A reader writes:
You think you’re having a bad day? On the anniversary of 9/11 you have the audacity to vent about how tough your day is? Yes, life goes on, but have some sense of time and place. Shame on you!
Sigh. I was writing what I hope was an obviously not-too-serious post about the petty vicissitudes of daily life on September 10. If you think that means I don’t care about the victims on 9/11, I guess I’m not going to persuade you now, am I?
And England will endure – despite the evil bureaucrats in Brussels, who never saw a tradition they didn’t want to streamline.
A revealing quote from Kevin Drum, back in February 2002:
"No one ever pressed LBJ for proof of what happened in the Tonkin Gulf, but there will be dozens of countries and dozens more NGOs who will be looking very closely at what we find in Iraq after ground forces move in. It will hardly be possible to fake vast numbers of mobile weapons labs, swimming pools of anthrax, ballistic missiles, and the like, and if those things aren’t found in substantial and convincing quantities George Bush will be lucky to escape impeachment, let alone win reelection."
And yet he won re-election; and the Demcrats are still deferring to him on the war. In the end, shamelessness defeated accountability.
Not that different from us, apparently:
When trying to understand someone’s intentions, non-human primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University.
The findings appear in the Sept. 7, 2007 issue of the journal of Science. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, along with Brenda Phillips of Boston University.
"A dominant view has been that non-human primates attend only to what actions look like when trying to understand what others are thinking," says Wood. "In contrast, our research shows that non-human primates infer others’ intentions in a much more sophisticated way. They expect other individuals to perform the most rational action that they can, given the environmental obstacles that they face."
But our kids still beat theirs’.
(Photo: Peter MacDiarmid/Getty.)
"Mitt Romney will do anything, say anything, smear any opponent and flip flop on any position in order to win," – Todd Harris, spokesman for Fred Thompson, after Romney’s "half-baked cover-up" of an alleged surrogate’s hit-job on the Tennesseean. Hold your gold, girls.
It has to do with sex and competition, apparently. They don’t have an itch.
During the Q&A round at the armed services committee, Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican … asked Petraeus a pointed question:
"Do you feel that [Iraq war] is making America safer"?
Petraeus paused before responding. He then said:
"I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq."
That was, of course, a non-answer. And Warner wasn’t going to let the general dodge the bullet. He repeated the question:
"Does the [Iraq war] make America safer?"
Petraeus replied, "I don’t know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind."
He’s fighting a war that he hasn’t even decided is vital or even beneficial to the security of the United States. That’s how lost we are in mission creep. That’s the depth of the hole in which Petraeus has been ordered to keep digging.
Allow me a vent. So yesterday, I woke up back in DC trying to start a new regimen, by going into the Atlantic offices early, rather than blogging from home in the morning. We got back over the weekend and the place is a bit of a wreck with unpacking, wedding gifts, a mountain of unwanted mail, etc. First thing: a water-main broke over night and there’s no water in the shower. Second: I remember that my bike was stolen the last week I was in DC, and so I have to cab it. Third: I left my keys in Ptown and couldn’t access the exercise room and shower at the office. Fourth: I left my cell-phone in my apartment. Fifth: I couldn’t find Obama’s press-guy’s phone number and I need an interview soon. Sixth: leaving the office around eight, I get home to walk the dogs while Aaron is in class for the evening with his cell off, and find that the spare keys are not where we hide them. A friend had used them to get in the apartment while we were away and had forgotten to put them back in the right place. Seventh: it’s about 100 percent humidity, the beagles are baying on the other side of the door, and I can’t find my husband. Sometimes, days just compound themselves. Aaron did get home around 11, by which time I was blearily watching Anderson at a friend’s apartment. Oh, and my friend’s air-conditioning was bust.
I feel better now.
A funny photographic exhibit by Andy Freeberg is currently at the Danziger Projects Gallery in NYC. It’s of those men and women who guard the entrance to art galleries. Or rather the tops of their heads.
A reader looks back:
Something I have wanted to ask you for a long time, brought up by your reference to not having kept your head after 9/11: have you read the very short book Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, by Doris Lessing? It is very much like a personal letter to her readers, on the subject of how – I remember that from her own experience she mentions wars and revolutionary fervor – people do tend to get swept away in a particular kind of dangerous surge.
Just thought it would resonate.
I realize that it’s no consolation – but even people who in one way or another can say that they did not lose their footing were operating in, and were affected by, a sanity context that was not normal. That’s how it was for me. I am uncertain that the diffidence in pressing one’s suspicions or thoughts under the circumstances was much more well-grounded or less culpable than a public living-in-the-illusion, really.
Perhaps the greatest weapon of terrorism is simply the impact that terror has – and ineluctably has – on the human mind and judgment. When we think of how understandably traumatized most of us were after 9/11, we can perhaps better understand why so many Iraqis – traumatized each day and night for decades by Saddam – are even now reeling from their own psychic traumas. To ask them to leave that past behind, like a cell-phone in a cab, is to ask the impossible. Paranoia, hatred, bitterness, revenge, panic: all these are very human responses to what they went through and have not begun to process. Which was why instilling order immediately upon liberation was so important. And why our refusal to do that has led to the current abyss. Human – all too human.
