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dulouz
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: Uranus
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 Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 9:13 pm Post subject: CAN I HAVE MY COUNTRY BACK, PLEASE? |
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It��s times like these that I miss my country most.
Holidays like Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving remind me that once upon a time (long ago, in a galaxy far, far away), I had a country. It was called America.
Perfect? Absolutely not. Nothing is in this world. But it represented something noble, brave and fine. Even if they couldn��t quite articulate it, Americans understood what America meant – and cherished it. Once, we knew our nation��s history. Once we spoke a national language. Once we controlled our borders. Once we knew what treason was and how to deal with it.
But I��m getting ahead of myself.
Of our three national holidays, for me, Memorial Day is the most significant. The Fourth of July celebrates our independence. Harkening back to our beginnings, Thanksgiving recalls our religious roots. But it��s the blood and guts (the suffering and sacrifice) symbolized by Memorial Day, that made America possible. To make ideals real – and to protect and preserve them -- requires payment in the coin of strife and death.
At the urging of my youngest son, I just finished watching the series ��Band of Brothers,�� based on the Stephen Ambrose history of one company of the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne, from Normandy to the Eagle��s Nest. It��s a stirring saga – all the more intense because it��s told without the usual Hollywood hoopla.
Each episode opens with commentary from the men whose story this is -- the veterans of Easy Company. Old men (most in their ��80s) their faces are like a bomb-scarred landscape. There��s an undercurrent of emotion in the quiet voices of men who went through hell so the rest of us have a safe, comfortable life as free men in a nation of free men.
If I could speak with them, I��d ask: ��Are you happy with what your country has become? When you were a nervous kid waiting to jump out of a plane while shells peppered the sky, did you ever imagine it would come to this?��
Alienation – the sense of being severed from your roots. Waking up covered in bandages, in a hospital bed in a strange land (where no one understands a word you��re saying) and wondering what happened to the world you once knew.
Doom and gloom, you say? You wouldn��t if you were paying attention.
Less than 8 weeks ago, a brain-damaged woman was deliberately starved to death. (Her mother was not allowed to moisten her parched lips with drops of water.) A judge decided that hers was a life unworthy of life -- in the finest tradition of Nazi medicine.
In Lexington, Massachusetts – where Minutemen first confronted the tyranny represented by redcoats – the father of a kindergartener was arrested recently for objecting to the indoctrination of his child in the homosexual lifestyle. (He had refused to leave his son��s elementary school until administrators agreed to respect his parental rights.) Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of teaching kids the swellness of sodomy.
In Nebraska, a federal judge overturned an amendment to the state constitution (enacted by over 70% of voters) recognizing the reality that a married couple is a man and a woman united in the bonds of matrimony – not two perverts playing house. Democracy and morality are dying together.
On a cable TV reality-based show, a fat loudmouth with a ponytail and his dwarf companion repeatedly used a four-letter word to refer to Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to succoring the sick and dying. This loathsome display of vulgarity and disrespect is one example of the evil that passes for entertainment in 21st century America.
Across the nation, pandering politicians rush to bestow benefits on illegal aliens – driver's licenses, in-state tuition at public colleges for their children, even workmen��s compensation for injuries sustained at jobs they shouldn��t have. We��ve become a people of misplaced compassion who are driven to show love for home invaders.
In Massachusetts, Connecticut and elsewhere, bills advance to give addicts needles (supposedly to contain the spread of AIDS – a disease spawned by the Sexual Revolution). Thus have we gone from just-say-no, to just use a clean needle as you shoot junk into your arm and accelerate our evolution to Addict Nation. In California and a number of other Western states, physicians can prescribe pot – the drug that opens the gates to a life of addiction – for everything from the nausea accompanying chemotherapy to a bad back.
