On Iraq

Peon did not support the war in Iraq.  She was clear on that.  She attended demonstrations against it.  She had read books on Iraq during the First Iraq War and knew that Iraq was very complicated.  She did not like Saddam, who delighted in knocking off members of the Iraqi Communist Party and other leftists, as well as, so far as she could see, anyone else he didn't like.  In the run-up to the Second Iraq War, she also read up and found that it was unlikely that the Iraqis had any weapons of mass destruction.  In particular, the nuclear weapons program was dead. Why?  Because nuclear weapons require a lot of money and the Iraqis didn't have any money.  See, so easy.  Doesn't require any "inside" information--just a little bit of thinking.

And Peon was more than a little irritated when, after killing lots of people and spending lots of money, VSPs decided that the war had been A Bad Idea.  How about illegal?  How about immoral?

But now that the government we left in Iraq appears to be collapsing, the VSPs want to drop some more bombs.  More shock and awe?  More precision-guided weaponry?  They've got to be kidding.  C'mon guys (and they are almost all guys), you screwed up. You made a hash of it.  You made Saddam look good, and that took some doing.  No amount of bombing is going to fix this mess.  Instead go off to one of those fancy resorts and do a goodly amount of soul-searching.  Think about the mess you made and resolve, over lobster and fois gras, not to do it again.

Summer Reading

This year I'll be participating in the local library's summer reading program.  Once upon a time this was a program to keep kids reading over the school break, but adults expressed interest and so it came to be that adults were allowed to participate.  There are prizes, but I'm really more interested in tracking my reading and forcing myself to read some serious books.  It's okay to have a lot of trashy mysteries on the list, but I should read some books that require more attention than watching TV.  I'm not counting garden books, as those are mostly pictures and it's okay to do picture books if you're five, but not if your less than a year from sixty.

In figuring out what to read, I'm going to look at some classics that I've somehow never gotten round to reading.  First up will be Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which I should have read as a young person, but never did.