FrontPage and Andrew Sullivan both have links to this, as I discovered after reading it. Norman Podhoretz on the necessity of mounting an intellectual defense of America's elevated place in history, to coincide with the rise of national unity post- 9/11.

He's right. And that's not just a pun.

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There are two pieces today, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, that perfectly encapsulate two disparate ways of looking at the world and the people in it.

The first is the lead piece in Frontpage Magazine, by Editor David Horowitz. In it, he paints his usual ideological portrait: we are entering the time of Great Conflict, where the near East will try to destroy the West. We are entering a war that will permit no compromise, only victory or our destruction. Israel, he maintains, is our front line position in this war. That country and its neighbors are like the two stones of a mill, and their heavy, grinding points of contact are the end product of the driving force of the cultures of the West and near East. It is an abstract piece, where nations represent not individuals but ideologies, and clash in the rarified space of ideas as much as--or more than--they do on the real fields of battle.

Contrast that with this piece in today’s Salon. It’s an interview with Filmmakers B.Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro, whose documentary “Promises” is up for a Best Documentary Oscar. Made between 1997 and 2000, the film follows seven young Israeli and Palestinian children as they live their young lives in the midst of burgeoning conflict. I saw the film when it aired on PBS in December, and it is indeed very affecting…heart breaking, actually. To see such young children already mouthing the ideas and prejudices of their elders is nearly enough to rob one of all hope. ‘Nearly’ enough, I say, because one of the documentary’s centerpieces is the meeting of Faraj, a Palestinian boy, and Yarko and Daniel, two Israeli boys, at Faraj’s refugee camp home. For a brief moment, the commonality of the human desire to know and be known is there. But, by the end of the film, checkpoints and increased hostilities have prevented further meetings. Faraj, now two years older and entering a disillusioned adolescence, has the nascent spark of the Intifada in his eyes. Yarko and Daniel have pulled back, both because of the danger and, one senses, because of their parents, who seem to have decided that they have done their bit for peace.

It is these children, and thousands like them, who are the grist between Horowitz’s millstones. These are the young people who will grow up imbued with the ideologies of their parents, and who will be ground to dust by the forces of history. It is all very well for Horowitz to blame the Arabs, and to portray the Israelis as vanguards of Western democracy who just want to live in safety. It’s very tidy, rhetorically comfortable, and an easy position to argue from. It’s also overly simplistic, and very nearly inhuman. Ideologies are created, believed, and conveyed by people. They do not descend to earth from somewhere in the ether, like voodoo spirits, to ride their hapless subjects.

That we must defend ourselves from the ancient sacrificial evil of our enemies is beyond question. But we must be careful that we do not become cavalier about those human beings who will pay the price during the course of that defense.

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Yes! I am a temperamental, half-crazed American! 'Ware my wrath, my PlayStations, my corporate scandal, my laser-guided bad-guy-seeking unilateral missiles that cost more than the GNP of Paraguay! Each! Lo, though I am depressed by the sight of Ground Zero, yet will I cleverly fill the air around mine enemies with volatile aluminum powder and ignite it in their faces! And I will do so with crass, proto-human-browed disdain for twilit European culture, and with elephantine recall of the beaches of Normandy! Ha! And so forth.

If you checked in with Mr. Sullivan this AM, you've probably already read this. If not, then do: Victor Davis Hanson on European attitudes towards America.

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I've been resisting this all day. But the barrel...the fish...oh god...

Courtesy of Mr. Drudge, I read today of a certain Woody Harrelson. Said Mr. Harrelson:

• "The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just bullshit."


• George Michael is "brilliant," and "incredibly brave" for putting out his Shoot The Dog single, in which he tries to revive his flagging career by taking a brilliant and incredibly brave stance against British Prime Minister Tony Blair and American President George Bush. Mr. Harrelson thinks that such an act could be "very dangerous."


• The Daily Mirror is also "very brave," and "bold" for agreeing with him about the war on terrorism.

Mr. Harrelson recently had an encounter with the British police after he trashed a London cab and then tried to skip out on the fare. The cab driver described Mr. Harrelson as a "caged animal." Mr. Harrelson described the event as "one of those terrible circumstances." Ah, yes. These things just happen, Mr. Harrelson. You smoke enough marijuana to choke a ruminant, and suddenly you're paying a cabbie over 500 pounds in damages. It's nobody's fault, really.

Apparently, Mr. Harrelson is also concerned that Mr. Michael is "too scared to go over to the States now." As well he should be. Unlike the civilized people of Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, we here in America are not averse to executing people who speak their minds. Mr. Michael is also an unabashed homosexual, which means that, should he come to our shores, we would have to capture him, bind him with rope, and place him next to a large, poorly built stone wall, which a group of Christian ministers would then push over on top of him.

You're right, Mr. Harrelson. It is dangerous in America. Our culture grants success to flagrant drug users who don't know that one can't be a vegan and also eat canapés. It supports the lifestyles of foreign homosexuals. It gives them fame and tremendous wealth. Fortunately, there are those of us who know the true path, and are committed to insuring that all of America--and eventually the world--stays upon it. Praise God! For He will assist us in our struggle against the sinning, unrepentant nonbelievers.

Since you "love it" over in London, Mr. Harrelson, I suggest that you remain there. Otherwise, you may find yourself strapped into a chair alongside Alec Baldwin and Tom Cruise while our Most Holy confessors apply jumper cables to your testicles.

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Back on September 5, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai survived an attempt on his life, largely because three members of the US Special Forces assigned to his security detail killed all three of the would-be assassins. That was the same day that a car bomb exploded in Kabul, killing six and wounding dozens.

I mention this now because of a photograph I saw on the cover of one of the New York dailies. It depicted one of the soldiers who had taken out the assassins, apparently discussing the incident with other members of his team. Around his head, he wore a traditional Afghan headdress, somewhat like a turban but loosely wrapped, so that tousled hair poked out its top. Usually, we see our soldiers clean-cut and smooth-faced, but this soldier, in keeping with the customs of his hosts, was sporting a thick beard. Not Mullah-thick, mind you, but getting there. He was shirtless, his broad chest crossed by the strap that held a lethal-looking, snub-nosed machine gun close to his hip. A smooth, fat egg of a grenade was tucked casually into his waistband, hanging by its spoon, next to a .45 snug in its compact leather holster.

And he was big: the arm that lightly gripped the machine gun was a thick hamsteak, and his shoulders were equally thick and broad, tapering down to a fit waist. At the time the photograph was taken, he had just recently put down one or more armed men intent on killing the President in his charge. But here he was, relaxed, one foot up on the low bumper of a military vehicle, one hand gripping his gun, the other gesturing in conversation. Beneath the thickening beard I could see clear eyes and a small, slightly upturned nose that seemed out of place, given his heavy armament and his foreign surroundings. Altogether, he looked competent, dangerous and--by virtue of his clear pale skin and his rusty-brown hair and beard--undeniably American.

Over the next few days, I came to wish that I had followed my impulse and bought that newspaper, so that I could show this soldier to you instead of describing him. Because, seeing him, I became filled with an inspired confidence. My conviction that Bin Laden had been grievously, stupidly mistaken about our troops' capabilities and their resolve grew to become completely unshakeable. I realized that my tax dollars had helped to train this man. My country had provided abundant, nourishing food for him while he grew up, so that now he was strong and fit, a force to be reckoned with. My culture had helped to raise him, to shape his talents, to provide him with the skills needed to defend the leader of a distant land. He is defending that leader solely because that man represents a glimmer of hope for freedom, representative democracy, and the reconstruction of a nation torn by 20 years of war and religious tyranny.

In short: he is the face of military spending. Not night vision goggles, or undetectable aircraft, or ambitious, pork-filled projects that the military neither wants nor needs. That young man is part of the true engine that powers the American military machine.

I'm glad he's fighting for us. I'm proud to be in a country that produces such people. I pray that he, and all the others like him, will return home safely.

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Sometimes I am amazed by my own inanity.

Him: Fit and in fighting trim. Facing death and danger. In Afghanistan.
Me: Pudgy and unnecessarily sweaty. Facing painting and spackling. Stateside.

And yet, somehow, we end up within mere paragraphs of one another.

Maybe it's the beards. Yeah, that's it: we both have beards.

Sheesh.

