He Is Wrong
Wed., December 6, 04:41 PM
I am going to ramble a bit today ('cause it's my page and you can't stop me), but I do have a destination in mind. My mind just went wondering as I mulled over this subject.
One of the benefits in earning a four-year degree in liberal arts is that you are required to take a number of courses -- usually introductory -- in specified fields, regardless of your main course of study. I have a bachelor of arts, with my major courses in science. Obviously, I could easily find choices in the physical and biological sciences that filled those requirements. Some of the others were a little more complicated.
I needed two courses in fine arts. Me? Yeah, right. I took Theater 101, which was interesting but wasn't going anywhere. And I took Music Appreciation which was awful. It absolutely turned me off classical music for more than a year. Another kind of understanding came through: since I had always liked classical music before, the problem was obviously not in the material but in the presentation.
Another strange territory was social sciences. I tried sociology and anthropology; again, these were interesting, but they weren't taking me anywhere. Then I signed up for Introduction to Political Science, which turned out to be the most useless course I ever took. I am willing to concede that it might have been the presentation, but the fact remains that I took nothing away from that class. Even now, when some newscaster starts quoting political scientists, I feel my eyes -- indeed, my whole mind -- glazing over.
Thus I was a bit surprised to hear that political science has a precise definition of civil war -- including such criteria as more or less equal factions and a given number of deaths on each side -- and that the conflict in Iraq fits those criteria. (In contrast, when one side is more powerful than another and is engaged in systematically destroying the other, that's not civil war. More like genocide.) Anyway, I was surprised because I was calling it civil war long before NBC. I just didn't know that I was supposed to wait for an okay from the academic community before I could say so.
Now the question becomes, what the heck are American soldiers doing in the middle of someone else's civil war? We don't belong there. I suppose, if American troops now get caught in the crossfire between Shiites and Sunnis, they will be termed collateral damage? Fancy language or not, they're still dead. I doubt that their families are comforted by the fact that they really weren't in a war.
Back to this education thing, our Illustrious Leader went to a well known private school, followed by attendance at Yale and Harvard. I just went through the public school system and to a state university. I doubt whether Mr. Dubya could have made the grade there, because no one coddles the dummies in a public university; but I guess if you have enough money, you can buy anything. He believes his own rhetoric -- whoever wrote it for him -- and he never did learn to say, "I was wrong." Why are we surprised?
This political science stuff really wears me out.
