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Just finished reading...

...The Subject Steve (ISBN 0767908856) by Sam Lipsyte. Good, funny, strange. Likely to appeal to fans of Chuck Palahniuk.

Thoughts on the way home from the pub

...it seems that since the war started, support for it in this country has risen above 50%. It seems reasonable to ask, or at least, speculate as to why, though the Economist does an unusually poor job of doing so. I can think of a few possibilities:

• Additional information coming to light since the invasion. If so I must have missed it; granted there've been some pretty gruesome reports coming out of the occupied areas concerning torture cells and so on, but I can't believe that enough people had missed previous descriptions of what was going on in Iraq to be so thoroughly swayed in their opinion by that. (Reminds me of a lot of the pre-war debate on Usenet etc; almost none of it, on either side, seemed likely to sway anyone...)
• The "support the troops" effect. Should require no explanation.
• Some kind of concept of collective acceptance of national decisions: argue against a decision you disagree with until it's made, but thereafter regard it as the will of the country and move onto the next thing. People do this all the time on a smaller scale, it doesn't seem implausible that they might apply the same logic to national matters.
• "My country right or wrong". Superficially similar to the collective acceptance idea but I think really more closely related to "support the troops", and a throwback to less individualistic times.