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This began as a response to a Commentarium entry made by Sylvain in response to yesterday's bit of fluff(go check it out), but it got too long and then morphed into a post. I beat it back with a chair and forced it into the blog template.

Sylvain wanted to know whether I crave "Justice" or "revenge" regarding Iraq. Interesting question, to which I respond:

"Justice" is a lot more problematic than "revenge," simply because Justice with a "J" can't really be had in perfection on this earth, which is why folks like Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin and Woody Harrelson are doomed to be dissatisfied with the world throughout their entire cushy lives: they think that it's possible to bring an Ideal down from whatever ethereal space it inhabits and make it work here in the mud with the monkeys...right now! Perhaps that's because they're used to living entirely in well-lit fantasies with a well-appointed trailer out back, I don't know. But there are plenty of less-famous folks who believe the same thing, and at the moment I have no explanation for them.

Revenge, on the other hand, is a very mud-and-monkey sort of affair: a fistful of feces flung in the face deserves a bash on the head with a stick, resulting in a sock in the snout with a rock, which in turn necessitates the deployment of the Seventh Fleet. The wisdom of such automatic responses is debatable, of course, but revenge doesn’t have a lot of theory behind it, and thus has the virtue, if you can call it that, of being practical.

So, on the one hand: yes, it would be grand to neither want nor need a massively complex military-industrial machine that is capable of laying waste to thousands of square miles and killing our enemies in ultra-Biblical proportions. On the other: we live in a world where significant numbers of people think that it's acceptable to fly airliners into buildings, kill 500,000 people with machetes and rocks based upon ethnic differences invisible to the outside world, and persuade populations to relocate by shooting large numbers of them in the head and dumping them into big pits.

It is quite possible to have "American Pride" without regarding the war opposition as "commie tree-hugging anti-Americans." Neither does American Pride mean that The Only Good Muslim Is A Dead Muslim. I view the force we can bring to bear in defense of this nation as a product of this nation; that is, it is a direct result of American ingenuity, dedication, and skill. It is made up of millions of American citizens whose job it is to keep pudgy armchair critics such as myself safe and secure.

So: I don't crave Justice, because in a world this complex, it can't be had, and it won't be until we solve a million other problems, which will then allow for an equitable, European-style Diplofest where everybody's rational, well-fed and willing to talk.

I will admit to being immensely satisfied by the thought that Osama Bin Laden, thinking himself safe in his cave and pursued by cowardly weak Americans, was in all probability pulped by a laser-guided BLU-118/B “bunker buster” thermobaric explosive device designed by the military’s top explosives expert. This expert also happens to be a woman who emigrated to the United States from Vietnam after the war. I’m not satisfied because such a thing was “Just," but because he was an evil bastard and now he won’t bother us anymore because he’s very, very dead. I’m not proud of the act: I’m proud of the nation that allowed a destitute war refugee to come here, rise to the top of her profession, and make such a contribution to the defense of her fellow citizens.

Such a nation is worthy of defense. It is, in fact, a testament to the national ethical sensibility that we even have such things as precision, laser-guided munitions. We could have cheaper, “dumb iron” bombs, and a lot more of them. Instead, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the development of weapons so accurate that we can take out a munitions factory and barely scratch the hospital next door to it. Or—as was demonstrated yesterday—we can blow up a car with a Hellfire missile fired from an unmanned Predator drone and kill a top al-Qaeda operative without taking out a city block in the process. I'm proud of that, too.

Many people like to compare us to Rome, but that reflects an ignorance of history. The Roman response to September 11 would have been to turn most of Saudi Arabia into an expanse of black glass on September 12, level Mecca and Medina on September 13, and take over the oil fields on September 14. What did we do instead? We deployed 2% of our available active-duty soldiers, destroyed the al-Qaeda training infrastructure in Afghanistan, toppled a despotic theocratic regime, and installed a nascent democracy. The Roman response would have been to reduce Baghdad to rubble in 1991 and mow down anybody who tried to leave. Now, we're dealing with the results of our restraint.

Finally, seeking either "revenge" or "Justice" in this case would imply that Hussein has a direct causal link to September 11. He might, he might not, but that's not really the point. As I've said elsewhere, the point is that we cannot allow a man with a proven record of expansionist aggression and genocidal tendencies to develop nuclear weapons, which he would then use to hold us at bay while he rolls across the entire Arabian penninsula and acquires the oil revenue needed to develop ICBMs.

If we developed fusion power tomorrow, or could use Shipstones or geothermal taps to generate the 3 terawatts of power we consume annually, then I'd be more than happy to tell Sadaam to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. But that's not the situation, and the reality is that we can't afford to let him have his way with the region, any more than we can continue to let him harbor folks like the late Abu Nibal, or lend military expertise and assistance to organizations like al-Qaeda. Enough's enough. Lights out.

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Speaking of fatuous comparisons of America to the Roman Empire, here's Victor Davis Hanson from an interview on RWN:

"Politically they [such comparisons] are absurd. We do not send proconsuls to demand taxes to pay for basing troops. In fact we do the opposite--pay lavishly for bases that protect others. The imperial senate was impotent, and civil war was common after AD 200 -- we have a stable Congress and little strife. For all the European venom, George Bush is not a Caracalla or even Diocletian. The classical topos of luxus, decadence brought about by affluence and leisure -- read Petronius, Suetonius, or Juvenal -- well, that is a real concern. Self-loathing and smug cynicism from an elite are the first symptoms and we see that clearly among those pampered and secure, who nevertheless ridicule the very system under which they operate in such a privileged fashion -- most notably in the arts, on the campuses, and in the media. A Jessica Lange or Barbra Streisand is right out of a Petronian banquet or perhaps sounds like a Flavian princess spouting off at dinner before returning to Nero's Golden House. Norman Mailer is a modern day Eumolpus bellowing on spec, and a Michael Moore a court-jester brought in to stick his tongue out at his benefactors for their own sick amusement."

The whole thing is swell and worth a read.

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As I've stumbled through the murky forest of opinions and rants over the past several months, one of the key characteristics of certain segments of the American polity has been made clear to me: vast, unplumbed depths of ceaseless impatience.

A case in point is this incident as related by Nicholas Monahan, the summary of which is pretty much explained by the title. Basically: idiot airport security person has no sense, commits egregious and insulting offenses against pregnant wife, husband flips out, authoritarian mindset sets in, lawsuits pending. Since then the story has been picked up by BoingBoing, (twice), Silflay Hraka, and probably many others.

Now, I'm pleased to observe that the most idiotic comment I've seen to date on the story--to wit, that America is becoming "a fascist military state worse than anything Soviet Russia could ever be"--was posted by someone who isn't an American citizen and doesn't live here. It is a comment almost perfect in its stupidity, both ill-informed and internally contradictory at the same time, a fine example of its type. I stuck a pin through its head and put it in the case next to the "...we'll be just like in fucking Russia" comment made in 1997 by Big Doofus Frank, a housemate of mine whose political insights were startling in their inanity.

That being said, there are of course plenty of American citizens who will read Mr. Monahan's story of airport breast-groping and see in it grim confirmation of all that they have suspected: Oh we've seen it all before in other countries, the thin end of the wedge. Before we know where we are we will have the full apparatus of totalitarianism. Never mind that these days the U.S. airports process well over 600 million passengers a year, and that even 1,000 breast-gropings wouldn't constitute the advent of the vast machinery of oppression whose name shall be called BUSH. To some people, any failure of judgment on the part of anyone in authority is evidence of their True Thinking, a glimpse of leather jackboot beneath the cheap flouncy petticoats of "Liberty." Such failure is an occasion for wonderfully overblown rhetoric: "Secret laws and 'security' measures that do not arise from real threats, but rather from an opportunistic drive to roast civil liberties on a pyre of the smouldering 9-11 dead do not make us secure."

To which I respond: in whose interest, exactly, is it to "roast civil liberties on a pyre of the smouldering 9-11 dead?" Unless you already suspect that the Guvmint's got legions of Gestapo-clones ready to be let out of their goo-filled vats and unleashed upon the citizenry, who will then be forced to mine oil-shale for the Cheneys and Bushes, such spouting doesn't make a lot of sense.

Which is more likely: a Freemason-like cabal somewhere, ready to go at a moment's notice with a carefully pre-coordinated plan to strip us of our freedom when the opportunity presents itself, or a vast slow-moving bureaucracy that, when prompted by circumstance to react quickly, produces something sloppy and ill-considered?