Sometime in its current term, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if Americans will be allowed to have public displays of the Ten Commandments (as long as they��re constitutionally camouflaged with secular documents). It��s reached the point where this is a real big deal – permitting any public acknowledgement of the ethos on which America was founded. The 9th Circuit Appeals Court nearly succeeded in taking ��one nation under God�� out of the Pledge of Allegiance. (Its decision was overturned by the Supreme Court – on a technicality.) What then of John Adams admonition: ��Our Constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other��?
And that��s just an aerial overview of a nation in spiritual free-fall.
If you approve of the above, read no further. You are hopeless, and deserve the fate which awaits you. On the other hand, if you hate what we��ve become in the past four decades, let me show you the not-so-distant past.
Let me tell you what my America was like. For those of you under 40, it may come as a revelation.
�� In my America, there was prayer in the schools, crèches in public parks at Christmas (in fact, sales people actually wished you a ��Merry Christmas,�� instead of the generic, secularized ��happy holiday��), and universal respect for individuals who were reverently referred to a ��men of the cloth.�� Hollywood celebrated faith with classics like ��The Song of Bernadette,�� ��Going My Way,�� ��The Ten Commandments�� and ��Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.��
�� Instead of half-naked, writhing celebrities and smirking savages with pistols larger than their brains, we had athletes, warriors, champions of justice and people of faith as heroes. (In terms of role models, we��ve gone from Audie Murphy to Eddie Murphy.)
�� It was universally acknowledged that sex should be reserved for marriage. Those who lived together without the benefit of a marriage license weren��t called a ��cohabitating couple.�� It was said they were ��shacking up�� or ��fornicating.�� The product of their ��illicit�� relationships weren��t ��born out-of-wedlock;�� they were bastards (a judgment on the parents, not the children).
�� Pornography was limited to the shadow world – to paperbacks and magazines surreptitiously sold under the counter, or arriving in the mail in a plain-brown wrapper. Parents could be assured that children wouldn��t encounter sex before the appropriate time. Society treated this volatile aspect of human nature cautiously and respectfully, not as a lurid national pastime that pervades every aspect of our lives. Virginity and fidelity were prized. Indiscretion, promiscuity and adultery were condemned.
�� Addiction too was limited to society��s fringes, to social outcasts. Provisions were made for the treatment – or incarceration – of the unfortunates who became slaves to narcotics. But we didn��t cater to them by facilitating their addiction, in the name of disease control or compassion.
�� Immigrants (who were here legally) were humbly grateful to reside in the greatest nation on earth. They understood that it was their responsibility to learn our language and history and identify with us – in short to Americanize. Instead of making demands, they accepted obligations.
�� In general, our society was more oriented toward responsibilities than rights. The mark of an American wasn��t a hand outstretched, palm up, but a shoulder for bearing burdens. Instead of whiny demands, we gratefully accepted duties.
�� Crime was an anomaly. In small towns, people frequently went away for the weekend without locking their doors. Except for certain disreputable sections, the streets of our cities were safe for women, even at night Girls weren��t abducted, raped and buried alive in landfills. The rights of the accused were minimal.
�� Expressions like ��no-fault divorce,�� ��casual sex,�� ��recreational drugs,�� ��undocumented workers,�� ��same-sex couples,�� ��trophy wives,�� ��gender-neutral,�� ��racial profiling,�� ��affirmative action,�� ��church-state separation,�� ��victimless crimes,�� ��sex-industry workers,�� ��symbolic speech,�� ��sexually transmitted diseases,�� ��non-judgmentalism,�� and ��revisionist history�� were blessedly unknown.
�� Homosexuality was treated as a grievous sin – or a mental disorder (depending on your perspective) – not as an innate characteristic conferring minority status. Before they became ��gay,�� homosexuals weren��t hated; they were pitied. But they weren��t allowed to turn the social order upside down to enhance their self-esteem.
�� The FBI, Boy Scouts, police, firemen, military and clergy were respected. Degenerates, parasites, misfits, mutants and whiners were not.
