I love books and Why History Matters.

It's wrong, it's a little ridiculous. I'm reading five books right now because I'm a six year old and have no patience to finish one book before I pick up another. I shall list them because this is my blog and I shall be as boring as I so choose (as you've already discovered, I'm sure)

1. The Victorian Age, for one of my classes in the fall
2. The D'oh of Homer: Philosophy and the Simpsons, which I actually started in first year but I only realized just last night that I hadn't finished reading it.
3. Antony and Cleopatra- I was all cocky after watching Shakespeare in Love and Slings and Arrows. I was all, hey Shakespeare, you're not so scary, I've seen you on TV, you can't be that smart. However, reading the foreword(s) of the text, I'm a little frightened. I'm used to having a teacher or a great deal of secondary source material to hold my hand through La Shakespeare. However, I shall persevere.
4. Some biography of Tolkien that was written for children. Right around my reading comprehension level.
5.The Chronicles of Narnia, which are, as I said earlier, fantastic.

Good thing I'm not a productive member of society.

Also, I watched a lot of the O.C. this weekend.

Really good thing I'm not a productive member of society.


I was up late watching TV again. This time it was for a good cause and not the Magic Bullet (although some may think that getting 2 revolutionary food processing systems for the price of one is a good cause, I'm just saying). There was this author, Niall Ferguson, speaking on TVO about how the United States is an Empire in denial. Crapping on America? Check. Delightfully British? Check. Interesting parallels between the Roman Empire and the United States? Check. My hornies were ablaze. He made a good case for the continued presence of the US in Iraq, even if I don't necessarily agree.

So after he was done it was like 3 am or something ridiculous and I'm like, finally, I can go to bed. I was dead wrong. The program was like Big Ideas or something like that and they presented the other side of the argument, that the United States needed to get it's butt out of Iraq like whoa. Robert Fisk from The Independant (London paper) was also delightfully British and drew scary parallels between the American occupation of Iraq and the British occupation in 1918. You know how the United States thought they'd be welcomed as liberators? Well so did the British (only Iraq was under the thumb of the Turks in this period). The Brits also had a little problem with insurgency that they blamed on outside agitators. Scarily similar.

This, people, is why history matters. If anyone in charge of this debacle had ever read a book about Iraq's colonial past they might have acted a little differently. If they'd read that the Brits were there for 40 YEARS maybe they wouldn't have had the ludicrous idea that a stable democracy could be built in LESS THAN TWO YEARS.

Seriously, the British occupation was less than 100 years ago. Get a clue world.

I liked listening to Robert Fisk talk because, unlike a certain leader of the free world who shall remain unnamed, he's actually talked to some Iraqis that aren't Ahmed Chalabi. That's someone I can respect.


And there's totally a British history program every monday at 10 pm on TVO. I'm tres excited. God, I am a dork. Disown me. It doesn't matter how much booze I've drunk or pot I've smoked, I'm a geek.