50 Things More Interesting Than the ‘War’

by Joseph R. Stromberg

For the edification and entertainment of my fellow Americans, I submit the following list of things which any rational American might well think more important or more interesting than the present "war":

1. Country music.

2. Private property.

3. Austrian economics.

4. The Tenth Amendment.

5. Origen of Alexandria.

6. Antoine "Fats" Domino.

7. The works of Edward Gibbon.

8. Spiro Agnew’s novel, The Canfield Decision.

9. The Clash.

10. Scrabble.

11. 100-watt light bulbs.

12. Low-tar cigarettes.

13. Riley Puckett.

14. Frasier.

15. Cold Comfort Farm.

16. 1966 Mustangs.

17. Hotdogs with coleslaw.

18. The Auburn-Florida game.

19. Raoul Berger.

20. The glottalic theory of Indo-European consonantism.

21. Bad habits of the Scythians.

22. The revival of representational painting.

23. Jimmy Stewart movies.

24. The stock market.

25. Biltong.

26. R. M. Williams boots.

27. Cape Breton fiddle music.

28. Cheeses.

29. Flea market haggling.

30. Ohio.

31. Roget’s Thesaurus.

32. Robert Benchley.

33. Aristotelian epistemology.

34. Medieval windmill technology.

35. Bracket creep.

36. Perils of the stock market.

37. St. Anselm’s argument for the existence of God.

38. Home schooling.

39. Comparative 20^th-century mass slaughters.

40. The Irish Gaelic spelling reforms of 1948.

41. Elvis Presley’s dog, Gitlow.

42. Interlinear Greek-English New Testaments.

43. The ontological status of abstract nouns.

44. Air conditioning.

45. Free trade.

46. Australian Blue Heelers.

47. Cut-rate department stores.

48. The Dry Tortugas.

49. The topography of Lappland.

50. The stock market.

That’s quite enough for the moment. There may be others. The above list does not reflect my own value scale, so much as the order in which the items came to me. Others would naturally produce a different list.

I would guess, however, that any American could easily come up with 50–100 items more pressing in his or her life than the present "war." I rest my case.

August 12, 2002

Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is holder of the JoAnn B. Rothbard Chair in History at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

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