�� Americans knew their history, celebrated their past and revered their heroes. They weren��t consumed with guilt for the mistakes of the past. Everyone knew that slavery was a great wrong and the Indians got a raw deal. We also knew that slavery was a universal institution and we weren��t the first people to clash with an indigenous population. We understood that America��s faults were minor and – on balance – the blessings we bestowed on humanity far outweighed our mistakes.
�� We weren��t obsessed with our image abroad – whether foreigners loved us. We were willing to accept the animosity of the envious and the hatred of our enemies as part of the natural order. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we didn��t ask if we had brought this on ourselves by our ghastly treatment of a nation of ruthless warmongers. FDR didn��t proclaim that our mission was to bring democracy to the Germans and Japanese (that was a side effect). It was to kill Japanese and Germans and to keep killing them until they stopped killing Chinese and Filipinos, and Jews and Poles and went back where they belonged. The idea of Americans agonizing over whether Mein Kampf was treated disrespectfully in a POW camp for Germans is ludicrous.
�� We weren��t ��multi-cultural.�� There was one culture – Anglo-Saxon, Protestant – to which others were expected to conform. This didn��t mean that Jews, Catholics, blacks or Asians, considered themselves less American than those of Mayflower descent. But it was universally acknowledged that America was founded on the heritage of Western civilization, as amplified and transmitted by England.
My America worked. We saved civilization from repeated barbarian onslaughts. We were the arsenal of democracy – the workshop of the world. Our prosperity lifted boats across the globe. We were happy, self-confident and proud.
And look at us now. We��re like a dysfunctional family of 268 million, bordered by two oceans.
Our salvation/resurrection lies in memory.
In a novel of the end of the Roman Empire (��The Last Legion�� by Valerio Manfredi), the boy emperor Romulus Augustus and his tutor are about to escape their barbarian captors. The elderly mentor stops to take a copy of the ��Aeneid�� (Virgil��s epic poem of the founding of Rome).
����That��s useless weight,�� protested Romulus.��
����On the contrary, it is the most precious thing I have in here, my son,�� replied Ambrosinus. ��When we flee and leave everything behind us, the only resource that we can take with us is memory. The memory of our origins, of our roots, the stories of our ancestors. Only memory can allow us to be reborn. It doesn��t matter where, it doesn��t matter when. If we conserve the memory of our past greatness and the reasons we��ve lost it, we will rise again.����
No one will give us back our country. We have to take it back – with our memory, our discernment, our capacity for struggle and sacrifice and our sheer will.
These are thoughts to ponder while you��re waiting to jump out of a plane onto the battlefield of the culture war.
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 10:54 pm Post subject: |
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Wow, when did Ed Anger get so long-winded?
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The idea of Americans agonizing over whether Mein Kampf was treated disrespectfully in a POW camp for Germans is ludicrous.
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Hey, that's a great comparison!
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| The FBI, Boy Scouts, police, firemen, military and clergy were respected. |
Yeah, all the disrespect that firemen get these days is really grating, eh?
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| In general, our society was more oriented toward responsibilities than rights. |
It is sad how they don't teach about the famous "Bill Of Responsibilities" in civics class anymore.
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| Everyone knew that slavery was a great wrong and the Indians got a raw deal. We also knew that slavery was a universal institution |
I mean, didn't ALL countries get into a Civil War over slavery?
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| We weren��t obsessed with our image abroad – whether foreigners loved us. |
Probably 'cuz in those days foreigners actually DID love you.
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The product of their ��illicit�� relationships weren��t ��born out-of-wedlock;�� they were bastards (a judgment on the parents, not the children).
