On Generals Testifying Before Congress
Fred Reed
2008-04-14 16:00
Whenever I see that some dismal general will testify to Congress regarding the war against Iraq, I imagine the first paragraph of his Power Point presentation:
'All metrics show a downsurge in the violence in Iraq, and a continuing improvement in indicators of the production of a better life. Next slide. The Iranians are aiding the enemies of America, and must be bombed. This is a recording.'
A Dog to Its Vomit
Fred Reed
2008-03-12 17:00
Common delusions notwithstanding, the United States, I submit, is not a democracy'by which is meant a system in which the will of the people prevails. Rather it is a curious mechanism artfully designed to circumvent the will of the people while appearing to be democratic. Several mechanisms accomplish this.
A Dog to Its Vomit
Fred Reed
2007-08-23 16:00
August 24, 2007
I have just returned from two weeks in Washington and find myself almost giggling with despair, or perhaps chortling at the madness. I need a bottle of Padre Kino, maybe laced with Haldol.
A New Improved America
Fred Reed
2007-05-22 16:00
Something is wrong with the United States. I think most of us have noticed it. There is a mortal rot in the country, made manifest by many little rots that are hard to integrate mentally yet are, I think, somehow related. The change is grave, accelerating, probably irreversible, and fascinating. Things are not as they were.
The Avoidance of Honor
Fred Reed
2007-04-17 16:00
It amuses me to hear people talking about their 'honor,' when they don't have any and it probably doesn't exist. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, honor is the first. Actually, as character defects they are about equally reprehensible.
The Ganglia of Four
Fred Reed
2007-03-26 16:00
Methinks we don't'think, I mean, about anything outside our immediate visual horizon. Thinking is a poor way of understanding the world, which is too complex to be thought about effectively. That leaves hormones and unfortunate limbic wiring.
Reflections on a Solemn Ass
Fred Reed
2007-03-14 17:00
I usually regard liberals and conservatives as equally but not identically reprehensible, rather like the complementary halves of a migraine headache. Some differences do stand out. Peculiar to conservatives is a certain tribalism, often accompanied by subclinical paranoia. They seem to be looking fearfully about as the wolves circle closer. It doesn't matter whether there actually are any wolves.
Fred: A True Son of Tzu
Fred Reed
2007-01-24 17:00
Being a military thinker of the profoundest sort, I offer the following manual of martial affairs for nations yearning to copy the American way of war. Read it carefully. Great clarity will result. The steps limned below will facilitate disaster without imposing the burden of reinventing it. The Pentagon may print copies for distribution.
It Floats
Fred Reed
2006-12-17 17:00
It's all but official: The war in Iraq is lost. Report after leaked report says so. Everybody in Washington knows it except that draft-dodging ferret in the White House. Politicians scurry to avoid the blame. One day soon people will ask aloud: How did we let 3000 GIs die for the weak ego of a pampered liar and his desperate need to prove he's half the man his father was?
The troops from now on...
A Bush in Need of Pruning
Fred Reed
2006-10-11 16:00
I miss the days of smoke-filled rooms when crooked pols chose corrupt presidential candidates who were approximately sane. Today we have a sort of presidential bus-station lottery. We choose as ruler any beer-hall putz who can shake hands and grin his way successfully through New Hampshire. This, plus the deep rot of the American political framework, is allowing the rapid conversion of the United...
"Not Today, Sir."
Fred Reed
2006-10-01 16:00
When, one wonders, will mutiny begin among the troops in Iraq?
Recently I talked by email about the war with Jim Coyne, an airborne-infantry friend who served two tours as a gunship door-gunner in Viet Nam and then made a career in journalism. I asked, 'Do they [I meant the officer corps, the official military] actually believe the optimistic twaddle this time around? Do they really not know what...
What's Fred Smoking?
Fred Reed
2006-09-24 16:00
Letters pour in from desperate readers (or would if they did) saying, 'Fred, explain America today. Say something tendentious and irritating about what is going on in this curious country. Why do we do what we do? Sock it to us.'
All right.
Conservation of Parody
Fred Reed
2006-08-07 16:00
I'm wondering. Help me wonder. Either Georgie Bush is the minor, depressing, witless ferret I think he is, or I am. It has to be one or the other. If things don't start looking up pretty soon internationally, I'm going to be pretty sure which.
A Modest Proposal to Abolish Universities
Fred Reed
2006-07-24 16:00
I think it is time to close the universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. Universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.