People had different responses to September 11, and those who could take some sort of action did so. That's a very human thing to do in a time of trauma and crisis. So, Photographers photographed. Poets poetted. And legislators...well, they legislated.

Most probably, they legislated badly, and we accepted it. As has been remarked, this wasn't because we're stupid or they're evil; it was because we're human and so are they. Now that some of that immediacy has faded, many Americans have shaken the stupor from their eyes and realized that things are different. There's a whole new system being put in place in America's airports. It's only a few months old. And--good god!--it's not perfect! There are idiots in positions of authority! Rules and procedures that aren't clear! Breasts are being groped! We're not going to stand for it!

None of this is intended to excuse the offensive conduct of the authorities involved in this incident--to use a Rummyism, there's no question but that this needs to change. But the nifty thing about the American system of government is its ability to fix itself when broken, which in turn is largely the result of the citizenry's freedom to complain loudly and often about things they don't like. That's where the unplumbed depths of American impatience come into play. As much as I mock the shrill, fearful alarmism of certain parts of the political spectrum, I've come to see it as a necessity that contributes to a certain beauty in the system as a whole: it is because of this impatience that things improve. It is because of this vocal, perpetual dissatisfaction that slothful bureaucracies are moved into action. It is because of this petulant demand to have everything work perfectly right now that changes for the better eventually happen.

Less than a year after it was legislated into existence, we don't have an efficient, well-run airport security infrastraucture with the latest technology managed by an army of experienced, well-trained, professional security experts. What we do have is a vast array of impatient, incredibly dissatisfied Americans who will, quite simply, bitch and moan until the system improves. And then they'll complain about that.

Ain't it grand?

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More lump-headedness in the comments section at BoingBoing.

This crop of Oh What A Fascist State Is America emerged as a result of the latest INS idiocy, wherein a Canadian programmer who went in to get his paperwork straightened out in California was treated to a five-day, all-expenses paid trip to the graybar hotel, courtesy of the bureaucratic morons who are currently in charge of keeping terrorists from overstaying their student visas while they build bombs and take flight training.

Whenever one of these stories crops up--as I remarked on December 30--there are always those who claim to see the true Evil Face Of America. Now, I also wrote that there is a certain uniquely American penchant to complain about things that aren't right, because we have high standards and because we have the freedom to bitch and moan as much as we want...hell, we can even get off our ever-fattening asses and do something about it, if we choose to.

But too often, there's another class of complainer, whose ignorance results in comments "such as, "Locking people up who have come in voluntarily to clear up fucking paperwork is only possible in a totally fucked up, repressive, unworthy police state."

To begin with, I asked this person to let the discussion thread know when the jackbooted representatives of this totally fucked up, repressive, unworthy police state showed up at his house to cart him off in the middle of the night for voicing dissent on the web. He responded in a clueless fashion, which resulted in comments roughly resembling the following.

Such people clearly have no idea what it means to live in a police state. They have no concept of what the term means beyond its use by various overwrought leftists. They know nothing about totalitarianism's place in history, what a real police state looks like, or how the people who live in such a state suffer on a massive scale.

None of which is a defense of the INS; far from it. But I'm sick and tired of these yammering yutzes who complain about what the INS is doing on "our" behalf--admitting the very real tradition of democratic representation--while spouting the same tired, knee-jerk trope that any failure or idiocy on the part of any governmental authority is full evidence of totalitarian oppression. This does nothing except expose them as fully-involved members of the chattering class of this country, with nothing to offer except their complaints.

The INS was a vast web of crap before 9/11; it's even more so now, and we desperately need it to do its job.

Instead of indulging in simple paranoia, I do wish that such folks would attempt the apparently novel task of recognizing the real problem: how can we meet the very real security needs of this country while maintaining the liberty that makes it so attractive to immigrants in the first place?

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“I was enraged, and went there at once.”

There was a brief flurry of ideas and verbiage last week about Representative Charles' Rangel's introduction of a bill to reintroduce the draft. My take on Rangel's headline-grabbing bill is that his reasons are divisive, prejudicial, and political, and that he should title his bill "Rich White People Suck." It is disingenuous for Rangel, who opposes action in Iraq, to claim that he is interested in renewing the nation's commitment to "shared sacrifice" when his true intention is to somehow prevent any military engagement with Iraq by legislatively forcing members of Congress to place their own children in harm's way. He seems to believe that Congress is composed entirely of self-interested men and women, and that these elected representatives will act to protect their own flesh and blood rather than to protect the nation as a whole. With that in mind, I must wonder: what interest of Representative Rangel's does his proposal serve?

TRF makes short work of the proposal and of Mark Shields' defense of it. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers also dismiss to the idea with typical brevity. Today, the Pentagon released an 11-page white paper outlining the racial and economic makeup of the current all-volunteer force. Of particular interest is Figure 3: Minority Representation in Selected Career Fields on page 6:

"Blacks today account for 21 percent of the enlisted force, but make up only 15 percent of combat arms (e.g., infantry, armor, artillery). In contrast, Blacks account for 36 percent of Functional Support and Administration and 27 percent of Medical and Dental career fields."

Then there is the highly informative Table 3: Median Total Gross Household Income by Race & Ethnicity, 1999 on page 11, which shows that while white civilians make nearly $11,000 more per year than their military counterparts, black civilians make a little over $4,000 less than blacks who serve in the military.

Minorities are not disproportionately represented in combat troop deployments, and may in fact have slightly better economic and career development opportunities in the military than out of it. So much, then, for Rangel's proposed social engineering.

There is, however, another side to the pro-draft issue. While Rangel's use of the words "shared sacrifice" seems to be efficient code for "America is run by rich white folks who rely on poor brown folks to defend them while they sit on big piles of ill-gotten loot," other people use the same words for different reasons. Like Rangel's leftish proposal, Erick Stackelback's also contains shorthand that will appeal to Front Page's decidedly right-leaning readership. Like Rangel, Stackelback brings up the idea of the military class split, but within a different context and with a different conclusion:

"With the word 'sacrifice' apparently stricken from middle-class dictionaries, we’ll have to turn to that always-reliable group who suffered the brunt of U.S. casualties in Vietnam: the poor and working-class people of our nation’s rural and urban areas. Except that these most patriotic of citizens aren’t such a sure thing anymore. Besides sharing the corrupted culture of their suburban counterparts, poor and working-class kids of all races and ethnicities must often face the additional demons of violence, poverty, drugs and failing schools."

This problem is compounded, he says, by an

"...educational curriculum that seems bent on portraying Americans—whites and Christians in particular—as racist, imperialist bullies who’ve brought nothing but suffering to others. Such false teachings have gone a long way towards making our nation’s youth what it currently is—depraved, listless and indifferent, with little appreciation for America or its place in the world."

The question he finally asks is, I think, an important one: is our present educational and cultural climate one that can produce truly great men and women? This "greatness" is implicitly defined as the quality of recognizing the unique nature of American free society and being prepared to do what is necessary to defend that society from those who are sworn to destroy it.

The Bin Laden quote above is in reference to the time he spent in Afghanistan, supposedly engaging in Jihad against the Soviets. It is self-serving, intended to portray him as a righteous defender of Dar al-Islam. When reading Stackelback's familiar story of his grandfather's immediate enlistment following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, I was immediately struck by two things: the stark difference between Americans' response then and in 2001, and the similarity between Bin Laden's professed outrage and the actions of Stackelback's grandfather and hundreds of thousands like him.

Hawaii was annexed by America in 1898, and became a US territory in 1900. No American President visited it until Roosevelt in 1934. It wasn't even a state until 1959. The Japanese attack caused national outrage not because of the status of the territory in which it occurred, but because we had American military personnel stationed there. 2,388 Americans were killed, and this demanded a response. The stories of lines around the block at recruitment stations, and men having to take a number just to join up, are now familiar to us all.

Until 1790, New York City was the Capital of the United States. The site of the original Federal Hall, where the Constitution was ratified, the first session of Congress met, the Bill of Rights was written, and George Washington was inaugurated, is mere blocks from the World Trade Center. Washington, D.C. has been the seat of national government since 1800. On September 11, 125 people were killed at the Pentagon in Washington. 36 of those people were civilians. That same morning, 2,629 people were killed at the World Trade Center. All of those people were civilians. 245 more people were unwilling passengers on civilian aircraft that had been turned into guided missiles. That's 2,999 Americans altogether, killed within the continental United States, in cities that are integral parts of this country's history.

