This is
the first Corner post ever that I've been at a loss to parody.
[M]ost Americans probably are not in imminent danger of death by stingray. But I do wonder if Irwin, having taken risks so oftten in the past, having cheated death on so many occasions, may not have gradually become over-confident in the face of danger.
Nations, as much as individuals are susceptible to such thinking. Kissinger said - I wish I could find the exact quote - that past victories can lead to defeat because those past victories can appear to have been inevitable.
I worry that because Americans proved equal to the task of defeating the Axis is the 1940s, and because the Communists lost the Cold War, too many of us have come to think we will of course defeat the Militant Islamists or the Islamo-Fascists or Radical Jihadis or whatever term you prefer. But the outcome of those other pastwars was not inevitable. Nor is the outcome of this one. Every stingray is a very real and present danger.
-- Cliff May
There's a lot of different ideas in here, sort of like when Bush talks and everything his advisors have ever told him gets blended together and comes out as one mush-grey colored smoothie of foreign policy wisdom. And so my problem is, I'm not entirely sure which parts were originally what. There's Hitler, the Soviet Union, the Cold War, militant Islam, and undersea creatures in there, but in what proportions? Can a message be deciphered from this one ominous warning, or are we doomed to ignore Kissinger's wisdom yet again -- whatever it was?
I'm pretty sure the stingrays are supposed to be Muslims, but they're also like Hitler and the Soviet Union. Or maybe they are mostly Hitlers, but Islamic versions of Hitler. And they're also communists, of course, because stingrays do not believe in individual ownership of the sea's resources.
Or maybe the real point is that we're not supposed to step on Muslims while swimming, because while they are normally peaceful, every once in a freak while one of them will stab you in the heart with a poisonous barb. Or maybe a collection of stingrays is like a collection of Hitlers and Stalins and Islamofascists, and they hide under the sand on the sea floor. And maybe, now that I think of it, missile defense is like one of those underwater vacuums that sucks up the sand so that you can see all the Hitlers hiding down there. Or maybe National Review Online is the Hitler-sucking undersea vacuum -- they suck powerfully, in order to expose the IslamoHitlers, and maybe missile defense is more like wearing sandals when you're going in the water, just in case you step on Hitler. Except Hitler isn't Hitler, remember, he's a non-Christian Dasyatid.
But then I thought to myself, the stingrays are also supposed to represent "Militant Islamists" in general, and I can't quite figure out what the Militant Islamist part of a stingray is. I mean, there's obviously the stinger part, which sortof can represent the abstract notion of militancy, when you're not using it to represent the Axis march through Europe, but what about the Islamist part? Maybe non-Christianity is represented by the absence of dorsal fins?
The warnings of Henry Kissinger are indeed certainly apropos to these new, stingray-infested dangers, however. You may think you've beaten IslamoHitler, but then it turns out that the Dasyatid forces have taken over the Polish steel industry, which allows them substantially increased production capacities. They are also aplacental viviparous, which is a fancy way of saying they give birth to live Hitlers, instead of Hitler eggs, which is the rough equivalent of the Soviet 5-Year Plan.
According to marine biologists, some Hitlers may be "found in cleaning stations where they are attended to by the Bluehead wrasse and Spanish hogfish." Clearly, then, the Bluehead Wrass is Neville Chamberlain, who failed to recognize the dangers of SovietoJihadiHitlerFascists because he was too busy sucking parasitical organisms off of Hitler during the conference of Finding Nemo in 1938. That would probably make the Spanish Hogfish Ronald Reagan, who insisted on a policy of economic warfare against the dangerous Islamofishies instead of just nuking them like all the other Hogfish had urgently been pleading with him to do.
So not nuking the stingrays is, as Cliff May said, cheating death. We are in a Cold War with the stingrays -- so don't fight them just in a bathing suit, you'll probably want to put on a wetsuit for this one. And the moment our nation becomes complacent about stingrays, the Axis powers will take us over.
When I started puzzling over this post, I was of the opinion that perhaps, just perhaps, the Corner post was just one of those instances of punditry so tortured, so painful, and so brain-molesting that in any just world the punditry license of the author would be suspended pending an internal investigation as to whether or not the pundit in question represented a brand of stupidity so spectacularly malignant as to be a menace to meaningful national discourse.
But now, I am beginning to understand. Stingrays, Hitler, the Soviet Union, and militant Islam are all, indeed, part of the same undersea circle of life. If that Frenchman Cousteau had just allowed us to start dumping our nuclear waste onto coral reefs like decent, patriotic EarthoAmericans, Iraq would not have been necessary. Instead, people continue to not take stingrays seriously, and the Muslims are weakening our resolve by singing "Under The Sea" from Disney's Little Mermaid soundtrack -- and if the militant Islamofascists have half the obsessive off-key persistence of my five year old daughter, we're in for a long and ear-splitting fight.
In conclusion, the next time you visit the beach, do not step on Hitler. And the National Review sucks fish crap.