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Protesters drive former deputy permanent UN representative to madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging self through negro streets at dawn looking for angry fix
I always thought Don McLean was the master of the torturously mixed metaphor. I mean, who else could in the space of one sestet have birds fly off to a fallout shelter that's eight miles high, and also have something land foul on the grass (which sounds like baseball to me) while the players are trying for a forward pass (which sure sounds like football)? But even solemn Don's met his match with Edwin A. Sumcad's essay "Let's Not Make Iraq a Foolish Repeat of Vietnam Where Beatniks Won the War for the Enemy." A characteristic sample:
The tipping point as to why we can lose the war in another way, is self-explanatory, to wit -- when we let a bunch of marijuana-smelling, Beetle hair-styled, dirty-faced wild guitar-playing zombies, capsule-upper-downer-dependent brush artists from the dark side of art for art's sake, heroin-sniffing metallic rockers and their Woodstock, cheering drug-addict teenage fans and followers, politically drunk Hollywood activists, school drop-outs, alcohol-soaked bike-riding beatniks, moonstruck religious freaks, urban drifters and their kind, lord our streets and win the war for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army.
It goes on like that. I have no opinion on the content of the piece or on Sumcad—who in addition to being an author who "has written published, unpublished academic papers; has long years of newspaper experience, writing daily and magazine editorials, essays, feature articles, columns, novelettes, short stories" and boasts "degrees in literature and jornalism, masters in development economics, and in civil law," is also a "journalist, practicing lawyer, Finance Attache, ASEAN specialist, retired diplomat, and former deputy permanent representative to the United Nations." But the writing style sure caught my eye, though I was looking for something entirely different on Google News. While you're figuring out what search term I was looking up, I'll be trying to draw a mental picture of the tree in Joyce Kilmer's "Trees." (I mean, it's got robins in its hair, but its leafy arms are lifted to pray while it's looking at God all day, but then its mouth is down at the earth's sweet-flowing breast, and it's also got snow laying on its bosom? What kind of mutant tree is this?)
|10.3.05 @ 7:05PM|#
[Chandler] That was the worst thing ever. And I don't just mean in political essays. [/Chandler]
|10.3.05 @ 7:08PM|#
This theme has been beat to death. The failures of this war,
like every government program, will be blamed on the people who did
not support it. If only we had been better cheerleaders, it all
would have come off perfectly.
And what's with "beatnik" being used over and over? There are no
beatniks; and if there were, they would be too busy with dilaudid
and teenage Mexican prostitutes to care.
|10.3.05 @ 7:18PM|#
So if it was beatniks who lost the Vietnam War, wouldn't the
equivalent for the Iraq War be the grunge rockers?
Damn flannel-wearing Nirvana fans are spoiling it for everyone in
the Middle East.
|10.3.05 @ 7:28PM|#
I think the seed of a potentially apt metaphor fell upon the all-too-fertile droppings of rancor, and sprouted into a clarity-smothering kudzu vine of unrestrained berserkery.
|10.3.05 @ 7:38PM|#
Wow. Real life outdoes The Onion once again. Hey Edwin: 1971 called. They want their lingo back. I wonder if the Viet Cong ever properly thanked the Freak Brothers back in the States for the fall of Saigon.
|10.3.05 @ 8:26PM|#
Joe:
Of course "bike riding" is an insult. The jobless long hairs don't
have jobs, therefore no cars.
|10.3.05 @ 8:28PM|#
Uh, that should have been "shiftless longhairs have no jobs". I'll now accept my diploma from the School of Redundancy School.
Jeff P.|10.3.05 @ 8:32PM|#
Sorry, but that essay contains no less substantive political
content than anything I've read from the "pundits" from either
side. It's simply a distilled version of the vapid saber-rattling
and specious reasoning that gets printed every day.
Wake me when actual philosophy reappears in political debate.
And the war will be lost by death metal fans, shoegazers, and
trip-hop ambient club kids. Although I think the insurgents would
shit thier panst if they suddenly saw Gwar coming across the desert
at them.
|10.3.05 @ 9:06PM|#
I don't believe in self-policing over the long term or the
short, but this crap was not lifted from Juston Raimondo's
AntiWar.com.
Okay, now we can continue to discuss mixed metaphors, or we can ask
why DemocRATS continue to pooh-pooh, chill and uranize upon their
leader, Howard Dean.
Does anyone know the whereabouts of Jane Fonda's fart-powered bus?
This old jarhead wants a rendezvous to thank her for Barbarella
which I enjoyed immensely while in VN.
|10.3.05 @ 9:24PM|#
Jennifer-Bad news: there are no grunge rockers any more. I'm hip enough to know that. I am not, however, hip enough to know who or what has replaced them. Something involving hip-hop or pseudo-punk pop rock, is my guess.
|10.3.05 @ 9:45PM|#
I'm really hoping that this is revealed to be a hoax like Sokal's essay in "Social Text"....
|10.3.05 @ 9:49PM|#
Bad news: there are no grunge rockers any more. I'm hip
enough to know that.
