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Above, an image by Alex Wilson, from a page presenting his last 24 years of Christmas Cards. Moving from pagan to secular idolatry, Alex also found this photo of the Joe Louis Memorial in Detroit, which I would characterize as "Giacometti meets Diego Rivera meets Sun Ra":
Plus maybe Dawn of the Dead. I mean, that's a severed arm, right? This is where a little Modernism gets us in trouble.
UPDATE: D'oh, just realized this was by Robert Graham, a sort of classicist-minimalist (or minimalist-classicist) dude who specializes in detached, fetishized bodies and body parts--often of toned young females.
Justin Raimondo tries to make sense of the latest poll results on Bush's Folly:
"For the first time," a Washington Post-ABC News poll shows, "most say the Iraq war was a mistake." Not to worry, however, because "a strong majority of Americans, 58 percent, support keeping military forces in Iraq until 'civil order is restored,' even in the face of continued U.S. casualties. By a slight margin, 48 percent to 44 percent, more voters agreed with Bush's position that the United States is making 'significant progress' toward its goal of establishing democracy in Iraq." But, oh wait: "Yet, by a similar margin, the public believes the United States is not making significant progress toward restoring civil order." To top it all off, 70 percent say the present casualty rate is "unacceptable."So in the face of all this contradictory data, the New York Times sends a reporter out to "talk to America" and sums up the findings in this (online) headline today:
Fighting On Is the Only Option, Americans Say"Fighting on"--what a crock. It's Vietnam all over again. Growing up, I remember well the mantra "We can't pull out of South Vietnam, there will be a bloodbath." Meaning civil war and reprisals, but as it turned out the bloodbath in Vietnam was the one we caused by staying and bombing and defoliating year after year. Iraq is even worse, though, because we out-and-out invaded it. As Raimondo reminds us:
Having bombed the nation's physical and social infrastructure into piles of blood-stained rubble, disbanded the Iraqi military, marginalized the highly educated and secularized Sunni elite and driven them into a destructive and increasingly successful insurgency – we can't leave until we establish the "civil order" destroyed by ourselves to begin with.The "only option" is to pull out our troops and offer financial reparations (and help to refugees) for the havoc we caused. Then impeach Bush for ginning up the phony WMD threat. We're the 800 pound gorilla, we can do whatever we want. Last I heard there was no other global superpower around to "interpret this as a sign of weakness." Terrorism is the price we pay for maintaining 700 military bases around the world after the cold war ended.