Great general or greatest general?
Jan. 26th, 2007 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat_sochoIt's Douglas MacArthur's birthday. I've always found him fascinating; his life was truly heroic in many ways, and while his failures were pretty serious, his accomplishments were even greater. There's a reason that the Japanese and Koreans, who don't agree on a whole lot else, have memorials to him - the former have the 1948 Constitution and the latter, a mother-huge statue at Inchon. The William Manchester biography American Caesar is perhaps the best (and least biased) of the many done on MacArthur; those who know MacArthur mainly through the extremely slanted portrayal in Anton Myrer's Once An Eagle especially should read it.
One of the criticisms leveled at the antiwar Democrats in Congress and elsewhere is that they have no plan for Iraq. Well, now that Democratic media darling Michael Moore has sounded off, I guess we can't say that any more. On the other hand, since some folks on the Left seem awfully fond of the Vietnam analogies, it seems only fair to remind them what happened the last time we let them knock the props out from under the war effort.
It's fairly slow at work today, which is just as well since I'm thoroughly unmotivated.
I find it horribly, painfully ironic that I used to have a reputation for being skilled with administrative/bureaucratic stuff, because one of my biggest problems in recent years (going back some 10-20 years, really) has been a continuing inability to stay on top of my financial situation. It's as if the sheer number and size of all my bills -especially the medical bills- has utterly swamped my ability to organize and cope with them, so that I'm constantly in crisis mode, jumping from one fire to the next with not nearly enough urine to do more than push back the flames slightly. (There's probably a section of Dante's Inferno that describes this.) This also makes it nearly impossible to make and stick to a budget, except in the most crude and unsatisfactory manner.
In the long term, this will be solved by taking a job that pays more in a location with a lower cost of living, and one that reduces some of my hideous debt load to boot, but in the short term things are going to suck for a while and I don't really see any way out of it. There's a limit to how much more expense I can cut from my life; the few remaining discretionary expenditures I have wouldn't make much of an impact in the situation, and replacing/disposing of the Sportage isn't really an option either.
I think I'm going to go have lunch, try not to think about it for a while, and see if I can work on getting the whole thing summarized tonight after I get home.
One of the criticisms leveled at the antiwar Democrats in Congress and elsewhere is that they have no plan for Iraq. Well, now that Democratic media darling Michael Moore has sounded off, I guess we can't say that any more. On the other hand, since some folks on the Left seem awfully fond of the Vietnam analogies, it seems only fair to remind them what happened the last time we let them knock the props out from under the war effort.
It's fairly slow at work today, which is just as well since I'm thoroughly unmotivated.
I find it horribly, painfully ironic that I used to have a reputation for being skilled with administrative/bureaucratic stuff, because one of my biggest problems in recent years (going back some 10-20 years, really) has been a continuing inability to stay on top of my financial situation. It's as if the sheer number and size of all my bills -especially the medical bills- has utterly swamped my ability to organize and cope with them, so that I'm constantly in crisis mode, jumping from one fire to the next with not nearly enough urine to do more than push back the flames slightly. (There's probably a section of Dante's Inferno that describes this.) This also makes it nearly impossible to make and stick to a budget, except in the most crude and unsatisfactory manner.
In the long term, this will be solved by taking a job that pays more in a location with a lower cost of living, and one that reduces some of my hideous debt load to boot, but in the short term things are going to suck for a while and I don't really see any way out of it. There's a limit to how much more expense I can cut from my life; the few remaining discretionary expenditures I have wouldn't make much of an impact in the situation, and replacing/disposing of the Sportage isn't really an option either.
I think I'm going to go have lunch, try not to think about it for a while, and see if I can work on getting the whole thing summarized tonight after I get home.
