4 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, April 13, 2004 OPINION Ulije- 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 opinion. michigandaily.com tothedaily@michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JORDAN SCHRADER Editor in Chief JASON Z. PESICK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE "Iwarn the Arabic media: Iraq's patience has reached its limit and they will regret what they are doing." - Iraq's National Security Advisor Muaffaq al-Rubaie on the state of Iraqi television, as reported by the Agence France-Presse. COLIN DALY THE MICHIGAN DA Y I fleet, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly ... AUBREY HENRETTY NEU ROTICA When I said it was my last column, they all had suggestions. Write about neo-domes- ticity and gender roles, they said. Write a really impassioned case against the Bush administration, something so powerful it will bring readers to tears and - more importantly - to the polls in November. Write about kittens. Write about affirma- tive action and unions and capitalism and don't waste a single word, because this is it, this is your last chance. Write about the Middle East. Write about language. Write about the terrible history class you're tak- ing and how if anyone is thinking about taking it, she should e-mail you immedi- ately so you can talk her out of it. Write a sestina. Write porn. Whatever you do, they said, don't write a goodbye column. Seriously. We'll vomit. Sorry, guys - there's too much. Trying to pick a topic for a last column is a lot like trying to do anything at all when you're waiting tables and your section is full and the kitchen is a war zone and everyone needs something two minutes ago. For every second you save, you need a hundred more. You couldn't get everything done even if there were two of you, and sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing at all. Stop. Get yourself a glass of water and lean on the service bar and ask the service bartender if she's heard the one about the ham sandwich. A ham sandwich walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender says he is sorry, but that's out of the question. Con- fused, the ham sandwich asks why. "I'm sorry," the bartender says again, "but we don't serve food here." When I was young and lacked confi- dence, a professor told me I was digressive and uninteresting, and that this was never more true than when I tried to relate litera- ture to my own life. I was willing to give her digressive, but I've never quite forgiv- en that last part, the part about literature and life. Literature - all writing, in fact - is worthless if it is not personal, is a waste of time if it doesn't demand that you step inside it, feel it, empathize with it, be just as crazy as it is, if only for a moment. Shortly after that professor said that thing to me, I started writing columns for the Daily. That was three years ago. Since then, once every two weeks, for 750-800 short words, I have been allowed to play the smartest person in the world, to insist implicitly that no one could argue what I argued as well as I argued it, to smile slyly at 40,000 people and dare them to dis- agree. Meanwhile, I've been meeting peo- ple 10 times as smart as I am, and far more interesting to boot. I've been leading a double life, at once supremely confident in my words and humbled beyond humble by the great and creative minds of those around me. I came into the Daily a reject, a column applicant who hadn't made the cut, a digressive and uninteresting freshman. I might have stayed away, dejected, had it not been for a short, friendly e-mail from the tall, friendly editor who'd read my sub- missions. She thought I had potential and told me I should come in and write other things for a while and see where that led. I .was terrified (not interesting! didn't make cut!), thinking this had to be a joke, a pity e-mail, but I walked in the door a week later and never walked back out. I've thought often about what would have hap- pened if that editor had been just a little bit busier that day, or just a little bit less thoughtful. This all would have turned out very differently. This would be someone else's goodbye column. That e-mail was nothing - a shrug - but I latched onto it like it was my one and only chance to be interesting, to do some- thing worthwhile with my time here. Look- ing back, I think maybe it was. There's got to be a metaphor for life in there somewhere. But I digress. Here's what's important: Vote Kerry in November, support unions only when their demands are reasonable, watch television, curse loudly in public, skip class, read everything, wear comfortable shoes. If you must hate your job, hate it with gusto. Learn things. Know that your friends are the best people in the world. Make sure they know it, too. Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Listen. Argue respect- fully. Have fun. Thanks for everything. I'll miss you. So long. Henrett can be reached at ahenrett@umich.edu. VIEWPOINT The day Saddam's statue fell BY WAJ SYED You're George W. Bush. You're 50- something. You're a Yale grad. You've had cocaine-use problems. You're supposed to be a draft-dodger. You've been voted in on the most contro- versial election of the age. The only peo- ple who like you on the domestic front are from your redneck constituency (which is the Christian Coalition or any one who supports the Christian Coalition, i.e. the American South or Midwesterners with relatives from the American South), your cabinet (probably minus Powell) and maybe your wife. In fact, statistically, just a little more than half of your countrymen hate you. The United Nations abhors you. The Europeans think you're a cowboy from hell. The Africans