That ought to have provoked enlistment such as has never before been seen in this country. But the "upsurge" in new enlistment following September 11 seems to have been illusory, mostly measured by the ringing of phones at recruitment centers. There were no lines outside of those centers. No number-taking. Certainly no news coverage of Johnny Getting Ready For War. Instead there was a muddled chorus of "That was terrible! But...," led by the ever-ready pen of Noam Chomsky. Initially, I was part of that chorus. My first response, expressed in an e-mail sent to a friend twenty minutes after watching the Twin Towers burn, was to blame Israel. My second response, written two days after the towers collapsed and I escaped the area choking on their dust, was to blame America's insularity and its meddlesome, misguided foreign policy.

In short, I was a sterling example of the results of our present educational and cultural climate--and I didn't read Chomsky or any of his fellow-travelers until after September 11. I didn't need to. Like a fish who doesn't know that water is wet, I was so thoroughly saturated with the pleasant liberties of our nation that I failed to realize how unique those liberties are in the world. I was floating in a seemingly endless sea of privilege, where I was free to absorb fashionable ideas and accuse my government of mismanagement and ignorance without even bothering to vote in Congressional elections. When my nation was attacked--when 2,500 of my fellow citizens were burned, crushed, and torn apart less than 600 yards from me--my first instinct was not to protect these now-threatened freedoms, but to continue using them as though they are eternally without cost, like sunlight.

It would be easy for me to make the excuse that, until I read more and learned more, I did not understand the true nature of our enemy, or comprehend the enormity of the threat. But that would be, at best, an evasion. Who, in 1941, knew much of anything about the Japanese? The common factor in each instance is that Americans lay dead, slain without warning. In 1941, the citizenry's overwhelming response to this was outraged action. In 2001, the citizenry's response was...talk. Hand-wringing. Printing up stickers that read OUR GRIEF IS NOT A CRY FOR WAR, and plastering them all over New York. Parroting ideas spread, by and large, by the educated intelligentsia and the "activist" celebrities of the country, ideas that have become so ubiquitous that they are practically core editorial principles of the "paper of record," not to mention the implicit moral code at most of our universities.

The culture that Bin Laden wanted to convince his cohorts that he is willing to die for has produced the public execution of adulterous women, the imprisonment of women who have been raped on the grounds that they have become adulterous women, the stoning of homosexuals, the elimination of the free press, death sentences for authors and academics who question Shari'a, and the massacres of thousands of Americans and hundreds of Jews by extremists who embrace death with maniacal passion.

The culture that Bin Laden wanted to destroy has produced female members of Congress, governors and mayors, finely parsed legal decisions--however arguable--that have set precedent for rape charges after consensual sex has been initiated, special sessions of state Legislatures convened soley to consider the issue of homosexual rights, a press that is so free that one can find a publication that supports any position on any issue imaginable, no matter how repugnant, tenure for professors who demonstrate brazen contempt for their country, and a military that made possible the evacuation of Palestinian Liberation Organization forces from Lebanon and the survival of Muslims in the former state of Yugoslavia, and has developed multi-billion dollar weapons systems the sole purpose of which is to minimize civilian casualties in time of war.

I don't think that reinstating the draft will solve the problems described by Erick Stackelback. Stanley Kurtz has suggested re-invigorating the Junior ROTC and the ROTC itself, although he regards the potential benefits to the character of our youth as secondary to the benefits to our military readiness. But the problem exists, and is exemplified by Representative Rangel, whose idea of leadership is to drive wedges between rich and poor, black and white, to encourage us to focus on our differences, and to suggest that it can only be the self-interest of the elite ruling class that might cause them to send our young men and women to war.

I'm not beating my breast, lamenting, "Oh, but were I a younger, thinner man," and longing for some Byronic experience of warfare while knowing that there's little or no chance I would ever be called upon to make the commitment. The truth is, there are people who are cut out for such things, and I seriously doubt that I'm one of them. I'm easily distracted, I don't follow orders well, and if I managed to survive combat I would become an burden upon the American taxpayer for the rest of my life as my easily-traumatized brain attempted to salve itself with alcohol, drugs, and violent outbursts in public places. Actually...that would probably happen if I managed to survive boot-camp.

But I'm disturbed when I juxtapose Bin Laden's propaganda--"I was enraged, and went there at once" (or,"Come and make the ultimate sacrifice so that we can bring about Most Holy oppression, misery and death!")--with Representative Rangel's propaganda--"I think, if we went home and found out that there were more families concerned about their kids going off to war, there would be more cautiousness and more willingness to work with the international community, instead of just saying that it's my way or the highway" (or, "Let us force all these rich white people to put their children in harm's way so that they will not choose to go to war because, after all, there's no threat from Iraq, and those 3,000 dead Americans were really our fault, anyway"). Bin Laden was purportedly ready to die for a corrupt culture that he found worthy of sacrifice. Representative Rangel apparently believes that our culture is so corrupt that it is unworthy of the same sacrifice. Bin Laden rose to power on his family's fortune and his willingness to kill Americans, and became the spokesperson for terror and oppression. Representative Rangel was elected by the people, and became a spokesperson for American self-recrimination. Something is wrong with this picture.

Representative Rangel does not sound like someone who is enraged by what was done to his country. He sounds like someone who thinks that his country is almost irredeemably flawed, and that now is the best time to redress all social inequalities, real or imagined. He does not sound like a leader. He sounds like exactly the sort of irresolute, soft-bellied paper tiger that Osama Bin Laden thought all Americans are. And because Rangel represents an electorate, it seems that Bin Laden was at least partly correct.

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Lileks points out the sheer volume of the cotton and glue 'twixt the synapses of all those who would have you believe we live in anything remotely resembling a repressive state:

"I remember the Soviet dissident we put up in our house in '83; he'd been imprisoned for ungood wrongthink, and injected with a wide variety of chemicals to pacify his anti-Soviet tendancies. Contrast: I have a newspaper column in a quasi-major metropolitan daily. I could, if I wished, spend the next year railing against the Bush administration, three times a week. Nothing would happen to me. Nothing. My editors would not complain.The publisher wouldn't take me aside. The guvmint would not come calling. It would never occur to me that I'd suffer any professional repercussions from changing my happy-fun column into a 24-7-365 anti-war diatribe - and if you think I'm mistaken, trust me on this: you have no idea what you're talking about."

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Then again...

On Tuesday I ranted for awhile about Representative Charles Rangel's proposed bill to reinstate the draft, and outlined the stark difference between the response of the citizenry in 1941 and 2001.

Courtesy of Reynolds, I found this piece by Michael Barone, who brings up an interesting point:

"Critics who look back at World War II with nostalgia and argue for shared sacrifice and a drafted military miss the point. We are no longer the kind of country that fights most effectively that way."

I don't think that I was voicing nostalgia per se, but Barone's nuanced criticism has caused me to rethink the issue. We don't need 15 million volunteers to fight this war. As he points out: in 1991 an aircraft carrier could destroy 162 targets a day; in 2003 that number is around 700 targets a day. We don't need men to carry around lethal bits of mass-produced machinery anymore. We need highly-skilled operators of highly technical equipment that can do the job of 100 or more WWII-era soldiers.

Barone's final words still give me pause:

"We can fight today's wars with fewer troops than we used to need. But every citizen should stand ready to fight at any time in any place."

No lines around the block at recruitment centers? Fine, it seems. But it's the lack of readiness that I still find disturbing.

Hopefully, this perception is the result of the insularity of the Northeast Corridor, where I live.

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"The fact is that democracy does not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus but rather is an epiphenomenon--the formal icing on a preexisting cake of egalitarianism, economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and constant self-criticism."

Since the anti-war protests this past Saturday, there have been various weather phenomena occurring inside of tea-preparation devices. The nation-wide events, see, were co-ordinated by ANSWER, which in turn is a front for the Workers World organization, which excuses things like the massacre in Tienanmen Square, and creates apologies for Sadaam Hussein, North Korea's state-sponsored famine, and Slobodan Milosevic. Fairly unpleasant folks, really, excusing death, starvation and general mayhem in their fevered quest for the Big Big Utopia. Apparently, they also happen to be really good at organizing things, particularly things that are "Anti-". You know--"Anti-War," "Anti-Bush," "Anti-White People In SUVs Mowing Down Exploited Third World Children While Clubbing Baby Seals With Cudgels Made From Tropical Hardwoods." That sort of thing.

