Bali who?
I've had the pleasure of visiting Bali twice, once as a 17-year-old gadabout reveling in the pleasure of publishing my first novel, A Tale Of Young Men At War, and the second time in 1995, as a paid guest of the President Suharto Isn't Such A Bad Guy Coalition. I enjoyed many free drinks and free sunsets and the island's patented mix of carefree hippie partying, cheap muliticultural prostitution, and bohemian Hindu mysticism. But now Al Queda has struck again, and the naive anti-war left is on the run trying to explain another paradise lost. I think it's interesting how we haven't heard word one from Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter on this situation. Where is the hero of Plains now? Off enjoying the spoils of the Oslo Committee, I'm sure. But isn't that just like former "President" Carter? When the world calls him to duty, he runs and hides under his bed like a whining, simpering child. Let me ask you an interesting question, and perhaps you can provide an answer. Would Jimmy Carter have been in that disco, whooping it up like you or I, or would he have been miles away fingering the detonator, moaning about the "lust in his heart"? It's very interesting that I have the intellectual clarity, like Orwell, to even conceive of such a scenario.
While I have your attention, is it completely beyond the realm of possibility that Jimmy Carter is helping to fund the activities of the D.C.-area sniper? After all, it was "former" "President" "Carter," who coined, in his ONLY speech to the United Nations in 1977, the phrase "Dear Policeman, I Am God," and he has, in the past, shown interest in the Black Art of the Tarot. The pattern is clear. A maniac is killing innocent gas-station customers, but our Democratic leadership says nothing. Have any of the 23 Senators who dared oppose President Bush's noble war resolution spoken out against the Bali bombing or the sniper or the attack on the French tanker in Yemen or that guy in Kuwait who shot at our soldiers? Not unless they said something on the Sunday morning chat shows, which I always skip to watch J.B., Terry, Howie, and Jimmy, not to mention the sexy weather humor of Jillian Barberie.
Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan are joining me on this site sometime before the end of the year to discuss Hitch's runaway bestselling novel, Why Orwell Matters. If you have any questions regarding Orwell or Matters, please direct them here, and one of us will answer you in this most public of forums. And watch for next year, when the Pollack-Hitchens-Sullivan Speaking Truth To Power Orwell Express Bus hits the road for a 30-campus tour. Cornel West, we're crashing at your house!