Fear of flying on the reactionary "left"

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight. (The first working glider plane was invented some years before by a German Jew named Otto Lilienthal.) Best of the Web has this absolute howler from George Moonbat Monbiot:

We've often observed that today's political left has largely abandoned its faith in social progress and become almost entirely a reactionary movement. George Monbiot, a columnist for the London Guardian, provides a nice example in a piece on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight, which is today.

The anniversary "should be a day of international mourning," moans Monbiot. "December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine." Monbiot calls flying machines a weapon of mass destruction; after all, have been used to drop bombs, including nuclear ones (though as the late Bob Bartley pointed out, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a lot of Japanese lives). More recently, al Qaeda used planes in their attacks on Sept. 11. Monbiot's conclusion: "Just as Alexander the Great worshipped his horse, George Bush, the new conqueror of Persia [sic], will [today] worship the aeroplane. Our societies are built upon these technologies of war: the current world order fell from the hatches of the aeroplane. At 10.35am, North Carolina time, George Bush and the other enthusiasts for domination will bow down before it. The rest of us should observe 12 seconds of silence, in commemoration of the deeds wrought by those magnificent men in their killing machines."

But wait. Monbiot glosses too quickly over Alexander and his horse, though he does note earlier in the piece that "in the past we raised our eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens." Plainly the trouble began with the invention of horses. Horses go "neigh," it's time to say "nay" right back to them.

Yearning for a pristine pre-industrial past, of course, can no more be "progressive" than fire can be cold. Except, of course, that "cold fire" is the Dutch term for gangrene, the intellectual variety of which has been affecting the "left"-ist chattering class for some time...