The Shape of Days

It’s just after five o’clock in the evening. It’s Thursday. It’s the first of December. I have no idea where my day, week or year went.

As I think I mentioned recently about a skrillion times, I am in the middle of the Great Blog Migration of ’05. TypePad has betrayed me for the last time, and I decided this week to move my site to my own server. I have to say that the task has gone spectacularly well so far, with one little caveat. See, Movable Type is so much more powerful than TypePad, I’ve found myself seduced into investing vast amounts of time on things that I never bothered with before. For instance, I’ve spent the past 24 hours — almost nonstop; I couldn’t sleep last night — reworking my archiving system completely. The new arrangement is nothing worthy of a ticker-tape parade, but it’s pretty spiffy. I think you’re going to like it.

Totally apropos of nothing: Until I was about eight, I thought the phrase was “tick-or-tape parade.” It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that’s what I thought I was hearing. Of course, “ticker-tape parade” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense these days either, what with stock tickers having been consigned to the same notional back room where all the world’s slide rules and pocket calculators and typewriter ribbons have gone.

I took a peek at the headlines a few minutes ago and found, happily, that there really aren’t any. No news is good news in these troubling times. I did see this story on the CNN site that can basically be boiled down to, “Poll: American people believe what we tell them to believe.” Or to put it even more succinctly: “Who run Bartertown?”

I honestly don’t know if anybody’s sitting inside the rarefied offices high atop CNN Center right now — or behind a desk at The New York Time, or tucking into a plate of bangers and mash or whatever the hell they do over at Reuters — who’s chuckling with glee at the secure and certain knowledge that the world is a puppet show and he’s pulling the strings. I don’t have nearly enough faith in the human condition to be a conspiracy theorist; I prefer to speculate about incompetence and shortsightedness rather than malice or malevolence. I think it’s going way too far to call the press an active participant in the war; they’re far too self-obsessed for that.

But the cancer that eats away at your liver isn’t an active participant in your demise, either. It just sits there, carrying out the natural order of things, growing and growing as all living things must until finally, almost as an incidental side-effect, you die.

I don’t think the press is trying to turn the tide of the war. I think the press is just sitting there, pandering and pandering until finally, almost as an incidental side-effect, we’ll lose. Baghdad will fall to the Islamists, then Riyadh a few years after that. Then Madrid. Paris, Berlin, London. Washington.

And you know what? Maybe we’ll deserve it. Maybe we’ll deserve to lose this war, to see the light of freedom which was passed on to our generation be snuffed out by men who think that how many times a day your pray and how long you grow your beard are more important that rights or liberties. Put any reasonable human being in a chair and let him choose between life in the liberal democracies of the West and life under Islamic radicalism, and he’ll pick the cheeseburgers and Hollywood blockbusters and Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues any day of the week. Not just because we have all the cool stuff, but because liberty is better than totalitarianism and pluralism is better than apostatical purges. It’s not even a contest. It’s not even a race.

Our enemy in this war is a culture so mind-blowingly backwards that it seems like a parody of itself. If we can’t defeat that, then hell, maybe we deserve to lose.

I love my country with all my heart. But sometimes I just get so damn mad at the people who populate it.

• Absolutely necessary tool of the day: Paparazzi