an aria in present tense

From “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, translation by Andrew Hurley

Wow, I knew she had a large readership, but that's still such a cool coincidence. I hadn't met someone before who had also read her blog! America's image was severely tarnished after that, both internationally and domestically. I could actually see it sliding downhill, especially when the recession hit and the country clearly wasn't even reaping any economic benefits from the war. Now, for example, when Australia announced the discovery of large oil fields, the thread on Reddit was filled with people joking about how America might want to "liberate" Australia too. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.

I'm pretty sure a huge part of my conviction that the war was utterly morally abhorrent was because of Riverbend's blog. I can't describe how happy I was when I found out she had updated. She touched me on an incredibly deep level, and I still wish her all the best. Beyond that, there's nothing more that can be said, other than, "Look at what we did."

"You would think God would relent," the American poet Richard Eberhardt wrote during World War II, "listening to the fury of aerial bombardment." Of course, God is not the cause of aerial bombardment. During the Vietnam War, the United States hired the RAND Corporation to conduct a study of the effects in the peasant villages of Vietnam of their policy of saturation bombing of the countryside. That policy had at least two purposes: to defoliate the tropical forests as a way of locating the enemy and to kill the enemy if he happened to be in the way of the concussion bombs or the napalm or the firebombs. The RAND Corporation sent a young scholar named Leon Goure to Vietnam. His study was rushed by the Air Force which was impatient for results, but he was able to conduct interviews through interpreters with farmers in the Mekong Delta and the mountainous hillside farm regions around Hue. He concluded that the incidental damage to civilian lives was very considerable and that the villagers were angry and afraid, but he also found that they blamed the Viet Cong--the insurrectionist army the U.S. was fighting--and not the United States for their troubles, because they thought of the Viet Cong as their legitimate government and felt it wasn't protecting them. Seeing that the bombing was alienating the peasantry from the enemy Vietnamese, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, General William Westmoreland, the commander in charge of prosecuting the war, and Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, ordered an intensification of the bombing. In the end, there were more bombs dropped on the villages and forests of South Vietnam than were dropped in all of World War II. The estimated Vietnamese casualties during the war is two million. It was a war whose principal strategy was terror. More Iraqi citizens have now been incidental casualties of the conduct of the war in Iraq than were killed by Arab terrorists in the destruction of the World Trade Center. In the first twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were deaths of civilians. There are imaginable responses to these facts. The nations of the world could stop setting an example for suicide bombers. They could abolish the use of land mines. They could abolish the use of aerial bombardment in warfare. You would think men would relent.