Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2003 > That' Not All Yet, Folks
The war is not over.
Yes, the Brits have taken Basra. Sure, American troops have entered Baghdad and Saddam Hussein is in hiding (or rotting in a pile of rubble). Okay, Saddam's government has, for the first time ever, stopped lying to its people.
But there is still a long fight ahead. There is still the north and its oil fields to take over. There are still guerilla teams to fight. Then there are twelve years of neglect from the sanctions period, and wanton environmental vandalism in the Shatt-al-Arab region (Saddam's punishment of the marsh Arabs for their rebellion after the Gulf War) to repair. Then we have to persuade the Kurds in the north not to go it alone, which would make Turkey and Iran (with their own Kurd problems) very unhappy.
The war is not over. It won't be over for a long time after Baghdad is secure. And we will have to keep remembering that until Iraq is stable again.
France had a lot to lose with an Iraqi war, for it had big financial and political interests in Iraq. But the resistance of the French to the war goes much deeper than those.
You know, this is not the first time the French have turned on us. The French hate us. They have always hated us. When it comes to culture, they are more prideful and arrogant about theirs than any American or Japanese. When it comes to politics, they think the world should pay heed to them—the Most Enlightened Society—and not to whatever nation has the most money, the most goodies, and over all the most power.
Sure, they helped us out during our war for independence; but that was a different France then; and it did it to weaken the British more than to help us. Then the French got the false idea (helped along, no doubt, by a self-deceived Thomas Jefferson) that their revolution was the same kind as ours. Our revolution was the product of several Protestant Great Awakenings; did not pile up hugh mounds of innocent dead; and did not end with a despot running the country with an iron fist. But Franco-American relations have been based on this basic misunderstanding.
So we can be annoyed, but should not surprised, with French resistance to the war. This thing about 'freedom toast' is nonsense (when 'omelette toast' is more descriptive). And nobody I know here buys French goods, anyway. French technology is, and has always been, a joke. Wines from Italy or California are just as good. As for perfume, if you are beautiful you don't need it, and if you are not it won't help anyway.
Wednesday morning's paper had a syndicated article called 'About women' by this gorgeous woman named Catherine Toth. The actual title is 'The goddess speaks', and that's how it appears in the Ball State Daily News. But it's not called that in the Marion paper (or in any other non-varsity rag) because too many people would be offended. C'mon, folks, Ms. Toth is a human, and hybris is part of being human, right?
Anyway, Ms. Toth writes about how women communicate to each other and with their men in code. She says it not lying, but it's hard for me not to interpret it in any other way, especially when it makes matters worse between men and women. As an example:
Sure, I'm cool with you going to Rock-Za [a Honolulu strip joint]is our way of really saying,I'm cool enough to let you go, but you'd better be smart enough not to.
The type of guy that wants to visit a strip joint is likely too stupid to stay away…or to understand what his woman is getting at. Why on God's earth is she going out with this guy, anyway?
Here's another example:
At the Gap once, the cashier, shamelessly flirting with the guy she assumed was my boyfriend, looked at me and said,
You know, maybe you should get the reverse-fit jeans.
No thanks,I say with a forced smile.I wear regular.
Yeah, but, like, reverse-fit would look so much better on you since, you know, it's cut for wider hips.
Obviously the cashier was not behaving enough like the droid she was. The only thing she'll soon be flirting with is the unemployment line! Anyway, Ms. Toth's point was that her friend, who was witness to all this, was too dim to realize that Ms. Toth was being dissed or even that he was being hit on.
You would think women would realize that most men are dimmer
than fifteen-watt bulbs when it comes to social situations.
And most men just want to have a good time, not lessons in
social etiquette nobody bothered to teach them when they were
younger. And since when are quarrels and misunderstandings
with your woman half the fun of dating
? That sort of crap
is one of the reasons I never date myself.
In defense of Ms. Toth, though, it is a banal fact of life that people tend to lie to spare the feelings of others—especially when people today are oversensitive 'victims' who tend to bleed at a touch.