Stay Out of Tegucigalpa, Lebowski

There is a certain charm to the response, which moves feelingly, but could've used a continuity editor. In the first paragraph, it accuses us (the, uh, Who Is IOZ? community) of campus liberalism, which is understandable, given our fondness for tapestries on the dorm room walls. Of course, this is as far from a den of revolution, self-proclaimed or otherwise, as you can get, seeing as we counsel that the revolution is useless, defeat inevitable. The condition of man is to be ruled. Annoyance is the ultimate resistance. And cetera. I personally am not ready to fight for Latin America. I simply counsel that the United States, a corporation in which I am just a poor, extremely minor shareholder, not fight for Latin America either, indeed, that we leave Latin America alone.

In the second paragraph, Mr. Loomis declares that this aggression will not stand, man, and proclaims that the principle of preventing rightist rollback of leftist political gains to be "more important than this particular situation in Honduras," a curious complaint from a man who just a half-sentence before was parenthetically castigating his critics for their ignorance of "actual conditions in Latin America." Well, is it the particular or the universal that hold the day, the principle or the actual? I suspect the question remains unresolved in Mr. Loomis' brain. I suspect the question hasn't occurred to him. Meanwhile, the more pressing question, which motivated my first little foray, goes thunderously unanswered: I am still not sure what it means to say the coup cannot stand. Send in the Marines? Place your suggestions in the box.

In the third paragraph, Loomis ventures that I and others react poorly to criticisms of Castro and Chavez. Allowing that such reactionaries exist, so what? Whatever else you might say about those two, they are leftist, Latin-American-ish presidents . . . though presumably not the sort whose ousters Loomis would personally prohibit from standing. Or are they? In any case, it doesn't seem germane.

After this we return to Loomis' fanciful "world," whatever or whomever that may be, and his insistence that it not "allow the coup to succeed," again without pausing to take a breath and suggest just what this world is supposed to do about it. He then notes that President Zelaya is not "a real progressive leader," although Loomis, gosh, sure wishes that were the case, but in the meantime, what're'ya gonna do, vote Republican? He concludes with a clarion call. What happens in Honduras has no effect on the rest of the world, unless it happens, in which case, it will affect the rest of the world. Now that's clarity you can change your belief in.

Wooly-headed sentiments like these usually herald a dire case of the neoconservatives, for eventually the revolution can only ever be served by sending in the Marines. Meanwhile, the non-revolutionaries here at Who Is IOZ? advise only that the US stay the fuck away from Latin America, letting them fight their own wars and revolutions, rather than forever seeking to mold other peoples to our passing political whims.