| Growing Up At Gunpoint |
[May. 20th, 2008|07:25 am] |
Yesterday, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo was reporting on McCain's assertions that Iran's current threat to the USA is as big as the Soviet Union's ever was. I sent the following in an email to Marshall:
Growing Up At Gunpoint
"For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbours too,
There'll be nobody left behind to grieve." -- Tom Lehrer
Regarding the claim that terrorists and/or Iran are the biggest threat this nation has ever faced, well, that's just an insult to all of us who spent the first decades of our lives with missiles armed and aimed at us.
Laurie Anderson reminds us that the context to Andy Warhol's "15 minutes" remark was that, at the time, it would take our missiles seven and a half minutes to get to the Soviet Union, and a similar amount of time for their missiles to reach us. So 15 minutes could be all we had LEFT.
This was a central fact of my childhood. It was a central fact of hundreds of millions of childhoods.
And to claim we're currently facing a more immediate threat is to insult us. |
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| Comments: |
I had no idea this was the actual context of Warhol's comments.
I think my 15 minutes are already up.... | |
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