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06 May 2003: "L'ennui du fin-de-guerre, darling"

Whether one is member of the armed forces, the press, or any number of other professions, after the urgency of war, the cessation of hostilities inevitably leads to a lessened sense of purpose, and warbloggers are now falling prey to this as well. Well, I am anyway. Of course, there are plenty of things happening around the world worthy of comment—reconstruction in Iraq, tensions on the Korean peninsula, the Israel-Palestine "Road Map," SARS, you name it—but they're not fast-paced, fluid situations which change by the hour, or even by the day, and you feel less pressure to comment now.

Oh, yeah, well sure I could point out that Bush's declaration of victory without actually declaring the end of the war fits into the pattern adopted by this administration of creating loopholes by which it claims all the rights but ducks all the responsibilities for its actions. The whole "War on Terrorism" rhetoric is a fine example, by which the administration uses the pretext that the US is "at war" to violate civil liberties and whip the opposition into line, while simultaneously avoiding any action like declaring a state of emergency, or anything else that would involve requiring approval or scrutiny by Congress at any point. A similar dodge is the classification of the Guantanamo Bay detainees as "unlawful combatants," by which the detainees are accorded all the drawbacks of the status of both Prisoner of War and criminal defendant, and none of the rights of either. By in effect declaring victory while not declaring the cessation of hostilities, Bush can reap the political capital of victory without committing the United States to being an Occupying Power (with all the responsibilities that entails) under international law. For an administration that claims to strive to uphold the rule of law, the Bush administration seems to be doing everything it can to dodge the law when it the law proves inconvenient. Sure, I could point all that out, but I won't.

Instead, I'll take a (belated) cue from Colby Cosh on the topic of city slogans. While I have to agree with him that the short list wasn't worth C$200,000 (that's 62,500 Big Macs at Canadian prices), I'm in no position to criticise, really.

For starters, the best my old hometown of The Hague could come up with was "Koninklijk veelzijdig!" (freely: "Royally multifaceted") and I'm not sure Olympia even has an official slogan. The signs at the city limits proudly proclaim "An All-America City", but avoid mentioning that that was in 1987. The slogan "Way to go! Olympia" applies only to the "Olympia Gateway Corridor" which is an exaggerated way of saying "the 5th Avenue bridge." In fact, the best recognised city motto, as borne out by this t-shirt is "Don't move here, you'll hate it."
In the meantime, the best the tourist board of Lacey (which abuts Olympia to the east) seems to be able come up with is "19 miles from Tacoma." There is a lot of ambiguity in this phrase, and one is left to wonder whether they mean "we're only 19 miles from Tacoma" or "hey, at least we're not any closer."
Lord only knows what Tumwater has; probably "well, we used to have a brewery."

Still, in the case of Olympia, at least "there's a there there" (right down to the Evergreen Terrorist Training Camp in the woods out west, or so say—with utter conviction—some people who couldn't even find Washington state on a map if you forced them at gunpoint), which Colby seems to imply is not the case with Edmonton. You'd think something like

"We've got the Oilers and there's jobs available; what the hell more do you want?"

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