Velociworld

WHERE I LOST LILEKS

Lileks's column of 11/21 was a piece of work. He started out right, taking Salam Pax to task for his whiny "Hep Me's":

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Let me explain this in simple terms, habibi. You would have spent the rest of your life under Ba’athist rule. You might have gotten some nice architectural commissions to do a house for someone whose aroma was temporarily acceptable to the Tikriti mob. You might have worked your international connections, made it back to Vienna, lived a comfy exile’s life. What’s certain is that none of your pals would ever have gotten rid of that “scary guy without the hideous moustache” (as if his greatest sin was somehow a fashion faux pas) and the Saddam regime would have prospered into the next generation precisely because of people like you. People who would rather have lived their life in low-level fear than change your situation.

So far, so good. Here's where I lose "Jimmy":

I understand; I would have done the same. I’m not brave enough to start a revolution. I wouldn’t have grabbed a gun and charged a palace. I would lived like you. Head down, eyes wary. When the man’s too strong, the man’s too strong.

THAT is the defining moment. The moment that says "I will cheer on the righteous freedom fighter, but don't touch me in my comfy Minnesota den, with my Macs and my Giant Swede and my Gnat. For I know already unless the odds are at least 50-50 my ass is sitting this one out, cowered down like a pussy."

Fuck a duck. Here's what makes the thing worse: Lileks apologizes in his Bleat of the 24th, but only because he used the little "effie" word:

Okay. The Pax Apology.

I’m sorry I swore. And by “swear” I mean the king-hell effenheimer, which I use maybe once a year on this site. That just shows the power of swearing when you’re not known for swearing – drop the word all the effin’ time and no one fargin’ blinks an eye when you say it for the fiftieth fricken’ time. But it was the only word that really fit what I felt. And I didn’t use it rashly; I’d written that little passage about Mr. Pax the day before, then let it sit to see if that’s how I felt 24 hours later. It was. Les mots juste. What did it get me? Linkage galore, delinkage galore, and even my own Fark thread. (Rule of thumb: if someone give you the HERO tag, it’s only a matter of time before someone insists you get the DUMBASS. Or vice versa.) Nice mail; horrid mail. You’d think I spent every day complaining about commie homersegjuls, Hillary Clinton, and them ragheads over there what needs a gud nukin’. All in all, the sort of thing that just makes me want to shut up and write about Bounty towels. Who needs it?

You're right, James. It's apparently all about the nasty e-mail and the de-linkage and some harsh words. Was that worth an apology? Hell, I agreed with 95% of what you said in the first post. I didn't strangle on the FUCK word, I stangled on your admission you would be too chickenshit to do something about a craven fuck like Saddam in the first place. That you're the kind of guy who'll sit back and see which way the wind blows.

And don't call me a chickenhawk. Nobody knows their shitlevel day one; nobody knows when their sphincter will give up the ghost until the deal goes down. As for me, though, I know it will be after the shit hits the fan. Not before it. And sometimes you fight against the odds, knowing you'll lose. You do it for posterity, for your children. Am I that brave? I'd like to think so. If your family is going to die eventually anyway, they may as well be proud of you up till then. God help me if my kids ever unearthed an admission like Lileks's after I'm gone. They'd spit on my grave.

There should have been a Shiloh in Minnesota in 1862. Maybe you people would understand. Sometimes it ain't about whether you want to. It's about whether you have to.

P.S. James has always admitted, freely, that he voted for Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore before he realized the error of his ways. In other words, it wasn't until his PUBLISHER was hit until he understood the nature of the task before us. Well done, James. Well spoken.

Posted by Velociman at November 28, 2003 11:53 PM