'Scuze Me While I Disappear Saturday, July 31, 2004

To put all of the below another way: There are terrorists out there and they have committed acts of violence over the past two decades, with the exhaustively stated goals of instituting world-wide Muslim rule and wiping out the state of Israel. Our response to that is open to legitimate debate--but questioning the facts seems to me puerile and dangerous. On the extreme end you've got mainstream movies claiming the whole thing is the invention of a government contractor and public officials (the delightful Cynthia McKinney; the poet laureate of New Jersey) alleging it was all orchestrated from World Jewry's Secret Volcano Base.

That's just the outre stuff. On an everyday level, it has become a commonplace that Bush et al are "pumping up" the threat to "keep us scared." Looking at the other side's record of malefaction, as listed above, I think the Bushies if anything are downplaying the threat. But on this issue, they can't win: The same crowd that accuse them of sleeping through 9/11 now say they've overplaying the threat of future attacks. And the same crowd will be calling for the Bushies' blood if anything else happens on U.S. soil.

As for "keeping us scared": After 9/11, I had a performance review that turned into a moan about everything that had changed since the attacks (new offices fifty miles from home, etc.). My boss observed that what all of us wanted was the world returned to 9/10. I think that still holds. We want to forget about terror, we want another long, boring, prosperous decade (or, as that widely e-mailed poem put it, a "low, dishonest" one). In refusing to turn the terror fight over to the Proper Authorities (or the Usual Suspects), Bush seems to be prolonging the bad times, if not bringing worse ones on our heads.

Call me a chicken hawk, but I'd rather have war than Peace in Our Time. To wit, Evelyn Waugh, writing during World War II:

So to Virginia normality meant power and pleasure; pleasure chiefly, and not only her own. Her power of attraction, her power of pleasing was to her still part of the natural order which had been capriciously interrupted. War, the massing and moving of millions of men, some of whom were sometimes endangered, most of whom were idle and lonely, the devastation, hunger and waste, crumbling buildings, foundering ships, the torture and murder of prisoners; all these were a malevolent suspension of "normality"; the condition in which Virginia's power of pleasing enabled her to cash cheques, wear new clothes, lave her face with its accustomed unguent, travel with speed and privacy and attention wherever she liked, and choose her man and enjoy him at leisure. The interruption had been prolonged beyond all reason.


I want peace like nobody's business; I want 9/10; dammit, I want my accustomed unguents. But peace, as it was on 9/10, isn't good enough anymore. Bush, for all his missteps, for all his chimpiness and smirking and gaffy tongue, is the only candidate to recognize that.

@ 8:12:00 AM,

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