Well, it's about time, is all I can say. America has surely been crying out for a novel about the great march of the Boiotians under Epaminodas to liberate the Messinian helots, and soon it will have one! If the excerpts are any indication, this thing's gonna be dynamite:
The great victory over the Spartans at Leuktra is a year past. It’s now winter, and the Boiotians are still debating whether to take the war home to Sparta. After hearing the Athenian Kallistratos and his Boiotian ally Eteokles damn the notion of a katabasis southward, the general Epaminondas addresses and wins over the assembly to march out the next day.
Wow, COMPELLING! Way to set the scene, Vic. Now, hit us with some narrative.
No one was quite sure what would next follow. No one in memory had voted to march so far for so long—and for so many others. An eerie silence followed. Would harsh Reason goad them back, back to blame others for the vote?
I DON'T KNOW! But I can't wait to find out! You never know what's going to happen with that crazy harsh Reason, and its goading!
Then Melon for the first time noticed that the old sophist Alkidamas of all people, the wine-soaked has-been of the symposia, not the Boiotarchs or once again Pelopidas, was approaching the bema.
No! No fucking way! Not Melon! Surely it's a Boiotarch. NOT MELON!!!1! Totally get that guy away from the bema!
As the assembly of the Boiotians broke up, the white-haired Alkidamas lumbered over to Melon and slapped him lightly across the face, “I think I have the beginning of a real speech some day from these words that suddenly flew into my head. Such a wild daimon came into me—it was as if the one god of ours were wagging my tongue. Still is it seems.”
That...is some A-#1 dialogue. No wonder he is the leading light of neo-conservative smartitude! I cannot wait for the release of this amazing work of fiction.
Vic also has some pointed questions for his audience today:
If one were to substitute “Muslim” for “Christian” in the rants of the Edwards bloggers, would there have been any hesitation about firing them?
That's an interesting question, Vic! I bet the continued employment of Charles Johnson, your co-columnist at Big Boy Jammies, might help answer it.
If Austrian sniper rifles really were recently sold to Iran, brought into Iraq, and used to kill Americans., what would Europeans think if American sniper weaponry were sold, under our government’s auspices, to those supplying the Basque separatists to kill Spaniards?
Uh...there's no "if" about it, Vic. The United States is the biggest arms supplier in the world and has been for decades, and has supplied arms to a number of terror organizations all over the world, and to State-Department-certified 'undemocratic states' and human rights abusers like Pakistan, Colombia, Ethiopia, Chad and Angola. People who are against these sorts of deals, unlike you, are generally opposed to the proliferation of violence in general rather than just trying to score ideological I-told-you-so points.
Hamas and Fatah have different uniforms. They have two conflicting ideologies and clear antithetical agendas. And now they are killing one another. Why is this not a “civil war,” but the senseless sectarian violence in Iraq is?
Hmmm. A stumper! I can't think of one single answer to this one! Possibly because there are many answers! Like:
- Neither Hamas nor Fatah have official uniforms
- While their ideological agendas are different in some ways, they are similar in many others
- Neither is a state actor, and the area in which they are fighting is not a recognized nation, thus disqualifying any conflict between them as a civil war on its face
- The phrase "civil war" has an actual meaning and isn't just some bullshit thing that people say, and the Hamas/Fatah conflict doesn't even remotely meet any of the standards for a civil war
- You're an idiot and nothing about your question makes any sense
2 comments:
I was re-reading "300" this weekend and noticed that Frank Miller cited one of VDH's books in the acknowledgments. This would be the follow-up to that, then.
what would Europeans think if American sniper weaponry were sold, under our government’s auspices, to those supplying the Basque separatists to kill Spaniards?
Did you notice the rather vile assumption underlying the way he phrased this question? Namely that, even if it were a widely reported fact that Americans had been arming Basque separatists, that this is something that only Europeans would regard as criminal, and that Americans should not be concerned about it at all?
Post a Comment