Or at least, a view of Waikiki Beach from the top of Diamond Head…
…the peak of which is accessed through a World War I-era pillbox, so it’s just lucky for us that the Jews didn’t start any wars while we were on vacation.
Back now, and while catching up on the blogofascosphere, I noticed that Kathryn (Windsock) Lopez saw Oliver Stone’s 9/11 film, and said, “It’s about why we fight.” To which an emailer responded, “I think it fair to state that you do not fight — you never have and, hopefully, never will have to. You are not a member of any of the branches of the armed forces, nor a reservist. You are not, and I am fairly sure, have never been engaged in a combat situation…It does a tremendous disservice to your readers and is extraordinarily disrespectful to the millions of men and women around the world who are in uniform and fighting and dying for their countries.”
Amazingly, Miss Windsock shifted and confessed that no, she wasn’t humping a pack through triple digit heat in downtown Baghdad. But both Cliff May (“There is a war of arms. And there is a war of ideas.”) and Mark Steyn immediately bitchslapped K-Lo and pointed out that “the notion that ‘fighting’ a war is the monopoly of those ‘in uniform’” is crazy talk! Windsock immediately shifted again, and declared,
Mark Steyn []
is exactly the guy you want on your side in a street fight.
So now she’s not only Rambo, she’s Sonny Chiba.
While in Hawaii I visited the U.S.S. Arizona memorial, where 1177 of the 2390 people who died on December 7, 1941 lay entombed. It’s a sobering monument; oil still seeps from the wrecked vessel, leaving small rainbow slicks on the surface of Pearl Harbor. The names of the dead are incised in a marble wall in the chapel, and to the side, a smaller wall contains the names of “U.S.S. Arizona survivors who have chosen to be interred with their shipmates.” The morning we were there, two anchor-shaped wreaths stood in the chapel, an offering from the Chilean navy.
Flag Flying Above U.S.S. Arizona Memorial
In the museum we found a postcard that reproduced a First World War recruiting poster by James Montgomery Flagg, creator of the iconic “Uncle Sam Wants You” poster:
Back then, of course, our forebearers were so primitive they believed that war was something fought largely by soldiers, sailors, and marines, on the blood-soaked fields of Flanders or in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. They didn’t realize that one day the Information Superhighway would make combat a truly global phenomenon, so I wondered what kind of poster campaign Flagg would design for a world war in which the battlefield extended from the bomb-torn streets of Fallujah to the crumb-strewn carpet of Jonah Goldberg’s cubicle at the National Review Online. I think it would go a little something like this:
Followed by a defiant: Tell It To the Bloggers!
England America expects every man to do his duty. At least until Battlestar Galactica comes on.
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