If I was optimistic -- stop laughing, damn you -- I'd look at it like this.
The drafting of ESR's manifesto, and that link takes you to version the fourth:
WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.
(Changes in purple. It's like evolution, only without the getting better part.}
coming so soon after CalPundit's Critique of Pure Fisking:
Childish, petulant, ignorant, and willfully trying to miss the bigger point. Almost autistic in the certainty that their hyper-rationalism has dealt a devastating logical blow to their safely-out-of-sight opponent.
means that events in the blogosphere are coming to a head, and a Great and Holy War shall. . . hang on, that gag's been done already, way back in get your voltr on, page ten of Get Your War On. And I didn't know the book had an introduction by Colson Whitehead.
Colson Whitehead (Foreword) is a recent recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, and the author of John Henry Days which was a 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and was also short-listed for the LA Times Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. His first novel The Intuitionist won the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award for 1999 and was PEN-Hemingway Award for First Fiction finalist in 1999. He is also the recipient of a 2000 Whiting Writers' Award. He lives in Brooklyn NY.
I only care because, you know, he's a Negro. They don't mention it, to avoid scaring people off.
There an excerpt from The Intuitionist up at Salon, if you're interested. Plus, he's doing a reading/seminar at New York State Writers Institute on. . . um, yesterday. Sorry. C.P.T.
I'll go back to packing now.
I'm so in love with The Intuitionist. It came out while I was working at Waldenbooks over one Christmas -- great thing to do for the discount alone, I discovered. Everyone got books that year, and in my family, that's a good thing.
Anyway, I doubt I would have picked that up (that and Everybody Smokes In Hell) if we hadn't had advance copies; both books were paid pretty much no attention in Lancaster County, while the next book in that series about the people who get stuck on Earth after all the Really Good People get beamed up into spaceships taken to heaven got prime placement.
Have I mentioned lately how much I love living in PA's very own Bible Belt? I need to move.
That, and I need to reread The Intuitionist now.
Addendum: Yeah, it is just like that, except without the getting better part. I guess rabid dogs better expresses what he wants to say and all than "wolves" or "feral beasts."
Still doesn't make the message any more than it is.