I saw a funny one-liner that made me think.

I was perusing some newspaper columns yesterday, catching up a bit. I've forgotten whose column I was reading, but the writer lampooned the relentless branding of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the "War On Terror™". It's a pithy, near-perfect comment.

Here's the problem: You don't actually wage war against an idea or a practice; you wage that war against people. Whether you oppose that war or not, it is the most serious of human undertakings and shouldn't be marketed like a dad-gummed Hollywood movie. This appears to be part of the strategy of the current administration and their supporters to make the war seem like the right thing, to disassociate the discussion of the war from the too-ugly truth of combat's daily grind. This war is against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq–not the concept of terrorism.

Making war on "terror" is like making war on sunsets or war on semicolons.

CDs listened to today:

• Maurice Ravel: String Quartet
• Semisonic: Feeling Strangely Fine
• stellastarr*: (eponymous)