The news broke on Sunday, and by Monday, little eight-year-old Glenn Reynolds was in a state. He couldn’t wait for recess. When it finally came, he ran up to the sandbox where two classmates were already playing.
“We captured Saddam! We captured Saddam!" Glenn shouted. "Nya, nya, nya, naya!” A few kids playing kickball nearby turned their heads toward the commotion.
Joe continued scooping sand into a bucket. “Oh jeez. Really? And you think that’s going to change anything?”
Glenn started pacing and gesturing erratically. “Hahaha. Score one for me! Woos.”
Joe leaned toward Jack, who was navigating a dump truck over a bumpy sand road. “Is he still playing this game?”
“God yes. It never ends. It’s his favorite game in the whole world – the U.S. versus Islamic fundamentalism.”
“No, I think it’s the true patriots versus the insidious liberals.”
“It’s both, really,” Jack replied, raising the back end of the dump truck.
“Aha! You're dismayed at this victory in the war. Therefore you are objectively anti-American.”
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."