On to Damascus

Apologies for the lack of posting of late. I'm going out of town for a few days and I had a project that HAD to be done or my vacation would have been cancelled. Fortunately, that didn't happen. So, I'll be back on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy this wonderfully sarcastic "pro-war" letter from the Juneau Empire.

On to Damascus To all those whiners and complainers who've been wringing their hands about the destruction over the weekend of the National Museum and National Library of Iraq - hey, there's a war on, and bad stuff happens during a war. Sure, it was a war that didn't have to happen, but we won, so quit bellyaching. Yeah, you'd think that the most powerful military machine in the history of the world could have spared a couple of platoons of Marines to keep the local criminal element from burning and pillaging the irreplaceable heritage of Mesopotamian and Iraqi antiquity and you'd think that an administration that can manage to round up more than enough federal employees to search every last airline passenger in every airport across the country, right down to their skivvies, could manage a little bit of security, even for a bunch of broken statues and crumbly old cuneiform tablets, but that's the "old American" way of thinking. Sure, the French and their sympathizers will denounce the destruction of this museum as an act of cultural, artistic and even spiritual vandalism, but what do you expect from a nation that spends more on the arts than on smart bombs? Anyway, they're practically socialists, which is pretty close to communist, and communists are against private property, and museums and libraries are public property, which means they must be a waste of taxpayer money, if not downright subversive! The common good is so "old Europe." What everyone has to realize is the museum wasn't looted, it was privatized. Priceless Iraqi antiquities, which until now were merely safeguarded for future generations of Iraqis, are now free to be purchased by the entrepreneurs and job creators who have the cash and the acquisitiveness to truly appreciate them where they belong, in the good old US of A. Its too bad about that library in Baghdad, but it's probably on line somewhere and history is irrelevant anyway, 'cause let's face it, you're either with us or against us, and if you're against us, that makes you an evildoer. Besides, print is "old Europe" too. Art historians, museum curators, and other shameless apologists for international terrorism are starting to compare last weekend's cultural catastrophe with the burning of the library at Alexandria. No way! That is just so not true! When the library at Alexandria got torched, only about 1,000 years of history and literature went up in smoke - at the Iraqi National Museum, 10,000 years worth of artifacts and art were smashed or stolen. Welcome to the New America! And on to Damascus! Charles Rohrbacher Douglas