I know this. I am sitting in my office in Jocotepec, consorting with a bottle of Padre Kino...
On Recent Wars
Fred Reed
2006-05-17 16:00
People ask how we got into our splendid mess in Iraq and why we can't get out. The question is a subset of a larger question: Why, since WWII, have so many first-world armies gotten into drawn-out guerrilla wars in bush-world countries, and lost? Examples abound: France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, France in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon, etc. Why don't they learn?
The...
In Search of Darkness
Fred Reed
2006-02-16 17:00
The other day I found myself trapped next to the lobotomy box in the house of a friend. The show was one of those dismal productions based on sexual innuendo, the sort that I would have found titillating when I was eleven. The format was not complex. Neither, I suspect, was the audience. Several shapeless young couples sat together.
A Colony Again
Fred Reed
2006-01-18 17:00
I'm going to start a rickshaw factory. It's so our kids will have a way to make a living, now that America is pulling out of the First World. Maybe I'll put an iPod socket on the poles or a little tiny television, made in Japan. That way our puzzled offspring won't inadvertently start thinking. Tradition provides an anchor in the circumambient chaos. See, what's going to happen is, all the...
Thoughts Unthunk, Mostly
Fred Reed
2005-12-13 17:00
I am persuaded that the gravest catastrophes to afflict this misguided planet were the inventions of agriculture, clean water, and antibiotics. Without these pernicious conceptions our squalid race might consist of a few millions of savages picking bananas and slaughtering the occasional bison. I do not say this in criticism of savages. Theirs was a reasonable existence. I like bananas, which...
Getting Apart
Fred Reed
2005-12-08 17:00
Explain it to me, diversity. I don't get it. Everyone in the feddle gummint and all the news weasels and the academia nuts and assorted distasteful do-gooders with goiterous self-admiration are always honking and blowing about how we need diversity. Why? What is it good for? I think we need homogeneity. Probably the greatest desire of humanity other than getting sex is avoiding diversity....
Soldiers and Reporters
Fred Reed
2005-12-04 17:00
Much email comes my way, from military folk both current and retired, assuring me that the press consists of leftist commy anti-American liberal tree-hugging cowardly backstabbers who probably like the French and would date Jane Fonda. It is an old song. Having spent decades covering the armed forces, I have seen much of the Pentagon and the press. Things are a tad more complex. A few thoughts...
Mothers Against Drunk Drivers
Fred Reed
2005-10-23 16:00
I begin to think that Mothers Against Drunk Drivers constitute a public nuisance, and need to be stuffed down an abandoned oil well. And indicted for fraud. We could dangle a microphone down the well on a wire so that they could testify. These tiresome biddies aren't against drunk driving, which anyone with a possum's brains is against. Your dangerous drunks are incorrigibles who time and...
Diving Into the Third World
Fred Reed
2005-10-04 16:00
I'm thinking about turning into a Marxist. Ol' Karl used to talk about these irresistible currents of history that just swept you along and you couldn't do anything about'em, like the current that swept communism mostly out of existence. (He may have had some other currents in mind.) I'm looking at what's happening in the US. It's gotta be an irresistible current. It couldn't be on purpose...
A Grand Adventure
Fred Reed
2005-09-19 16:00
A friend recently asked me what I would tell a young man thinking about enlisting in the military. (He had in mind his son.) I would tell him this, which I wish someone had told me: Kid, you are being suckered. You are being used. You need to think carefully before signing that enlistment contract. First, notice that the men who want to send you to die were draft-dodgers. President...
Vienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes?
Fred Reed
2005-09-15 16:00
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In late September, 1994, Henri Lepage asked me to address the Mont Pelerin Society in Cannes, France. The title was "I Like Hayek," an appreciation of the principal founder of the Society in 1947. I thought the subject would be well received, but I was mistaken. Over a dozen attendees lined up to take issue with my favorable comments about Hayek's capital theory and...
Looking for Commies in China
Fred Reed
2005-09-12 16:00
Guadalajara' Just finished the last bag-drag back from China, jet-lagged, brain fried on caffeine, edgy groggy. Maybe I'll kill something. Or hibernate. What province am I in? Why do these Mexicans have round eyes? It's not natural. Some thoughts, barely: I couldn't find the commies. Conservatives, who apparently preserve their minds in amber at birth, ramble on about Communist...
