@Che Pasa

The Americans blithely build military bases on top of the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh. How can this be even imaginable?

No doubt they take the crumbling bricks for landing pad ballast. Of course. There's such a ready supply.

You make me weep and rage at the same time with these simple statements.

When I first read of the base over the top of Babylon my gut felt hollowed out.

Soulless. Monstrous. Criminal.

No good can come from such rank disregard for the very cradle of ALL civilization. Ugly Americans come in and piss on the ruins of Babylon and spout nonsense about the people being nothing and having no culture, etc.

Words cannot convey...

I don't know. When I look back at what Athens did to Melos (see Thucydides) or read the debates in congress over the Indain removal act (see Trail of Tears, etc) I find myself quite full of horror. And in a class I teach with a colleague who is a history professor on native american thought and history we have found the most effective presentation to be a dispassionate narration of what actually happened (including the facts of human suffering, the realities of it): and usually the horror hits them. Any "long view" that minimizes the realities of human suffering (by glossing over or not presenting them) is to me poorly thought out. I agree that we should not frame the history so as to evoke a certain reaction (that would be rhetoric and not history); but I think however dispassionate you are, the realities of human suffering, to a thinking mind, will have its effect. I have no fear of any real thinkers looking back at our time and not seeing the horror.

that the nuclear weapons components disguised as helicopter batteries were transported over by Milo Minderbender.

Just don't blame Yossarian.

that is well and clearly said:

"what I mean to say is that the changes which occurred to make homo sapiens sapient and not just sentient were just that: changes It was us, William, who called them advancements or progress. This ability to manipulate the environment to a greater degree, both mentally and physically, than any other species, were evolutionary changes, that is, they worked and they happened to be available. They were not necessarily better. Nor does evolution have the ability to peer into the future and comprehend consequences. The things that make us men may turn out to be an amalgam of destructive tendencies, in the long run. Nature doesn't care."

Thus you baldly state my secret fear before all the world (well, part of it). If it is all quantity and no quality then I move way beyond horror. And it may be you are right. Bob Dylan said it best for me: Oh Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of mobile with the memphis blues again?

you really need to give fair warning on those links. To unsuspectingly click on it and be faced with that visage and voice is a cruel thing to do to a man on the sunday evening before workday monday morning. I think I will go look at Pastor Wright's sermon again to make me feel better.

you did say theocon mentor/hero, but I did not expect it to be the anti-christ himself.

"Never mind asking the millions who perished; no one ever asks them."

But we can answer for them, or put ourselves (through moral imagination) in their place? So as better to analyze now, before it happens again?