Tuesday, June 28, 2005

The Super Secret Hero Club

Jonah Goldberg says:
I don't use the word "hero" lightly, but I am the greatest hero in American history. Except, maybe, for Al Gore.

On the basis of that quote alone I wanted to write about this article. You'll have to read it to learn the details of his heroism, but it's the events leading up to Al Gores feat of courage that really caught my attention:
Of course, I didn’t realize any of this until I read an essay in last week’s New York Times by one Fatina Abdrabboh, a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. You see she is a Muslim woman too.
... [And] she was in pain. She was working out at a stylish upscale gym in that known hotbed of anti-Muslim bigotry Cambridge, Massachusetts. All she was trying to do was work out, to build her physical strength to match the psychological and spiritual stamina required to persevere, on a daily basis, in that infamous City of Hate. But she couldn’t escape the oppression, which flooded around her like the Charles River breaking its banks. She tried to ignore the dirty stares from upscale Islamophobes looking to feel-the-burn in their pecs and then rain that heat a thousand-fold upon the Saracen hordes of Cambridge and, yes — dare to dream — New Haven. The in-house TV sets spewed hatred upon her.

Uh...And she was watching which TV sets again? In my experience, American news programs in general don't seem all that anti-Muslim. If anything, they are doing yoga quality back bending to be so non-anti-Muslim as to be PRO Muslim. There's nothing wrong with being pro-Muslim - but to be so in this way seems to invalidate the work that our troops are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. (No, the war is not against all of Islam, I'm not saying that. Don't leave hateful comments.)

The point is, I haven't seen TVs spewing anti-Muslim hate here in Ohio...and so I can't imagine local Cambridge news spewing it either.

Seriously, what was she watching? I think we should start a campaign to secure the video tapes. We could call it:
www.WhereAreTheTapesFromTheHateSpewingTVs.org

Or...something.

Anyway, read the whole article...you wouldn't want to miss Al Gores dramatic key rescue:
She “got on a treadmill and started running as hard as I could.” But she couldn’t sweat out the hate. When she reached for her towel to mop-up the oppression, she dropped her keys!

Her keys, man! Her…keys!

“It was a small thing, I know, but as they slid down the rolling belt and fell to the carpet, my faith in the United States seemed to fall with them. I did not care to pick them up. I wanted to keep running.”

But then: Hope.

"Ma'am, here are your keys," declared a smiling and friendly Al Gore, former vice president of the United States. “Mr. Gore had gotten off his machine behind me, picked up my keys, handed them to me and then resumed his workout.”

He got her keys! Al Gore saved her keys!

I can already hear them polishing his Nobel Prize.

And by the way, Jonah Goldberg is my hero.

[Thanks to the Ranger for sending me this article and suggesting a possible soundtrack: The Battle Hymn of the Republic]