake. Some will give you a bit more than a shake, though I’m sure you can handle it. Of course there will be at least one raging lunatic. However, I promise that it won’t be me for a change.
Perhaps you can write about the America that you grew up in. I’d love to hear about it. If you have already written about the blissful utopia of your youth, please forgive me as there is still much here that I haven’t discovered yet. Simply point the way.
OK guys, as long as people are civil, I’m obliged to be civil back.
To be honest, the blog you mentioned didn’t really appeal all that much to me — not because of the ‘echo chamber’ effect (and aren’t we all occupying echo chambers these days, because it would be nearly ridiculous to say that Fox News is truly ‘Fair and Balanced’). What was particularly distasteful was all the religion. I may have been raised a Jew and was even bar-mitzvahed, but my feelings on religion these days (Judiasm, Christianity, Islam, what-have-you) is that they are certainly Not Worth It and I can gladly do without all of that mythology and piousness. Maybe I’m missing that God gene thingy, the arrangements of thymine and guanine that make one see the divine light, but that God stuff just doesn’t do it for me at all.
I also have no trouble with euthanasia at all, and all of those postings about how we let Schiavo die just strike me as utterly ridiculous and childish, especially now that it’s entirely clear that she had truly been a vegetable all of these years. So those postings were also highly unappetizing (much as I like vegetables).
At any rate, after we get settled (and by the way, I doubt we are returning, although I’ll always listen to arguments for us to reconsider, and never is a long, long time), I’d be intrigued with guest-posting at discardedlies.com. As for getting a fair shake, that’s what I would expect. Otherwise, I suppose I’ll just have to return to the muck and mire of liberal (excuse, me, leftists — huh, does that make the other side ‘rightists’?) blogs…
David I don’t get it. Are you saying that DL is a religious blog. Perhaps you are confusing it with mine. One of the editors of Discarded Lies is an agnostic the other is Greek Orthodox. The posters there agree on nothing, religion especially. Christian kooks like me are graciously tolerated.
Anyways the invitation wasn’t to read the blog, but do a guest post. Diversity of viewpoints, remember?
David here are the guest post guidelines for DL:
http://discardedlies.com/guidelines.php
If you edit it in Blogger and paste it into notepad, you are golden.
Anticipation is reaching a fever pitch. Please post soon. You know you want to…
Good afternoon David,
I read several of your posts as I was enjoying my lunch today.
“Things I’ll miss:
#6 Living in the Intellectual Capitol of North America”
LMAO! I sure hope that you didn’t design their T‑shirts.
(Sorry… I just couldn’t resist that one)
BTW, I like the subway car analogy. I still suspect that you my be ‘off your rocker’ though : )
“you my be”
Heh, serves me right.