When I was in high school I wrote for
L.A. Youth, a newspaper written by teens and for teens. It was amazing--issues covered a wide range of topics from the typical teenage stresses of the SATs and college apps to the wonders of live rock music, horrors of being locked up in county jail, and randomness of visiting a nudist residence. L.A. Youth covered everything, and writing for the newspaper served as a stepping stone into my years of adolescence.
As a fourteen year-old I was timid and shy (believe it or not, I think I still am), and when something so grand or furious came to my mind, I was too afriad to open my mouth and share it. Instead, I took to pen and paper. That sort of writing allowed me to collect my thoughts and organize them in a way that I found to be just as effective as oral communication. It gave me the support to use writing as an outlet for social activism and the confidence to publicly express my emotions even in the toughest situations dealing with personal matters. There was nothing more empowering than receiving letters from peers who were so motivated by my articles to write back. In the bigger picture, writing for L.A. Youth stressed the importance of communication, whether oral or written, to reach people and converse. Might I also note that my writing escapes led me to find the most amazing cookie recipe and produce this short commentary--
link here.
I thought of all of this after my former editor, Mike Fricano (awesome awesome man and friend--who, to this day, still edits my work!) sent me this NY Op-ed column by Maureen Dowd, a columnist I love for her worldly knowledge and razor-sharp wit. I thought I'd share the article here because otherwise you'd have to have pay the Times. Please read with me in laughter and awe.
Daffy Does Doom
WASHINGTON
Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as "delusional."
It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.
Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn't begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.
Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he's right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying America's reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S. military, failing to catch Osama, enhancing Iran's power in the Middle East and sending American kids to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can work against American interests.
Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.
You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq's civil war, to have a total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.
In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by attacking gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book about politics and decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot tell Wolf Blitzer he's "out of line" when he gingerly raises the hypocrisy of your position.
Mr. Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson gang. Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution critical of The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, "It won't stop us."
Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be "detrimental from the standpoint of the troops."
Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the troops even when they did not support the war. From media organizations to Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our troops.
It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.
"Bottom line," Vice told Wolf, "is that we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes." The biggest threat, he said, is that Americans may not "have the stomach for the fight."
He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We've had the stomach for more than 3,000 American deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk.
If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Mr. Cheney could not influence him with such tripe.
They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are consumed by the fear of looking as if they don't have guts, when they should be compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains.
After offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the president resumed mindless swaggering. Asked yesterday why he was ratcheting up despite the resolutions, W. replied, "In that I'm the decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster." (Or preordained it.)
The reality of Iraq, as The Times's brilliant John Burns described it to Charlie Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be far worse than Vietnam, leading to "a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we're seeing now," and a "wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the world's flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King Abdullah in Jordan if there's complete chaos in the region?"
Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.
He assumes that the more people think he's crazy, the saner he must be. In Dr. No's nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The proof that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn't.
He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the wilderness must be a prophet.
To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it's hogwash.