Now, the basic reasoning here is of the "lie down with dogs and get up with fleas" variety, with some rhetorical "moral squalor" fillips thrown in. It's turned into quite the feud. People are being asked whether they'd attend a rally to save homeless puppies if it was hosted by the KKK, which is somewhat akin to asking if you'd attend a Nazi bake sale. I don't think that either event happens very often.

All of this seems to rest on the idea that it is very important for Americans to be morally pure, and to both understand and be swayed by the complexities of ethical argument to the extent that they are willing to stay home and watch cartoons instead of heading off to what was--by some accounts--a somewhat lackluster protest against current government policy, with a generous helping of well-rehearsed anti-Americanism thrown in. By not-so-subtle implication, all of this sound and fury is intended to cast moral aspersions upon everyone who attended.

And, at some level, there is something to be said for moral purity. I'm starting to think that that "level" is not necessarily the level of the overall American enterprise, because if it is, then we're all in fairly deep trouble.

Were there no such protests, I, for one, would be distressed in the same manner as a pith-helmetted explorer of the deep Congo who has suddenly noticed that all of the animals in the jungle have gone silent. What has gone wrong? I would think. Such unanimity would be unnerving. Where are the overwrought, knee-jerk anti-Government sentiments? Where are the dedicated emoters, marching to express their feeeeelings about war, exploitation, and supposed American fascism?

As noted by Hanson, a key component of the democratic--and therefore the American--endeavor is constant self-criticism. This does not mean, however, that such criticism will always be morally pure, well-thought out, or even rational. That would be nice, of course, but--folks being what they are--you can be fairly certain that there will be a lot of ill-considered notions presented with earnest conviction, such as the speaker who took the stage to declare that once the Iraqi adventure was complete, Bush and Blair would team up for their next war: on Africa! This generated applause from the assembled.

Whether there were 30,000 people on the Mall in D.C. or 500,000, such yelling, drum-beating, and public, electronically-amplified espousal of ridiculous, ideologically incoherent tropes is part of the essential foundation of this country. It's all well and good to post photos of grinning yutzes carrying signs that say GEORGE BUSH IS THE EVILLEST PERSON IN THE WORLD EVEN MORE EVIL THAN HITLER AND HE WAS REALLY EVIL and NO BLOOD FOR OIL BECAUSE DICK CHENEY IS AN OIL GUY YOU KNOW, but most of the people at these things weren't carrying signs, and may have only been responding to the vague--and quite correct--feeling that war is, well, bad. And it is. Whether it's necessary or not, and to what degree, and on the basis of what particular school of American political principle, is a discussion that some of those outside of the ivory sphere of excitable and erudite bloggish types may or may not be inclined to spend vast amounts of energy on.

I'm okay with that. If you've got an argument against the war, I'll argue with you because I think you're mistaken. But I don't feel the need to try and shame people, even if I think they've got their goofy heads rather uncomfortably far up their colons.

I like seeing people shouting stupid things in public and not getting shot for it.

It's one of the things that makes America go.

You know...like oil.

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"It's cynical to believe that the Rangel-Conyers bill aims to improve the military. It is incumbent on any individual in stewardship of lives and liberties to maximize his resources. Currently, the military functions well with an all-volunteer force, and is supported by civilians in industry and government. Rangel and Conyers claim that the disproportionate number of minorities in the services is unfair, but with an all-volunteer force, it seems rather easy to question their credibility. The draft, as is, ignores our capitalist society by concentrating all our resources into combat. Today, logistical, intelligence, and technological advantages will win the war, not human waves."

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Here is the response of the Senior Executive Producer of CBC News to a complaint that I sent to the Canadian Broadcasting Ombudsman's office regarding the "American arrogance" question asked of sci-fi author Robert Sawyer on the day of the Columbia accident:

The CBC Ombudsman has sent me your complaint about part of our coverage of the Space Shuttle disaster last week.

I must tell you that I was driving to the CBC building when the remark in question was made so I didn't hear it. But since I was in our control room producing our coverage beginning about 15 minutes later and ending after midnight, I know the tone we set. There wasn't a hint of anti-Americanism in what we did. So I was very surprised to hear about the nature of the complaint.

I have now watched the videotape of the interview you cited. You are, of course, accurate in saying that our anchor used the word, "arrogance" in a question. It came in a conversation with a writer about how confident NASA had become with shuttle flights. The shuttle had a proven track record, said the writer, so naturally there was a high level of confidence at NASA.

Our anchor then asked, albeit in an awkward fashion, if that "confidence" had spilled into "arrogance". Her intent, it seems to me, is clear. She wondered if healthy confidence had become willful blindness to trouble, based on the belief that any problem could be overcome with NASA's combination of brain power and ingenuity. I think, in the context of the conversation, that was a reasonable thing to ask.

But I concede that the anchor mangled enough words into her question to blur her meaning.

I have spoken to her about the question. She is aghast at the interpretation that some people have put on her words. She says anti-Americanism never entered her mind. I believe her.

I think her true sentiments were expressed just a minute or two earlier when she said, "We are all watching horrified..."

As I am sure you appreciate, anchoring a LIVE news special as a story is happening, is not easy. The anchor is getting information from untold numbers of sources and trying to formulate articulate questions at the same time.

As I said, I think the question could have been worded much more clearly. I'm sorry it wasn't. It left some viewers reaching conclusions we had not intended.

Mark Bulgutch
Senior Executive Producer
CBC News and CBC Newsworld

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As I suspected, the letter below is not a super-special-just-for-me e-mail. Nicholas Packwood over at Ghost of a Flea--who brought the original interview to everyone's attention--comments on the boilerplate, excerpts some Reader Mail on the subject, and offers to show up at the CBC to have a look at either a transcript or a tape of the interview, neither of which seems to be forthcoming. Go, Nick!

And, in the interests of full disclosure, here is the letter I sent off to the CBC's Om Bud Fellow:

To whom it may concern:

Perhaps you can send the interviewer you sent to speak with Robert Sawyer to interview the families of the seven astronauts, and ask them how 'American arrogance' might have contributed to their loved ones' deaths.

I do wish I had managed to get the name of your organization's interviewer, so that I could track down her e-mail address and publish it on my website. It would be interesting to see how well she could defend her contemptibly small opinion without the benefit of hiding behind a so-called 'broadcasting corporation.'

Sincerely,

Ian Wood

Now, I call this full disclosure because I didn't actually hear the interview in question, which was made painfully obvious by the now-corrected gender of the pronouns in the mail I sent. This, to be honest, makes me feel a tad disingenuous...normally I don't take pokes at folks based on second-hand information. But I wrote that note at 12:32PM on February 1st, after spending some hours watching the television, reading the blogs, and so forth. So I'll cut myself some slack, because this is my site and I can.

What I find most entertaining about this particular stormy teapot is that Mssr. Bazay (the CBC Om Bud Fellow) has probably been deluged with criticism about this interview...much of it, perhaps, from people who haven't heard the CBC in their entire lives (like me). 'Tis indeed a Brave New Information Age we arrogant Americans have created. Pea had the Good Analogy in the car on the way home this evening: it's like living in a small town. If you get drunk at the pub and shoot your mouth off like an asshole, everybody knows about it the next day.

Highly amusing!

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"These [eternal] principles, as embodied in the Bill of Rights, are like stars that always remain remote from every human realization but that, like stars, show the direction in which mankind must go. Once discovered, they cannot disappear again, although their theoretical and practical realization is always in process toward a higher perfection."

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Mr. Beniste keeps the faith.

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When I was a lad, living in a suburban New Jersey townhouse, we had a succession of neighbors live in the unit next to us, which was a rental. One such neighbor was David Petraeus, who lived there for a short while with his wife and their daughter. I say a "short while" because David was an officer serving in the Army, and--like everywhere he lived--Lawrenceville, New Jersey was just another stopover until the next duty assignment. This particular "duty assignment" involved getting a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University.

