My New Year's Resolution

I generally arrive at the end of the year with a bout of insomnia. I lay awake last night and listened to "No Country for Old Men"—a book that has been much praised and which is now a major motion picture, and which I found to be largely senseless and gratuitously violent.

I see of course why this should be a book for our times.

I heard numerous politicians say yesterday that "the surge" in Iraq has been a success.

What this means is that over the past six months fewer American troops have been killed in Iraq while civilian casualties have gone up. It is true of all civil wars that civilians die in great numbers.

Most of the GOP’s candidates are comfortable with this outcome.

Accordingly they are in support of civilian casualties in the name of "American foreign policy".

In the aftermath of 9-11 the Bush administration has promoted civil wars in Pakistan and Iraq in the name of the war on terror.

In the final analysis I can’t square my Christian conscience with my nation’s present foreign policy. I do not believe that by killing civilians we foster freedom and peace.

I am appalled by the easy and imperial indifference to the taking of innocent lives which continues to be promulgated by the major Republican presidential candidates, including Mike Huckabee who ought to be the most outraged of all.

America has lost its collective ability to see violence as a grievous fascination and a moral mistake.

Cormac McCarthy’s "No Country for Old Men" is just junk. His characters are cartoon figures held together by the standard pathologized clichés favored by an increasingly illiterate culture.

Accordingly my New Year’s Resolution for 2008 is to stop reading
crime novels and/or "thrillers" and instead redouble my reading of
poetry.

Here are some famous lines by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Happy New Year.

… The passion being in an inverse proportion to the insight, that the more

vivid, as this the less distance; anger is the inevitable consequence. The

absence of all foundation within their own minds for that which they yet believe

both true and indispensable for their safety and happiness, cannot but produce

an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has

no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first

defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

S.K.