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while the unfolding of the implications of the canoe trip analogy ace was kind enough to venture earlier seems a potential thread in itself, i wanted just to respond to the op for a minute...
i dont see anything wrong with debate--including often passionate-to-snippy debate--amongst folk about the course the present administration has embarked on in iraq. i have never understood--and still do not understand--anything about what i think is still best characterized as the busby berkley school of political debate-you know, "come on, kids, let's all pull together as a team and put on a really great musical..." as if:
(a) fundamental disagreement is somehow a problem in politics (it isnt)
(b) power in any meaningful way resides with the people in the united states (it doesnt) such that there is any direct correlation between what "the people" want and how political power is exercized. last night's new course speech from the Dear Leader would have been impossible were there any such connection, for example. it aint like that: we the people have indirect power one day every two years, and really one day every 4 years.
(c) there is no coherent notion of the "national will" that you can appeal to either in order to cement the argument that we all need to pull together in the same way in order to make of this wreckage a happy, shiny musical. democracies are characterized by the diversity of viewpoints--even a shallow one like the american version requires it if it is to be healthy. so i would think that vigorous debate would be understood as a hopeful sign in itself, even if it happens in spaces that could notbe more removed from actual power like this one.
(d) i have never been persuaded that there is any single agreed upon way to define what working in the common interest looks like. i would think that principled dissent IS a way of trying to work for the common interest. so from my viewpoint, the idea that we all need to hold hands and sway together in the same way around a campfire so that the whole edifice does not collapse is just narcissism. so i see no problem at all with any and all modes of opposition to the war in iraq, say--not in principle at least (the contents of actual arguments are what really matter in any event)--nor in principle do i have a particular problem with such support as there is for it--but i also have no hesitation to say that i think the folk who support this war are somewhere been misinformed and wrong--and i see nothing about that which would indicate one way or another whether i (or anyone else) did or did not want the best for the united states--where i live too--across such debates. there are simply disagreements about what constitites the best for this place, just as there are disagreements about how this place is as over against how it culd be, and how the world it dominates is as over against how it could be.
for myself, i simply do not accept that the present state of affairs is the best that we--or anyone--could do.
if by thinking that way in general, it means that in the eyes of some i do not want to participate in the higher calling of putting on a musical, then so be it: but that it a judgment that comes entirely from how the sentences are read, and so refers to the reader, rather than from any coherent understanding of how is intended when the sentences are written.
civility is another matter: another way of reading the op is as another call for civlity. same arguments as above could apply to this--there is no reason that civility should be used as a wedge to exclude positions, as if by saying x you are a priori not being civil. on the other hand, i think most who play here have found that it is more functional to take some of the edge off the posts we make from time to time. and that sometimes this editing is more successful than others. goes with the territory, i think.
my my, wasnt that fun?
yes, madge, it was fun.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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