David was what my mom called a "real go-getter," which meant that he really went and got on planes for the express purpose of jumping out of them. My mom kept in touch with his wife, and every so often I'd hear a story: David's in the hospital because his chute failed, but he'll be OK. Some idiot accidentally shot him, but he'll be OK. To call him a resilient guy is entirely inadequate.

I remember one snowy winter, when he tried to get me off my bookish lazy ass and out into the street to shovel driveways. "Every snowflake should look like a little dollar sign," he told me. "That's your motivation."

I knew that he had been moving up in the Army during the past two decades, and last night I was talking about him after the President's speech. I wondered what rank he was now, and where he might be on the command structure charts with the little pictures that they were showing on ABC.

Now I know: he is Major General David H. Petraeus, and he commands the 101st Airborne Division. Synchronicity--as always--is an amazing thing in my life. I mean: just last night, I wondered about the man. And today, from Phil Carter via Glenn Reynolds, there he is. Carter's point is that two reporters filed a story containing the same vignette about push-ups, but I don't care.

There he is: commanding the 101st Airborne. The 101st. In a little over 24 hours from now, he will

"...personally oversee the attack by the most potent portion of his 16,000-soldier division: the assault deep into Iraqi territory of 72 AH-64 Apache helicopters armed with Hellfire missiles, rockets and 30mm cannons."

They will engage the armored divisions that protect Baghdad.

Godspeed, sir.

I never made a dime shovelling driveways.

Godspeed.

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So far this morning I have swiped my Special Nifty ID Card four times: once to securely enter the lower dining area level, there to obtain my oatmeal with stewed apples and raisins and brown sugar and a dollop of steamed milk, very nice; once to securely get up from the ground level to the plaza level via escalator; once to securely get to my bank of elevators; once to securely get into my company's offices. The Security Person at the elevator bank told me that, starting today, I'll have to swipe my card to get out, too.

Yes...we know for a fact, from the computer logs, that the terrorist with the stolen card got breakfast at 9:07 AM, went up the escalator at 9:13 AM, and took the elevator at 9:15 AM. Sometime after that he must have broken the lock on the utility room door and dumped the anthrax into the ventilation system on the 52nd floor. He exited the building at 9:52 AM.

Over the past six months, Building Management has installed a bevy of security cameras in the elevator lobby, and placed something called "security film" over all the towering windows. This is a tough plastic film that turns the glass walls into windshields made of Safe-T Glass, and becomes psychedelically iridescent when viewed through polarized sunglasses. They did this because a piece of debris flew 1000 yards on September 11 and shattered one of the windows around the sunken fountain in the plaza outside.

The Management has also insured the safety of the local bird-citizenry by putting bird-shaped silhouette-stickers high up on the tall glass panels.

Here is the terrorist with the stolen card and the anthrax on this videotape...and this one...and this one. And look! Here is a bird veering away from the window at the last moment.

At every card-swipe station is a blue-jacketed Security Person. They are empowered by Management to Visually Inspect All IDs. I haven't had mine Inspected, yet, but it's good to know that they have the Power. At the permanently installed security turnstile stations, employees swipe their cards against the glowing yellow square, get the glowing green arrow, and pass through waist-high glass doors that swoosh open before them in high Star Trek style.

I dunno...he had a beard, the picture on the ID had a beard...it was the morning rush, I couldn't keep track of everybody. He had oatmeal and a V-8 in one of those little cardboard tray-things from the cafeteria. He looked like everybody else.

They've closed off the plaza outside with spiky-looking Expando-Gates. This funnels everyone down into the lower ground level which is, I suppose, an easier entrance to secure. No Star Trek style down there, though: they have portable card scanners on black pressboard pillars, each trailing a thin snaking cable that's plugged in to the security system computer network. Swipe your card, a red light blinks green, there's a beep, and off you go.

Special Nifty ID Cards, security cameras, security film, bird-shaped silhouette-stickers, and Star Trek swooshiness aside, all of this apparatus relies on one thing: the Security Person. There are a lot of them in and around the building these days. Without them, it's all pointless. They have to catch the swarthy gentleman who's trying to get up the escalator with a card that doesn't make the red light turn green and beep properly. It's their job.

It always comes down to the person. They are the key elements. We may have cards, cameras, servo-driven doors, satellite-guided JDAMs, unmatched night vision equipment, and the biggest conventional bombs known to mankind, but none of that matters without the eyes, ears, hearts and minds of the people watching the gates and fighting the battles.

So on this day, of all days, I'm directing good and grateful thoughts towards the men and women whose job it is to keep me safe, whether they're watching me cart my oatmeal up an office building's escalator or engaging the Republican Guard in Persia's ancient desert. The scale and the training are different, but the task is the same.

Thanks to you all.

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Because I have a force of nearly 300,000 soldiers protecting my interests in the Gulf, it is also appropriate that I enact trade sanctions against other nations.

To wit: my shoes. I have needed new ones for a long time, having been let down by my pair of New Balance 503s. Two years ago, I bought New Balance 502s, because they were black and comfy and made in the U.S.A. of mostly-made-in-the-U.S.A. bits. The 503 was the new model of the same shoe, and it sucked, sucked as a gaping maw in the earth leading to hell sucks. They collapsed. I've been getting out of bed in the mornings like a vitamin-deficient old man for months, what with the aches in the heels and calves and all.

And so, I resolved: the most expensive...the most well-made...the best shoes...shall be mine. Mephistos. I was going to cough up the dough for the legendary shoe worn by...people who wear legendary shoes.

Across the street from the cemetary of Trinity Church--wherein are buried Alexander Hamilton and the inventor of the steam engine--is an outlet shoe store that, for a long time, boasted that WE HAVE THE LOWEST PRICES IN THE CITY. At some point over the past year or so, that sign changed to WE ARE PROBABLY THE LOWEST-PRICED IN THE CITY.

Such candor demands respect. So I went there to buy my Mephistos.

A good salesman is good and speedy judge of people. The store was nearly empty, with one person being fitted, and when the salesman asked me what I needed, I told him: Mephistos. For walking, please. He had recently sent most of his Mephisto stock to his warehouse, so he showed me the catalogue. I blanched at the $270 price tag, but there they were: the Mephisto walkers. A great shoe, he told me. I have a pair on right now. Look at that sole--I've worn them for a year, and--nothing! I needed my feet measured--for, as age approaches feet warp and change, spreading out and morphing into different shapes. I'll measure you, he said. Then, I can have the shoe from my warehouse in 2-3 hours. He must have seen it on my face. I was ready to buy now. Right now. I was thinking: I'm willing to wait, I guess... But I wasn't sure.

The salesman knew this. His insight was keen, and he had the incantation that would secure a sale. He lowered his voice, and said the magic words: They're made in France, you know.

I felt my eyebrows elevate. Really, I said, in a tone that I'm sure said to him, steenking frogs, I will buy no shoe of theirs!

Let me show you this shoe by SAS, he offered. It is American-made. Indeed it was. Handlasted and handsewn, using moccasin construction so that the leather wraps completely around the foot. Funky hi-tech Selfset footbeds that will mold to my foot over time. Available in black or cordovan. Priced for you at $130.

I tried on a pair, and my calloused heels and strained achilles tendons rejoiced and did little dances, which was momentarily embarrassing. Two laps around the store and I was sold, as were the shoes. I happily handed over my debit card and watched with sadistic glee as my New Balance 503s were tossed screaming into the trash. Less than twenty minutes after I walked in, I walked out with a pair of new, comfortable, soft and yummy shoes wrapped completely around my feet, shoes that were made right here in America.

Where in America, exactly?

Texas.

Life is good.

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According to the Big Book Of Words, "hypocrisy" is

The act or practice of a hypocrite; a feigning to be what one is not, or to feel what one does not feel; a dissimulation, or a concealment of one's real character, disposition, or motives; especially, the assuming of false appearance of virtue or religion; a simulation of goodness.

Although derived originally from the Ionic Greek hupokrisis, meaning simply a "reply or answer," it is the the later Attic Greek usage that I find most provocative. In Attic hupokrisis primarily indicated the playing of a part, as on a stage, or, literally, an "outward showing;" it was also used to indicate an orator's "delivery." It wasn't until the New Testament, written in Koine Greek, that the word was metaphorically used in its modern derogatory sense (as in Matthew 23:28).

