There’s Never a Nixon Around When They Need One

John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harper's Magazine and the Grandson of the late billionaire John D. MacArthur speaking from New York on the tidy and tedious France24 made a polemically charged “report” out of his feelings on deploying more troops to Baghdad to provide some more safety for Baghdadis that John R. seem otherwise quite ready to fret about.

I really don’t know how to sum it up other than to say that his “thesis” seemed so obsessed with the Vietnam war that it came to no conclusion other than to assume that everyone over 40 in America would be made anxious somehow by it. It’s an armed conflict on a low boil – people should be anxious, and anxious to snuff the insurgency long enough for a beefier Iraqi government to stand up for its’ own sovereignty. I think that this might include people who weren’t 9 when the last helicopter took off of the roof of a US Embassy.

One would think that John R. has neither the facility to reason outside of the use of infantile analogues or is ill prepared to look at the world outside of the narrow slot of an anti-civilizational-half decade where the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and Symbionese “Liberation” Army was a subculture’s idea of peacekeeping.

What I wonder about is why some in “his generation’s” view of history is so short that they can’t seem to find any other events or time to think about.

Imagine just how much reason you have to suspend to appeal to trope of aging leftist revolutionaries: after all they were more willing than anyone to dispose of cultural norms developed through millennia of trial and error in favor of notions more symbolic than rational, all so they could personally feel like they’re “getting over” something.

He was 12 years old in 1968, the year the subculture he inhabits idolizes in secret the nibbling away of the foundation of the society they live in the way Harry Hopkins tried to impose an bacterium unwanted by the people to begin with. I’m glad John R. is working out his issues in words and on a little-watched TV outlet far from his home where they can remain as significant to the rest of us as any individuals’ reminiscences of the past are: in his youthful adoration of others’ adolescent memories of having a fabrication to rage against.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)