These Are Interesting Times
Fred Reed
2005-08-15 16:00
Washington, DC' It's getting stranger, I tell you. Riding the subway from Vienna Station to Franconia-Springfield, at every stop the woman driving the train said in an over-elocuted voice, 'A-ten-tion, customers. This is a Metro Safety Tip. Pay attention to your surroundings. Look up from your newspapers and blackbirds [it sounded like, though nobody seemed to be carrying any sort of bird...
Who Is Running This Choo-Choo Train?
Fred Reed
2005-06-19 16:00
The crumbling has begun, methinks. Congressmen, a few only now, speak of withdrawal from Iraq. A small thing, but for the White House a worrisome step toward vertebracy in that body of polyps. The numbers of the dissenting will grow as they see that they do not get hurt. Military recruiting is way down, and will stay down: The gullibility of the young cannot forever be relied upon. The House has...
A Continent of Clowns
Fred Reed
2005-06-06 16:00
'WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bursting into tears, eighth-grader Anurag Kashyap of California became the U.S. spelling champ Thursday . . . . Tied for second place were 11-year-old Samir Patel, who is home-schooled in Colleyville, Texas, and Aliya Deri, 13, a Pleasanton, California, student.' Indian kids have won first place in five of the last seven years. Might be there's a pattern here? Nah. A...
A Matter of Allegiance
Fred Reed
2005-05-30 16:00
I wish to propose a salubrious anarchy, a deliberate renunciation of fealty to country, society, and government, an assertion of independence from folly and moral decay. Permit me to offer a taxing political idea: When a society ceases to be worthy of support, it is reasonable to withdraw support. The time, I submit, has come.
Rednecks: The Virtues Thereof
Fred Reed
2005-05-22 16:00
There is a lot of snot and malice about rednecks on the internet. Most of it comes from such cornflowers and honeysuckles as college professors, other witless suburban nonentities, and assorted twits in cities. By 'redneck,' these bundles of intellectual lingerie seem to mean anyone without a college degree who can hang a door or lube his car.
One of them, some sort of biochemical rascal, figured...
Fred to Save Country
Fred Reed
2005-05-17 16:00
One reads much about the poor in America, their piteous lives, their blighted hopes, and the unrelieved downtreading of them by various social ogres such as oppressive corporations who sell them greasy hamburgers. (Why does my wretched spell-checker object to 'downtreading'? You can't be downtrodden unless someone downtreads you. How obvious is that?)
Fred to Save Country
Fred Reed
2005-05-11 16:00
It has become apparent that I am going to have to reform the government of the United States. Frankly I'd rather remove one of my lungs with a ballpoint pen. Still, I'm nothing if not perfervidly public-spirited. I will not stand around like Nehru fiddling while Rome burned. Noblesse oblige, that sort of thing.
How We Were
Fred Reed
2005-05-01 16:00
The summer of '62 didn't seem like much at the time. It was just summer. The County of King George was a forested section of Tidewater Virginia, peppered with small farms, and home to watermen who crabbed on the Potomac. To us it was just KG. It was about all we in high school knew. Only later did I realize what we'd had.
Democracy, Birds and Snails
Fred Reed
2005-04-10 16:00
I wonder whether liberal democracies do not follow an ordained trajectory into the muck, ripening like fruits, having their arteries harden, and falling, plop, to be eaten by birds and snails. (That was a two-animal medico-vegetative ballistic metaphor, not so much mixed as homogenized, almost colloidal. Patent applied for.) I note that the English-speaking countries are doing to themselves...
Hunter Thompson
Fred Reed
2005-03-03 17:00
When Thompson blew his brains out, a door closed somewhere and you could hear the latch click. The main man had gone. Most of us can easily be replaced. There was only one Hunter Thompson. I'll heist one tonight to a fine, fine writer, a voice of his time, the embodiment of an age the like of which there never was and which, for good or bad, will never come again.
In Search of Men Who Want to Marry Mommy
Fred Reed
2005-02-13 17:00
It is becoming a constant, like gravity: Maureen Dowd opens her mouth, and I get email from guys saying, 'Fred! Geez, man, how much do apartments go for in Guadalajara?'
Maureen is the resentment columnist for the New York Times. She serves as newsprint megaphone for the angry, selfish, wretchedly unhappy career woman who can't understand why she is living alone in an apartment with two cats. (I...
Objective Journalism and Hen's Teeth
Fred Reed
2005-01-28 17:00
Fred explains practically everything.
I get email from people who say they wish that journalists would engage in objective coverage of the war in Iraq. They are always indignant and often bitter, but they mean opposite things. Those against the war assert that the fascist press is slanted in favor. Those in favor assert that the leftist press is slanted against. All agree that reporters are...
