Grim's Hall

Bring them on:

President Bush said this on July 7th. While back-reading for something, I find that I said it on March 29th, in the course of a rejection of Noam Chomsky. If you don't want to revisit the whole thing, what I said was: "Bring them on: we'll clear the world of them."

I was drawing on Moby Dick for that, one of my favorite lines in the whole novel. I don't know where Bush got it--I won't claim he took it from here. I have to say that I feel the same way today. Osama bin Laden called this tune. On 9/11, he and his took us over the edge from the world of order and law into the world of war. We will not, frankly, have peace again until we have met on the battlefield those who think they can destroy the order of the West through violence, not until we have met them and slain them. There is no one we could surrender to if we would. There is not anyone to negotiate with.

I'm an openminded sort of fellow--for example, I support the northern Sudan's call for Sharia law because I understand that their desire is, by removing judicial power from an illegitimate government that came to power by coup, placing that judicial authority instead in the hands of local imams, to restrain the government's authority. Sharia makes perfect sense under the circumstances, and I wish them the best of it.

With the Islamists who want to bring war against us, though, there is no hope. These lads are dead-enders--and matter of fact, so am I. My father's family left Quakerism to fight in the Civil War, because their hatred of slavery overrode their love of pacifism. I have to say we never looked back. My great-great grandfather killed seven men in one night to prevent a lynching. My great-grandfather stood off his father's enemies in a Tennessee gunfight. My grandfather carried a gun until he was nearly eighty, and used it to enforce peace and justice on his nearby surroundings during the Civil Rights troubles of the 1960s. I don't think there's a single bastard who's trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan whose devotion to his cause rivals my father's patriotism. For myself--well, bring it on and see what you get.

And I have a son, named Beowulf. Yes, Osama called the tune. He wanted a fight for the future of mankind. I welcome it. The Beowulf of old said:

I ask you,
lord of the Danes,
protector of this people,
for only one favor:
that you refuse me not,
fair friend of the people,
do not refuse those who
have come so far the chance
to cleanse Herot.

And so we shall.