Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

The main critic with The Buffalo News, Jeff Simon, isn't one of my favorite critics -- his reviews tend to be stuffy, pedantic, and focused more on demonstrating his own erudition than on examining the work in question. (Simon mainly reviews films, but he also reviews music -- mainly jazz -- and books pertaining to the arts.) However, I do tend to enjoy Simon's weekly commentary columns. He has a pretty good one this week about the war and the aftermath:

....Nothing has yet proven George W. Bush to be anything other than a rich man's son, a man with a bad swagger and smirk who always looks as if he's confident that no matter how badly he screws up, daddy and his friends will bail him out.

And yet I have to admit that, as horrifying and amoral as it was to watch, it's dimly possible that this war positioned America exactly where it might be good to be for the next 50 years:

A) In the center of the world's most combustible and dangerous region, perhaps finally able to put out the major fires and bring stability to it through influence and strategic placement.

B) In the middle of one of the richest energy deposits currently known.

C) In the minds of every despot on the globe a nation fully capable of being reckless and rash against anyone who so much looks at America cross-eyed. (Remember that Revolutionary era flag - "Don't Tread On Me.")

Just as likely, though, are those other possibilities that angry people have been demonstrating about all over the globe:

A) That America is now virtually friendless in the world - except for Tony Blair, the Spaniards and the awesome forces of Cameroon - and will, therefore, be expected to clean up every toxic oil spill in global affairs for generations to come. We are now the world's cop and sanitation crew combined.

B) That America has just engendered in Iraq all the anti-American terrorism we wanted to eliminate in the first place - generation after generation of Muslim fundamentalists so steeped in hatred for the United States and so hamstrung by history that terrorist strikes on U.S. soil seem the only way to combat hopeless impotence.

C) That our capacity for thoughtless, self-righteous chest-thumping - the whole 24-hour news/talk radio apparatus that has turned American political debate into noisy gibberish - has now been so institutionalized that there is no coherent way to have an informed American citizenry. In the age of information, there is a meaningless glut of opinion and fact that can be surfed over by any president, mandate or not, in pursuit of almost any goal whatsoever. This surfeit of information may have created an entirely new kind of human ignorance.

So the question now is: Just what HAVE we done? (Or, more accurately, what have we allowed to happen in our name?)

It may take a very long and anxious time to find that out.

The whole article is available here.