Over the years our Viewpoints section has featured some interesting essays by artists of various sorts

Over the years our Viewpoints section has featured some interesting essays by artists of various sorts,

including Monty Python‘s Terry Jones and chef-turned-author Anthony Bourdain. One piece I wish we had

excerpted was this bit by English musician Robyn Hitchcock from late 2002 (back when people like Randy

Barnett, Glenn Reynolds, and Andrew Sullivan were pissing themselves over Saddam’s unmanned aerial

vehicles of doom). Hitchcock isn’t a hyperpolitical do-gooder, but he did pen a great antiwar song

back in 1980, the punky, acerbic “I Wanna Destroy You.” From his Slate diary entry of Dec. 9, 2002:

7:07 a.m. Grey dawn. The silhouettes of bare trees slowly take shape against a sky several degrees

darker than the porridge that I have just eaten. The branches, and the twigs that grow from them, wave

in the freezing air. From my window I can see the shapes of people scuttling along the path in the

nearby park, followed by the brake lights of the Civil Defence trucks.

It has been several hours since the last mbt shoesi air raid. We are lucky, I suppose, here in West

London, that the majority of collateral damage has been at Heathrow Airport, 15 miles away and now,

obviously, uninhabited. Furthermore, the immense improvements in the homing devices in unmanned

missiles since the V2 rockets that hit us at the end of W2 (the last time Britain suffered air raids)

have meant that, barring the odd stray bomb pulverizing a mall or side street, the devastation has been

confined to the former airport.