I’m sorry I haven’t been able to post any additional comments today. There’s a lot more I wanted to say about Iraq-like where I’m at now, not three years ago. And there’s so much else going on that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write up Iran and the whole “hanging homos” thing. I’m curious to know if anyone is going to ask Bush-or Dobson or Falwell or Roberts or Santorum-what they think about Iran executing gay men. I wanted to write about childhood obesity, and share my observations about the CRAP 99% of parents seem content to feed their kids.
But I’ve been swamped at work today.
I’m almost reluctant to mention what I spent the afternoon doing, but full disclosure: The Stranger is having an amateur porn contest and I’ve been sitting in a conference room watching the submissions. Sound like fun? It’s not. I’m not a big fan of professional porn, much less amateur porn. There are places where the sun isn’t meant to shine. Here’s an interesting tidbit… we got 43 submissions, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s our first year. (We modeled our event on an amateur porn contest held every year in Boston, and they’ve been at it for six years and get roughly 25 submissions per year. So we’re feeling pretty good about the number of tapes we got it.) Of those, about 35 are from straight couples (and triples and quads). The rest? From lesbians.
Hm.
None-not one-from gay men. Does that strike anyone else as… odd? Aren’t gay men supposed to be the shameless sexual adventurers? Not gay men in Seattle, it would appear.
-posted by Dan.
ALL APOLOGIES: But it’s six here, and I’ve got to get home and have dinner with my boyfriend and kid. We like to eat as a family, you see. I’m flying to Chicago later tonight-on a midfuckingnight redeye-but if I can slip away after dinner and get to a cafe with WiFi before I have to head to the airport I’ll blast out a few last posts. In the meantime, here’s one last letter from a reader…
-posted by Dan.
JUST ONE MORE LETTER:
Dan: As a fellow pinko-commie-liberal (though you still have me beat on the Jerry-Fallwell-hate-o-meter since I’m not a homo-pinko-commie-liberal), I am thrilled to see that at least one of my fellow travelers understands the history of the Middle East and the West’s duties therein.- And I am pleased to agree with you that war is sometimes the answer- you do have to break a few eggs to make an omlette.- Sometimes terrorism can even be the answer- it certainly brought an end to a millennium of injustice and genocide for the Irish.- And the line you cited from Bob Kerrey (how did we end up with John Kerry again?) is pure gold.- However, I-feel a bit let down that you missed several key points that forced me to oppose the war.
1) Bush is an idiot and some problems are like your plumbing.- It’s better to let them stay broken until you find a skilled plumber, than to try to fix it yourself and make it even more broken.- You can’t trust this man to correctly make soup from a can, much less fix the most broken region on the planet.
2) You said it yourself: Iraq is one of “these pseudo-states could only be ruled by brute force.”- If a 3-way partition was the plan, I would have probably supported the war.- But as early as October 2002 both Bush and Blair soundly rejected any partition and promised a democratic Iraq within its present, wholly fictitious borders.- As I told anyone who would listen at the time, that was the moment, 6 months before the first shot was fired, when we lost the war.- Iraq, much like Yugoslavia, is a figment of Winston Churchill’s imagination (he was the point man in drawing the borders of both nations), and both could only be ruled by a strongman with an Iron Fist.
3) Why Iraq?- There are lots of countries in the region (Iran and Saudi Arabia come to mind) that are much more important, more homogenous, more dangerous, and which would create far fewer problems regionally.- Specifically here I am referring to the enormous windfall increase in power and prestige both internally and regionally that the hard-line clerics in Iran have reaped through this invasion and overthrow of their neighbor and greatest rival.- Oh, and by the time the US Military has extricated itself from Iraq and regrouped enough to do this sort of thing again, Iran will be nuclear (or, as the Boob-In-Chief would say, nucular).- Thus, our mutually-agreed upon plan for an Extreme Makeover- Mid-Eastern Edition will be dead In-Utero.
4) Finally, there is a strategy for Western occupation of the Muslim world that would have been far less bloody- instead of turning Iraq into a third-world, crap-hole, anarchic, nominal Democracy, why not look to the Muslim world’s large, flourishing Democracies to be our forward guard in this war?- Particularly, let’s look at Turkey- how can we tell the people of the Middle East to go Western when the already-Western Turkey can’t get into the EU,-is languishing in economic turmoil, and there seems to be no help in sight from the West?- How about we give them some incentive to change here!-Greg M., Dallas, Texas
-posted by Dan.
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The Dish 