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A distinction that I'm sure was recognized by every orphan who ever had the word "bastard" shouted at him. |
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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 12:17 am Post subject: |
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| The idea of Americans agonizing over whether Mein Kampf was treated disrespectfully in a POW camp for Germans is ludicrous. |
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| Hey, that's a great comparison! |
Islamic militants use the Koran to justify the killing of innocents, just as the Nazis used the racist ideologies espoused in Mein Kampf to justify killing innocents. Just because a book is wrapped up in something called 'religion' doesn't make it any more worthy of respect. |
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krats1976
Joined: 14 May 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 12:44 am Post subject: |
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| bigverne wrote: |
| Islamic militants use the Koran to justify the killing of innocents, just as the Nazis used the racist ideologies espoused in Mein Kampf to justify killing innocents. Just because a book is wrapped up in something called 'religion' doesn't make it any more worthy of respect. |
And the Bible was used as an excuse for the Crusades and Inquisition. Just because a book is (mis)used to justify evil acts doesn't meant the book itself is actually evil. |
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 2:04 am Post subject: |
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The only problem with that 'ideal' version of what the US was suppose to be about is caught in a 1950s time-warp after WWII when people were seeking out a pretend 'normality'.
Anyhow.. your description of what the US is suppose to be all about sounds almost exactly identical to what South Korea is more or less like today. |
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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 2:11 am Post subject: |
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| Just because a book is (mis)used to justify evil acts doesn't meant the book itself is actually evil. |
Firstly, that's true. However, we shouldn't get into a sweat cos someone (heaven forbid) disrespected a Koran.
Secondly, the Koran can be used far more easily to justify violence than the Bible. Whereas the example of Jesus can be used to forge an argument against some of the Old Testament ferocity, the example of Muhammed amplifies the violence of the Koran. This is especially worrying, as Mohammed is held up as the ultimate role model for muslims. |
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some waygug-in
Joined: 25 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 3:42 am Post subject: |
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Hmmm.
Let's look at some things Jesus said:
http://www.carm.org/diff/Matt10_34.htm
Did Jesus come to bring peace or not?
Matthew 10:34; Luke 2:14; 22:36
and Mark 9:50; John 14:27; 16:33; Acts 10:36
No Peace
(Matthew 10:34) - "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35"For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 36and a man뭩 enemies will be the members of his household."
(Luke 12:51) - "Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division; 52for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two, and two against three..."
(Luke 22:36) - "And He said to them, "But now, let him who has a purse take it along, likewise also a bag, and let him who has no sword sell his robe and buy one."
Peace
(Mark 9:50) - "Salt is good; but if the salt becomes unsalty, with what will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."
(John 14:27) - "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.
(John 16:33) - "These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace..."
(Acts 10:36) - "The word which He sent to the sons of Israel, preaching peace through Jesus Christ (He is Lord of all)."
Context is the key to Jesus' words. In Matthew 10:34, Jesus is speaking about the divisions that will come, even among family members, over their belief or lack of belief about Him. In that respect, He has come to bring division. This context is also related in Luke 12:51.
Luke 22:36 Jesus is preparing the disciples for His departure. He is telling them that they will need to provide for themselves and even protect themselves. Up to that time, everything they had needed had been provided. But, after the crucifixion and ascension, they would again be "on their own." They would need to work, provide for their families, and, if need be, protect their own; hence, the mention of the sword. Of course, the Bible teaches that Christians are to be peaceful, loving, and forgiving. But it also teaches that we are not required to sit idly by when persecuted unrighteously.
The rest of the "peace" verses, teach just that: peace.
Jesus did not contradict Himself. When we look at His words in context, we can see what He was saying and that there is no contradiction at all.
Just like in English class, context is everything. Anyone can take something out of context and skew it to mean something different than what it originally meant.
It's been done with the Bible, Koran, and a whole host of other things too. |
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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 3:58 am Post subject: |
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Qur�an 8:12 �Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: �I am with you. Give firmness to the Believers. I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes.�
I suppose those are 'metaphorical' smites to the neck. It's all about context. And it's important to understand the context when Mohammed sanctioned the rape of captured women by his companions. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 6:56 am Post subject: |
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Hey, that's a great comparison!
Islamic militants use the Koran to justify the killing of innocents, just as the Nazis used the racist ideologies espoused in Mein Kampf to justify killing innocents. |
Well, if the Allies HAD desecrated a copy of Mein Kampf, they could at least have justified it on the grounds that the whole point of the war effort was to destroy Nazism, of which that book was the sacred text.
