"Security is a Team Effort - - KEEP AMERICA MOVING."
So says a poster on the platform, which I can read through the train window. I've seen some others, with increasing frequency over the past couple of months.
Way to go, guys! And it only took you three years.
Here, let me quote myself. In May of 2002, I wrote
What've we got today? A poorly - publicized color - coded national alert system and a political leadership that's scrambling to make a scandal out of a memo. Where are the posters in our cities' subways? HOW TO RECOGNIZE A SUICIDE BOMBER: Look for the bulky jacket... the nervous jitters... the sweats... muttering of prayers... visible wires at the wrists or on the hands... WATCH YOUR SURROUNDINGS. Goddamn but this PC civil - rights crap is crippling us. Where are the posters telling people who to call if they're suddenly living next to three young Middle - Eastern students who rent a one bedroom apartment month - to - month and have no furniture? Are we going to let the right of people to behave suspiciously negate proper intelligence gathering?
Say... they're still scrambling to make a scandal out of a memo.
Anyway - - then, I did a bit of warrr mongering. This was pre - Iraq, barely post - Afghanistan, and about eight months after 9/11:
Kicking out the Taliban was great and all, but I want blood and guts and gore and veins in my teeth, man! I want every would - be terrorist to know without a doubt that Allah will not save the population of his town, his city, his nation, if he raises a hand against us on our own soil. I want pictures of vast plains of burnt desert littered with the husked remains of enemy soldiers and the smoking wreckage of a thousand tanks. I want the State Ass of every terrorist sponsor to be so utterly and thoroughly kicked that an entire generation will instantly lose the false hope presented by religious extremism.
They may know that now, albeit probably with at least a bit of doubt, and Representative Tancredo is doing his bit by playing the role of Loose Cannon in this film. The fact that they're attacking trains and buses in the UK and tourists in Egypt suggests that perhaps we're not regarded as quite so much of a paper tiger anymore.
As I approach the Secaucus Junction station, I can see the heat - hazed profile of Manhattan... still missing its downtown punctuation. And I still have the sense that we're missing a Presidential emphasis.
The only way to get at the real purpose and intent of the war in Iraq is to ignore the overt message from the White House - - freedom - loving Iraqis, liberation, and so forth. I don't know whether the assessment is that Americans can't handle a plain - spoken statement of strategic national self - interest, or that such a statement would be considered a political liability. Either way, the whole GWOT remains rather nebulous, which leaves the bulk of the non - wonky populace to the tender mercies of our Famous Unbiased Media. Any subtle cues (such as various hints that "it's better to kill them over there than over here,") tend to get filtered out by the wash of BUSH LIED! HIS BRAIN EXPOSED A CIA AGENT! AND ATE BABIES WITH HOT SAUCE!
Perhaps that's just the nature of this conflict... a shadowy war where our soldiers move among hidden cells and through failed states, instead of hitting European beaches taking small islands on the way to Japan (and, to be fair, the WWII analogy really doesn't work very well at all). Still, this somewhat vague America: Helping People Help Themselves! rhetoric may be one of the reasons that the current President will probably never be regarded as a "great" leader of our country. He's too insulated by his staff from the people, too constrained by various political machinations to come forth with something that is inspirational and truthful. His "plain - spoken" nature is a bit too calculated to be exactly that.
At any rate, this concludes babble from the train... a tunnel approaches.
Tunnels continue to make me a bit nervous...
