Wednesday, September 19, 2007

I'm shocked at how un-shocking that is

So I was walking by Harvey's yesterday, and they had on their windows a poster advertising the following:

CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE!!!! MADE FROM 100% REAL ICE CREAM!!!!

And I admit, I was intrigued. Not enough to actually get the milkshake, but damn close. You see, sometimes the ordinary is bracing in it's very ordinariness.

To put it another way, sometimes we're shocked to see something we really shouldn't be. So when the former Commander of CENTCOM for the US military says
"There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran... Let's face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we've lived with a nuclear China, and we're living with (other) nuclear powers as well."
You're almost shocked by the implied rationality, the sanity, the ordinariness of it all. No slavering Cheney in the wings yelling about how Iran is planning on some combination of holocaust and world domination (somebody's got to sweep up the ashes, I guess.) No drooling simp of a President talking about how foreign countries need to respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, totally devoid of the self-consciousness that would be required for a sense of irony.

Just a basic statement of fact.

Bracing.

1 comment:

Raphael Alexander said...

I don't see how a nuclear Iran is any more frightening than a nuclear Pakistan. But then again I have always been afraid of a nuclear anything. I'm silly that way. Fission is a nasty thing.