Are you suggesting that the whole point of the current war effort is to destroy Islam? |
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Cthulhu
Joined: 02 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:17 am Post subject: |
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Have to agree with Tiger Beer. The original editorial is nothing more than a p.o.'d conservative pining for a place that only existed in his mind.
America still reveres heroes, patriotism is as high as its ever been and anyone who things America is becoming a less Christian nation hasn't been paying attention. The best part was his laundry list of things that didn't (or hardly) exist in the past simply because there were no catchphrases for them: Sex industry workers blessedly unknown? STD's blessedly unknown? Casual sex blessedly unknown? The writer of the article is borderline retarded.
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| Instead of half-naked, writhing celebrities and smirking savages with pistols larger than their brains, we had athletes, warriors, champions of justice and people of faith as heroes. (In terms of role models, we��ve gone from Audie Murphy to Eddie Murphy.) |
I found the inference that black people are savages to be particularly indictative of his 1930's mindset.
Last edited by Cthulhu on Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:29 am; edited 1 time in total |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:24 am Post subject: |
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Here's one of my favourite articles on the subject:
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Geezer talk about Golden Ages that never were
by Robert Fulford
(The National Post, February 19, 2002)
Just about everyone believes in the idea of the Golden Age, but no one has ever announced that we are right now living through one. The air around us is filled, as always, with loving accounts of various Golden Ages, but all in the past. People used to read more, think better, live more honest lives. They spoke better, developed better political ideas and gave better parties. People were smarter before TV -- but early TV was smarter than recent TV. In the old days there were public intellectuals, brilliant thinkers who kept us alert and informed; alas, as several American commentators have lately shown, they all died out.
This is nonsense, of course, though probably harmless. It pleases those who write it or speak it and those who read and listen. It substitutes for thinking. It is geezer talk, the dreamy fantasies of the old and nearly old who want desperately to convince themselves that they once did everything better than young folks do it now.
Just the other day, Allan Fotheringham wrote about a time when women in Ottawa were exciting, as apparently they aren't at the moment. Fotheringham was in those days a couple of decades younger, a fact that only he will consider coincidental.
Spider Robinson, the science fiction writer, believes, as he wrote recently, that there was a Golden Age of science fiction when he was young. It inspired him, but now he feels betrayed because the tastes and interests of the public have changed.
Young people especially are not doing their duty, which is to replicate the reading habits of the young Spider Robinson. Unlike him, they enjoy the neo-medieval fantasies of Tolkien & Co. They don't embrace the future in space, as young people should.
"I am disturbed," Robinson wrote, "by the growing realization that today's bright teenagers -- always science fiction's bread and butter -- no longer want to know what the future is going to be like, that they are willing to imagine no more, no better, no further, than their great-grandparents did."
That's pure geezer talk. Like most such balderdash, it involves a confusion of realms, in this case conflating taste and ethics. Robinson converts differences of imaginative pleasure into differences of morality. The failure of the young to hail his kind of future makes them unworthy. He seems not to know that his own words mark him as the ultimate conservative, a man who yearns to see his youth replayed by the next generation.
The first Golden Age was so long ago that we can't begin to date it, and even the first example of geezer literature can't be precisely located in time. Sometime around 700 BC, in Greece, Hesiod wrote Works and Days. It describes the Golden Age, well before his time, when everything was perfect. It was always spring, the world was at peace, and fruit grew without anyone bothering to cultivate it.
Those details faded, but the idea of a Golden Age took root in the Western imagination. It became a way of complaining about the present.
Years ago a newspaper editor I was working for suggested I write an article on the decline of oratory. "Politicians today," he said,"don't give good speeches anymore, like they used to, 20 years ago, in the days of John Diefenbaker." My own view was that Diefenbaker's speeches consisted of daydreams (he called them a "vision") combined with bile. He could actually tell a joke, but always killed it with a smirk. Still, I promised the editor to think about it.
