Carnal Reason

My favorite blog ever was Steven Den Beste’s now retired USS Clueless, which I started reading in early 2002. One of the other blogs I remember from back in the day was Eject! Eject! Eject!. I ran across it today after a long absence, and was pleased to see Bill Whittle still in fine form:

Socialist intellectuals will tell you that Cuba is a model nation: universal free health care, near total literacy, and essentially no gap whatsoever between the rich and the poor. They call it an island paradise where brotherhood and compassion reign in stark contrast to the brutal inequalities of the heartless and racist capitalist monster to the North, ruled by its Imperial Nazi King, who is the devious mastermind of all manner of Conspiratorial Wheels and also a moron.Capitalist intellectuals -– and there are not many, since most of these people have jobs -– argue that Cuba is a squalid, corrupt, poverty-ridden basket case, a land of oppression and secret police and torture chambers run by a megalomaniac who practices the most idiotic, inhuman and degrading economic system ever invented.

So here we sit in the chartroom, with our competing maps. What to think?

Well, ask yourself what it would take to give up your home, your country, your family and all your friends. Ask yourself how desperate you would have to be to sneak out in the night, and strap your family – your grandmother and infant son – to a collection of inner tubes lashed together and set out in the dark surf across 90 miles of shark-infested water in the dead of night, hoping against hope to make landfall. We can all agree, I think, that that kind of desperation could only be driven by fairly passionate first-person opinion of such things. Surely this goes beyond what you or I would do to win a map argument at Starbucks.

So. Go up on deck, get out the telescope, and answer one simple question for me and for yourself:

Which way are the rafts headed?

I was born in Cuba, as were my parents and grandparents, so I have some standing here. Bill, thank you for saying that, and for saying it so well. Upon reflection I find it odd that I thank a man for stating the simple truth, but we live in times when the truth is denied again and again.

Posted on June 20th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: Cuba, blogging, politics