Comments on: Donald Rumsfeld (and Mail.app) in the Dock

By: Tim Gaden

Tim Gaden — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 01:03:15 +0000

@Nick, thanks for your comments.

I think it is a mistake to confuse humour, especially satire, with “not taking things seriously”.

I hardly need mention that satire is a genre with a strong sense of moral outrage and a desire for reform. This is true all the way for Ovid, Martial (and that crowd) through to great eighteenth-century English satirists like Jonathan Swift. His “Modest Proposal” on how the Irish should just eat their children if they don’t have enough food, is a tour de force of engaged reformism that takes things very seriously indeed.

I’m not suggesting that this screenshot is in the same class as Swift, but at the very least it undercuts the rhetoric of “resignation” that has surrounded White House spin on the development.

By: George

George — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 18:10:41 +0000

lol at Nick’s comments.

I can picture the same thing with Tony Blair.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 17:49:00 +0000

Force Quit? Maybe. Maybe he’s simply had enough. The shallow and self-satisfied (which is a good description of Boing-Boing and not so far off for Daring Fireball for the matter of that either) may mock. But the point is that very few people have understood the seriousness of the particular global issue that is likely to be the problem here – and that certainly goes for the people who’d like, for their own trivial reasons, to score off Rumsfeld as much as for Rumsfeld himself. Rumsfeld was following the President’s lead, and the president is naive enough to believe that everyone everywhere is much the same and everyone wants freedom – and, moreover, that the political settlement we enjoy in the West is a matter of systems or arrangements (whereas it is actually a matter of culture and a growth of centuries) so that it can be easily “transplanted” anywhere. Quite simply, that’s not true. And the fate of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe should have taught people that: one man; one vote; one time …

Removing Saddam may have been necessary; trying to reconstruct that society was a generous act – though don’t expect the likes of Boing-Boing to recognize that – but a ridiculous pipedream, because that whole culture is more deeply screwed-up than people living in happier places can possibly imagine. Iraq is a nation; it’s a three-cornered fight.

But let’s not worry about serious issues like that. The self-satisfied cretins at Boing-Boing are feeling happy with themselves even if the international scene, which such people have no chance of understanding and little genuine interest in either, looks pretty bleak for the future. Boing-Boing (moronic name in itself) is pleased with itself, so all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.