The Last Necessary Column on Politics
Fred Reed
2005-01-06 17:00
In my capacity as Western Civilization's principal moral compass and intellectual lighthouse, I thought I might explain politics once and forever. There are altogether too many television shows about politics, too many books by people who would better pass their time in drinking. Newspapers have gotten above themselves. They are full of columnists. A final explanation of all things political will...
Read Your Newspaper
Fred Reed
2004-12-13 17:00
Whither the competition between the mainstream media and the Internet? It sharpens. The big papers still rule the roost, but they hemorrhage readers and credibility, perhaps more than they know or understand. People move to the web, spend more time online, hold the usual media in decreasing regard. The bright and the young switch effortlessly.
Until recently the paper press, in a display of self-...
Wars and Their Aftermath
Fred Reed
2004-12-05 17:00
The observant will have noticed that we hear little from the troops in Iraq and see almost nothing of the wounded. Why, one might wonder, does not CNN put an enlisted Marine before a camera and, for fifteen minutes without editing, let him say what he thinks? Is he not an adult and a citizen? Is he not engaged in important events on our behalf?
Sound political reasons exist. Soldiers are a risk...
Be Good, Chillun
Fred Reed
2004-11-21 17:00
I tell you, coming back yearly to the United States is stranger than dwarf-tossing, maybe up there with licking toads. It's like watching something dead that you once cared for decompose in time-lapse photography. The country is in lockdown.
I live in Guadalajara a couple of blocks from the US consulate, a fortress. Big concrete stop'em-bombs circle it, disguised as planters. Iron bars spaced a...
Buckshot and Designer Water
Fred Reed
2004-11-11 17:00
I have received thousands of letters (all right, three letters, but I'm rounding up) asking me to explain the election. Bending to the public will, I'll try.
The way it looks to me is coastal snots against the heartland. The wine-and-cheese folk against pickups with gun racks. Texas against Massachusetts. Maybe that's too simple, but I'm not going to admit it. I don't have to. I'm writing the...
Reinventing the Bushman
Fred Reed
2004-10-03 16:00
I imagine taking a bushman from some hitherto undiscovered Pacific isle and setting him down in front of a television in, say, Washington. The fellow would be astounded. He might say, 'Whoa, boss! Heap magic! Spirits inside, talk talk. Bad juju.' He would have no idea how the babbling box worked, or of the civilization that produced it'where it came from, why it was as it was, what its literature...
Fredwitz on War
Fred Reed
2004-09-26 16:00
A columnist has a peculiar perspective on things. He sits high above the intellectual plain and has mud flung at him from all sides. He probably deserves it, but that is not my point here. He sees a world in which everyone has the correct answer except himself. He also sees that everyone's correct answer is different from everyone else's. Oh well.
There follows an explanation of our invasion of...
Letters About Jews
Fred Reed
2004-08-24 16:00
From time to time I write about the cloacal morality of the media as they go about wrecking civilization and annoying hell out of me. For rhetorical convenience I use 'New York' and 'Hollywood' as a sort of abbreviation for the news racket and the screen trades.
This column gets a lot email. Some of it assumes that 'New York' and 'Hollywood' are code words for 'Jews,' and excoriates me mightily...
Pondering the Telescreen
Fred Reed
2004-08-16 16:00
Denunciations of television have become as routine as breathing: the programming is crass, stupid, propagandistic, so bad that only an idiot would watch it yet everybody does. Actually things are worse. They are much worse.
To see what is happening, start with what may be the crucial truth of our times: People will watch a screen. They will watch anything in preference to nothing, watch programs...
In Praise of Mexicanas
Fred Reed
2004-08-05 16:00
Living in Mexico as I do, I often hear from North Americans that gringos move to Mexico chiefly for the women. Well, yes. The women are certainly an attraction. Indeed they are. The North American tendency however is to confuse women with sex. American men in the United States usually see Mexican women as LBFMs, 'little brown, er, sex machines,' faceless, indistinguishable, and cheap. So do...
Clueless in Baghdad
Fred Reed
2004-07-28 16:00
Some months ago I returned to my home in Mexico after two weeks of hard touring in Bolivia. It was the kind of travel that at my advanced age I should know better than, but never do: flying into grass strips to boat into the endless swamps of the pampas, freezing in unheated shacks in the wild high desert at 12,000 feet, mountain biking down El Camino de la Muerte out of La Paz next to drop-offs...
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