Friday, April 25, 2008
Time capsule
Another extract from the incomparable quiz show Information Please.
This three-minute segment, from January 1944, contains within itself EVERYTHING we've lost. In these three minutes you can hear certainty about sexual identity, calm confidence in our SPEEDY AND FINAL victory over the enemy, and a light-hearted non-snobbish discussion and explanation of classical music, linguistics, history, politics and military strategy.
No moral equivalence, no sexual ambiguity, no fucking Hundred-Year-Long Fucking Twilight Struggles, neither euphemism nor vulgarity, no dilution of knowledge.
LISTEN.
These folks were elite but not elitist. They had a tremendous store of knowledge, and happily shared it in a way that an ordinary audience could enjoy, and in a way that would help America defeat its enemies, firm, fast, and final.
Well, one important difference is not mentioned in the clip. The most important thing we owned in 1944 that we have conclusively lost. One word: Industry. We had steel-makers, car-builders, radio-builders, airplane-builders, coal-miners. Equally important, we had car repairmen and radio repairmen, and we had cars and radios that could be repaired. All of these skills, and the design that made the cars and radios repairable, have been lost. We still have a tiny remnant of these men and these industries, but we've found in Iraq that you can't fight a tough and dirty war with delicate disposable unrepairable plastic Chinese crap.
So finally a quiz for us.
Which candidate appears to grasp the need to rebuild industry? Hillary.
Which candidate appears to understand firm, fast and final victory? Hillary. ¶ 9:11 PM
Another extract from the incomparable quiz show Information Please.
This three-minute segment, from January 1944, contains within itself EVERYTHING we've lost. In these three minutes you can hear certainty about sexual identity, calm confidence in our SPEEDY AND FINAL victory over the enemy, and a light-hearted non-snobbish discussion and explanation of classical music, linguistics, history, politics and military strategy.
No moral equivalence, no sexual ambiguity, no fucking Hundred-Year-Long Fucking Twilight Struggles, neither euphemism nor vulgarity, no dilution of knowledge.
LISTEN.
These folks were elite but not elitist. They had a tremendous store of knowledge, and happily shared it in a way that an ordinary audience could enjoy, and in a way that would help America defeat its enemies, firm, fast, and final.
Well, one important difference is not mentioned in the clip. The most important thing we owned in 1944 that we have conclusively lost. One word: Industry. We had steel-makers, car-builders, radio-builders, airplane-builders, coal-miners. Equally important, we had car repairmen and radio repairmen, and we had cars and radios that could be repaired. All of these skills, and the design that made the cars and radios repairable, have been lost. We still have a tiny remnant of these men and these industries, but we've found in Iraq that you can't fight a tough and dirty war with delicate disposable unrepairable plastic Chinese crap.
So finally a quiz for us.
Which candidate appears to grasp the need to rebuild industry? Hillary.
Which candidate appears to understand firm, fast and final victory? Hillary. ¶ 9:11 PM