It's interesting to me that this word has its roots in performance, for so much of our modern information culture is bound up in stagecraft and the manipulation of perception. A further consequence of that information culture--especially for public personas--is that past pronouncements and activities can and often do become part of the overall searchable "soup" of facts and factoids. This means that it is becoming easier and easier for people to compare today's performance with yesterday's, and to make public accusations of hypocrisy, particularly with regard to the "concealment of one's real character, disposition, or motives" and "the false appearance of virtue."

I've been thinking about this because of my own apparently hypocritical stance as the Paxil-popping creator of satirical anti-depressant advertisements. It's easy to observe, from my various writings and my cartoon, that my relationship with psychiatric pharmaceuticals is ambivalent at best. I choose to call it a "complexity" or a "contradiction," but the case for hypocrisy may seem to be easily made.

I'm also thinking about hypocrisy because of Amiri Baraka (née Leroi Jones), who recently came up in an inebriated conversation I was trying to have with a poet friend of mine. Baraka, you may recall, wrote "Somebody Blew Up America" [full text here] shortly after the September 11 attacks. He was Poet Laureate of New Jersey at the time, and the work caused controversy because of just a few lines:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?

I find Baraka to be well-soaked in the post-modern idea that "truth" is just a word, subjective at best. This has furnished his mind with a somewhat tweaked idea of what Keats and Dubois meant when they called for poets to bring forth Truth and Beauty. Although he claimed that subsequent calls for his resignation were "an attempt to repress and stigmatize independent thinkers everywhere," his credulous repetition of this particular conspiracy theory--and his repetition of many others--is based on bits and pieces of information gleaned from the Internet, most of which, apparently, he couldn't source. Unfortunately for him, the independence of one's thinking is not actually measured by the outrage it causes in the establishment, which is an idea often held by veterans of the various 60s "revolutions."

The entire stink was given fuel and vigorous fanning by the Anti-Defamation League, which obscured some of the more important issues raised in Baraka's work by wrenching a few lines out of their context.

The poem is, in fact, a mostly consistent litany of complaints against those in power, from a perspective typical of the far left (Baraka is a self-described "Third World Marxist"). True to post-modern academic form, Baraka is not necessarily peeved about skin color per se (witness his condemnation of the blacks in the White House), but about the structures of power that oppress the poor and the lower classes world wide, most of whom happen to be non-white. His poem is an attack, he says, on "Imperialism, National Oppression, Monopoly Capitalism, Racism, Anti-Semitism." Thus, he can quite un-self consciously pick and choose the information tidbits from the media and Internet soups that support his assertion

I WAS NOT SAYING ISRAEL WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ATTACK, BUT THAT THEY KNEW AND OUR OWN COUNTERFEIT PRESIDENT DID TOO!

The poem is about hypocrisy--or, at least, it's intended to be. How can white America start a War on Terrorism when power-elite whites wiped out Indians, Jews, blacks, Vietnamese, and any other fashionably oppressed ethnicity you might care to name? How can the elites claim moral cause when they "invented AIDS," doped up the Chinese, and killed Lincoln, Kennedy, and every important black leader ever? Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, and Colin Powell are all traitors--house Negroes. And on and on. There is, in fact, nothing in this poem that truly contradicts Baraka's previous assertions that blacks can't make their own world until "the white man is dead" ["Black People," 1967] and that white people "are a cancer" who can best help black people by dying [The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, 1984]--this, from a man who now loudly objects to Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon's description of the Palestinians as a “cancerous manifestation."

I say there is nothing here that "truly contradicts" his prior racist assertions because Baraka, like most people, has grown and changed as he's gotten older. Simply pointing out that he advocated the death of white folks in 1967 and now claims to write against racism, and crying hypocrite! is to avoid looking at another possibility; namely, that what Baraka called "white people" in 1967 has evolved in his mind into "power elites." His outrage is the same, but perhaps he has come to realize that it is not just the melanin content of one's skin that makes one an oppressor, but rather the ideas one holds and the actions one takes as a result of those ideas. His evolution as a writer is roughly divided into a "Beat" period, a "Black Nationalist" period, and a "Third World Marxist" period, and his ideas about who the oppressors of the world are have changed throughout each of them. In the preface to The Baraka Reader he writes

My writing reflects my own growth and expansion, and at the same time the society in which I have existed throughout this confrontation.

I don't doubt his sincerity because, frankly, he'd have to be a blithering idiot not to see the glaring contradiction between calling for white blood and claiming to be against racism, and as a thinking person the way that he has chosen to resolve that contradiction is to identify what offended him about the "white oppressor" and to attempt, to some degree, to remove race from that quality. He fails to do so in this work--these days, far more Africans are being killed by other Africans, in the most brutal ways, than are being killed by whites; and far more Arabs were killed by other Arabs than were ever killed by Israelis. But I suspect that he would still have difficulty placing those murdering Arabs and Africans among the power-elites.

It's not really my intention to engage in a line-by-line critique of this particular work, or to defend the Anti-Defamation League's shrill accusations, or to point out that the man who refused to "apologize to Evil" and who has serious problems with the white capitalist government establishment was happy to take an official, paid position with that government (New Jersey Governor McGreevey saw to it that Baraka never got that $10,000, but Baraka certainly didn't know that would happen when he signed up). I won't question whether a person ought to be able to "grow and expand" at the taxpayer's expense. My simple point is that contradiction is sometimes an indication of complexity.

But very often, I read what passes for critique out there among the juicy fact-bits and the bobbing factoid-dumplings: so-and-so said this, but look: five years ago he said the opposite! There was a recent spate of this as various Google-savvy bloggers dredged up a nice gooey haul of past quotes from prominent Democrats, all calling for action against Sadaam Hussein becuase of his WMD programs. And these very Democrats are now yelling for an investigation into the Bush administration, for attacking Hussein because of these "purported" WMDs!

Imagine that.

No, my point is: so what? Merely throwing up a pair of snipped quotes and going ta-daa! as though something requiring thought or insight has been accomplished is unimpressive at best. The information soup is rich, and full of crap. Such a presentation of mere contradiction is tantamount to yelling, hypocrite! and, as I have hopefully shown, hypocrisy is an issue of character, not of the validity of ideas or the content of a given argument. If your goal is to edge closer to the truth, yelling hypocrite! is an ad hominem attack and a logical fallacy.

The exposure of contradiction, if treated with a Socratic sensibility, is an occasion for satisfaction, because it indicates progress in an argument: here are two possibilities, both of which cannot be true at the same time. Therefore, we are on the cusp of eliminating an error in our thinking. It is not the end of the process, merely one step in it. Unfortunately, proper execution of the Socratic method requires a "congenial soul;" that is, one who is amenable to the process. It can't be done alone, or with someone whose goals are not your own. It can't be done via the Internet unless you're actually exchanging e-mails with the party in question. And it most certainly can't be done by a poet chanting words before crowds that, by and large, already agree with him.

Thus, when Baraka's spoken words--and "Someone Blew Up America" is meant to be heard, not read--rattle off rhythmic denunciations of all the contradictions that litter American history in particular and Western history in general, my final response is: so what? I used to piss in my pants, but I don't anymore. Oh, the contradiction of my childhood as compared to my adult nature! All of these things are obvious. Yes, Americans owned slaves. Yes, we are a racially divided culture. Yes, yes, yes! But cultures--being composed of and created by human beings--are rife with contradictions. And cultures--again, being composed of and created by human beings--grow and expand.

Ask a lower-class black American whether he'd rather be poor here, or poor in Africa. Ask a Rwandan about racial tolerance. Ask a Jew living in France about anti-Semitism. Ask a Saudi woman about misogyny. Ask an Egyptian Christian about freedom of religion. Ask the millions of immigrants why they came to this racist, imperialist, capitalist hellhole of oppression and misery. The answers will illustrate the difference between the failure to live up to some Marxist, utopian ideal of human perfection, and the reality of what America is.