think you ignore them. The Indians and Chinese only want your money. And the Islamic world, at least on the popular if not on the leader- ship level, wants you served for breakfast, topped with a bit of crusading and a pinch of clash of civilizations. Man, even the Canadians are ticked at you. By default, your only buddy internationally is one Tony Blair, which is a crazy coincidence because he's an old pal of mine as well, but we haven't been talking since he start- ed a career as a co-invader of Islamic countries with you-know-who. But hey, seriously, Blair isn't a bad guy. In fact, you're a pretty nice guy yourself. Your only problem is that those years in Texas haven't really worn off. So what do you do for kicks? Well, there's little doubt that you've had a tough time in office, spending almost three of your first nine months on vacation because of your high-stress job. And then, on a fine September morning in 2001, you get to deal with the largest terrorist event in the history of the world, short of, hmmm, Napoleon's battle at Leipzig, the Mon- gol attack on Baghdad, Hitler's invasion of Rus- sia and oh yes, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb runs. But anyways, considering that those were "wars" and this is "terrorism" (a scourge which exists in the gray area between all-out crazy nukes/commandos/fighter-bombers war and pathetically hippie/bong-smoking/can't-we- all-be-friends peace), we'll let you have it. Sept. 11 was a huge tragedy. So, faced with such havoc, what did v A~ dnU W11 ,,,n.. rA ri r~tty rnAi inh Brits, the Pakistanis, even the Iranians lined up. After all, America had been wronged. We all thought so. It was a good thing taking out those Taliban crazies and their crazier al-Qaida pals. Read my lips. We all thought so. Then things got a tad more complicated. Considering you can bench 240 pounds and you're the president of the United States, we all knew you to be a pretty strong guy. You had "smoked them out of their caves," and you now wanted to "take the war to terrorists." Fair enough. Sounded impressive. We agreed with you, George. Sure, let's take the war to the terrorists. Let's tell Iraq and Saudi Arabia and-Egypt and Syria and Jordan to get their case together on human rights and democracy so terrorist recruitment can be stemmed. Let's reconstruct Afghanistan and disarm its warlords so that post-Soviet factionalism never returns. Let's send peacekeepers to quell the terror of Africa's rampant civil wars. Let's get Pakistan and India to talk and disengage their nuclear posture. And let's implement that two-state solution in Pales- tine and Israel and tell both parties to take it a little easy. Sounds like a plan, George. Let's do it. And what did you do, George? You did- n't fully commit to Afghanistan, making American military presence more Osama- centric than reconstruction-based. You dilly-dallied with your Arab friends, let- ting them be because you needed their bases. You had a lukewarm, apprehensive approach to Indo-Pakistan peace, not wanting to force India to talk because of trade ties, not wanting to tick the Pakista- nis off too much on Kashmiri infiltration because of the war on terror. Your ignoring Africa while the bloodiest conflict since World War II raged on there was abysmal, a contradiction to your "save-humanity" ethos. And your "road map" to peace in Israel and Palestine lacked resolve. Ameri- can resolve, to back it up, to force Israel to talk, while vetoing any and every Unit- ed Nations resolution against that up-tight, aggressive state. Instead, your version of "taking the war to the terrorists" translated into "let's attack Iraq on bad intelligence, no evi- dence o f weapns o f mass destruiction. ican college grads (believe it or not, a lot of Yalies among them) are unemployed, the U.S. Social Security program is going bankrupt, the U.S. government has the highest budget deficit in history and four U.S. soldiers on average are being killed in Iraq every week, where the latest polls indicate that freedom is welcome, but American occupation is not. And it gets more glib on the global front, George. The American system of alliances, so intricately constructed since the times of Woodrow Wilson, is literally in tatters. American unilateralism has destroyed the confidence and functionality of the United Nations and the prestige of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance in Europe. And the complacent handling of Israeli terror (no doubt in reaction to Palestinian terror) while aggression is exemplified next door in Iraq and Afghanistan has angered much of the Islamic world into believing the semi- myth of a Zionist-American alliance. Pats on the back like "major non-NATO ally" status for Pakistan, a $3 billion annual aid package to Egypt and almost $40 per bar- rel oil prices for Saudi Arabia are not going to deflect the reality of the Ameri- can reputation and position in the world forever. America was hurting after Sept. 11, but instead of raging into a construc- tive anger, it slipped into destructive arro- gance. That is the fallibility of America in the age of terror. That is the legacy of your White House. And oh George, good luck this November. Sved is a University alum and a former Daily 'columnist. He is currently in rural Pakistan. 0 0 LETTERS POLICY The Michigan Daily welcomes letters from all of its readers. Letters from Universi- ty students, faculty, staff and administrators will be given priority over others. Letters should include the writer's name, college and school year or other University affiliation. The Daily will not print any letter contain- ing statements that cannot be verified. T s~tr-c zbnlrl bk0 lrntrtonnnrnirhAvp, ad .-1 . A 4i'. 1 A-1' t .. ..