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have no opinion on the content of the piece or on Sumcad—who in addition to being an author who "has written published, unpublished academic papers; has long years of newspaper experience, writing daily and magazine editorials, essays, feature articles, columns, novelettes, short stories"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?)