So, in the Attic sense, Baraka is a hypocrite. He is an orator, delivering rhetoric. He is a player on a stage, as evidenced by his adoption of a black patois for his script. And though I question his virtue, and certainly reject his ideology, I can't in good conscience call him a hypocrite in the Biblical sense without applying that label to myself.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)
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Lessee here...first, there was the Syrian Band of Flight 327...14 Syrians with weak stomachs and a penchant for McDonald's, who may or may not actually have been conducting a Terrorist Probe, or maybe they were just messing with American minds, which is just rude, because this is where they're gigging, the ungrateful Semites. Then there's the story of a fellow with the Middle Eastern cant who was in an airplane bathroom removing the mirror and trying to get through the wall into the cockpit before an Air Marshal broke down the door which, if true, is certainly cause for concern. And, yesterday morning, authorities stopped a New York bound train in Newark and questioned the passengers, because someone found what the New York Times euphemistically calls a "religious message" in an envelope in the restroom. In one of those Gosh What A Modern Age We Live In moments, I was on a cellphone on a ferry in the middle of the Hudson river talking to my mother in California who told me about the train in Newark.

This has created a bit of nervousness for Your Humble Narrator. Not that I fear the loss of my own life life or limbs--I think that, most likely, the next Terrorist Event will be a plane going BOOM up in the sky, rather than being used as an Allah-guided air-to-ground missile...American passengers simply wouldn't allow anything else. Neither am I as nervous as some people, which I find odd, because I actually attended the first Terrorist Event. Still: frost this yummy concoction of fact and rumor of with 500 pages' worth of 9/11 Commission Report (.PDFs both great and small available here), and you've got yourself an anxiously tasty treat. It's nerve-wracking-riffic!

Before the July 4 weekend, Peggy Noonan suggested that Americans might need a sort of break from all of this History-Makin', and that Long John Kerry might be just the sort of dull Gaul to provide it.

The only problem with that: as Americans we haven't been asked to do anything. Except "shop." And "go about our business." Oh, and "be vigilant," whatever that means.

Packrat Lileks recently found a bar of Victory Soap in an old box o' krep--a small bar of cheap WWII-era hotel soap, emblazoned with the V-for-Victory insignia and its attendant dit-dit-dit-dah Morse code sigil. Back then, there was no possible way to deny we were at war. If your hotel soap didn't remind you, your monthly ration book of food staples did. You remembered we were at war when you had to patch your car tire instead of getting a new one, because all our rubber was transporting our boys across the battlefields of Europe in trucks and returning them safely to ground on fat-wheeled bombers. When you stuck your hand in your pocket to get some change your fingers got grubby because the pennies were made of easily-blackened zinc-coated steel instead of copper, which was being used for the shells that were pounding Japanese-held islands in the Pacific.

There was no doubt. There were no homegrown propagandists explaining to the stupid Americans how FDR was all buddy-buddy with Hitler's cousins. Celebrities weren't lining up to compare him to female genitalia, and they weren't giving speeches at the National Press Club about how oppressed and silenced they were.

It made sense to the polity: we were attacked by the Japanese, and Germany declared war on us four days later. To protect ourselves, we undertook a massive, nationwide effort that was directed not just at Tokyo, but at all of the Axis Powers that supported each other in their efforts to attack us and our allies. Did we head off to the South Pacific on December 8, 1941? No. We first invaded Vichy-controlled Morocco, so we could then move through it to attack German forces in North Africa while the British attacked them from Egypt.

Iraq is close to the geographic center of the Middle East. It borders Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. It's a stone's throw from Afghanistan and Sudan. And now, the US Central Command has a base of operations there with over 100,000 troops.

Does that make sense to you? It makes sense to me, because this is a war. Strategically, we have placed our forces in a position from which they can strike at any of our enemies in the region. That's the sort of thing you do in a war.

Not that you'd know that from watching the news or reading the papers, or from listening to our incumbent President or his hopeful challenger. During WWII, a troop ship was sunk, with a loss of 1,500 American soldiers. The papers didn't report it, because it might have adversely affected the morale of the nation. Today, we hear about every American death, in ones and twos, every scratch, every injury, day after day. Half of the political leadership is unwilling to behave as though we are in a war because it might benefit the sitting President. The other half is unwilling to do so because they're afraid of being accused of scaremongering and using the Iraq campaign for political ends. The incumbent has mistaken a time of crisis as a mandate for the imposition of Christian domestic policy, creating unnecessary strife on the home front. The challenger diffidently echoes the incumbent's war strategy while relying on the irrational animus of his base to carry him into office.

This is a sad, pathetic joke. The American polity is a moody, spoiled adolescent, so unsure of itself, so mired in the midst of a navel-gazing identity crisis, that it can't even clearly recognize a punch in the face as the initiation of combat.

Ms. Noonan thinks I need a break--and she's right. I need respite from this half-assed, wage- war- in- comfort- with- a- Frappuccinoâ„¢- in- one- hand- and- the- TV- remote- in- the- other nonsense. FDR was on the radio 17 times in four years during WWII--where is our President? I want basic briefings on our progress abroad. At home, I want to know that our airliners are protected, and not subject to Norm Minetta's flaccidly inoffensive PC whims. I want to know that my local hospitals and first responders are being given extensive and effective training in dealing with biological and radiological exposure. I want to know that we're spending the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to secure our nation's seaports. And if these things are not occurring, I want to know that too, and I want to know why.

I'm sick of relying on rumor and anecdote, and I'm fed up with our half-educated, incompetent, partisan media, and I'm disgusted by our lazy, frothing, muddle-headed citizenry.

Are we at war or not, people? Make up your damn mind. Enough of this neurotic freakshow.

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A post on the good Reverend's site obliquely targets some my malaise, icing on top of cake freshly baked by NPR, USA Today, and other Standard Media, Inc. outlets.

What I keep coming down to: either we live in a representative republic, or we don't.

If we do, then all of these creatures who play on this absurd stage are there because, as a people, we want them there, or simply don't care enough about our nation to remove them.

If we don't...well, then, the Great Experiment is over, and it was a failure. We just don't know it yet.

Either choice is cause for despair, and I see no others.

But was it too much to expect? I myself alternate between outrage at those who treat the populace as ignorant sheep to be managed by their intellectual, moral, or political betters, and disgust with that populace when it does, in fact, act like a bunch of blinkered, stupid ruminants. Did the Founders, practical as they were, overestimate the potential of the people? Or did they not truly foresee what would happen to a population with unprecedented prosperity and leisure? Surely not--didn't they have the example of Rome?

But they did not have the example of an industrialized Rome, a Rome where even the poor have running water, food, and the miraculous television, a Rome where sustenance and entertainment are so abundant that even the murder of three thousand of its citizens within the heart of its greatest metropolis and its capital utterly fails to bring about unity of purpose and action, an un-Imperial, fattened Rome that does not immediately mete out the most profound and utter destruction to its enemies but, instead, prevaricates and wrestles with gentle questions of decency, value, and identity.

What is wrong with us? I will not be surprised if, even in this Most Important Election, the voter turnout is still abysmally, embarrassingly low. Far too many of our citizens are content to let the decisions of representative government be made by others, believing that they know many people who think like them who will take responsibility, and who will ensure that their own, personal circuses continue on unabated.

Perhaps it's a function of scale: the imperfectly realized principles of the directly democratic polis of Athens, with its 30,000 propertied male participants governing 10 square miles, became even more imperfect when expanded out to 193 million indirect voters scattered across 3.5 million square miles.

We lament the biased rhetoric that passes for "news coverage," but were we really expecting our media to be staffed by philosophers of the Socratic mode, believing in Truth and pursuing it, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of achieving perfect knowledge? No: somehow, we expected the media to be made up of Cartesian hyper-rationalists, presenting only that which is beyond doubt and discarding the rest. What a foolish, blind demand. A stupid idea: we will trust you to make the proper judgements by the proper method, and will assume that we learn the Truth from you. Only fools are outraged or surprised by the media's failure to be "objective."

We, as individuals, are supposed to be the final estimators of what is true, relying on our uniquely human ability of reason, of logos, to form our judgments. We are supposed to engage in conversations with each other, to test ourselves and our beliefs, to ask questions and to participate in dialectic which has as its only possibility the approach of Truth, not its ultimate realization. We are supposed to take the results of our discussions and our thinking to the polls.

As a people we have abdicated our responsibility. We have turned our governance over to people who will parse the meaning of the verb "to be" and who will "smooth over differences" among themselves by limiting discussion and debate among the citizenry, and to professional rhetoricians who will imbue the spectacle of an out-of-office triple-amputee denied entry at the gates of a desert ranch with moral significance.

We are faced with an enemy that thinks nothing of blowin