Monday Stuff

Someone sicked Monday upon us. And it has arrived.
Mean, apparently, from a six-day absence.

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Can’t seem to string too many thoughts together at the moment, so taste some excerpts and links:

Good New York Times Read (No. 1): Nicholas Kristof: “More Troops Are A Bad Bet.”

Kristof takes aim at the push to send more troops to Afghanistan, reminding us of our past with this fine introduction:

The United States was born of our ancestors’ nationalistic resentment of a foreign power whose troops we saw as occupiers, not protectors. The British never fathomed our basic grievance — this was our land, not theirs! — so the more they cracked down, the more they empowered the American insurgency.

Given that history, you’d think we might be more sensitive to nationalism abroad. Yet the most systematic foreign-policy mistake we Americans have made in the post-World War II period has been to underestimate its potency, from Vietnam to Latin America.

Oh my, we are an ignorant lot.

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But who’s got time for heady political matters when the saga of the so-called Bubble Boy has got your attention? Which brings me to Good New York Times Read (No. 2): Frank Rich on the Bubble Boy.

Read it. All of it. No cheating.

I followed next to none of the Bubble Boy story when it was in real time (really, truly). But I did hear radio news reports, and found myself chuckling when the Bubble Boy’s dad was being castigated for orchestrating a “publicity stunt” in the hopes that he would “make money.”

And I thought: In a nation of people orchestrating publicity stunts to make money, how do we determine which ones get our riches and which ones get our scorn?

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Special shout-out to my Yankee-loving friends: Fuck you.

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“You know it’s called bad luck.” – Lou Reed, “Street Hassle.”

It’s today’s best song ever (again).

Join me in listening pleasure. Here’s a truncated version: