Hawk I? One can never be completely Shaw.

 

 

“In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty”. -Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

 

…The thing about Obama is he has this, he’s a very articulate guy when it comes to saying nothing. -Mark Steyn

In P.J O’Rourke’s precise and very funny book ‘Give War a Chance’, he speaks of how in the 1960’s and its shabby aftermath, he once believed in everything but the facts. And now he believes in nothing except the empirical and even then. For me, this fits kind of neatly into my two favourite Left Liberals and maybe my only two. Sadly, both are entirely fictional characters.

The first one that really influenced my feeble humour and attitudes was Hawkeye Pierce from the TV show M*A*S*H. I loved Hawkeye and it was always disappointing as a profoundly clueless 14 year old that I didn’t live in a cool army tent riffing with a hip pal on the resident straight man. And that I didn’t have the required equipment to home make a martini.

Hawk was and is a classic Left Liberal of the imagination and a human mess of contradictions. Filled with good intensions and unaware it seems, of the path to Hell they pave. At turns morally driven, decent, obsessive and immoral; he’s witty, fun, giving and entirely selfish. Hawkeye was good company, neurotic, unstable and courageous while simultaneously an utter wimp. Hawke also managed to be paranoid, open, careless, fussy, annoying and fascinating.

Pierce was a highly skilled professional and mostly personally incompetent. Hawk had deep insight and self destructive sensitivity to many things, while believing that equivalence was broadly applicable which made him often utterly clueless to the many true forces for evil. That’s because, for Hawkeye, the paradoxical self flagellant and egotist, everything must be about him, good and bad included, so anything bad can only be from either himself or alternatively, his own country and culture. For Hawkeye, there are no independent agents outside of America and the West, only victims.

This is perhaps the main Left Liberal conceit…Continue Reading on Colonel Robert Neville Always Dresses for Dinner