That was supposed to be the point--there aren't any grunge rockers
now, anymore than there were beatniks when the Vietnam War
ended.
Sigh. Never mind. I'm having an off night, anyway.
t. rev|10.3.05 @ 10:35PM|#
There's something very odd about this Edwin A. Sumcad
fellow.
Plug
Edwin A. Sumcad into Google and the hits are from the
suspiciously similar www.illinoischronicle.com,
www.americanchronicle.com, www.longbeachchronicle.com,
www.santamonicachronicle.com, www.marylandchronicle.com,
www.palmspringschronicle.com...
Who is this guy, and why is he featured on a dozen dummy
front sites?
The Anti-Puritan (channeling J|10.3.05 @ 11:14PM|#
I think that we have never had
A pundit silly as Sumcad,
Whose whines and moans and groans and gripes
Are convoluted stereotypes;
Whose literary serpent's bite
Makes Ann Coulter look polite;
Whom no comedian on earth
Could match for accidental mirth.
Through this bozo's fumbling pen,
Archie Bunker lives again.
I think that we have God to thank.
No mortal could have pulled this prank.
|10.4.05 @ 7:45AM|#
This has to be bogus. No way is this guy or this essay legit. "walk any tightrope of peril"? Please. Tack on the Kim Jong Il type resume, and you have one very clear cut case of B.S.
|10.4.05 @ 8:03AM|#
I haven's seen such cluelessness about the Boomer generation since the salad days of Max Rafferty...
|10.4.05 @ 9:29AM|#
Joyce Kilmer was always exhorting his kids: "Keep your nose to
the grindstone; your shoulder to the wheel; your ear to the
ground."
When they grew up, they looked like pretzels.
|10.4.05 @ 9:36AM|#
Of course "bike riding" is an insult. The jobless long hairs
don't have jobs, therefore no cars.
Out here where it's semi-rural, it has another distinct
connotation: multiple DUI convictions.
fyodor|10.4.05 @ 11:20AM|#
I'm all for mixing metaphors myself. Makes them a lot more fun
and interesting. If consistency ever IS the hobgoblin of little
minds, it's when it's demanded of metaphors.
But Sumcad's problems seem to have little or nothing to do with
that anyway. Allow me to be the gratuitous first to point out that
he doesn't even know how to spell Beatles.
Edwin A. Sumcad|10.4.05 @ 12:13PM|#
I'm all for mixing metaphors myself. Makes them a lot more
fun and interesting. If consistency ever IS the hobgoblin of little
minds, it's when it's demanded of metaphors.
But Sumcad's problems seem to have little or nothing to do with
that anyway.
No it has to do with the street parliamentarians who are lying spin
doctors of documentary proof, using our greatest weapon of
democracy as our Achilles heel, all the while flashing their
two-fingered sign like a badge as a dirty finger pointed
at President Bush, even though the box of worms is opened by the
eagle eye and revealed to be full of skeletons in the closet--thus
surprising the people wielding an axe on the neck and forcing me,
with deep reckoning, to walk the tightrope of peril.
The Anti-Puritan|10.4.05 @ 12:19PM|#
joe,
LOL.
Sumcad,
Who let you in here? Your mixed metaphors are a pain in the neck
that should be thrown out the window.
The Anti-Puritan|10.4.05 @ 12:42PM|#
fyodor:
I'm all for mixing metaphors myself. Makes them a lot more fun
and interesting. If consistency ever IS the hobgoblin of little
minds, it's when it's demanded of metaphors.
In the summer of 2004, I went to a learning center to help with my
"concept
imagery" problem: that is, I have some difficulty turning words
into pictures in my head and vice versa. Since my condition has
improved somewhat, I've come to understand why mixed metaphors are
a stylistic vice: They distract the reader by putting laughably
bizarre pictures in his head.
|10.4.05 @ 1:36PM|#
Sounds like something Hunter S. Thompson would have written if he had been a Buchananite.
|10.4.05 @ 2:39PM|#
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds.
Mr. Whitman understood what I meant.
That bitch Rand misquoted me.
fyodor|10.4.05 @ 3:35PM|#
Anti-Puritan,
Hmmph. Well, SOME of us just dig the "laughably bizarre" then!! And
if it's meant to be ahtsy, such as in verse or song, then the
movement and color provided by the mixing may be the point, not a
distraction. For rational and serious discourse, objecting to mixed
metaphors would have greater weight. But such discourse was hardly
the point of "American Pie"!
Nice rhymes yourself there, though!
Don McLean|10.4.05 @ 3:48PM|#
I may be twice removed from Oscar Wilde, but I still suck, and that ain't no metaphor.
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