Friday, June 09, 2006

Mac Johnson: A great American

An Evil Man's Death Replenishes Me
Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is dead. May he rot in Hell forever.

Perhaps that's not as clinical and detached as most of the reporting and analysis regarding yesterday's successful extermination of the gleeful decapitator, but that's OK, because I make no claim to being a mainstream journalist.

I do not believe that it is the job of the chattering class to divorce itself from the society that has given it the right to chatter. I do not believe it makes a journalist or a commentator moral and righteous to coldly report on a war involving his own people as if he were filing scientific reports on the inconsequential battles between two different sorts of ants.

If you don't read the rest of this column then I will personally come to your house or place of work and read it to you.

Oh, and visit Mac's homepage too.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

who cares. zarqawi has already been replaced be another, the iraq war is still a miserable failure and the majority of americans want us out. time to move on to another topic - this is old news.

Kaelri said...

I admire his candor. And in fact I agree with more of his perspective than you might think.

I'd only reiterate that I take no pleasure in the suffering of human beings. I believe justice should be done, of course - to kill one who would have killed many is an act of altruism. And Zarqawi's death is certainly not without tangible gain: if he's dead then he can't decapitate any more journalists or detonate any more hotels.

But - although given the above, it's a moot point - I don't think that simply because it would make the rest of us happy is reason enough to kill someone. I think that where I differ with many of the rest of you is this: I don't believe a terrorist doesn't deserve human rights. Zarqawi, Hussein, bin Laden, all; I'd rather try and imprison them for life - in Siberia, in Micronesia, maybe on the moon - than execute them. Whatever is enough to prevent them from ever harming another human being. Killing Zarqawi would certainly make a lot of Iraqis happy; but then, killing me would make a lot of other Iraqis happy.

And I'm certainly not saying a terrorist's incarceration should be much of a cakewalk. I'll stand by with Josh Lymon's proposal:

"I'd put 'em in a small cell, and make them watch home movies of the birthdays and baptisms
and weddings of every single person they killed, over and over, every day, for the rest
of their lives... and then they'd get punched in the mouth every night
at bedtime."


And no, I don't believe that's "cruel and unusual." The only torture that bin Laden would get from those images is purely what he brought upon himself. To kill is to imbue sorrow in happiness; to devote your life to killing is to forfeit ever feeling happy again. Let's not give them the privilege of being martyrs.

So I agree with Johnson here:

"...the truly civilized man is so empathetic and thoughtful and concerned with others that he cannot even enjoy his own victories for sympathizing with the vermin he has just defeated."

And although most of the minds whose philosophies I follow are saying that Zarqawi's demise won't really be any help at all to our cause, he's got an interesting point about the negotiations.

Anonymous said...

Where are your statistics anonymous? You may be right, but you have to prove it. Otherwise you just sound like an idiot.

And what about the majority of the military. You know...the ones who actually see the truth of what's going on over there?

Kaelri said...

"And what about the majority of the military. You know...the ones who actually see the truth of what's going on over there?"

Zogby International has spoken to that.

Anonymous said...

ya-hoo death to the reglious right

Anonymous said...

This one polled 6 times as many people.

Military Times.

The numbers are a little different. Just picking one poll doesn't work.

BEAR said...

Wowee! When the cockroaches (that's lefties to you lefties) come out from under their rocks in such numbers to wallow in their own denial, we can be certain there is MUCH to rejoice. Let's see.....evil is destroyed, and Americans are accused by the left of lacking compassion....sheesh.

BEAR said...

Hey, guys I found out to locate the idiot kaelri....just follow the trail of fruits and nuts.

Kaelri said...

2:12, I'll concede the superiority of the Military Times poll, based on the information I have.

A perspective on Zarqawi's death worth reading, by the way.