Lileks has been musing on why the Three Musketeers never had muskets:
Where are their guns? They never have guns. They must have been a grave disappointment when they showed up. We are here, my liege! The Musketeers! Fine, fine, take up position on the parapet, and aim down at – say, where are your muskets? We have them not, my liege! We live life at swordpoint! All for one, and one for – Fine, you have a motto, I know, but I wanted guns. Why do you call yourselves musketeers if you don’t have any bloody muskets? Tres simplisme, monsieur! We must see the whites of our foes’ eyes, wide with fright! We must – Oh shut up and take these muskets and start shooting at something, for God’s sake.
Other amusing pop-cultural observations as well (and as usual).
Less than fifty years ago, African-Americans were barred from public universities, restaurants, and even drinking fountains in many parts of the country. On Tuesday we came together and transcended that shameful legacy, electing an African-American to the country’s top job — which, in fact, appears to be his first actual job. Certainly, it doesn’t mean that racism has disappeared in America, but it is an undeniable mark of progress that a majority of voters no longer consider skin color nor a dangerously gullible naivete as a barrier to the presidency.
It’s also heartening to realize that as president Mr. Obama will soon be working hand-in-hand with a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard like Senator Robert Byrd to craft the incoherent and destructive programs that will plunge the American economy into a nightmare of full-blown sustained depression. As Vice President-Elect Joe Biden has repeatedly warned, there will be difficult times ahead and the programs will not always be popular, or even sane. But as we look out over the wreckage of bankrupt coal companies, nationalized banks, and hyperinflation, we can always look back with sustained pride on the great National Reconciliation of 2008. Call me an optimist, but I like to think when America’s breadlines erupt into riots it will be because of our shared starvation, not the differences in our color.
“Mark my words,” Biden promised at the Seattle fundraiser Sunday. “There will be an international crisis. The world will be looking. They’ll say, hey, here is this handsome, clean, ar-ti-cu-late young president, not unlike a very, very tanned John Fitzgerald Kennedy, dancing at his inaugural ball with his beautiful wife who is not unlike a very very very extremely tanned Jackie. And our enemies will think, ‘ba ha ha, look at how thees seely new Amerikanski preseedent dances so! Such skeels can only be from many years in zee dancing school, where theys do not teaching the toughness! Launch zee meesiles!’ But these enemies are in for a big surprise. America’s foes must never confuse Barack Obama’s terrific dance floor moves with weakness — because as an Afro-American African, Barack is a natural dancer.”
…”Ching chow pow!” added Biden, demonstrating his point with several pantomime karate chops. He also issued a pointed warning to the government of Spain.
“Let me be blunt: if you think we will sit idly by while you land your mighty galleons at Boca Raton, and unleash your gleaming-helmeted conqustadores to enslave and convert our whiny retired Jewish-Florida-Americans – well, think again, Cortes. Hey mang, say helloo to my leetle fren’!” said Biden, spraying the room with pantomime machine gun fire.
As a current resident of Rat Mouth of Jewish ancestry, I’ll be ever confident with him holding the nucular football.
Only P.J. O’Rourke could write an hilarious column about his cancer diagnosis:
Why can’t death — if we must have it — be always glorious, as in “The Iliad”? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallouja and Kandahar. But nowadays, death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home, or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV, or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed.
I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.
Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy’s. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass … well, I’ll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?
I don’t believe in God, but it he’s there, please bless him.