The Machinery of Night

Posted 2:43 PM by Angie Schultz

In the Altogether Down Under

In the wee small hours of the morning, Tim Blair is haunted by thoughts of nekkid women.

You'd think this would be par for the course for Tim (and if his wife ever finds out...), but here he's contemplating a naked Margo Kingston. I'll let Tim fill you in on the details, but the bare facts are that an Australian singer named Grace Knight saw the pictures of the Marin women valiantly stripping for peace, and thought it would be a good idea for Australian women to follow suit.

Now, look. It's not exactly heroic, but it does take a certain amount of fortitude to run around nude on a Northern California winter day, and lie down on the cold wet grass. (Er, not that I, personally, have done this, you understand.) It just doesn't require the same amount of sacrifice to do it in Byron Bay during the summer. Byron Bay is famous beach town up near the Queensland border, and so does not get particularly cold, even in winter, which it isn't now.

The singer naturally had to inform Margo of her plans. Here's the relevant section of Margo's Web Diary:

"Although my political views might be wrong, this should not be happening! And how can anyone [be] politically aware these days - there's so many layers, so much history, so much propaganda, we all get lost."

Grace believes many women feel as she does - desperate, helpless, and afraid to speak up because "they're not able to back it up with political analysis".

In other words, Grace doesn't really have any idea of the history of this conflict, the causes, the options, or what's at stake---she just knows that war is icky and wrong and bad for children and other living things, and so she's against it.

The idea that anyone could know that war is icky and wrong, and still believe it's necessary, that it's better than the alternative, is simply impossible

And apparently, not only is she too lazy or stupid to inform herself on the issues in order to argue effectively, but she believes that many other women are too. So she urges them to communicate with men (since society is "male-dominated") with their bodies, rather than their minds.

How very progressive.

I can't think of a better example of the anti-war crowd. She ought to be ANSWER's poster girl.

She writes really bad song lyrics, too (see sample on Web Diary page).