I just finished reading Keith Platfoot’s letter, the one where he seems to connect anti-war sentiment with emasculation while simultaneously accusing the media of being involved in a vast conspiracy to hold the President accountable for his words and actions.
I thought about a variety of rebuttals. “Nobility” seems to be a concept of great weight with Mr. Platfoot. I would like to think that there is a certain “nobility” implicit in the concept of standing against the grotesque butchering of other humans, be the American or Iraqi.
Mr. Platfoot somehow insisted that Sept. 11 drove America into “fearful isolationism.” Jesus H. Christ. We’re practically a globe-trotting military junta. We’ve always been interventionist in matters military and economic, and we always will be.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Sept. 11 was a tragedy and all that, but I figure that we’ve probably about cashed in all of our sympathy chips. Sept. 11 emphatically does not give us carte blanche to run around in the rest of the world doing as we please.
I also thought about countering the Roosevelt clause about “dying nobly” with a little Salinger. Namely, “it is better to live humbly for a cause than to die nobly.” Please, spare me from your sophmoric rants about dying under a fussilade of bullets and how cool and “noble” that would be.
I bet you get all excited when you think of all of the girls who never even gave you the time of day were there at your military funeral bawling their eyes out, regretting that they never got to know you better. Sentimentality like that is the kind of tripe that has turned us into a nation of warmongers.
But upon reflecting a bit, I decided to not say any of this. Rather, I would like to remind Mr. Platfoot and all of the other macho conservative tough guys out there that anti-war seniment does not necessarily make a man a eunuch.
Leo Festag2002 Graduate
