Too Easy

Gosh. I have missed the Beslan catastrophe, for which I had thought of something breathtakingly inflammatory to say. I have missed the anniversary of Paul Hill's execution, on September 3rd, for which I had something planned. And I have missed the anniversary of September 11th, which I think was about a week later. Oh well. Not topical enough.

One thing I will say, briefly, that I thought of this morning, for the benefit of those inclined to see meteorological portents, is that the dates of the Florida hurricanes neatly bracket said anniversary of Paul Hill's judicial murder. And that the whole point of the 2000 election fiasco was that Florida did vote Democrat. It is just too easy to make up stuff like that.

Another thing it is easy to make up are comparisons along the lines of 'If America was Iraq, what would it be like?. If America had been like Iraq, what would it have been like?

Well, Jimmy Carter would have been president for almost thirty years, and only Democratic party members could get decent jobs. 95% of this governing class would be white southerners. They could just take cars, houses, and women that took their fancy. There would have been a systematic effort to settle decent white southerners in districts that had too many black people. These inconvenient black people would have been brutalised in ethnic cleansing campaigns using poison gas, with more than a million killed during Jimmy's reign. Four million Americans would have died in a futile war with Mexico that also killed three million Mexicans and flattened every city within 100 km of the border. America would have invaded British Columbia for no reason and looted everything that was not nailed down, killing hundreds of thousands in a mindless orgy of rape and torture. America would have lobbed missiles at Afghanistan and Sudan. Oops, they did that in real life. Let's say America would have lobbed missiles at Venezuela and France. America would have paid billions of dollars to English extremist groups for killing thousands of French civlians. The Everglades would have been drained. Yellowstone and Yosemite would have been clear-felled. Every catholic family would have at least one member who had been killed in the big uprising of '91. The catholic bishops would be dead or in exile. After the liberation of British Columbia- in which let's say another million and a half Americans were killed- crippling economic sanctions would have been imposed on America by the rest of the world, driving a hundred million people into conditions of chronic malnutrition and resulting in the needless deaths of 15 million american children. That's 9/11 every day for the full thirteen years.

Like I said, too easy. I don't think the situation in Iraq at the moment is good. I don't think the situation anywhere is good. Everything anywhere is only ever relatively good or bad, in comparison to how things could be. I think, unreservedly, that the situation in Iraq now is better than the situation in Iraq then.