It happened that the next day, in pursuit of self-improvement, I was turning the pages of a work by Seneca, who lived some eight centuries after Hesiod and showed his influence. My eye fell on a passage in which Seneca (roughly 1,900 years ago) mourned the sharp decline in the quality of oratory. It had flourished in his youth, he claimed, but was now a dead art. I decided that maybe this wasn't the freshest story of the year, and ducked the assignment.
Giorgio Armani has lately revealed himself as an oddity, a geezer who operates in the world of fashion. After a lifetime of making expensive clothes for rich people, he recently issued a humourless attack on, of all things, consumerism. By some bizarre twist of the mind he has decided that young people cause moral failure in his business. Consumerism dominates their lives, as it presumably did not dominate his. "Today's youth, which has suffered neither deprivation nor war, does not value sacrifice. Today, having the newest watch is what people care about." It is typical of the geezer that he does not notice when he turns into a clown.
Last month, reading an obituary of Frank Shuster, I was struck by words attributed to Harry Rasky, the documentary director. Rasky, who is 73, said the comedy team of Wayne and Shuster came from an older tradition. "It was a different time," Rasky said, "when we all aspired to be something greater than ourselves." What does that imply about their successors? I've not heard people expressing a desire to be less than they are. But it is a rule of journalism that no geezer is required to explain or think through what he says.
Jacques Barzun's enjoyable and successful book of cultural history, From Dawn to Decadence, can be seen as top-of-the-line geezerism. He believes civilization has been decaying since the Renaissance. If he meant only painting, one could sympathize. But he means everything: philosophy, literature, music, political ideas, etc.
It occurred to me as I read Barzun that he runs the common risk of misjudging his own time just because it is his own time. It's dangerous to assess a period while living it, and perhaps particularly dangerous for those of a certain age (Barzun is in his nineties). His affection for the past can easily screen out the reality of the present.
We forget that all we have of the past is the good stuff; our ancestors threw away the rest. In the present, as always, bad art and bad ideas inevitably outnumber the good. It was ever thus. Only a confirmed geezer fails to grasp that crucial point. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:41 am Post subject: |
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Instead of half-naked, writhing celebrities and smirking savages with pistols larger than their brains, we had athletes, warriors, champions of justice and people of faith as heroes. (In terms of role models, we��ve gone from Audie Murphy to Eddie Murphy.)
I found the inference that black people are savages to be particularly indictative of his 1930's mindset.
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The funny thing is, if you look at Eddie Murphy's work as of late, he tends to appear in all the most wholesome, Disneyesque stuff being made. Dr. Doolittle, The Nutty Professor, Haunted Mansion, etc. Not exactly the most subversive fare out there. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:47 am Post subject: |
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| Years ago a newspaper editor I was working for suggested I write an article on the decline of oratory. "Politicians today," he said,"don't give good speeches anymore, like they used to, 20 years ago, in the days of John Diefenbaker." My own view was that Diefenbaker's speeches consisted of daydreams (he called them a "vision") combined with bile. He could actually tell a joke, but always killed it with a smirk. |
Yeah, talk about the Golden Age of Political Oratory. Diefenbaker is famous for having gone around telling people that it was HIS speech at the UN which inspired Khruschev to bang his shoe, when in fact it was Harold MacMillan's. |
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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:53 am Post subject: |
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I only read about half of the OP, though I did go a little further than the part where he said "If you approve of the above, read no further."
Most of all, it looks like an argument for the idea of progress, that things are better today than they were in the past ... wierdly, I think that was the opposite of what he wanted to convey. |
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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:56 am Post subject: |
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| Are you suggesting that the whole point of the current war effort is to destroy Islam? |
I have no idea what the current 'War on Terror' is about. Of course, if they were being honest, they would call it a 'War on Islamic Terror', but they can't, even though that's obviously what it is. |
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