Goon defined
In his biography of Peter Sellers, Alexander Walker quotes a radio critic named James Thomas about the Goon Show, the influential ’50s British radio program on which Sellers appeared.
“What is a Goon? A Goon is someone with a one-cell brain. Anything that is not basically simple puzzles a Goon. His language is inarticulate, he thinks in the fourth dimension.”
On a completely unrelated matter, I will not be watching the state of the union. I just can’t. I can’t watch George W. Bush speak. And it’s not just to do with politics, it’s to do with my love of the spoken word, and the agony that he puts it through.
But if I were to be watching it, I’d want to have read this Altercation first.
From Eric Alterman:
“This Jarvis “blood libel/Get on the bus or else” bluster reminds me of the day the Marines tore down the statue in Baghdad. I had just questioned Paul Wolfowitz’s contention that “we will be welcomed as liberators” in The Nation. What happened on that day? Little Roy demanded that I take it back on his blog. David Brooks announced that my entire world view had collapsed. Bill O’Reilly showed my picture on Fox–the last time my face has been up there–as some kind of Wall of Shame type thing. And the Weekly Standard included me in their collections of idiotic statements, or whatever it is they call them. What else happened? Well, I was right. More than 1300 dead Americans and 11,000 injured Americans and who knows how many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would tell you that, if they were still alive to do so. We were “welcomed” as not as liberators but as occupiers. A bunch of marines pulling down a statue didn’t change that; proclaiming “mission accomplished” didn’t change that; pretending your found WMDs won’t change that; and elections, unfortunately, won’t change it. Thousands more will die for Bush’s ignorance and arrogance.”
